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strong_belwas
Reviews
Mythic Quest: Raven's Banquet: Buffalo Chicken Pizza (2023)
Season 3 missed the mark
The overall story this season felt a bit tired and aimless. The tension and energy of the previous seasons is missing, and in the end, several characters just end up back where they started. A lot of the good things about the show are missing this season.
The gaming world used to be integral to a lot of the stories, but now it's more of a backdrop - the fact that the characters work in the gaming industry is no longer as important to the stories, which made the show feel more generic. The first season had fun and original stories about things like dealing with unpredictable teen streamers with a huge amount of power over the game, and players using the game to promote nazism. This season had stories about things like christmas parties and brunch.
The show has also become much less grounded in reality. It seems like anyone can just decide to work anywhere they want - changing your profession is as easy as changing your hat. Ian and Poppy don't seem to have any plan for building their company and just do whatever. They start by reject a huge investment offer, because of an unexplained gut feeling, and then money doesn't seem to an issue until the end of the season. Meanwhile, they rent a gigantic futuristic office space but don't hire any people to work there. And they're supposed to be two intelligent people with a lot of experience and prior success in the industry. In short, there is a feeling of "anything goes" and "actions without consequences", which reduces the tension makes it all feel a bit empty.
The group dynamic of all the characters is another loss, now that they are off doing their own things. A lot of the friendships introduced this season feel rushed, because they didn't have enough time to set them up beforehand (maybe it would have been wiser to not separate the characters until a later season). Also, the departure of F. Murray Abraham was a huge loss for the show, he was always hilarious and had some fantastic character moments last season.
This season saw a major change to its formula, and I don't think they managed to pull it off, but the show survives because of its well-developed characters and good performances. Hopefully, the show can find its way back to the quality of the first two seasons.
Rick and Morty: Full Meta Jackrick (2022)
The meta overload
Personally, I can only take a certain amount of meta while still being engaged in the story. When characters repeatedly tell you that what's happening isn't real, but just a story, you inevitably lose all the stakes. Really, this is something that can happen in any art form, if you keep deconstructing it, you eventually end up with nothing.
Of course, being what it is, this episode brings up this very point. Rick says something along the lines of "meta works in a comment here or there, but if you base a whole story on it, it breaks down". When characters blatantly point out the problems with the story they're in, at best it comes across as self-deprecating, and at worst, as obnoxious and irritating. What it doesn't do, is fixing the problem. It's just the writer saying, "I know this is flawed but I'm doing it anyway", or maybe "I know what you're going to dislike about this, so I'm saying it first to get ahead of you".
At its best, Rick and Morty gives you funny jokes and an engaging story, this had one of those things. The jokes carry the episode and make it worth watching, (the Self-Referential Six was a personal highlight) even though it's very hard to care about anything that is happening.
Mr. Robot: eps3.7_dont-delete-me.ko (2017)
Insightful and perfectly crafted
Creating a dark story is easy. Creating a story that goes this dark and still ends with hope, without it feeling contrived or dishonest, is both difficult and admirable. The key to this is that personal change comes through experience, not words. Eliot can't be told how to move on, he must go on a journey to find a way out of his depression. Similarly, we as the audience can't be told how Eliot does this, we need to experience it with him. This is what makes Eliot's journey from total despair to finding hope feel so profoundly real.
At its core, the message of this episode is simple. We can't live without having connections to other people. Eliot has always had trouble relating to other people and now he feels betrayed by the only two people he has ever been close with. He is completely alone with his grief and guilt. So, of course, to find his will to live, he must make a connection to another person.
Trenton's little brother is the perfect choice for this. He is a lonely child who has just lost someone close to him, thus perfectly relatable to Eliot. He allows Eliot to empathize with another person and get out of his own head (like the kid says: "You talk about yourself a lot"). This line captures the essence of depression, the inability to see past yourself and connect with other people.
Another thing that makes this episode so impactful is how focused the storytelling is. We're with Eliot the whole time, and everything that happens, all the interactions between characters and references to other work, is in service of telling this single story. Every setup is paid off, the most important one being when Eliot makes plans to see a movie, first dishonestly with Darlene illustrating his choice to die, and secondly with Trenton's brother, illustrating his choice to live. Malek's portrayal of the release of emotions caused by Eliot's decision to live is incredible and gets me every time. It only lasts for a couple of seconds before the kid comes back, but you just feel the immense weight of that moment.
This series has more suspenseful episodes, more action-packed episodes, and more intensely dramatic episodes, but to me, this small scaled and quiet meditation on grief and loneliness stand out, not just in the series, but as one of the most moving pieces of fiction ever made.
Doctor Who: Listen (2014)
Well made but lacks resolution to character arcs and story
Despite some great performances, atmosphere and well executed creepy scenes, this episode, like a lot of Moffat's later episodes, ultimately left me feeling unsatisfied. The reason is a lack of resolution to the story and/or character arcs. The fact that we don't get to know whether there is a monster or not, isn't necessarily bad, but in its place, we need to find a resolution to the story somewhere else, which we don't.
The episode is about fear. The Doctor is afraid and tries to overcome his fears by doing what he usually does: defeating a monster. However, it's strongly hinted that there is no monster or at least that the characters will never be able to find out if there is. The problem is that we don't get to see the Doctor being confronted with this fact. How does he react when he doesn't get to know the answer and is not allowed to deal with his fears the way he usually does? Is he going to change? Is he going to try to ignore these things, and will it result in bad consequences later? We don't know, because the episode ends, and these ideas are not followed up on in later episodes. This makes the story feel unfinished.
We do get more of a resolution to Clara's arc since she actually seams to learn how to deal with her own fears during the course of the episode. At least, I think that was the point of the story with her and Danny, though it is not very clear how their fears are the reason for the date going badly and in what way she faces her fears to make the relationship work in the end.
Like others have pointed out, the overall concepts are classic Moffat, which works great in his early episodes, but here it seems like his attempts to deconstruct the usual Doctor Who formula gets in the way of telling a complete self-contained story. Basically, he's trying too hard to be clever and ignores the simple elements needed to tell a good story.
Of course, he pulls this off perfectly in his most well-regarded episode, Blink, where we have strong characters overcoming clear obstacles and learning and growing in the process. At its core, Blink is a simple story where every scene builds perfectly on the previous ones and all the information needed to understand what's happening is presented gradually over the course of the episode, leaving no loose ends to the story. The complicated time-travel stuff is just the icing on the cake, it makes the story more interesting and exciting but it's not the point of the story, it's just the medium.
This is what is missing in Listen is and in a lot of other stories during Moffat's run of the series. If you take away the fantastical elements and the thrills, there isn't enough left underneath to make it feel like a real story. After watching an episode that solely relies on interesting concepts and complicated time-travel stuff, we're left with a kind of empty feeling and wondering what the point of it was.