While they might not start out that way, after a while a lot of the villains in superhero movies and TV series become boring and overused. In the Superman movies time and time again it’s Lex Luthor who’s the main baddie and in the X-Men universe it’s Magneto. Not to knock those characters, or the actors who portray them, but in the Superman and X-Men universes there’s literally hundreds of amazing villains that could be used, yet those standby bad guys get used time and time again.
Rachel Keller
Except the FX TV series Legion, which is part of the X-Men universe, doesn’t use Magneto, or even an antagonist many people would know. Instead, the creator of that series chose to use a relatively obscure villain, the Shadow King.
A little backstory — in the comic book universe David Haller is the son of Professor X and suffers from a condition of multiple personalities where each personality controls a different power. Haller was such a powerful mutant that he, abet accidentally, destroyed the entire X-Men comic book universe a few decades back. The TV series approaches things a bit differently, though still very interestingly.
In the first season of Legion, Haller (Dan Stevens) is a person who’s suffered his entire life with mental illness and ends up in an institution. But it’s an odd place where it seems as if some people there possess strange abilities. And as David begins exploring past memories he comes to realize that he too possesses said “strange abilities” when inexplicable past events suddenly becomes very explicable if the explanation was that David has superpowers. And the reason that David is in an institution rather than running around and using his powers for good is that there’s a mutant parasite called the Shadow King (mostly Aubrey Plaza) who’s attached itself to David’s psyche and is feeding off of him and his powers and keeps him in a delusional state.
Aubrey Plaza
I’m a comic book collector and while I’m intimately familiar with the likes of Luthor and Magneto, I was only dimly aware of the Shadow King. Which I really liked in Legion. If I don’t really know a character, then I really don’t know what they’re going to do next, unlike villains who get used all the time. The first season of Legion kept me guessing as to where it was going to end up right until the end which made for what I thought to be one of the best series of 2017.
Now comes a second season of Legion which began last week. Always a series that’s just as much style as substance, but is able to be BOTH rather than just style, the show picks up about one year after the events of last season with the Shadow King on the run and Haller kidnapped by a robotic orb. Now returned to the fold, Haller finds that the group of mutants he was working with in the first season to battle the Shadow King have joined forces with the mysterious “Division 3,” a sort’a government organization, since both came to the realization that the Shadow King’s more dangerous to the future planet than their small group of mutants
But David’s returned a bit different, he seems to be hiding things. And the one place you should never try and hid things is alongside other mutants who can read minds.
I was a bit concerned when watching this latest season of Legion as the show takes some time to ramp up. I was worried that this season was going to be more style than substance, but when the second season story kicked in and made my jaw drop all my fears about where Legion was headed dissipated and I couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen next.
I hadn’t heard much about the new HBO series Barry other than it’s been in the works for a few years now which sometimes spells trouble — though this has also happened with other HBO shows like Westworld and that show turned out pretty good. And, luckily enough Barry is pretty good too. In fact I’d go as far to say the first episode was great.
Bill Hader and Sarah Goldberg
Bill Hader stars as the title character, an ex-Marine turned hit-man for a family friend named Fuches (Stephen Root). Barry isn’t happy and is suffering from depression, not quite knowing how his life got off the rails going from serving our country in the military one year to murdering people for money the next. On an assignment in L.A. Barry is following a target and winds up accidentally attending an acting class with him. And after doing a scene on stage to their teacher (Henry Winkler) the “acting bug” bites Barry and he knows he wants to spend the rest of his life acting. Even if that’s contrary to his profession as a hit-man that demands anonymity.
I was surprised just how much I enjoyed the first episode of Barry. It’s a show that’s got a lot of heart, Barry comes across as a realistic, damaged person who made a hugely wrong choice in becoming a hit-man. But the show is also very funny too. I went from laughing out loud to cringing at times from the tension on-screen, sometimes in the same scene which I can’t remember doing in the last sitcom I’ve watched.
We live in an era where many TV comedies and dramas are so saccharine they’re totally unreliable. So, for a show like Barry to come along that’s so full of pathos and comedy with characters who don’t feel like they’ve been mass-manufactured at the sitcom factory is a breath of fresh air.
The Crossing
I hate to say this since I don’t want to curse the new ABC series The Crossing which premieres this Monday, but it’s the series that reminds me the most of the classic show Lost in its early days. And I mean that in a good way. At least I think so.
Steve Zahn and Natalie Martinez
Steve Zahn stars as Sheriff Ellis who moved to a small Oregon coastal town to try and get away from big-city problems. Ellis is a modern man who’s called away from his yoga class by deputy Rosario (Rick Gomez) to investigate a body washed up on a beach outside of town. What starts off as a simple drowning turns into a massive tragedy when hundreds of bodies all begin washing up simultaneously. A few are alive but most have drowned. These survivors tell a story of coming from several hundred years in our future where there’s a great holocaust of which the only escape from is to slip into the past. Department of Homeland Security official Emma Rea (Sandrine Holt) doesn’t know what to believe. The people didn’t arrive by boat and there was no plane crash but the survivor’s stories are too incredible to believe.
