Civilization VI: Rise and Fall

Eleven months ago I spent an exorbitant amount of time playing Civilization VI and then for good measure I spent even more time writing up a post about it. It's probably one of my best posts in years, and here it is: https://back-blogged.blogspot.com/2019/02/civilization-vi.html

That post ended like this: "I just don't see myself going back anytime soon. That said, if there's any DLC for this game in the future...  oh man, look out!"

And fam, guess what. We got that DLC. Oh man, look out!

I'll structure this post the way I did the previous one, so...

1. Scenario - Nile (Nubia)

The first chunk of DLC I downloaded was the Nubian civilization and an accompanying Nile River map and scenario. In the scenario, you pick to play as either Egypt or Nubia and there are two victory conditions. One is the standard domination victory which requires you to capture your enemy's capital city. The other is a very specific religious victory that requires you to build seven specific temples before the other player does. Now, I just jumped head-first into this one as Nubia, and I had no intentions at all of starting a war with Egypt; I'd just focus on trying to settle seven cities and proceed through the various science and culture trees in order to unlock that very specific temple. There were two major issues with my plan! One was that this specific scenario only gives you six settler units, but you need seven cities in order to win. Which means the only path toward religious victory requires at least a little bit of military planning. I went to town on some poor city-state to my south - honestly I have no memory of who it was - and eventually found myself owning seven cities the hard way (but the only way). The other problem is that these specific temples that had to be built had prerequisite buildings in each city. And those buildings had prerequisities. This meant I had to build 21 different religious buildings, and all religious buildings required a currency called "faith" to build. But I'd been so focused on fending off barbarians and capturing a city-state with my military that I'd put almost no effort into manufacturing faith until halfway through this 125-turn game. Gah! I'll cut to the chase and say that it worked out and I completed my seventh temple and earned the W somewhere around the 115th turn or so. Close, but not too close! Egypt never attacked me and also never made a single temple, which aligns very well with my previous scenario experiences in Civilization VI - you're not playing against the CPU as much as you're playing against the very specific victory conditions that only get tighter and harder as the difficulty increases. Oh, lastly - I'm glad I picked Nubia here and not Egypt. One assymetry in this scenario was that throughout the game, foreign armies from places like Greece and Rome would arrive on the Mediterranean coast looking to expand their own empires. Apparently, this puts Egypt in a ton of unavoidable conflict, and if you play as Egypt the most important thign to do is to avoid war with Nubia to your south lest you be surrounded by enemies on all sides; meanwhile as Nubia you're actually supposed to rush Egypt early with everything you've got and shoot for that domination victory. So I did it the hard way, apparently. Well, shoot.

2. Scenario - Southeast Asian Religious War (Indonesia)

That last one was super long, so I'll keep this brief. This was a seven-civilization competition with no military conflict; the only path to victory was once again a very specific type of religious victory. Here, whichever civilization had the highest score after 50 turns would win. There were three components to scoring - how many followers your religion had throughout the world, how many total foreign cities followed your religion, and how much faith you were producing every turn. Like I said, I'll keep this brief. I was Indonesia, mostly on a whim. This put me in an isolated corner of the map, which probably helped me avoid an onslaught of foreign missionaries pouring in from all sides. While the six other civilizations fought generally omnidirectional wars, I just kept pumping out missionairies and apostles and flinging them toward Thailand and Vietnam and Burma. No real strategy beyond badgering the closest cities with my religious beliefs as often and as hard as possible. It didn't work! On Turn 49 I was still very clearly in second place to China. And then out of nowhere at all, I won. Turns out China somehow fucked up and lost like fifty points on the final turn, just the biggest choke job you've ever seen. I still don't understand what happened, and I don't care.

3. Free Play - Russia, 133% speed, standard "Europe" map, Level 5

This one's based very heavily on the "one that got away" eleven months ago: my Russian playthrough, in which I intended to eke out a meager "surviving not thriving" existence in the tundra before eventually expanding across all kinds of useless, wide open space and then establishing a totalitarian state with all the good communist perks and then winning a scientific victory by beating everyone else to outer space. You know, like the real Russia did in the version of history that ends in 1960! Back then, I was ravaged by enemies before I coudl expand past more than three or four cities and the whole thing never really got off the ground. This time around, sadly - or honestly, maybe thankfully - things only went slightly better for me, as I wasn't vanquished by AI opponents but by some shitty recurring glitch. The game kept freezing after 175 turns or so, just after I'd established my first city on the Black Sea somewhere in the medieval era. I tried to restart it four or five times and it just kept freezing no more than one turn later. There would be no space race, there would be no communism, and there would not even be a big eastward expansion. But, fuck it - I'm claiming partial success this time. When I was forced to throw in the towel, I had the second-highest score in the game and also an empire spanning from St. Petersburg and Helsinki in the north to Moscow in the east to Riga in the west and down to Kyiv and Crimea in the south. It was almost poetic, really - wasn't that the great accomplishment of Catherine the Great? Expanding Russia to the Black Sea and Crimea? Fuck it, we're done here. Shut it down!

(Be back soon for the remaining DLC, I think!)

Crash Bandicoot

I never played mroe than the first few levels of this in my youth, and now that I have, I realize I didn't need to. Fixed-camera 3D platformers are hard as hell to pull off if you've got wonky edge detection and enemy hitboxes, and let me tell you, Crash Bandicoot has both of those things in spades. Still mostly enjoyed this trip down memory lane, and who knows? I just might hit up the sequels for more of the same madness and frustration.

