New Black Mirror season is coming next week on Netflix. I can't fucking wait.

^SWEET


Two shows I checked out:

Baskets: Very endearing little show; drama, comedy and strangeness juggled well. I did not expect all that much and it's all very understated, but quite nuanced and layered. Natural and relatable in a way, despite frequent borderline surreal moments. You can really see Louis CK and Galifianakis behind this.

Channel Zero: New horror anthology series based on creepypastas and it has got the creepy part down very well so far. Good disturbing horror with tremendous unease pervading everything. They nailed it with their representation of the fictional Candle Cove "show". Yikes.

Oh sheeeeeit, great news.

Westworld and Black Mirror, dark dramatic sci fi never been better.

Rick's looking a bit more sturdy than he did in the last three minutes of the last season.

Negan's not talking about his right hand man, he's talking about his right hand, maaaan.

I thought about that but they've said for years they would never go that route because of how hard it would be to film afterwards. I mean, comics are still pictures but on a television show they would actually have to show Rick loading his gun with one hand.

He's definitely going to threaten to cut it off though.

I know exactly what you're talking about, I wonder if they really do it though. I'll give it a 50/50.

I honestly don't even care at this point. The past few seasons of TWD have somehow miraculously turned it around from "promising but in reality incredibly disappointing" to "very, very entertaining" and I'm dumb enough to have faith in them that they'll continue to keep the show very solid. I have no investment in the comics or whatever so any deviations from it could be either bad or good.

I don't think there was any point in the show where I would have described it as overall disappointing. The worst season for me was the second one, where you could really see them stretching out plot lines and where the show's most annoying characters at the time were especially annoying. I definitively got a "the creators are unsure what to do" feeling but if you looked at what went on behind the scenes it made sense.

That feeling of writer's block ended in season 3 and never came back though, and those two annoying characters were both dead by end of season 3 (one of them early in the season). Really at this point, all of the commonly annoying characters except one has either been killed off (fucking teflon kid gets shot twice in a world without emergency rooms or trauma centers and lives) or have evolved into something worth watching. I'm excluding Judith because babies are not characters, they're props.

There's still individual areas that disappointed me at times (I thought the Wolves were dispatched with too quickly) but there were always good things to look forward that were obvious.

But yeah, going forward I'm not really sure how anyone could be disappointed, especially from season 5 onward. Plot-wise, the overarching four-season pattern of "find settlement/get brutally destroyed/wander the woodland wastes/repeat" that lots of people complained about is done. Alexandria puts us in totally new territory storywise here, because unless the show makes a radical departure from the comics Rick will still be in charge of Alexandria in season 10 (at the pace the show is going now anyway). The past settlements lasted 1.5 seasons or less each; Alexandria is already 1.5 seasons old and will probably still be standing through season 11 (again, at the pace the show is going and assuming they don't do a 270° from the comics).

The find settlement/lose settlement repetitiveness is over, and all but one (okay, with Eugene it's two ) of the annoying characters is gone. So anyone disappointed by the show in the past should get back on board.

I love Eugene, don't even slander that beautiful man.

The way he says things is just unconvincing and too distracting for me to take seriously (and no, I'm not talking about his southern accent). But hey, he's contributing big-time now. And even Gabriel became cool, so I'm not ruling Eugene out.

Don't worry, I am sure it'll be revealed that Negan killed Eugene or some other secondary character who isn't as important as all the interviews are building up. I really hope I'm wrong about that, but I just don't have confidence that they actually have the balls to kill off Daryl or someone.

My money is on two characters, one will probably be the one from the comics and the other will probably be Abe. Just a guess of course, don't give me no shit about spoilers.

I was just wondering if I should check it out again, I quit in season 4 because I was tired of the melodrama and bad writing.

I personally never felt the show had bad writing, I've loved every season.

