Direct Beam Comms #129

TV

The Terror

The first season of the AMC series The Terror wrapped up Monday night, and it too like Barry was another series I greatly enjoyed. Though The Terror did start off slowly and takes a while to “get going,” none-the-less it’s the best limited-series in recent memory.

Jared Harris as Captain Francis Crozier
Jared Harris as Captain Francis Crozier

Based on a true story, here the ships HMS Erebus and Terror are trying to find the fabled Northwest Passage but become stuck in the ice and have to spend a winter in the Arctic waiting for the thaw in the mid–19th century. But one winter becomes two and as a third looms ahead Captain Francis Crozier (Jared Harris) must decide whether to spend another year on the ice as their supplies dwindle or set off on foot heading south hoping they can find open water and a friendly ship to take them home. But that’s not Crozier’s only problem as it quickly becomes apparent that the food they’re eating was made in a way that it’s slowly poisoning the crew and, even worse, there’s a weird thing that kind’a sort’a looks like a polar bear but is seemingly indestructible who has a taste for human flesh and is working it’s way through the crew a few men at a time.

No one’s quite sure what really happened to the men of the real Terror and Erebus, other than they never made it back home and were presumed either killed by the harsh Arctic elements or when they ran out of supplies, so the addition of this pseudo-supernatural element, it might be a supernatural bear or just a weird mutant one, is inspired. It’s also entirely possible that in The Terror what they men were witnessing wasn’t a super-bear, but a regular one, or even a few bears, but since they were being unknowingly poisoned by their food, maybe they didn’t have their best faculties about them to be aware either way?

Can we trust what the men of the Erebus and Terror are seeing since they can’t totally rely on their senses, or is there really something supernatural going on here?

Ciarán Hinds
Ciarán Hinds

The sense of approaching doom in The Terror is palpable as the last third of the season is of Crozier and the remaining men walking south away from their ships and the only safety they’ve ever known in hopes of stumbling across rescue. And even when they do reach an island on their journey it’s not a paradise. Instead, it’s a dead place, covered in rocks and completely devoid of anything the men can eat. Which quickly becomes an issue as the group splinters with one thinking the unthinkable towards the weaker crew members in order to stay alive even a few more days.

There’s really no escape from the Arctic for the men. They can either head further south into the unknown but are in no condition to get very far, or they can stay on their island and stave off death a few weeks until winter comes and does them in. Sometimes in these expeditions into the unknown no one in them comes home, and this expedition to find the Northwest Passage is one of them.

The last episode of The Terror ends up in a place I wasn’t expecting. Not to spoil things, but just because in the history books the fate of the crew of the Erebus and Terror may have played out one way doesn’t mean it plays out the same way in The Terror. Now this doesn’t quite pull an Inglourious Basterds here, but it does go to a place I hadn’t thought of.

I was greatly impressed with how The Terror ended up but have one question — if this is the “first season” of the show as AMC puts it where will a second go from here? Maybe The Terror will become an anthology series for AMC like American Horror Story has become for FX since the story of Captain Crozier and his crew at the end of the first season of The Terror is certainly complete.

The Expanse

A little more than a week after it was cancelled, the TV series The Expanse was “uncancelled” by Amazon and the fourth season of the series will officially premier there sometime in, I’m assuming, 2019.

Huzzah!

Comics

Punisher Invades the ’Nam

The Punisher invades The 'Nam
The Punisher invades The ‘Nam

In the late 1980s one of the most critically acclaimed comic books was Marvel’s The ‘Nam which realistically told the life of soldier Ed Marks during his tour of duty in Vietnam. The comic was very successful long while but as the years went on it became less so, so Marvel decided to try and boost sales by including a story that featured one of their most popular characters of that time who had just so happened to have served in Vietnam as a Marine, Frank Castle aka Punisher. Which was a bit odd since up until then The ‘Nam took place outside the Marvel comics universe where superheroes didn’t exist. So with the introduction of Punisher meant that in reality Ed Marks was living in the same universe as Spider-Man and Captain America.

