Undone: Season 1

I wanted to absolutely love this, and for a little while, I did.

There's something inherently dreamlike about rotoscoping. Yeah, maybe it's just that Richard Linklater used the method in Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, forever linking the animation style to dream logic in so many minds, but also, it's a perfect fit for dream logic in the first place. Straight animation makes abrupt swirls and background shifts commonplace and loopy, far too absurd-looking and harsh to pass for something plausible. Rotoscoping, on the other hand, looks just real enough to pull you in, so when time stands still or a person starts flying, it's not like, "ah, geez, okay, those are just visual effects" the way it would be in live action, and it's not "well this is a world unbound by physical laws and constraints anyway" the way it is in most other forms of animation. Instead it's this weird hybrid of the two - right on the line between unreal and surreal, sort of in its own uncanny valley.

Anyway, all this is to say, this show looked amazing. And for at least a few episodes as it slowly introduced its characters and built its world, I was all in - not only on the story this show was telling, but the way it was being told. The first episode introduces our protagonist, shows us the rut she's stuck in, gives us the overall baseline reality we'll be using as a context going forward, and ends with a car accident. The second episode has our same heroine stuck in a hospital bed, communicating with her dead father, stuck in some sort of time loop. We see that classic thing where, in a panic, she runs into a future version of herself, also in a panic, and they speak gibberish at one another, and only later in the episode do we see the context behind the second version's gibberish. And then for a few more episodes as her life returns to normal, we get a better idea of hwo she's getting by after the accident (not well!) and there are a few touching moments with her sister and with her ex-ex-boyfriend. But honestly, the show started losing steam here in its midsection, slowly ceasing to be about this woman's quest to discover, through time travel, what happened to her father twenty years ago, and starting to become more of a mystery regarding her overall mental status. I mean, I get that, and I get why and how it's poignant to compare a woman's conviction that she has superpowers to, you know, an insane person's delusions of grandeur. I just never felt like the show went anywhere with that. I felt like the show slowly petered out and got less interesting, rather than snapping puzzle pieces into place as it went on. And, sure, we can have the same old discussion about whether open-ended non-conclusions are cop outs or not, but it just really seemed at first like Undone was going to be a dryly comedic and enjoyably-cast time thriller, complete with butterfly effects and parallel outcomes. I don't even like time thrillers much anymore, and still I was looking forward to that. Instead, it ends up hinging on whether or not this woman was sane and correct or delusional and crazy all along. And it doesn't even really explore what either outcome would mean.

Look, it's an easy watch and at eight half-hour episodes it's still well worth your time. I had just been hoping for something more, is all.

The Mind, Explained: Season 1

Here's another tough-to-categorize "thing I saw;" it's definitely TV, as it's broken into five distinct episodes that just came out on Netflix, but as far as seasons go, what was it? A mini-season of the Vox-produced docuseries Explained, which came out last year? Yes, probably. But that show's got its own, actual second season debuting in a week or two, and Netflix very clearly categorized these five episodes differently. Sow what is this? Is it a special? Is it a series of specials? Fuck it, no one cares, it's its own thing.

The five episodes in this miniseries (sure) were "Memory," "Dreams," Anxiety," "Mindfulness," and "Psychedelics." They were fine! Not great. Generally I felt more bored and less into these, particularly the later episodes, than I was last year watching Explained proper, but that might be because after an hour and forty minutes I was tired of hearing Emma Stone explain the hypothalamus to me. Hey, whatever, it was solid background viewing and I learned a thing or two I'm sure.

Derry Girls: Season 2

Oh hey it's another show I finished, forgot I finished, and have nothing to say about like two weeks later.

As always, major props to British comedies for delivering six half-hour episodes every year. These are easy one-night binges and we're so much better off for having them in the Era of Too Much Television.

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

Third time's a charm!

This was the oldest game on my backlog by a few years, first purchased all the way back in 2002 before I had any idea what it was, honestly. I remember firing up my PS2, starting the game on normal difficulty, and... immediately getting seen by guards, and killed, in the tanker level. Stealth, as a concept, just wasn't for 14-year-old me; that guy had been conditioned to blast his way through action games, killing every bad guy along the way, and as soon as I realized this was a game about sneaking around quietly, I dunno, it just had no appeal.

Flash forward a year or so and I decide to give the game another go. I use easy mode, I sneak around and try not to draw any attention, and still the whole thing just isn't my speed. I quit the game after what I'm later convinced is a couple of hours, but a recent memory card check reveals was only half an hour.

Nine years later, I finally get around to playing Metal Gear Solid, the first one. I like it but don't love it. I convince myself, however, that it'll be the push I need to jump back into Metal Gear Solid 2. It is not.

Seven years later, I do it. I do the damn thing and finally play Metal Gear Solid 2 as a 31-year-old man. As a father with limited free time living in 2019, I play on "very easy" mode and use a damn walkthrough. (Why not? I'm here for the story anyway!)

This game... is a masterpiece. I mean, it's hard to say I even enjoyed playing it, given my history with it. But the plot, the themes, the tricks it pulls... holy shit guys, what a mindfuck. What an eerily accurate prediction, pre-social media, of our "post-truth" world. Smarter and more invested men than me have written all kinds of praise about this game and about what an epic trolljob it was when it came out and about how finely it has aged.

(Still kind of played like ass, though. First-person shooting on the PS2 is an experience best left in the past!)

See you in five to ten more years with Metal Gear Solid 3, I guess.

Black Monday: Season 1

Black Monday was a show I liked enough - a Showtime comedy with plenty of recognizable names in the cast, ten episodes, half an hour each, very clearly a limited series.

Wait, what?

https://deadline.com/2019/04/black-monday-renewed-season-2-showtime-don-cheadle-andrew-rannells-regina-hall-1202604074/

Goddammit. Why? It's okay for things to just... end, you know? The entire structure and format of this show was that it was a countdown to the infamous Black Monday, a cheeky and fictional explanation of how one group of people trying to con each other made the whole thing happen. The first season ended with the cons completed and the market crashed. What need is there for a second season? Where does it go? What does it look like?

Anyway, what I liked most about Black Monday was its willingness to dunk all over '80s Wall Street culture instead of trying to venerate or celebrate it. These are all extremely shitty people with very bad morals and I think the show did a great job staying just barely on the right side of the "laughing with these people" to "laughing at these people" ratio when it came to depicting, say, sexual harassment in the workplace or systemic homophobia.

Give it a shot, maybe? Andrew Rannells, Don Cheadle, Regina Hall, Paul Scheer. You can do worse.