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater

This wasn't nearly as good or memorable as Metal Gear Solid 2 was, except for one key aspect: the boss fights. I accidentally and earnestly beat "The End" the cheap way (Google it), and only later on while reading about the game did I realize I had done so. And I absolutely loved the gimmick during the fight with "The Sorrow" where you have to fend off the ghosts of every soldier you've killed thus far. I guess sneaking and stealth really were the way to go here!

I didn't love the new emphasis on healing yourself with specific items on specific parts of your body - a little too much realism and nuance for a game as goofy and convoluted as Metal Gear Solid, no? - but the camouflage patterns were a cool idea (and they seem to be responsible for most of Snake's skins in Super Smash Bros., which is cool).

Last Week Tonight: Season 6

Swear I'd quit this if it weren't such a good laundry-folding show.

Modern Love: Season 1

A little sappy and schlocky. Whatever. I liked it, mostly! The Anne Hathaway episode was probably the standout. The one with Tina Fey and John Slattery was misery.

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: Season 14

I'm lying if I'm claiming I can remember even half the episodes this season off the top of my head, but I liked the one where they all went to the zoo and had issues texting each other.

Okay, I just checked the episode summaries, and there's a reason I forgot half of them. This show's getting a little long in the tooth!

The Crown: Season 3

Really dug the casting decisions this season, but Olivia Colman wasn't given nearly enough to do. That makes sense and all - she's the queen, she's got to maintain that stiff upper lip, and if you give Olivia Colman an inch of humor to work with she'll stretch it into a goddamn mile - but it still felt kind of weird that a show about a British queen would literally re-cast the queen using the reigning Academy Award winner for Best Actress, who won the award by playing a British queen, and let her play second fiddle to like, Helena Bonham Carter.

This season's secret weapon is Erin Doherty's Princess Anne. Its secret shame is that actually the monarchy is bad. I still like the idea of the series as a whole - a sprawling later-twentieth century period piece, kind of, that picks and chooses which years and scandals and crises to highlight on an episode by episode basis. Can't wait for the Season 6 episode about Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein! (They won't, right? But they have to, right?)

Luigi's Mansion 3

Beautiful-looking game. The slightest bit tedious and difficult to control. Love how this franchise has come out with three totally distinct types of level design, though.

The Affair: Season 5

It's amazing how a meandering, aimless final season of a show can be redeemed almost entirely by a strong finale. I used to love The Affair; it was a top ten show for me in its debut season and it didn't slip out of my top 20 in its second. Unfortunately, the wheels came flying off at the outset of Season 3, when this show - which had previously been about a family-destroying affair and the subtle inconsistencies between different people's perceptions of the same event - was suddenly about, shit, I dunno, a mental breakdown? An exploration of white man guilt in 2017? Season 4 righted the ship a bit but, in doing so, fully cut ties with what it had been in its first season and what had made it charming. It took place largely in LA and not Montauk, and dealt with new relationships for all four of the adults caught up in the first season's titular affair. So now it was just a show about four separate relationships, all strained and complicated and crumbling for their own reasons, and gone entirely was the initial gimmicky hook where we'd see the same events unfold from two different perspectives. (And that was a real shame, what with "fake news" and #MeToo on everyone's mind in 2018.)

Going into its fifth and final season, The Affair had very visibly run out of story to tell. It had killed off one of its two initial main characters and a third major character revealed he wouldn't be coming back. I very nearly bailed. I'm glad I didn't!

What unfolded for most of Season 5 was this strange and aimless and messy sequence of episodes - and even scenes within episodes - that bordered on incoherent. The first episode contains a death and a funeral. The second episode is a break-up. Interspersed throughout the season are scenes from thirty years into the future, where climate change has rendered Montauk borderline uninhabitable. We get half an episode from the point of view of a neighbor in LA struggling to raise her baby as a single mother. The only apparent arc features a growing #MeToo scandal and the show seems to say, if it's saying anything at all about #MeToo, that it sucks to be a man accused of misconduct. The whole thing feels pointless and meandering!

And yet... it ends on this weirdly perfect note. It re-unites the Solloway family - kids, parents, grandparents - that made the first two seasons a family melodrama, and it puts them all back in Montauk where the show really thrived. It was the finale I had no idea I wanted - the show totally abandoned the #MeToo arc and also provided mostly happy endings for its characters, even if many of them were bittersweet (keep in mind that the season has a thirty-year flash-forward arc, and most of the adults are in their fifties in the present day - you do the math).

And with the benefit of hindsight, I can look back on what felt like a messy season and realize that the season brought back something else I'd loved - the "same event from multiple viewpoints" gimmick. Which is a very satisfying answer to the question, "Why on earth do we need to spend half an episode with the single mom neighbor or this immediate ex-girlfriend?"

In the end - and really, only very literally at the very end - The Affair was about finding solace and happiness in simple familial love. Life is short, so why not spend it - the end of it, in particular - with the people who make you feel happiest and most comfortable? That's a message we can all get behind!

AI: The Somnium Files

I'm clearly unable to stay afloat on these posts and I know their overall quality has fallen pretty significantly - begging the question, why keep this blog going? - but also, fuck it, I don't play many video games anymore and this one's worth spending some time discussing.

Long time readers, if they exist (they don't) may recall a series of DS and 3DS games called the Zero Escape trilogy. They're more like visual novels than games, but I really loved them, or at least I loved the first two.