As the government tries keeping a lid on the situation and Sheriff Ellis is cut out of the investigation things turn when one of the refugees reveals something that might bring the threat from the future to our present.
The arrival
The Crossing reminds me of Lost in that there’s some mystery as to what’s going on. However, that mystery isn’t where the refugees come from or why they’re here. That’s pretty much spelled out in the first 15 minutes of the first episode which I appreciated a lot. I think if The Crossing had been made ten years ago the entire first season would’ve been, “WHY ARE THE REFUGEES HERE?” The mystery in The Crossing is what exactly is going on in the future, can we stop it from happening and do some of the people from the future want to stop us from trying to stop it. Now that I think of it, The Crossing has a lot of the time travel elements from the 2012 film Looper but not the same plot.
In a lot of ways The Crossing is a stranded sci-fi family series like Lost in Space or Terra Nova. They’re kind’a like colonists or settlers hoping for a better life and have decided our time is the best place for them to land, so to say. I also dug the little sci-fi references hidden in the show. One of the main characters is named “Reece” and another “Leah” — Kyle Reese and Princess Leah anyone?
I really enjoyed The Crossing but it wasn’t perfect, and these little imperfections bothered me in the fact that they might indicate a greater problem with the show that might not be evident one episode in. The biggest problem I had with The Crossing was there’s a big, bad villain in the show who’s obviously the big, bad villain the moment they step on screen. There was no mystery here whatsoever and when something happens at the end of the episode there was no mystery as to what its outcome was going to be either.
Problems like these can add up as the season goes along, but it’s too early to tell if The Crossing is going to be great, good or bad. But still, I’m hoping The Crossing is more Legion than Inhumans.
The Terror
The new ten episode AMC series The Terror debuted last week with the first two episodes. The network has been promoting this show about the real-life 1845 arctic expedition led by Captain John Franklin (Ciarán Hinds) as a horror series. While I liked The Terror, two hours in there wasn’t much to be terrified about in it, though there was loads and loads of atmosphere.
The cast of The Terror
Word of warning — The Terror stars British actors using a wide-variety of accents and 19th century naval slang. Usually accents don’t bother me but I think it was the wide variety as well as the slang that made it so I could only understand every third or fourth word the characters were speaking. Things got so bad I finally gave up on lip-reading and turned on my TV’s closed-caption feature. I think if you’re going to enjoy The Terror you should consider doing this too.
In The Terror, Captain Franklin commands two ships, the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, and is trying to find the fabled Northwest Passage that would connect the UK directly to the Pacific Ocean. Franklin’s second in command Captain Crozier (Jared Harris) has been to the arctic before and knows its dangers. So when the ships get stuck in the ice and have to spend a freezing winter in the middle of nowhere, he knows their situation is more dire that anyone else suspects. But there’s something else going on here too, a crew member unexpectedly dies and another falls off the mast and disappears into the ocean before the freeze. When one crewman is trying to service the ship he sees a ghostly figure in the water beckoning to him and another is attacked and carried off by a bear… thing, it becomes obvious that things are more dire than even Captain Crozier knows.
The Terror is a bit of H.P. Lovecraft mixed with something along the lines of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World but it moves at so slow a pace it wouldn’t surprise me that if those with short attention spans don’t bail out of the show after the first episode. Most movies tell a complete story in two hours, in two hours of The Terror I only felt as if the story had just started.
But like I said I liked The Terror and will stick with it until the end. Even if since it’s all based on facts it’s easy to find out what really happened to the crews of the Terror and Erebus, minus, I suspect, what’s up with the bear thing.
Roseanne
More and more classic series like The X-Files and Will and Grace are getting new season orders sometimes decades after the shows originally ended. The latest of which is the ABC show Roseanne which picks up 21 years after the original run of the series ended back in 1997.
The cast of Roseanne 2018
The only difference between this new and the classic Rosanne is that in the original series it’s revealed that husband Dan (John Goodman) had died at the end of the series. But now and a bit of retcon later Dan’s alive and well — and Roseanne is a better show for it. In the 2018 Roseanne, Darlene’s (Sara Gilbert) back living at home with her two kids, D.J. (Michael Fishman) is a soldier back from the war with a daughter of his own and Becky (Alicia Goranson) is widower working as a waitress.
Times are still tough in the Conner household but now even more so as Roseanne and sister Jackie (Laurie Metcalf) are fighting over politics, Becky is considering taking $50,000 to be a surrogate for another couple’s baby (a hilarious return for Becky #2 Sarah Chalke) and grandson Mark (Ames McNamara) has to deal with bullying in school for how he dresses.
I didn’t expect to like the return of Roseanne as much as I did but I really liked this new/continuation of the series. When so many other ABC sitcoms all follow the same mold these days of having families that feel fabricated where each and every episode ends on a “ahhhhhh, they really love each other” happy ending, Roseanne isn’t afraid to go to the dark places sitcoms used to go to and mine that place for laughs.
