Binge Worthy TV - Jan/Feb 2018

I watch more TV than I should, mostly science fiction or mystery related. I consider myself a negative leading indicator for TV shows. My tastes are not in line with the bulk of the TV-watching audience, and the fact that I like something is a pretty good sign that it’ll be cancelled soon. I’ve taken to calling that the Cozort curse. I don't seek out violent shows or ones with a lot of sexual content, but if something is good I don't stop watching it because of a violent or sexual scene. This article is safe for work, but some of the shows I mention are definitely not. With that in mind, here are some shows I’ve watched lately.

Don’t tell anyone that Dale Cozort likes it, lest we trigger the Cozort curse, but I love SyFy channel’s Happy. It’s one of the more bizarre series I’ve seen on TV. A little girl gets kidnapped and her imaginary friend Happy, a flying cartoon unicorn, goes to her father to get her rescued. The father, a disgraced former police officer who is now a contract killer, is the only arguably sane adult who can see Happy. Result: gory, bloody scenes with an incredibly cute little imaginary animal flying through them and reacting like a little girl’s imaginary friend should. Very strange television and not for everybody, but with unique and visually interesting scenes along with some that are strictly for shock value, which I’m not a huge fan of.

Then there is Bright. This is a made for Netflix movie starring Will Smith. It’s a buddy cop movie and urban fantasy, with Smith as the cop. Bright is set in a city where neighborhoods are settled by different creatures out of urban legend, without a great deal of love between the groups or between them and the police. Will Smith’s new partner is an orc. Orcs have a bad reputation as mostly criminals, so new partner faces a lot of discrimination within the police force.

The movie isn’t bad. Netflix put millions into the production—spending as much as a moderate-level movie for theatre release and it shows in terms of good production values for the most part, though the world-buildings doesn’t make a lot of sense.

A blast from the past: The Lost Room. This was a three-part science fiction mini-series released in 2006. I tried to record it when it came out but ended up with two and a half of the three episodes. I stumbled across the recordings a while back, remembered that I had never seen the whole thing and found a source for all the episodes after some confusion, mostly because they released it as six episodes at one point.

After all these years I finally got to watch the missing half episode. How was it? The parts I had already seen were as good as I remembered them, but the ending was a little disappointing. The idea is that something very strange happened in the early 1960s, which left a hotel room in a different dimension. Objects from that hotel room have strange properties, some useful, others just weird. For example, if you use the key in any lock, the door opens into the hotel room. Open the door again and you might be on a tropical beach or in the middle of a biker bar. A bus ticket from the room sends people to the middle of a rural highway in Arizona or New Mexico.

Objects are highly sought after by a wealthy and powerful underground. Using an object’s powers attracts these guys. A cop’s daughter (probably around 8 years-old) uses the Lost Room and disappears. The story revolves around his efforts to get her back. If you stumble across the show, it’s worth watching though it may take some searching to find a copy.

The Orville, which bills itself as a Star Trek satire, turned out to be surprisingly good, more for the dramatic parts which are quite good, rather than for the humor, which is mostly kind of juvenile. I found myself looking forward to every episode. Not sure why. Keep that to yourself too. Have to keep it from being consumed by the curse.

I recently watched and enjoyed Star Trek Continues, a fan-produced series of eleven episodes—full-length shows--that supposedly picks up right after the cancelled original Star Trek series. They’re available on YouTube and are surprisingly watchable for fan-based stuff, with a really good set, good computer graphics and acting that ranges from almost professional to cringe-worthy. The best episodes could, with better actors/actresses in a few roles, slide right in to the TV series and one or two of the later ones could work as is. There are some clunkers among the eleven too.
The best I’ve seen so far is a Mirror Universe episode which starts off from where the actual Star Trek Mirror Universe episode left off and traces what happens in the mirror universe right after the misplaced mirror universe people get back home. Quite well-done.

Actors from real Star Trek show up, though not always in their Star Trek roles. The actor who plays “Q” is in one episode, but not as “Q”. One of the guys from Mythbusters is in several episodes and Lew Ferigno from the Hulk shows up in one.

I’m told that there is a story arc that is scattered through the first nine episodes and comes to fruition in the two-part finale, but if there is they hid it well in the episodes I’ve seen so far.

