Currently watching..... on the TV

[Don Carlos]

S3 has Cavill in there - S4 will not

[MKJ]

Oh rly.
Eh still, interest waned nonetheless.

[xer0s]

Been watching Deadwood (2004).

COCKSUCKER!!!

[Lieutenant Dan]

Been watching Deadwood (2004).

COCKSUCKER!!!

Oh man, so good.

[seremtan]

Deadwood: in the top 3 of best TV shows of all time and yet somehow absent from every 'top 50 best TV shows of all time' list i've seen :dork:

[Mat Linnett]

I am currently watching a couple of things on Prime:

Reacher, which is dumb but entertaining.

And probably the best thing on telly at the moment, Fargo season 5.
Fargo's had it's ups and downs since season 1, but this is an absolute corker.
Stupendous performances all round, with Jennifer Jason Leigh and that chap from Stranger Things being particularly fantastic as villains I love to hate.
Whenever Noah Hawley lends his hand to something, it's always worth a watch

[Whiskey 7]

Re: Currently watching on the TV...Watching, well binge watching Star Trek Picard over 3 nights, one season a night

[Κracus]

Season 2 of reacher is so... bad. Like it's entertaining but jeeze, like does it have to be THAT predictable? Big man strong, I get it.

[Don Carlos]

Just finished watching series 2 of The Traitors on BBC. What a show; surprisingly compelling viewing. Would recommend.

[Eraser]

Re: Currently watching on the TV...Watching, well binge watching Star Trek Picard over 3 nights, one season a night

This reminded me I still have to watch S3 of Picard.
Watched the first few episodes now and so far it's the best season of the series yet. And most of that's due to it really going back to the classic crew-on-a-starship form. That's what Star Trek is about.

[Eraser]

Completed the series (Start Trek Picard) and, Jesus Christ, is season 3 one big overly nostalgic circlejerk but oh my god did I love it. At some point you'll be thinking "noo, this is too much nostalgia" and the writers go "really? too much? how about this" and you go "ohhhhh yeesssss". Sorry, I'm a bit of a Star Trek nerd like that. The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager were like a religion to me.

[xer0s]

True Detective Night Country…..meh

Lonesome Dove :paranoid:

The Wire S2

X-Files…..I think we’re on season 6

[Eraser]

I watched The Gentlemen, a Netflix series by Guy Ritchie.
It's typical Ritchie style pulp. It's absurd. It's ridiculous. It's grotesque. It's hilarious.

Ritchie isn't exactly an example of someone that constantly evolves and reinvents himself. The Gentlemen is basically a continuation of the style of his works like Snatch and Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels. In fact, The Gentlemen was originally a 2019 movie by Ritchie himself, which he has re-imagined into an 8-episode Netflix series.

If you enjoy movies like the aforementioned ones, this is right up your alley. If you're looking for meaningful depth or philosophical contemplation, look elsewhere. This is style over substance. But that's alright, because Ritchie is a master at what he does best. This type of gangster pulp, somehow always with Vinnie Jones popping up somewhere.

The interesting spin in The Gentlemen is that the criminal underworld and the upper class British aristocracy come together. Especially the latter doesn't get away unscathed as Ritchie clearly paints a picture of a completely deranged, self-absorbed group of pompous lunatics spread all across the UK, residing in castles and enormous mansions and driving expensive cars that are only family possession by virtue of inheritance. Self-absorbed, ignorant and apathetic enough to be used in a parasitical manner by the criminal underworld to be sucked completely dry. If there's any depth or social commentary to take away from this series, it's Ritchie's criticism on British aristocracy by portraying them in this manner.

The characters in the series are without much depth, but each one of them is a caricature such that, when you put them together, the result is bigger than the sum of its parts. Absolutely funny things happen and absolutely cruel and grotesque things happen. But even those things somehow become funny in an odd way because of the absurdity of it all. It's not a comedy in the sense that you could put a laughing track under it, but it's this melange of style and characters and situations that they find themselves in that it's relatively lighthearted most of the time.

Would recommend: 9/10

[Mat Linnett]

Yeah, I was looking forward to and really enjoyed The Gentlemen.
I'm not sure the ending really held together, but it was a good romp overall.

