It's a magical world

I really liked it. I really, really liked it. That said: ( Spoilers )

All that being said, I really liked it, and I'll be watching it every week until the end. I really love Peggy & Jarvis playing off each other--their actors are both very pretty and they are very fun together. I don't actually want Peggy/Jarvis because Peggy/Steve and Jarvis/his wife (is it me, or are they going out of their way to get his wedding ring prominently into certain shots?), but they are very pretty together, and I love James D'Arcy almost as much as I love Hayley Atwell.

Spoilers through 2x05.

( いただきます。 )

# longwhitecoats' meta on Hannibal is really good.

# This show has to be some of the best TV I've seen, period.

Technically brilliant, narratively highly questionable.

( Spoilers have learned to survive alone. )

( 6x05-06, with a DS9 digression )

---

( Live blog of 6x07, with Tsubasa spoilers )

As for Eyepatch Lady…the ends do not justify the means, no matter what.

So I'm watching Doctor Who now! And it's awesome! No one is surprised.

( Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock )

This post is a clever way to lampshade the fact that I have temporarily run out of canned (i.e. pre-written) reviews. Clever, huh!

1. The roommate and I watched the premiere of The Walking Dead yesterday. I give the show points for not killing off the black characters in the first episode, but based on the promo image, they're not recurring cast members, which is a net deduction--and note too how the one Asian character is half-hidden in that same image. And I deduct more points for the protagonist's white man-pain and his patent idiocy in going to Atlanta, WTF. Not enough genre savvy, in other words (WARNING: link goes to TV Tropes), and I don't care about his wife or kid or best friend, either. My roommate being a bio major in undergrad, we spent a lot of the episode wondering how the zombies communicate and/or sense live prey (their senses can't be that developed, right? their flesh is rotting!).

2. My research project is so characteristically me, you guys, it kills me. I don't understand people who are uncomfortable with the idea that their theses reflect on them personally and/or psychologically; how else would anyone get anything done?

3. Google Chrome for Mac does not play well with the rich text editor. I've been thinking of submitting a bug report: yes? no? I've never written one before, but it'd be nice to get the code optimized to work with Chrome, assuming it's something in DW's control…

4. I'm reading Bleach again. I don't even want to talk about this, except that everyone is at least 2x as awesome now thanks to the time jump, and the moment they called Ishida "megane-kun," I was like, "Dude, he's going to KILL THEM ALL," and sure enough, I was right. Kudos to the scanlators, too; their dialogue is actually both idiomatic and funny.

5. I went to my local sff bookstore, which is awesome, in search of Cat Valente's new novel The Habitation of the Blessed last Thursday; their distributor hadn't shipped them copies yet, but my name is on the list. In the meantime I am reading The Broken Kingdoms and rewatching the promo vid about Prester John. Seriously, if you like the middle ages at all, you should totally watch the vid, and think about reading the book. There's a reason that medieval Latin is the most fun you can have in a classics department, and it's not just because everyone forgot how to write good Ciceronian prose.

Like a lot of awesome things, I heard about this TV series (12 episodes long) via coffeeandink's recommendation.

I don't even have a television tag, that is how little I actually watch television. This entry will be tagged comics, which, given that it was based on a comic book series (that was itself based on an unfilmed TV pilot) written by creator Javier Grillo-Marxuach, seems fitting.

Temporary worker and unreasonably attractive art school graduate Wendy Watson (Natalie Morales) lives in a shared illegal sublet with her best friend, fellow conceptual artist Lacey Thornfield III (Brit Morgan). After Wendy loses her latest temp job due to surviving an attack by an alien tentacled monster, she is recruited by the Jolly Fats Weehawkin Temporary Agency, the cover organization for The Middleman (Matt Keeslar) and his android assistant Ida, who fight evil so you don't have to. Wendy, not without justifiable concern, takes a job as The Middle-sidekick, aka The Middlegirl, aka The Middleman-in-training. Eventually she gets kung fu training, a SMRT car, and a hot boyfriend out of the deal, to say nothing of more ripped-from-the-comic-books adventures than you can shake a Comics Code Authority sticker at.

What a great show, seriously. It is laugh-outloud hilarious, and has multiple PoC cast members as well as a PoC lead (Matt Keeslar gets first billing, but it's clearly Morales' show). It's also ridiculously immersed in pop culture references, and very close to breaking the fourth wall in its cheeky awareness of its own comic-book-yness; in some ways it explodes comic books by taking them absolutely seriously. Wendy and the Middleman make an awesome team, and their friends are just awesome (though Brit Morgan looks disconcertingly like Kirsten Dunst and the guy who plays Pip looks scarily like RPatz). The series also knows how to make emotional development out of a running joke, which is pretty great. I can't decide which episodes were my favorite; probably the one that was an explicit hat-tip both to Titanic and to that X-Files episode in which Mulder got stuck on a luxury liner in a time warp in the Bermuda Triangle. Or maybe the series finale, which is an explicit shout-out to the TOS episode "Mirror, Mirror" as well as an ironic take on that genre of movies that includes Children of Men (which, if you watch the table read of the episode in the DVD bonus material, was explicitly cited in the script, natch).

I haven't yet heard//seen the table read of the unfilmed 13th episode at Comic-Con; though I will shortly. I do want to track down the graphic novel of that at some point. Really, the show is perfect as it is; and in some ways it was too good to last (and certainly not on ABC Family).

P.S. Terrifying factoid: Varsity Fan Club are, or were, an actual boy band.