7th Station ~TV, movies, games~

[Celedam]

GoT

Like, I don't know any haters who has actually watched it properly.

There are some, but they hate the show because they're devoted book-readers who refuse to accept the realities of adapting a book — even a book as long and complex as this series — for a mainstream television audience. They nitpick everything. They're like the most obnoxious fanboys you've ever met.

And I say this as someone who read the books through A Feast for Crows, years before the show was even announced. My friends and I played the strategic board game as well. We were there before everyone else, but we can still appreciate the show for what it is. Aforementioned hand-waving not withstanding.

(I have A Dance with Dragons on my shelf, but I've never gotten around to reading it because the show has supplanted the books in my mind. I might go back and re-read the entire series when GRRM completes it. In 2043.)

Spoiler: show

I loved the meeting scene. Awkward reunions and all. Euron just jumping in right away, etc. […] All the subtle things that go on just when characters look at each other.

[Celedam]

I just had a wild thought about the possible ending of Game of Thrones…

Spoiler: show

The good guys (whoever they happen to be by the end) lure the Army of the Dead into King's Landing, with the "one million people" that were conspicuously mentioned twice during this season's finale serving as bait, and then they set off the remaining caches of wildfire in order to incinerate them all in a single blast. The Mad King's last command would finally be executed. Daenerys' prophetic vision in the House of the Undying would be fulfilled. King's Landing would be destroyed and no longer the nation's capital. The Iron Throne would be a pile of slag, rendering the eponymous game moot. And we would get the ironic, bittersweet ending that GRRM has promised.

[Zunu]

You just out-Grrm'd GRRM.

[Nayoko-Kihara]

I spent a little time today catching up on new "The Amazing World of Gumball" episodes; Teri Pamyu Pamyu was a pleasant surprise.

[Celedam]

I don't think I'll ever get used to how Game of Thrones has become such a huge part of popular culture everywhere. It's just weird to hear GoT references in the middle of, say, a TV interview of a political figure on the other side of the world. And references made not by young adults who are obviously immersed in pop culture to begin with, but by older, otherwise straight-laced politicians and journalists who read nothing but biographies about other politicians and journalists. Not even The Lord of the Rings has this much recognition, and it's much more important in recent cultural history.

The weirdest part was that when the interviewer made the reference, the interviewee immediately got it without any explanation or delay and then responded in kind. It's like GoT is in the air we breathe now and we all take it for granted.

For crying out loud, people, I know it's the characters and drama that everyone loves, but it's still a show about dragons and ice zombies!

[CaptainBerryzGiraffe]

i would have to venture to say it's very different than, say, something like lord of the rings in that the show itself has been running for what, 8-ish years now? And the books were released [i]way[i/] before that. So not only did it have a huge fanbase, but then it also continued that with an almost decade-long tv-series, so with something of that magnitude, it's bound to become basically part of pop culture. Whereas lord of the rings was just three books, followed by three movies many years later, it really wasn't a span of time as absolutely monstrous as A Song of Ice and Fire has been.

Which, I think is excellent

[Celedam]

Whereas lord of the rings was just three books […]

Care to comment, erilaz?

[Nayoko-Kihara]

Against my better judgement, or maybe just because I was bored, I decided to watch the first episode of the new Star Trek series.

Spoiler: show

Unfortunately the show airing before it ran long and football was coming on after (and football always wins, as many of my pre-set recordings have taught me), so it only recorded about 30 minutes of the show. That was enough though, I can't take the Klingon design seriously. They look like shiny fish people. I get that there's a reason for the altered design, but having a reason doesn't excuse the resulting product being ugly and awkward to look at when lines are spoken.

[erilaz]

^ The fact that they showed the premiere on regular CBS reminded me of the drug dealer's line, "The first one's free."

Whereas lord of the rings was just three books […]

Care to comment, erilaz?

Oooooh, where to begin?

Technically, The Lord of the Rings is not three books, but rather one story (in six "books" plus six appendices) that was originally published in three volumes, and is still usually similarly packaged. But if you're interested, you can add the published draft materials ("The History of The Lord of the Rings") that make up 3½ of the 10 volumes of "The History of Middle-earth". Of course, Tolkien's legendarium of that world also extends far beyond that, into The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, etc. etc., with posthumously published works still appearing. And don't even get me started on what Tolkien wrote about the languages spoken in that world....