I think if you compare it to other shows with really good writing, like say some HBO stuff along the lines of Deadwood/SFU/etc, it's pretty apparent you aren't dealing with top class writers. Maybe some of that is excusable because it's based on a graphic novel/supposed to be a bit pulpy--I feel the same way about a lot of the comic book shows on Netflix (Luke Cage being the latest). Still not really my thing, but if it's gotten better as some people seem to be suggesting...

I thought the writing and basically everything else about the show completely turned around in the second half of season 4. S2 was dull as dirt, S3 had an ok concept but far too much dumb shit happened, and the beginning of S4 was boring again. Picked way up with the twist halfway through that season, I thought.

that's cool if you see it that way, I simply just don't agree.

The problems with The Walking Dead are as follows:

- Main characters with seemingly next to no dialogue/response/reaction, that are essentially real life Hanna Barbera cartoons.
- Building an arch nemesis/foe/rival group only to kill them off by seasons end.
- Very poor decisions or acts of savagery that are seemingly forgotten after a few episodes.
- Nonsensical plot deviations that amount to pointless filler.
- Unimportant conversations with secondary/third rate characters that are trying too hard to be poetic in their final moments.
- Deaths of third rate characters we are supposed to CARE ABOUT after 1 to 2 episodes of them existing/interacting with main characters.
- Building characters up only to leave them for multiple episodes and in such episodes they merely act as background plants.
-
- Boring folky 5 minute song segments that serve no purpose but to fill out that 45 minutes.
- Epic showdown/climatic episode - don't actually show end result/aftermath of said event instead show some side-plot that was happening concurrenting because TWD is so complex apparently.

I have to agree with a lot of what volutetheswarth just said even though I like the show. Ever since Terminus, bad guys introduced have barely been characterized or anything, just killed off very quickly. And in the later seasons I can't help but think much of the build ups and things we anticipate in the show are diluted by weak payoffs - like the



They have good actors, can put together strong episodes and I even like the drama most of the time. But they just can't seem to keep the momentum up for a climax of a season and seem to be addicted to stretching things out for ratings, weakening a climax because they have to keep all the popular characters for several more years to come and can't risk changing any status quos.

^Oh don't get me wrong I like the show but I can't ignore it's obvious shortcomings. Personally wouldn't call myself 'a fan' but it has it's entertaining thrills/tense moments however brief they may be.

It's interesting how this Aussie web series is better than 99.9% of comedies on TV made today:


Every episode is brilliant.

I hope this Negan dude kills all the cast so we can back to our Star Trek discussion!

^I've got some bad news... Season 7 starts next week, but they already announced that it's renewed for Season 8; let's just hope that come Spring all the ST talk isn't "this new show sucks"

Now I hope the TWD talk lasts an extra two pages.

Someone should probably change your custom title then!

Been watching mostly gotham, trailer park boys, workaholics, house, dexter and some else sitcom and finnish series.

Actually recently they said TWD is going to be 20+ seasons, apparently the showrunner want's it to be a never ending generational thing like The Simpsons.

Star Trek should really have it's own thread like Star Wars, seems fair.

Yeah, but Star Trek doesn't have X-Wings.

TWD fell off a cliff after the halfway point of S4. I was really optimistic about it since the first season was great, the second season was bearable if you binged it all together, and the third season was great once they actually introduced the Governor, but every episode becomes the same:
-show zombie(s) doing zombie stuff, away from main characters
-have poorly paced conversation with lots of pauses, usually in hushed tones, to say "THIS IS IMPORTANT" in the dullest of ways
-threaten to kill everybody's favorite character (Darryl)
-pick two characters, add "will they/won't they" to their dynamic, then move on

After 3.5 seasons of it I checked out. There's supposedly people coming over next weekend for the premier but I'll just be balls-deep in some browser game the next room over to pass the time.

volutetheswarth's point about diverting from climaxes to show something else is part of one of the few major problems I still have with TWD. I do get annoyed when an episode ends on some sort of dramatic note that appears poised to turn into action but then picks up next episode somewhere completely different. The "dumpsterGate" thing from season 6 was the most egregious example of that...it took what, two episodes before they showed how that played out?