I think as long as you’re able to separate out the character of Roseanne Conner from the real-life caustic personality of Roseanne Barr you’ll enjoy this new/old Roseanne as much as I did.
DC is set to release a new collected edition of this now, ULP!, 16 year old series. There’s been talk on and off for years about turning Global Frequency into a TV series, there was even a pilot made a few years ago that never went to series. Maybe this collected edition will light the fire so to say under some producers butt to get a series on the air?
Global Frequency is a worldwide rescue organization that offers a last shred of hope when all other options have failed. Manned by 1,001 operatives, the Frequency is made up of experts in fields as diverse as bio-weapon engineering and parkour. Each agent is specifically chosen by Miranda Zero based on proximity, expertise and, in some cases, sheer desperation! Collects the entire 12-issue series!
Superman on TV is nothing new. The on of the first live-action superhero TV series based on a comic book was The Adventures of Superman in the 1950s, there was a popular series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman in the 1990s and a very successful teen-oriented show Smallville in the 2000s. And Supergirl on The CW on now is one of the more popular shows airing on that network too. So the new Krypton series on SyFy is really just the latest in a long line of shows based on the man of steel.
Well, kind’a sort’a as Krypton doesn’t actually feature the strange visitor from another planet, its focus is on Superman’s granddad Seg-El (Cameron Cuffe) and doesn’t take place on Earth. It tales place on that “another planet” Krypton 200 years in the past.
In that time on Krypton the house of “El,” of which Superman, aka Kal-El will one day be a part of, is no more after Seg’s granddad Val (Ian McElhinney) was executed for insisting that there’s life on other planets which also meant the house of “El” was striped of their rank and name. Seg’s a bit of a wild-card, I think he got into more fistfights in the first episode of Krypton than is usual for a whole season of a similar regular series. When he’s not beating people up he’s running off to be with his girlfriend Lyta Zod (Georgina Campbell). But when mysterious Earthling Adam Strange (Shaun Sipos) appears and tells Seg that the future of Earth, if not the universe is is at stake, Seg must get his life back tougher and finish Val’s work to stop to stop a massive interstellar threat so that his genes can continue on.
Krypton is interesting if it’s a bit all over the place. On the one hand some of the characters and characterizations are as over-the-top as those in the 1940s Superman movie serials, yet in other times Krypton tries to be a modern series with sex and violence and a season-long story. I don’t mind either over-the-top or modern, I just wish the producers of the show had settled on one.
The visuals of Krypton are right in line with the current ethos of the DC movie franchises — dark and dreary like in the Man of Steel movie. I’m not opposed to this, it’s just a different view of Krypton that we’ve thus-far seen on TV. Always before Krypton was this bright, shining beacon of hope, even if the scientists of Krypton couldn’t see that their own demise was coming. The Krypton of Krypton is a worn-down nub of a civilization where people hide from the weather under domes, corruption is rife and most of the populous is under the sway of a religious leader who’s taken over the government of the planet.
I’m kind’a sort’a interested in seeing where Krypton goes from here, but my guess is that after a few more episodes I’ll probably be done with Krypton for good.
Santa Clarita Diet
All episodes for the second season of the Netflix series Santa Clarita Diet dropped last Friday. This series about a realtor/mom Shelia (Drew Barrymore) who one day unexpectedly becomes an undead flesh-eating ghoul, but not turning totally zombie as long as she eats enough human meat was funny enough last season. This new season starts right where the first one left off, with Shelia’s husband (Timothy Olyphant) and daughter (Liv Hewson) along with neighbor (Skyler Gisondo) trying to find a cure for Shelia’s undead-ness before she either totally zombies-out or rots and falls apart.
I liked the first season of Santa Clarita and was looking forward to the second, if I can’t quite all remember what went on in that the first? And I’m usually pretty good at remembering those things. I don’t think that Santa Clarita Diet is a bad series, it’s just there are so many shows on now and they’re all coming so fast and we consume them so quickly, that even if a show is good, if it doesn’t really stand out it can be as quickly forgotten as it is watched.
Well, kind’a sort’a as Krypton doesn’t actually feature the strange visitor from another planet, its focus is on Superman’s granddad Seg-El (Cameron Cuffe) and doesn’t take place on Earth. It tales place on that “another planet” Krypton 200 years in the past.
All episodes for the second season of the Netflix series Santa Clarita Diet dropped last Friday. This series about a realtor/mom Shelia (Drew Barrymore) who one day unexpectedly becomes an undead flesh-eating ghoul, but not turning totally zombie as long as she eats enough human meat was funny enough last season. This new season starts right where the first one left off, with Shelia’s husband (Timothy Olyphant) and daughter (Liv Hewson) along with neighbor (Skyler Gisondo) trying to find a cure for Shelia’s undead-ness before she either totally zombies-out or rots and falls apart.