The Hobbit was published in 1937, The Lord of the Rings in 1954-55. Since then, and especially since the mid-1960s, there has been a very active fandom and voluminous scholarship devoted to these works. Last month I visited a friend who owns what is almost certainly the largest collection of Tolkien-related fanzines in the world, which occupies at least six meters of shelf space, not counting what's already been donated to Marquette University. And that's just fanzines. (You can get some idea of what's in his collection here and here.)

Then there's the enormous influence that The Lord of the Rings has had on the way books are marketed. "Fantasy" as a publishing genre didn't exist before Tolkien, and the proliferation of fantasy "trilogies" (which The Lord of the Rings is not) certainly owes its existence to Tolkien, as well. Tom Shippey writes in J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (p. 326), "I do not think any modern writer of epic fantasy has managed to escape the mark of Tolkien, no matter how hard many of them have tried."

So it's not just "three books" and "three movies".

[Celedam]

From January 2014…

Between Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, and other sources, there are too damn many choices. I truly don't know what to watch next. I'm the kind of guy who would be happy to watch nothing but Community and Good Eats reruns forever, but I know that's not healthy.

I just finished Yes, Minister / Yes, Prime Minister. Here's what I'm considering next…

Spoiler: show

Comedy:
- As Time Goes By (I've seen several episodes over the years, but not all and not in order)
- The Thick of It
- Spy
- Wilfred

Drama:
- Breaking Bad (unlikely, because I really don't like crime/gang stories, but it's almost unavoidable)
- House of Cards (UK, not US)
- The Tudors (seems a bit too 90210, but maybe…)
- Luther
- Dexter

Sci-fi/fantasy:
- Dollhouse
- Falling Skies
- Fringe
- Continuum
- Outcasts
- Misfits
- Black Mirror
- American Horror Story (unlikely, because it's similar to Locke & Key, which I just read)
- Twin Peaks (I was a bit too young for it when it originally aired)
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (it's been twenty years, it might be worth a repeat)

Anime:
- Attack on Titan
- Welcome to the NHK
- Mushi-shi
- Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (would be the third time for me, but it's deep enough to warrant several repeats)
- The Irresponsible Captain Tylor (an old favorite of a friend, I keep promising to watch it)

Non-fiction:
- Survivorman
- Stephen Fry in America
- An Idiot Abroad
- NOVA (152 full episodes via the PBS website, that could keep me going for months)

For what it's worth, I've pretty much given up on Almost Human and Sleepy Hollow.

Anyhow, I welcome your votes and suggestions.

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Wilfred is expiring soon off of Hulu (and already expired off of Netflix a couple months ago), so I'm binging it now. It's scary brilliant.

Elijah Wood stars as Ryan, a severely depressed, possibly mentally ill young man who attempts suicide in the very first scene of the series. The attempt fails, or at least it seems to. The next morning, as he tries to figure out why the attempt failed, he meets his attractive female neighbor and her dog Wilfred. The thing is, instead of an actual dog he sees a gregarious, somewhat vulgar Australian man in a dog costume. He thinks he's hallucinating, as an after-effect of the failed suicide attempt, but the hallucination never ends.



The rest of the series progresses from there. Ryan, who is out of work (despite being a skilled lawyer — that's a whole subplot in itself), spends most of his days dogsitting Wilfred for his neighbor, and together they explore the depths of his depression. It's nominally a comedy, because Wilfred is a comic character, but it gets so deep that it often feels like therapy. Depression, suicide, drug abuse, mental illness, isolation, unemployment, dysfunctional families, childhood trauma, ethical dilemmas, failed relationships… It's not for the faint of heart, and it's actually helping me with some issues of my own.

And through it all, the question remains: what is Wilfred?

Spoiler: show

I didn't really understand what the series was doing until the middle of the second season. The first season was just plain surreal, and then there was a sudden shift in tone for the first half of the second season. It seemed like the writing had changed, so that it had become a more conventional sitcom with an obvious setup and a feel-good resolution within each episode. I almost gave up on it, but it all turned out to be an epic head-fake.

After certain events in the middle of the second season, it becomes clear that he tone of the series itself fluctuates according to Ryan's state of mind. The first half of the second season felt more conventional because Ryan felt his life was getting back to normal. And then going further back, the first season was so surreal because Ryan was stoned out of his mind for most of it. Very meta.

Knowing this now, I'm looking forward to the rest of the series.