Category: TV

Deadly Class ⭐⭐

CategoriesFeature, TVPosted on

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like SyFy is trying way too hard to land a hit series these days. They’ve tried to get in on the superhero craze with the mediocre Krypton series of last year and the over-the-top and terrible Happy in 2017. But so far success has for the most part eluded them in the original series front. And now comes their latest series Deadly Class based on the comic book of the same name. I wouldn’t say that it’s a bad show, but that being said I wouldn’t say that I’m quite sold on it yet either.

In Deadly Class it’s 1987 and teen Marcus Lopez Arguello (Benjamin Wadsworth) is on the run from the police after setting a fire at a boy’s home where he was living that killed dozens. Which ironically makes him the perfect candidate for the mysterious school King’s Dominion where youth from all around the world are all taught the art of murder and assassination. Why would there be a school for teens to learn murder and assassination, you ask? Well, that’s never quite explained, at least in the first episode. But children of the Yakuza, drug cartels and southern gangs are all in attendance learning how to get away with murder.

Marcus accepts the offer from headmaster Master Lin (Benedict Wong) but quickly finds that he might be in over his head as friends are hard to come by, one student threatens to kill him and his first homework assignment is to go out, find someone to kill and get away with it.

Think Harry Potter with the school for teens hidden away from prying eyes meets Stranger Things with 1980s synth-pop on the soundtrack along with Battle Royale for the mood and you’d be pretty close to what the first episode of Deadly Class was.

Maybe this all works better as a comic, but here it was a bit odd. It seems like whomever developed this show wanted it to be edgy and dark, both literally and figuratively. So it rains all the time in Deadly Class, the f-bomb is dropped from time to time and everyone’s a smoker. Which is fine, but like I said it really seems like SyFy is trying too hard here to get something edgy that gets people talking again about the show and network and I didn’t think it was quite working yet here.

Project Blue Book ⭐⭐

CategoriesFeature, TVPosted on

As a kid I was fascinated with all things UFOs and aliens. I read every book in my school library that covered them and found the idea of “Project Blue Book” to be fascinating. This was an official governmental investigation into UFOs that went from the 1950s until the late 1960s at a time when aliens came in all shapes and sizes where people would report being whisked off to Venus or Mars for the afternoon on a regular basis.

While officially Project Blue Book didn’t find any evidence that aliens were visiting the Earth in flying saucers, none-the-less the case files from those investigations have cast a long-shadow on all sorts of things in pop-culture, especially with the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the TV series The X-Files. I mention that show because while the new History channel series Project Blue Book reportedly takes much of its story from those actual case files, I think it takes just as much from The X-Files as it does those investigations.

In the first episode of Project Blue Book Aidan Gillen plays real-life Dr. J. Allen Hynek, a university professor trying to get a grant to study launching cameras in space in the late 1950s. Contacted by the Air Force to work on a special project since he also served in that branch during World War II, he’s brought in to be the civilian scientist helping investigate UFOs along with Capt. Michael Quinn (Michael Malarkey). Hynek helping the Air Force will also help with him with that pesky grant he can’t seem to convince anyone to give him. Quinn and Hynek’s first investigation involves a pilot in South Dakota who chased a UFO one night, hit it and brought back evidence in the form of a damaged and radioactive aircraft. While Capt. Quinn and the Air Force want an open and shut case, they blame this one on a weather balloon, Hynek sees something different when weird elements of the pilot’s story begin adding up and pointing towards something much more scary.

The truth is out there!

Well, kind’a. I thought the first episode was good, if it were a bit too much The X-Files in the 1950s with one character being like Mulder a believer and another like Scully a skeptic for my taste. While this worked in The X-Files because the person driving the story was the believer and the skeptic followed, those roles are reversed in Project Blue Book with Quinn, the skeptic, in charge and Hynek with his alternate view is just along for the ride. I kept thinking during the episode that if the Air Force wanted reports that debunk UFOs rather than confirming them, why not just hire a skeptical civilian scientist rather than a believer? Wouldn’t that be easier?

Which is apparently what happened in real life. Hynek started off as a skeptic but was turned into a believer by what he experienced during his investigations. Which to me at least is a much more interesting story and a deeper character arc with someone changing rather than starting out one way and then staying that way until the end. And now that I think about it, that’s what happened to Scully. She started out a skeptic and by the end of The X-Files was more of a believer than Mulder.

My main concern for the show though is that if it’s all going to be cases based on Project Blue Book then that’s a little limiting. The X-Files wasn’t all aliens all the time, it was also monsters, supernatural entities and computers gone amok. If all Project Blue Book has are “little green men” I’m worried that’s going to get boring.

Also, I gotta assume that while Project Blue Book is based on real case files, they’re going to be, shall we say, “embellished” at the very least. The first episode was based on a real-life incident that occurred in 1948, which would have put it a few years before the official start of Project Blue Book, and does seem to have a pilot really chasing lights in the sky in his fighter but not everything else that happened with Hynek and Quinn reenacting the incident in another plane or the pilot ending up in an institution.

Whenever I come across a movie or TV show that was based on something that really happened I always think of this axiom from Mystery Science Theater 3000, “’Based on’? Yeah, in that they’re both in English!”