Now the creator of those games has made a new visual novel called AI: The Somnium Files. (God, why are video games always burdened with the weirdest and shittiest names?) "AI" here stands not only for artificial intelligence, but is pronounced "eye," because the artificial intelligence in this game is housed in the protagonist's artificial eye. And "somnium" is Latin for "dream," and this game is as much about dreams as the Zero Escape games are about escaping, so, sure, yes, the title works.

But yeah - the framework of the game is that you're a detective looking to solve a murder mystery, and you have two primary tools at your disposal. One of them is the aforementioned eye with AI - it's capable of things like thermal and X-ray vision which can help you find clues at murder scenes and deduce when people are lying. But the other key element is the "somnium" one - a machine that lets you enter the dreamscapes of another person - a witness, a suspect perhaps - in order to kind of sort of interrogate them without interrogating them. Sounds crazy illegal, right? And like anything discovered in said dreamscapes would be inadmissible in court? Well, yes - and the game kinda sorta alludes to this. It's part Inception, part Black Mirror. It works. Mostly.

But it quickly becomes clear as you play through the game that there's a bigger mystery afoot than just the murder case you're trying to solve.Blatantly and ominously, you yourself, as a protagonist and detective, have no recollection of your life before five or six years ago. Coincidentally, there was a spree of murders that took place five or six years ago. And coincidentally, the murder that takes place at the start of the game bears a striking resemblance to the murders that took place back then. Namely, the victim has had one eyeball removed.

There are just enough recurring themes and twists and red herrings here to keep things from being obvious, and that's really what I loved about this game. Like, I had elements of the overall "big story" figured out pretty early on, and a few suspicions where I was on the right track. but then also there were a few things that threw me off completely - chief among them, I think, was the way the game unfolds in a branching fashion. I'd say more, but Sweeney is playing this game right now and if there's a single person reading this blog anymore, it's probably him.

These games aren't for everyone, at all, and I can't even say I liked this one as much as that original Zero Escape trilogy. But I liked it enough to come back for any spiritual or direct successors. Your mileage may vary!

On Becoming a God in Central Florida: Season 1

I was skeptical going into this one - big fan of Kirsten Dunst's performances in general, but holy hell does setting TV shows thirty years in the past feel played out by now. That said? This was pretty good. Definitely started stronger than it ended, which gives me all kinds of pause for future seasons, but for about half of a season this was really churning along as a unique, weird show about pyramid schemes and the blissful naivete of the 1990s. The last thing I want to do at this point in my life is get caught up in another five-season Showtime drama that runs out of compelling reasons to stick around by like, Season 3 - looking at you, The Affair - but this one was strong enough to merit a second season.

The Righteous Gemstones: Season 1

Ah, shit. Yet again I thought I'd already made a post about something that ended over a month ago. Yet again, I had not!

Chapo Trap House (Matt Christman in particular) has an interesting take on the Danny McBride trilogy of HBO shows from the 2010s (Eastbound & Down, Vice Principals, and now The Righteous Gemstones) which is that together they examine in surprising depth the psyche of contemporary American Protestantism. Matt's take isn't fully formed and my attempt to reconstruct it will be even less complete, but it boils down to the idea that Manifest Destiny and American Exceptionalism polluted the very code of ethics and morals that existed in the European strains of Christianity that came to America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and now you have red states full of people whose personal codes of conduct boil down to, "if I am successful, it is because God has made me successful, and if God has made me successful, it is because I am living my life in accordance with his wishes." Or, essentially, "the deck is stacked in my favor because God has willed it to be that way, and if the deck is stacked against you it must be because you've pissed God off."

Such a theme is at its most overt here in a show about televangelists, but the undercurrents were there in both of the previous shows as well, albeit in a less explicitly religious sense. Danny McBride is amazing at building and portraying these characters who are reprehensible in their actions, but who clearly earnestly believe they are upstanding people. It's a gift!

I don't have much else to add, but Edi Patterson was the MVP of this cast, bar none, for her brazen performance as such a specific type of bratty, stupid, frustrated grown woman in Judy Gemstone.

And thanks to this show we will always have "Misbehavin'."

Catherine the Great: Season 1

I had high hopes for this! A four-episode HBO miniseries in which a 74-year-old Helen Mirren playing the famously promiscuous last Empress of Russia? That's an interesting set-up! Instead of focusing on Catherine's tumultuous rise to power and rivalry with her husband, let's take a look at the final years of the woman who was by that point maybe the most powerful woman in the world. Is she bored, with nothing left to conquer? Is she vengeful? Is she quietly satisfied? These lovers that she takes, who are forty years her junior - what's that whole dynamic like?

But the miniseries very emphatically was not interested in doing any of this! The series begins when Catherine is just 35 years old with minimal effort made to de-age Helen Mirren and, I mean, I'm sorry, but not even Helen Mirren can pull off "35 in the 1700s" at 74. And from there it's a fairly by-the-numbers retelling, in four episodes, of what the Russian Empire accomplished under Catherine's rule. The show doesn't shy away from the fact that she took multiple different lovers throughout her lifetime, but it also doesn't bother exploring this with any depth or substance. And it's also never really clear what makes Catherine tick, or who she is, or what she wants. Is she progressive? Is she an authoritarian tyrant? Are we meant to be rooting for her as a human being, or observing her as a case study of absolute power? All these questions go unanswered. The final episode has some great melodrama that Mirren dials up to eleven like the champ she is, but for the most part the role feels weirdly miscast.