I’m also told that there are other elaborate fan-produced Star Trek episodes out there, including one that uses scripts from the abortive Star Trek TV-series that was kicked around for a few years between the cancellation of the original Star Trek and the first Star Trek movie, (Star Trek Phase II) but that they aren’t as good as Star Trek Continues.

The fan-produced Star Trek ecosystem is likely to get a lot less fun in the future, because the copyright holders are cracking down hard, restricting fan-made films to 15 minutes each, with no more than two episodes in an arc and not allowing actors from any of the Star Trek shows or movies to play in them, along with a long list of other restrictions that are intended to keep them deep in amateur territory.

There were quite a few abortive Star Trek series, including a spin-off called Assignment Earth that would have been pitched after year two of the original Star Trek if Stat Trek hadn’t been renewed for a third season. There is a list of abortive Star Trek projects at:

https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-star-trek-tv-shows-that-never-happened-1785166911

Another recent find: The Guild. It’s about a group of people playing an online multiplayer role-playing game who meet each other in real life and become sort of friends. It’s mostly from the point of view of the main female character from Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. I should like it, but I’ve had trouble getting into it.

I just finished the second season of Travelers. It’s a Netflix series, in cooperation with Showcase. Teams of “Travelers” are being sent back from a really nasty future Earth to try to reshape the past and avoid the worst of the future’s disasters. Their consciousnesses jump back into the bodies of people who would otherwise die, at the moment of death. They maintain the lives of the people whose bodies they jump into and perform missions under the orders of an Artificial Intelligence called “The Director”.

The Travelers are sent back based on publicly available information, which is sometime a problem. For example, the guy who died of a heroin overdose wasn’t really using for the first time as his parents publicly asserted, so the Traveler jumped into a heroin-addicted body. Oops.

One Traveler jumps into the body of a woman with severe brain damage that didn't show up in the public records. She arrives at the moment her host would have died from a beating by a gang of thugs. She gets up and brutally, easily takes the bunch of them down. Unfortunately for her, the action is recorded on a surveillance camera. While it is obviously self-defense, the cops wonder how she managed the beat-downs. The more they look at the footage, the more they are left shaking their heads. Attracting that kind of attention isn’t good for someone on a secret mission.

There are other factions from the future, at least one of which is attacking Travelers and brutally torturing them to death. There are hints that the Director and the factions of the future are changing, which makes sense because the Travelers are changing their past. The show can be very brutal, but the characters are strong and draw me in. The Director is not particularly nice by our standards, sometimes using Travelers as “human bullets” to solve a problem.

I’ve been watching Marvel’s Agents of Shield, but in kind of a pro-forma way, only half-watching it in the background, until maybe the last seven or eight episodes. The most recent story arc is quite good and I’ve been watching it voraciously. The team has been transported to the distant future, where blue-skinned aliens rule the remnants of humanity who escaped Earth when it was literally shattered into asteroids. They try to survive and hopefully figure out how to keep Earth from meeting that fate.

I stumbled across a show on Netflix called The End of the F-ing World a few days ago and watched a few episodes. It’s very strange. A teenager who thinks he is a sociopath destined to be a serial killer is looking for his first human victim. He runs away with a teenage girl who has even more issues than he doe, looking for a chance to kill her. He eventually saves her from being raped and murdered, killing the would-be rapist. Based on his reaction to actually killing someone, he decides that killing people is over-rated and that he is falling in love with the girl, after which they go on a bizarre crime spree. It has nothing to do so far with the end of the world, but I found it oddly compelling.

Also on Netflix: The Returned. This starts out very strong but seems to lose its way as the series goes on. People who have been dead several years suddenly show up in a small town and try to go on with their lives. They have no idea they’ve been gone at first and no memory of where they were in the meantime. One of them, a teenage girl, walks into her house, fixes a sandwich, and has no idea why her mom is acting so weird or why her sister is now much older than her. This sets up some great conflict and I had a lot of hope for the series, but the show tosses out so many subplots and flashbacks that it’s difficult to follow and loses a lot of the dramatic possibilities, though it has several very striking scenes. The season ending leaves most of the subplots unexplained and unresolved. I don’t know if a second season is coming, but as it stands at the end of the first season this is a good setup with some very good acting marred by a weak overall arc.

Finally, here is one to look forward to. Apple (the computer company) is getting into original TV content and one of its first three offerings is apparently not just alternate history, but space race alternate history, set in a world (actually worlds, I guess) where the 1960s space race never ended. That could be a lot of fun.