Netflix – RAnt(hony)-ings

Purposefully Dark

I just finished watching the Netflix series Dark. To say I enjoyed the series would be an overstatement; my emotional state while watching it was more akin to the emotional state you might have while watching a train wreck in progress. I sat up and watched the last three episodes back to back this morning before tumbling into bed and sleeping like the dead for twelve hours.

When I woke up the show was still there in my head and so I felt compelled to write something about it here. Felt compelled to write something if not for other people, then for myself so that I can at least get this dark mess in my head out where I can analyze it. I have enough dark shit in there of my own to deal with.

I was dissatisfied with the conclusion of the show, but I was happy that there was a conclusion. There is nothing worse in the entertainment world than being teased along through dozens of episodes for a show only to discover that the story has no real ending. This story does end. Like LOST, like the director’s cut of The Butterfly Effect, the ending simply isn’t very satisfying and leaves you wondering what the message, the theme of the show, really was.

Set in a mythical town (Winden) in Germany next to a nuclear power plant, the story of Dark revolves around time travel and the ramifications of interfering in the progression of time. There are murders and missing children galore in the first season. There are mysteriously torn and variously mangled maps, books and photographs that are used as props in the show to keep you asking who is abducting and killing children and why?

The play of Ariadne (Araine, Tragedy by Thomas Corneille) that the character Martha is seen performing in during the first season is pivotal. There is a labyrinth to be navigated and a monster to be slain before the story is finished, but neither of these things are what we think they might be by the time we get to the end. Read on if you want to know more. There are spoilers beyond the break.

Happy New Year

If you only listen to one year in review show, this is the one to listen to. It’s just six minutes. This is the tl;dr version of a review show, set to music:

Vox. com – Today, Explained – The Year in Review – December 30, 2020

Now, if you are in for more of a marathon, take a look at Netflix’s Death to 2020:

Netflix – Death to 2020

Bring spirits to this one, and be prepared to laugh and groan your way through the crazy attempt to bring humor to a year that is definitively beyond the ability to satirize. But they do try.

There there is Amazon Prime’s Yearly Departed:

Amazon Prime Video – YEARLY DEPARTED

It too is a respectable entry into the annals of the shitshow that was the year 2020. Stay for the credits. How they put the comics together digitally is a thing of beauty.

The Wife and I sat up drinking until midnight, watching both these shows before tuning in to the creepy-assed feed from an empty Times Square on Youtube to watch the ball drop for Central Standard Time, before they hauled that sucker back up again to drop it again the next hour.

NBC News – New Year’s Eve Celebrations – Dec 31, 2020 (Times Square NYC pulled down their video)

Or maybe they just put the video of the ball drop on on a loop and replayed the one-hour loop twenty-four times? Who can tell? What I can tell is that the official feed did not have the sad CST drop that I saw as part of my New Year’s celebration. Everyone had cleaned up and left aside from some holdouts who were still braving the cold at one am EST. NYC needs to break with tradition and embrace the universal time code (UTC) they should celebrate the new year at 7:00 pm EST and call it done. It’s no more midnight in NYC at 12:00 am than it is noon (as measured by the sun) at 12:00 pm. Tell those railroad barons what they can do with their time zones! Throw off the yoke of the tick-tock man!

Anyway, fuck you 2020. Your next of kin might well be worse, but I’m well done of you no matter what happens later.

Ticking away, the moments that make up a dull day, fritter and waste the hours in a off-hand way.
Pink Floyd, Time (The Dark Side Of The Moon, track 4)

Contagion. Pandemic. Outbreak. Because, Why Not?

I was inspired to go on a journey of epidemiological exploration by this segment of On The Media part of the show that aired on March 13, 2020.

On the Media – Rewatching “Contagion” During The Pandemic

This was the second or third podcast that featured an interview with Laurie Garrett, one of the scientific advisors on the film Contagion. She was in a segment of On The Media from a previous week, as well as being the subject of the Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook: Infectious Disease Edition episode of On the Media back in 2014.

Then there was this episode of Planet Money: The Disease Detectives or this segment from Morning Edition. It was beginning to look like everyone was talking about this movie. I remembered watching it, or at least starting to watch it. But I couldn’t remember more than the first few minutes of the film.