There's one scene in particular that stands out to me as emblematic of the whole production's overall disinterest in saying anything. At the end of the third episode, Catherine finally arrives, on a ship, to the Black Sea; she has finally conquered Crimea - more specifically, her lover Potemkin has - and the Russian Empire has a warm-weather port from which to become a great naval power. This is ostensibly what she has been striving for throughout her entire reign, and Potemkin leads her up to the deck and says, "behold," and gestures vaguely toward an entire armada. That's quite a gift! Sensing the gravity of the moment, Potemkin vows he's done all this for her, would do anything for her, and loves her, before falling to his knees in front of her to abase himself at her robe hems. (She was fucking some other guy like two minutes ago, for what it's worth.)

This is the end of the episode! The music has reached a dramatic crescendo, the armada is all firing cannons, Potemkin clearly knows this is a hashtag-moment, and what's Mirren doing? Nothing! She just stands there, taking it all in, expressionless, but not like, meaningfully expressionless. It's not overwhelmed and it's not bored. There's no satisfied grin. Her eyes don't close as she leans her head back and inhales deeply. But there's also no "oh shit, what have we done?" deer-in-the-headlights look. Did she want his? Does she appreciate this? Does having a powerful man groveling at her feet amuse or excite her in any way? Or maybe, does it disgust her? The show doesn't know! Despite the show very clearly recognizing the bombast of this moment, it opts to let Mirren's Catherine not really react to it in any way! And so the very titular character remains a complete enigma even here at the height of her reign. It's not clear if this is on the director or the writers or Mirren herself - the scene is very clearly green-screened and CGIed, so, who knows if Mirren was even told what it was she was supposed to be looking at?

Anyway, they can't all be winners! Oh well. HBO still earns the benefit of the doubt more often than not when it comes to period pieces - shit, look at Chernobyl just earlier this year - and I'm sure I'll be back for whatever historical biopic miniseries they roll out with next.

Mindhunter: Season 2

Oh my lord, I cannot get over how boring I found this! Which is a shame, because I really genuinely liked the first season!

To hell with this show!

This Way Up: Season 1

Six-episode imported British comedies are so, so easy to binge and, in so many cases (Fleabag, The Office, Peep Show, Todd Margaret, Catastrophe) to love. This one barely registered! I couldn't tell you a single character's name! Sharon Horgan was here and the main character taught English as a second language to a bunch of immigrants, I think. Cool!

No, I've got nothing! To hell with this show!

HarmonQuest: Season 3

Christ, I'm way behind on my posting! I finished this like a month ago! Or whenever it ended. I don't know!

I honestly barely paid attention to this season of this show. The real reason to get on board witht his show in the first place was its impressive array of guests. Aubrey Plaza, Paul F. Tompkins, Ron Funches, Kumail Nanjiani, John Hodgman, Patton Oswalt, Jason Mantzoukas - you know, plenty of funny people! It was funny to watch them improvise their way through a big old Dungeons & Dragons game!

In Season 3, the show just leaned all the way into its own niche, pulling out nerdy guest star after nerdy guest star I'd never heard of or barely recognized. Like the biggest name this time around was... Reggie Watts? Kate Micucci? D'Arcy Carden, a.k.a. Janet from The Good Place?

To hell with this! I'm done!

Succession: Season 2

I liked Season 2 more than I liked Season 1, but, man, I'm just not ready to crown Succession the heavyweight champion of prestige television. There's too much plot going on "between episodes" if you will, and as such we're very much stuck in the third person, unaware of any individual character's true motivations. Also too much of the show still feels like a celebration of abhorrent behavior and excessive lifestyle porn. I understand the appeal here and in many ways I share it, but I'll enter Season 3 as far more of a casual fan than most people, it seems.

Ramy: Season 1

Here's a Hulu half-hour show from Ramy Youssef, a Muslim millennial, about being a Muslim millennial. It was pretty good! The standout episode is the fourth one, an extended 9/11 flashback; the attacks themselves notwithstanding, it's an utter tragedy to see a middle school Egyptian kid immediately lose all of his friends and kinda-but-not-fully understand why they and their parents suddenly seem to hate him and his. Oof. The show's been renewed for a second season and if you've got Hulu I think it's well worth your time! I mean, where else are you going to get a perspective like this one?

Untold History of the United States: Season 1

I thoroughly enjoyed this 2012 docu-series. It's a twelve-episode unapologetic People's History of the United States-like take on America's emergence as a global superpower during and after World War II from Oliver Stone, who, yes, okay, sure, go ahead and fact-check absolutely everything you're told here if you need to, he probably deserves it.

The purpose of the series is to provide alternative facts - no, not lies, literally and actually the information you don't get from high school or the news media or Hollywood war movies - to really help flesh out contemporary American history. And fam, it's some ugly shit! Which is the point. But still!

Also, holy hell, I'd love to see Stone make an epilogue chapter about the events covering, oh, 2012 to the present day.

Strongly recommend.

Transparent: Season 5

Yeah, I'm calling this one-episode feature-length finale a season of television, rather than a movie. Why? Because that's how it's been billed. Fuck, man, I dunno.

Let's talk a little bit about the history and legacy of the show Transparent, which won all kinds of Emmy awards and critical acclaim in part for depicting a transgender character's late-in-life transition and arguably lending visibility and cultural legitimacy to the trans community before kind of ironically, kind of predictably, kind of spectacularly blowing up five years later, in large part due to criticism and complaints from the same trans community it had helped legitimize.

