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!