Contagion (2010) (Cinemax link)

Wesley Morris, writing for the New York Times, calls it an explanatory drama in his article. I think of it more as a detective story that understands why we might turn on a movie about a fictional pandemic while we are caught up in a very real pandemic all around us. We want answers, and by the end of the film we have those answers. The closing scenes alone are very rewarding, making the sometimes dry delivery of the film worth the wait, if any of you who watch it find that you feel like you are waiting.

I know why I didn’t remember watching the movie to the end the first time. When they start trepanning open the first victims skull and folding back her scalp, I’m pretty sure I bailed on the film. I almost did that again the second time, even knowing what it was I signed up to watch. We will be getting the most out of that frew week of Cinemax that got us access to the movie for free that first night.

After watching Contagion, I surfed over to check out the Netflix documentary that I had heard someone else talk about.

Pandemic (2020) Netflix

I wasn’t clear on whether this series was a documentary series or not until I tuned in to watch it. The first episode makes this very clear. It’s a documentary. All the episodes inter-relate, but there are different segments in each episode about the different facets of the problem of dealing with a pandemic in different countries. You come away with a pretty clear view of the problems we face dealing with any kind of healthcare crisis in the world, much less one as broad and crippling as the current coronavirus pandemic.

From doctors to anti-vaxxers and back again, the series gives you a broad but shallow look at healthcare in the world today. Since we all have a lot of time on our hands these days, and are probably curious about why we have a lot of time on our hands, this series should help you understand why that is.

Neither venture delivers the punch of an epic disaster movie, though.

Outbreak (1995) Netflix

Outbreak is just the kind of disaster movie you are probably looking for, if those two offerings aren’t to your taste. From devastating viral death rates to government cover-ups to an edge-of-your-seat ending, this film is everything the others are not. Including it being completely unbelievable to anyone with a shred of understand of how infections spread successfully or how government programs work. But it is a good popcorn movie with a rewarding ending. You can’t ask for much more in these times of stress and worry.

Look Ma, I Can Write Again!

…at least briefly. I’m starting a entry on what happened and why after I finish typing this up, but I can finally use the right hand without pain again. Two weeks of forced TV viewing has finally come to an end. I thought I was going to lose my mind. At least I still had my podcasts to keep the mind busy in between binge watching all of Better Call Saul, Altered Carbon, Man in the High Castle and finally finishing the HBO series The Pacific. I’ll probably have time to at least start Electric Dreams before I’m fully recovered.

Two of the greatest scientific achievements of my lifetime made the news during the weeks I was recuperating.

Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add nothing to them.
Jules Verne, the SGU quote of the week.

I think that is appropriate given this episode. I mean we have a picture of a black hole, what’s more awesome than that?
…Except maybe fossils from the day the dinosaurs died.
Steven Novella

So I’m pretty happy to still be here to ponder which of those two achievements is the more important one.

Netflix Hates Firefly Fans?

It’s kind of been done, with Serenity, but yeah as a series. Let me give you one broad statement about these recovery shows. In almost every case the cult around the show gets more intense and smaller as time goes by. Arrested Development was the rarest of birds in that the audience of the show grew larger than the original broadcast audience because people came to discover it years after it was cancelled. The Firefly fan is still the Firefly fan from when it was on TV and there’s fewer of them and they’re more passionate every year. Whereas with Arrested Development we’re going to be serving a multiple of the original audience. Any of the other shows we could bring back would be a fraction of the original audience.
Stuff.TV, Ted Sarandos talks

Seriously? Perhaps The Stand deserves chance to be seen but Jericho? That series went nowhere after the first season, and I never need to see that again. Arrested Development? More people talk about that show than ever saw it or would sit down to watch it again.

But the Firefly fan base continues to grow, and that isn’t rocket science. Joss Whedon may not actually walk on water, but with the success of The Avengers under his belt (as well as Buffy) it’s hard to say he was wrong in creating Firefly and I can’t think of a better property that could be revisited given the chance. The problem isn’t Firefly, it’s Netflix. Imagine just for a minute that there were more than thirteen episodes to watch in the first place? It’s kinda like imagining that you could watch Babylon 5 as J.M. Straczynski first outlined it. What kind of show would that be?

The leadership at Netflix clearly lacks the imagination to create Science Fiction content on that level.

Postscript

This was a Facebook status that I backdated to the blog. Netflix has changed their tune somewhat in recent years. I’ve watched several good shows that they have funded and Firefly was on Netflix for awhile, too. It will eventually come back into vogue if Joss Whedon ever gets off the Hollywood blacklist. Fingers crossed?