(Look, I'm not complaining - that's literally what progress is! In 2014, our collective culture at large was introduced to so many aspects of life in the trans community that had previously gone unexplored by the mainstream by this show, explicitly; by 2017 or 2018, that community's cultural impact and visibility had already grown large enough for the same collective mainstream to take its cues on trans issues directly from said community, including criticisms and critiques of the same show that had arguably done more to boost awareness of the community than anything else in the first place. Oh God, this is a mouthful - can you tell I'm out of my element here?)

Let me maybe try phrasing it another way - no, don't take the shovel from me, I'm still digging! Like in 2014, it was, "give Jeffrey Tambor the Emmy for his heartfelt and dignified portrayal of a trans woman," and three years later it was, "it's nothing short of cis-washing that a trans character like Maura is played by a straight man like Jeffrey Tambor." I think the first take was a fine take in 2014 and I think the second take was a fine take to have in 2017 and I think it's very difficult for the zeitgeist at large to have the 2017 take without having first had the 2014 take. Does that make sense? Look, it's complicated!

All of that having been said, this show kind of stopped being about one trans woman's transition process and her family's reaction to that transition process somewhere along the way, and started being more about each of the family members' sexual and gender-based proclivities and hang-ups, and even some of their general flaws as people. Oh, and it's also somehow the most Jewish show of the decade.

But yeah, it's clearly run out of steam, and I can't think of a compelling reason it needed this finale once it was clear Jeffrey Tambor wouldn't be returning, beyond not letting Jeffrey Tambor's firing force the show to end prematurely; even though I said the show stared being about Maura's family as much as if not more than Maura somewhere along the way, what purpose does Transparent really have without the titular trans parent? Or, more directly, if you're going to make the finale of Transparent consist of the death of the trans parent, and you're going to loo at the family's reactions to that death... what are you doing making this thing a musical? None of these actors can even really sing, save for Judith Light, kinda. But what on earth - I mean, do these actors look like they want to be doing this? Does any of this seem like it was fun for them?

The most notable and controversial element of this whole thing is that it ends with a number called the "Joyocaust," whose premise as far as Twitter and I can tell is that Jews spend so much time, understandably, focusing on the dark and negative energy of the Holocaust - six million dead Jews! - that they ought to come up with some sort of positive energy counterbalance, some sort of joy, rather than horror, that can match twelve years of suffering and six million deaths. It's twice as insane as anything Marrianne Williamson is running on and way more tone deaf, but most of all it's a head-scratcher - less "oh wow, this is offensive!" and way more "this is such a weird note to end on."

Oh well. So long, Transparent. You were once very necessary, and then you got a little weird, and then in the end long after you were necessary you were just very weird. Thank you for your service!

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.

Claws: Season 3

Man, I was just positive I'd already posted about this. It's the same silly, campy, central Florida-based show it's always been. I've heard it described as a feminist fantasy of sorts, which, sure, I see that. A group of somewhat put-upon nail technicians when the show began, these women became druglords in Season 2 and casino owners in Season 3. That's a dang empire, baby!

Tough to see myself coming back for Season 4, but, stranger things have happened.

Baskets: Season 4

It's weird - I never really loved Baskets and I'll sure as shit never rewatch it, but now that it's over - and not even over all too soon, after four seasons - I kind of feel like I'll miss it a little bit. Gah!

I mean, I won't. I won't miss this show because you can't miss any show when there are all kinds of TV shows you still haven't seen and even more you need to finish. But I will miss the general concept of something as weird and earnest as Baskets existing at all. I came for the Zach Galfianakis, but I stayed for Martha Kelly's put-upon monotone performance and Louie Anderson's whole bittersweet old lady gimmick and the show's weird overall fascination with Arby's and Costco and juggalos.

Eh. Well, so long you beautiful oddity.

The Detour: Season 4

Oh boy.

Here's me talking up the first two seasons of The Detour in 2017:

...might be the best pure comedy I've seen in a while... This isn't a reinvention or a reboot of a family road trip comedy, nor is it an inversion or a spoof or a parody - it's just a straight attempt at the genre done very well, very consistently

...the second season was even better, against all odds ...newfound sense of confidence to make all kinds of in-jokes and callbacks. I'm not saying this is Arrested Development or anything, but it might be the closest thing on TV today to that beautiful, excellent family comedy too smart for its own good.

That's some very high praise! Here I am a year ago with a take on The Detour after its third season:

...third season was undeniably the weakest one yet. ...The Detour is probably going to get renewed for a fourth season... but it's clear the show was running on fumes already in the third... I don't have very high hopes.

Well, I can't say I didn't see this coming, but the fourth season was just awful on every level. The initial premise, the cliffhanger from Season 3 - that the family's daughter has run away from her very messy family at, like, 16, and the rest of the family is traveling the world trying to find her - very quickly resolved in an unsatisfying way that left all four characters scattered and the show without any real story to tell. And it's fine for comedies not to tell big stories - nothing wrong with a hang-out session and an episode-by-episode conflict-and-hilarious-resolution cycle - but this wasn't that, at all. This was, "let's change the setting every episode and never really have an understanding of why any of the characters are where they are, or what they're pursuing, or what they're doing." There were too many episodes without the kids, and worse, there was an episode without the parents. The kids aren't really kids anymore - classic sitcom issue, frankly - but their characters haven't really become teens either - more like little adults. It just doesn't work! Neither does the increasingly broad, easy, groanworthy comedy the show opts for.