Staying on a Netflix thread, I'm watching their adaptation of The Three Body Problem.
Aside from some inconsequential location and gender swapping to make the story more international and more relatable, it's very faithful to the book.

But that might be its downfall.

The books as a trilogy are relentlessly, crushingly nihilistic. There's no happy ending here.
While I appreciated the level of research and detail in the novels, I found the whole trilogy is just incredibly cynical, with no bright spots.
And if they remain faithful to the books, I can't see how they could adapt them to make them "happier".
I mean yes, I get it, not everything has to have a happy ending. But there is no hope to be found anywhere in the books. They even end with: [spoiler]the destruction of the entire universe.[/spoiler]

So yes, it's all big-brain stuff, with production values through the roof. The episode "Judgment Day" in particular is a tour-de-force of effects work.

But there's not much to "like" here.

I would still recommend it, because there's nothing quite so interesting or focussed on hard science immediately available in the genre of TV sci-fi.

One upside compared to the books is that they seem to have eliminated a lot of the creepier misogynistic portrayals of women.
Even though the vast majority of central characters in the books were women, their portrayal was more often than not quite problematic.

Edit: Oh yeah, Benedict Wong and Liam Cunningham are, as ever, excellent, as are the two actors playing young and old Ye Wenjie, Zine Tseng and Rosalind Chao.
You can also tell by a lot of the casting decisions that this is a Benioff & Weiss production.

[Eraser]

I've watched the first three episodes and to be honest, I can't make much of it so far. It's like it doesn't know what it wants to be.

Is it a supernatural horror movie? Is it a detective thriller? Is it a scifi show? Is it about aliens? Is it trying to make statements on the impact of humanity on our own planet and future? Is it trying to make some vague point about science vs religion? Why are there so many plot holes? Why is the scifi leaning way into the "fi" while the "sci" goes little deeper than superficial name dropping and a bunch of young people saying "brah brah I'm a scientist there's nothing like a good ol swig of science" while literally doing no science at any point at all.

I'm kind of lost here, honestly.

And sure, maybe I need to press on because things come together in the coming episodes but you know, after three episodes I'm still not sure if I actually like it, whereas I was hooked on The Gentlemen half an episode in. Yeah, you could suggest that I'm more of a "style over substance" guy then, but when people talk about hard-sci and stuff, I'm expecting more of a The Martian kind of deal than the X-Files.

[Mat Linnett]

It's pure, hard sci-fi.
It may not seem so at first, and to be honest, a lot of the more technical stuff probably does get glossed over for the sake of expediency in the TV adaptation, but it is very well researched.

[Eraser]

Spoilers ahead:
[spoiler]So far, the hard sci gets seriously watered down by unexplained stuff like Morse code flickering stars, the sun being used as an amp, people seeing digital clocks, fluent Chinese speaking aliens and oh yeah a VR device that's tech from 100 years in the future which virtually transports you to Xanadu where some Khan is advised by Newton and Turing through a 30 million people strong human CPU.

Hard science. Sure.

Ok, granted, the CPU thing might not be technically impossible, but it lies so far in the realm of fantasy that it can in no way be considered hard science. The remaining argument is that it's inside a purpose-built virtual world so it doesn't have to be realistic but when your cinematic world contains plot devices that allow you to portray any form of fantasy as reality then the hard science thing flies out the window pretty quickly.

I'm sure the author of the books thought through the whole using the sun as an amp thing really well, but when its presented as matter of factly as the TV adaptation does, with no science to back it up other than that an American scientist received a signal from Jupiter then it doesn't sell it that well to me and it stays in the same realm as dragons, wildfire and monsters beyond the wall.[/spoiler]

[Mat Linnett]

Remember, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Cixin Liu goes hard on this. Trust me, if you thought The Expanse was hard sci-fi, this makes it look like fantasy.

But you do have to be "comfortable" with the concept of multi-dimensional space (that is, dimensions beyond the four we perceive) and quantum entanglement.

I will admit, the TV series doesn't spend enough time explaining the Sophons as they need to for everything to click. But it's a really hard concept to show on-screen in a limited time.

Much more than that and it gets spoilery.

I would recommend reading the books, but A: I don't want to be that book-wanker and B: they're really fucking nihilistic.