I'm going to be pissed if the very first scene in season 7 isn't exactly where the season 6 finale ended.


I'm amazed anyone could think the show fell off a cliff in the second half of season 4 though. Really? Go look at the flowers. And the "will they/won't they" dynamic ended in season 6. There were three sets of characters who hooked up with each other.

I had zero problems with the dumpster thing, I in fact loved it.

Yeah I remember your reasoning on it. I'm not entirely pissed they did it, I just think it would have been better if they had picked up where they left off the dumpster in the following episode. What they actually showed in the next episode could have waited for one more episode.

I see what you're saying. That narrative technique of jumping to and from climax is a hit or miss. I wouldn't necessarily say it's a bad thing inherently, sometimes I like the effect it has on the rest of the story. For the dumpster though, I was fully with it. I liked the uncertainty, and did not personally feel that it was to the detriment of the writing or drama of show as others might.

I just hope they show some winter action this season or next. They've gone through two winters in the show now and haven't portrayed either of them. I get it, they film most of the show in the summer, but still. Weather would be a major issue in a walker apocalypse and they've really only shown its effects obliquely, like the river soil hardening around Hershel's farm when autumn came.

Winter zombies would be so cool (lol). I always thought that moving up to a near-permafrost type of climate should theoretically be a winning way to avoid the dead altogether, unless for some sci-fi-magical reason they can avoid being frozen. They did have the perfect reason/excuse for not showing proper winter when they were still in Georgia though. Also that's another reason why they won't have it on the show since they are still filming there despite the in-story location change.

Yeah but it's a catch-22 since a polar climate would also affect metabolism and they'd have to find even more food.

I was always intrigued by Michonne's suggestion in season 3 that they should go to the coast and look for an island. That's really a good idea if you know how to fish and can find a tall enough island that you don't have to worry about storm surges. You'd really only need to go back to the mainland for things like medical supplies or gas for your fishing trawler.

I stopped watching FTWD after the first season (awful) but that guy's idea to get on a stranded cruise ship was almost the right idea. They just needed an island, not a cruise ship.

Regarding the Glenn dumpster adventure, I thought it was just weak the way they did it. I liked the concept they claimed they were going for - this "uncertainty" if he was alive or not from the perspective of Maggie and others at Alexandria. But the way they went about it, with him in this situation that was so goofy and implausible, falling off the dumpster where he should've been eaten... it just came off as weak. I mostly thought they should've had a more plausible situation where the audience could've had real plausible doubt whether he was alive or not. Not something so goofy that the explanation we got made no sense.

But again, I liked the concept behind it well enough.

I really think the cliffhanger at the end of season 6 is indefensible though. I was about one step away from quitting the show after that - only reason I didn't was because I was already looking forward to Season 7 beforehand, so I'll give it a chance for a while anyway.

Yeah once you start getting that detailed about zombies you run into problems pretty quickly. Obviously a 100% biological zombie couldn't exist, at least not for long, because even with eating the few humans they find, they'd still die of starvation or malnutrition or whatever pretty quickly after the initial outbreak/societal collapse. So would they also be immune or at least resistant to cold, as well as to starvation? What about heat? Are the zombies dying of dehydration out in Arizona? Do they not need to drink? If they don't need to drink, how do they keep their body running with the necessary fluids? If they don't need things like blood or stomach acid, how do they oxygenate their muscles in order to move? How do they digest human flesh without a ready supply of stomach acid? A really slow metabolism explains some of that, but can't account for zombies being active for months and months.

Basically it would be 100% impossible to escape the zombie menace because the writers are always going to magic a way for the zombies to get you somehow.

Oh it's defensible alright, I loved it. In fact I'll go so far as to say that if they hadn't made it a cliffhanger I would have liked it even less.

I'm with rexxz in that I think there's a good chance Negan will kill two people in the season 7 opener. That's really the only way to make that cliffhanger have a payoff. I also think Glenn & Abe are the most likely combination. If they wanted to really do a 180 from the comics, it'd be Glenn & Maggie.