All this is fine - shows get shitty and shows get canceled all the time - but for a couple of seasons there The Detour was legitimately one of the funniest and most underrated shows of the decade. I would still recommend those first two seasons to anyone at all, but yikes was this a rough season. There've been murmurings that the show could be brought back for a fifth season on a different network, but at this point I don't think it's TBS that's holding it back creatively. Oh well!

GLOW: Season 3

Here's another third season of a Netflix original that didn't live up to the high water mark it set last year; fortunately, GLOW was still very good! There are still just so many characters running around in this thing - I won't say too many, because they're all fantastic - but enough to leave you wanting more of everyone. (And hey, that's a good thing, right?) The women's wrestling production has moved from late night cable TV to a Las Vegas residence here in Season 3, and that means a lot of different things for a lot of different characters. Some take comfort in the steady work and sameness of the show they put on every single night; others feel caught in a dead end career-wise or creatively stifled. The show still excels at "episodes," by which I mean every year it seems like GLOW has a solid season with two or three very specific and very memorable episodes. (This year: the one where they all switch roles for a night, the one where they go camping in the dessert, and the Christmas special.) In short, it's a great show and I'd love to see it get renewed for a fourth season. Is there any higher praise than that? (Yes.)

Dear White People: Season 3

I should have seen this coming, and probably overrated Season 2 last year in the first place, but holy cow what a dropoff in quality. It's insane that a TV show primarily centered on black college kids would have nothing to say in 2019 in only its third season. Just five hours of watching former friends bicker with each other. Every character got either less likable or less interesting and there were no arcs or throughlines to follow whatsoever. I'm not sure if we'll see a fourth season of this thing, and worse, I'm not sure if I care!

Orange Is the New Black: Season 7

There've been lots of pieces already about the end of Orange is the New Black representing the end of an era - kind of specifically, the "early streaming" era. (Do you know what now stands as Netflix's oldest ongoing show? It's BoJack Horseman. Weird, right?) They've focused largely on things like how it's fun and even cute to look back at how people reacted to the early seasons of this thing, when binge-watching was a novel concept and some viewers were more comfortable consuming show one episode at a time over the course of several weeks, or how only on streaming was it possible to get this bold and experimental and sprawling with your storytelling. (I don't buy that part; I don't think the show would have been substantially different on Showtime or HBO.)

I want to offer a different take on the cultural relevance Orange is the New Black and I'll come right out and say that I think it's going to end up being one of the defining shows of the 2010s by comparing what this thing was when it started in 2013 and what it became by 2019.

When this thing started it was the story of an upper middle class white woman being sent to minimum security prison for drug trafficking. The inmates of color around her weren't presented initially as sympathetic people; they were presented as scary and potentially threatening to Piper Chapman, with one eventually beloved gay black character earning the unfortunate (and tough for certain segments of the fanbase to shed) nickname "Crazy Eyes" because of her totally friendly and benign tendency to stare excitedly at Piper. Think about where most of the drama stemmed form in Season 1. There was Piper's (white) ex-girlfriend Alex, there was Piper's big (white) rival Pennsatucky and there was Piper's (white, male) counselor explicitly forbidding Piper from engaging in any acts of homosexuality with Alex. We got some stories in the margins about Laverne Cox and her character's transition and the issues that was causing her both at home and in prison, and we got some faint whiffs of stories about racial injustice in the prison system and how white women and black women are sentenced differently for the same crimes, but this was first and foremost Piper's story about how hard it is to be a bisexual white woman in minimum security prison.

Fast forward seven years, and all of the show's most sympathetic characters are black women and undocumented immigrants set to be deported. Somewhere along the way the show stopped being about Piper's life, and she got pushed to the margins and all those characters on the margins had their stories start contributing to bigger picture themes like the rampant injustice inherent in for-profit prison systems and the deportation process. Racism in the early seasons was treated largely as a joke, like when the trashy white meth heads would spew hilarious 2013 stereotypes; by 2019 the show was done treating racism of any sort as a laughing matter.

The show was often messy, but it used its platform and popularity to tackle key issues of the decade from trans rights to Black Lives Matter to the ongoing family separation crisis. It is not hard to envision a strawman viewer whose views on these subjects were made more empathetic and humane in no small part because their favorite characters on a television show were suffering. Call me cynical, but when the deportation of an entirely fictional character can stir more outrage in someone than the weekly reports about people dying in ICE facilities, I mean, that's the power of television and storytelling, I guess, and kudos to Orange Is the New Black for using said power for good.

Also, kudos for bringing back so many old castmembers here in the final season. It might be fanservice, but it was done in the purest way. Just, "hey, let's check in on what this guy's been up to with one quick scene," and not, "it's time to bring this person back from the dead so she can beef with this other character because the actresses used to be on the same show and it'd be a fun wink" or whatever.

Oh, I had a Wire comparison I wanted to make but I couldn't find a place to shoehorn it in. Basically it was just that this show at its best was capable of portraying systemic injustice at every level of an institution like no show I've seen since The Wire. But also, this was all way too messy with far too many go-nowhere stories to really compare to the tightly plotted Shakespearean tragedy that was The Wire. Still a pretty good show, though!

The Last Czars: Season 1

I've been on a bit of a Russian history kick lately, so when this relatively unknown thing popped up on Netflix, I knew I'd check it out. No need to read reviews or anything; a quick look would be all I needed, and best case, it might be worth sticking around for six 45-minute episodes, hey, fine.

So the first episode began and I had one of the weirdest viewing experiences for fifteen minutes as I tried to figure out just what the hell I was watching.