[Eraser]

Sorry to keep disagreeing with you. I haven't read the books so all I can go by is what the TV show has on offer. I watched all of season 1 now and it left me less than impressed. In fact, I've been audibly groaning with discontent from time to time.

Maybe your perspective differs from mine because you did read the books and maybe, I can't be sure, but maybe the books do fill in the science gaps that the TV show leaves so widely open.

"Sufficiently advanced technology will be perceived as magic" isn't, from a story telling perspective, a reason or an explanation. Instead, it's an excuse for poor storytelling. What I mean is that no matter how wildly "out there" your ideas are, they need to gel with the world you're portraying. It needs to be clear what the fantastic is capable of and, more importantly, what they can't do. It's why I accept the existence of dragons in Game of Thrones. They belong there. They react to the world like you'd expect them to and the world reacts to them accordingly. It's why I accepted Geordi La Forge and Data (a fantastical cybernetic being) discussing anti-matter warp drives and dilithium crystals and Borg cubes because the world of Star Trek fits those things and the limits of each of these things is clear.

"3 body problem" however, presents a current day world confined within the borders of the laws of physics and current day technology. The series goes out of its way to present the importance of factually correct science. It's actually one of the cornerstones of the series: mankind's advancement in science and technology.

But then there's the sudden introduction of impossible technology (impossible from our current day Earth point of view). The TV show then just assumes I'll mentally accept all this, right after being primed into a "this is going to be about real science" mode. To me, it's like introducing space ships into Game of Thrones or having robed wizards conjuring up fireballs and lightning bolts in Star Trek.

I understand that in the book (click for spoilers)
[spoiler]the universe blinking is someone detecting some weird deviation in background radiation, who ends up going mad because of not being able to explain this[/spoiler]

In the TV show however

[spoiler]it's literally the stars going on and off for everyone to see and no one appears to give a shit. Yes, it's all over the news but it has literally 0 impact on basically anything. It's glossed over. And there's no other explanation for it than some fantastical godlike Siphons which are can-do-all things akin to... well... magic.[/spoiler]

And that's part of the problem. The sophons are seemingly capable of anything. It's not clear what laws (of physics) they abide and which they don't. That makes it not only unrelatable but also unpredictable and story-wise makes it feel like a deus ex machina. They writers can do anything and file it away under "advanced technology" and that just feels weak for a TV series that portrays itself as being all about the science.

And if it wasn't bad enough with the mega-advanced tech, they have mankind pull tech out of their sleeves that clearly doesn't exist yet 2024 AD. No explanation of where it comes from or how it works. Suddenly mankind can do things of which I thought we had established they couldn't, but suddenly they can. This breaks my trust in the consistency of 3 body problem's world. I can no longer trust what I think I know that this the whole cardhouse collapses.

And then I haven't even talked about the inexplicable origins or intentions of certain individuals and parties involved. It's rarely clear why certain things happen as it's often alluded to it's part of some unseen bigger plan. That's straight out of the X-Files and Lost books of storytelling. And unfortunately, both series were terrible at tying it all together into a satisfying ending. I'm afraid 3 Body Problem will end up being the same.

[Whiskey 7]

Anybody watched the The Terminal List?
Chris Pratt & Navy Seals drama etc. Just watching on episode 1 and it seems interesting.....

EDIT: The 'flashbacks' help

[Κracus]

It was ok. I found it to be a little too much "America! Fuck yeah!"

I watched a blue eyed Ninja recently, enjoyed that a lot, Picard, on season 3 at the moment and I'm loving that.

I also watched One Piece and liked it! Reminded me of shows when I was a kid.

[Eraser]

Started on season 3 of Ozark.
Took me a while to pick this up after finishing S02. Very enjoyable series, although I feel 90% of its plot is due to people not properly talking with each other.

[Don Carlos]

Physical 100 on Netflix

"Who has the perfect body?"

Cue South Koren madness in a real life squid games-esque style thing, minus the death. Good easy watching.

[xer0s]

Fallout

It’s good.

[Eraser]

The commercials I saw for Fallout give me the impression it's a bit of a comedy thing. I never played the games, but I didnt get the impression that the games were a comedy thing.