Regardless, this new Punisher Invades the ’Nam edition collects all of Punishers appearances in The ‘Nam, some ‘Nam stories from other Punisher titles and, I believe, an issue of The ‘Nam that was set to be published but never was because of the title’s cancellation.

From Marvel:

Years before he brought his personal war to the mean streets of the Marvel Universe, Marine Sgt. Frank Castle fought in Vietnam — and the man he would become took shape in those killing fields. Revisit the horrors of the ’Nam along with Frank as he battles side-by-side with comrade-in-arms Mike “Ice” Phillips and faces down a deadly jungle sniper, and fights alone in his final tour of duty to rescue a crew of downed airmen from a sadistic vivisectionist. Plus: Years later, “Ice” comes to the aid of his fellow veteran — but can the two of them take down the paramilitary group the Sons of Liberty and a Central American drug kingpin?

Movies

Sicario: Day of the Soldado trailer

The Reading & Watch List

Cool Movie & TV Posters of the Week

Posters of the Week

Direct Beam Comms #120

TV

Krypton

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.

KryptonWell, 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

Santa Clarita DietAll 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.

Nightflyers teaser

Movies

SICARIO, Day of the Soldado trailer

Deadpool 2 trailer

The Titan trailer

Cool TV Posters of the Week

Posters of the Week

Direct beam comms #3

TV

I’m really digging The Expanse on SyFy. It’s very space-opera-isa with a heavy story.

 

Last fall BBC America aired several movie-length episodes of classic Tom Baker Doctor Who. It seemed that perhaps BBC America was about to start airing classic Doctor Who alongside the new but alas this seemed to only be a short experiment where only a few episodes ever aired.

Classic Doctor Who shows usually consisted of four or six half hour episodes that were aired weekly in the UK but were sometimes edited together into two or three hour stories for overseas markets — which is how I saw Doctor Who in the 1980s on my local PBS station and how BBC America is airing the shows.

After having watched several of the episodes on BBC America it’s plainly obvious that some of the classic Doctor Who was greatly padded.

Sometimes it seems as if characters spend what would be an entire 30 minute episode running from something, or getting ready to do something. But not actually getting anything done. And a 30 minute block seems only to exist to move characters from point “A” to “B,” which though the magic of editing could be done in a few seconds of screen time.

I think that the only reason this padding exists is because four or six episodes were needed per Doctor Who story back then, not that four or six episodes were actually needed to tell the story.

Not that this is a horrible thing or that it makes classic Doctor Who bad or anything — I actually prefer it over the new series — just that there was a reason when I was a kid I almost never made it to the end of a two hour episode of Doctor Who without falling asleep.

Movies

Neca Alien 1/4 scale figure
Neca Alien 1/4 scale figure

I mean this in the best possible way — Sicario is a cross between the movies Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and Traffic (2001). A-

 

For how much reviewers disliked Terminator Genisys I thought it was a good movie. There is the issue of a big story turn in the second act of the movie that doesn’t quite work — or make sense — but it’s not enough to spoil the film as a whole. I actually liked how the filmmakers of Terminator Genisys actively played with and used the idea of time travel in different ways than in the other films and introduced the idea that just one thing amiss in a timeline can totally change the future. B

My preference of Terminator movies in order:

  1. Terminator (1984)
  2. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
  3. Terminator Genisys (2015)
  4. Terminator Salvation (2009)
  5. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)

Toys

The Neca Alien 1/4 scale figure stands a whopping 22 inches tall and has 30 points of articulation including its alien tongue. It’s everything I didn’t get when I missed getting the original 1977 Alien toy as a kid. The figure retails for around $110 which isn’t totally insane considering its size.

On the Horizon

I’m working on columns for the second season of Daredevil and the Dark Horse Aliens comic books.