Episode one begins, and there's a man in Germany in the 1920s going to a hospital where a delusional young woman is claiming to be Princess Anastasia of Russia, the lone survivor of the slaughter of the royal Romanov family in 1918 by Bolshevik forces during the Russian Revolution. Okay, sure - this is a famous old rumor and there were all kinds of false reports about Anastasia surviving the massacre. There's even a '90s non-Disney animated movie about it, so, this isn't the show making something up out of thin air - but already I'm finding it weird as hell that a show called "the last Czars" is going to take place from Anastasia's point of view.

Except, it doesn't. We suddenly flash back to Saint Petersburg in 1894 - seven years before Anastasia is born - and we witness the funeral of Alexander III, whose death at the age of 49 leaves the Russian Empire in the hands of a 26-year-old named Nicholas II. Okay, okay - this, now, this is the titular last Czar. Maybe the story's about him after all, but what was with that weird framing device? The scene isn't terrible, but all the dialogue is noticeably "intentional" rather than natural-sounding. The production value looks okay, not great, but what did I expect from a relatively unacknowledged Netflix original series?

Then a voice-over comes in, some fifteen minutes into the episode, narrating what's happening. Okay, wait, is this the man from the beginning of the episode who's sitting bedside with the Anastasia imposter? No, it's a different voice entirely. And suddenly we cut to... a talking head! And then another one. And another. Several historians just kind of describing the scene we just saw. And suddenly my understanding of this show changes again, and it's clear that what I am seeing is being presented as a documentary! But like, again, fifteen minutes into the episode.

And now there's some archival footage and there are some pictures from like, 1900, and I'm curious if the format is going to jump between dramatic reenactments of scenes and then historians describing things and adding context. And then we jump back to our actors, the new czar and his wife, and BAM, sex scene, full nudity, as they try to make an heir. Just straight up Game of Thrones-style gratuitous titties-and-moaning.

I mean this thing is just all fucking over the place - a documentary, with substantial acting and production value, framed as a mystery. It made for a very easy watch, but I can't help but wonder if it could have and would have been a much better show had it just stuck heavily to one lane instead of jumping back and forth across all three.

Here is what I think happened. I think this was originally intended as a straight up drama, and then perceived as being so fucking bad that it was completely cut up and re-edited with talking heads. If I continue down this line of almost baseless assumption, I think they had the "Anastasia imposter" framing in mind from the beginning, but made the Czar and his wife and Rasputin and their son the four most important characters. So Netflix, or whoever, said "fuck it, call it 'the Last Czars' and chop it up however you need to with talking heads filling in the gaps and explaining the bigger picture, and maybe we can salvage this thing," and then for some reason they still kept the Anastasia framing device anyway. I don't know!

Th funny thing is, I didn't hate this! I should have, and I can see what a mess it was, but whether my theory is true or not - and hey, maybe someone actually greenlit this thing with exactly this "half documentary, half mystery" pitch - it... kind of worked. It's one thing to read about or hear about or see old grainy black and white footage of the late Romanov family in the early 1900s, but to see them brought to life in a Downton Abbey-scale production with all the opulent rooms and clothes, I mean, that's something!

I dunno, man. Way too many words spent on this thing no one will remember a week from now. But it was an interesting case, that's all I'm saying. And sometimes a weird mess you can't look away from ends up making far more of an impact on you than a ho-hum series that does everything by the book.

Super Dungeon Bros

Meh. This is exactly the kind of low-effort co-op hack-and-slash shovelware that phones and tablets do better than video game consoles at this point, and that really don't need to exist at all! I couldn't care less that it's a roguelike - I'm only playing this thing once, who gives a shit if it changes every time? Clearly this game was designed to be played with four players, but bitch I am 31 years old and I don't have four controllers even if I have four friends!

I hope I didn't pay any money for this. I probably did! Fuck!

Gravity Rush

Holy shit, a video game? Yeah, here's my fourth beaten game of the year. I started this one way back when my paternity leave was ending in, oh, April, and then didn't touch it again for four solid months.

Gravity Rush is a title I'm almost positive I boguht back when I didn't have much of a PS4 library. You know how it goes. "Wow, I've got this brand new system and nothing to play on it! Time to buy any game at all with decent reviews." I believe this was a Vita port. It was a fun ten-hour platformer with a unique art style and an incoherent story. The central gimmick here is that you can manipulate the direction of gravity. Now if that sounds to you like a great gimmick for a puzzle game - yes, I agree. So imagine my surprise when this wasn't a puzzle game at all, but a straight-up beat-em-up that takes place in 3D.

Initial genre-based disappointment aside, this was actually a surprisingly fun game. It's just long enough not to wear out its welcome and the missions are just varied enough to keep the game from growing tedious. I spent way more time than I had to exploring the four-part city where the game takes place, but less thn I could have doing side quests.

Look, it was fine! If I were five years younger I'd be putting the sequel in my Amazon cart right now. Speaking of which, what's this? Hey, only $20? That ain't bad. I wonder how the reviews are...

No! No, I can't. I shouldn't. I won't. But this was fun, really.

Perpetual Grace, LTD: Season 1

The existence of this show has made it entirely possible for me to stomach Amazon's recent cancellation of Patriot, a two-season masterpiece that never got a chance to show off how brilliant and brutal and funny it was. Why? Because the creator of Patriot, along with honestly more than half of its castmembers are here now, making Perpetual Grace, LTD, on fucking Epix of all places. It's arguably even better than Patriot was and its first season was just flawless and oh fuck wait a minute how is this even-less-accessible, less-hyped show ever going to find the audience Patriot so desperately deserved and needed? Gah!

Let me pitch this delightfully weird and wonderful show, all-star cast and all.

It all starts with a plan. Just the easiest little plan. In New Mexico, somewhere near the border of old Mexico, a guy named Paul Allen Brown (Dewey Crowe from Justified) has a scheme to rob his wealthy con-artist parents (Ben Kingsley and Jacki Weaver). It involves sending them to Mexico to look for him - their missing son - while an interloper named James (Jimmi Simpson) steals Paul's identity and empties out his parents' bank accounts back home. Then Paul and James will split the money fifty-fifty. Couldn't be simpler.

This goes, as you might suspect, immediately and hilariously awry. What Paul fails to mention to James is that he's a person of interest in the murder of a little girl from Texas. So when "Paul" attempts to make a transaction, a Texas Ranger (Terry O'Quinn) gets an alert and heads straight to New Mexico to grill James-as-Paul about the murder. Also up James-as-Paul's ass is a convicted murderer (Chris Conrad) whose dying parents lost all of their money after being grifted by Ma and Pa Brown.

Part of the plan involves coercing an inept Mexican sheriff (Luis Guzman) to occupy Ma and Pa Brown while they're in Mexico looking for their son. Part of the plan involves bribing a Mexican coroner (Pedro from Napoleon Dynamite) to issue death certificates for Ma and Pa Brown. Yeah, well, Ma and Pa immediately figure out something's afoot, escape the sheriff, and murder a prison inmate who just so happens to be the son of a powerful cartel kingpin.

Lots of balls in the air - and this ignores some of the show's best characters like Glenn, a kid with head trauma who James-as-Paul quickly pulls into the ongoing scheme; Uncle Dave (Kurtwood Smith), a wrongfully-convicted kid diddler and the only guy in town who knows that James isn't actually Paul; and Donny, fresh out of British prison with a decades-old axe to grind against Pa Brown and heading straight for New Mexico to track him down.

But that's just the plot and its hiccups. The reason to tune in and watch Perpetual Grace, LTD has almost nothing to do with its story and almost everything to do with its tone, its vibes, and its quirks. Paul Allen Brown? Fucking loves magic tricks. The Mexican coroner? He wants to be the first Mexican man on the moon. Texas Ranger Terry O'Quinn? His name is Walker, and no, he's never once heard of that reference, because he doesn't watch TV shows. Sheriff Luis Guzman? He's an aspiring, terrible writer and his fat dumb sons don't respect him. Ma and Pa Brown? Cold-blooded criminals, but holy shit do they have the best love story you've ever seen.

The way this whole thing is shot? Fucking beautiful. The way it's paced? Extraordinary confidence; patient and deliberate, but never slow. The score and soundtrack? Just perfect.

Watch this show! Pirate it if you need to - hell, I did - but watch this show!

Halt and Catch Fire: Season 4

Ha! I watched the first 37 episodes of Halt and Catch Fire way back in January, then for whatever reason I left three just kinda hanging there in my Netflix account's "continue watching" section. There was - minor spoilers - a very major character death at the end of that 37th episode, so it's possible I needed some time to breathe after that moment and really let it sink in, but I think that's giving myself a little too much credit. More likely, some other show or shows came out when I had three episodes left and I just never found my way back to Halt and Catch Fire.

Until now! The three remaining episodes made for a slightly-too-long epilogue of sorts to the series I'd mostly binged seven months ago. After seeing these characters change companies and projects so often, I was a little unclear upon resuming the show exactly who was working where and grinding what axe against who, but the concluding action still landed for me in a satisfying way. Mostly.

The Boys: Season 1

All y'all know by know that comics and superheroes are very much not my shit, and that my interest in the genre is that of any vanilla movie-goer, any garden-variety thirtysomething white guy. Broadly speaking, I neither love nor hate the annual onslaught of new content, and I pick and choose my way through these various cinematic universes with specific, limited interest.

The Boys, then, did not seem like it was going to be for me. The advertising, the marketing - I mean, look at that poster art. Yuck! And yet here I sit after devouring eight episodes in less than a week, very excited for the second season.

The show's based on a comic book from 2008 or so, which kinda tracks; that's about the latest possible year someone could have called their creation "The Boys" without inducing all kinds of groans and winces. Unfortunate name aside, the "Boys" in question aren't superheroes. Rather, they're members of a covert operation tracking, limiting, and in some cases even murdering superheroes. I guess they're literal antiheroes! (Yeah, this whole thing just plays so much better ten years ago, I'm sorry.)

Turns out, the superheroes in the world of The Boys are exactly what uber-powerful people would end up being, which is to say a bunch of corrupt and egotistical assholes, some of them downright evil. The show's most fascinating character is Homelander, a Superman-Captain America hybrid who wears stars and stripes on his cape, but also, you know, shoots down planes full of innocent people (twice!) for nefarious reasons. So this ragtag crew, the titular Boys, largely motivated by individual desires for personal vengeance, are attempting to expose if not destroy them. In some ways, it's a nice little story about the little guys fighting back - and that's something that honestly plays better in 2019 than in 2008.

I appreciated how patiently this show builds the world in which it takes place. We're still meeting major characters halfway through the season and when it draws to a conclusion, it feels like it's all just getting started. I know the whole "the first season is really just an extended pilot" model of TV storytelling can be stale and irritating, but it's not like the season was all exposition, at all.

I dunno, give it a try!