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Winter 2023 TV
Mar. 20th, 2023 03:31 pmYoung Justice: Phantoms (HBOMax, Season 4) – Having grown up with its initial audience, this show focuses on a lot of adult themes and fears and takes more and more of a parental generational view. This season has a collection of arcs that are mostly running in parallel and are presented in sequence: M’gann and Connor’s wedding on Mars. Artemis and Jade’s broken relationship being pulled to the forefront by machinations of the League of Shadows. Flaw and Child arriving and Zatanna and her new students working to stop them and Klarion the Witch-Boy. Lor-Zod’s machinations through time (and on New Genesis) to free his parents from the Phantom Zone. (With plenty of side-bits like M’gann’s initial story on Mars being an interesting trans allegory; Gar’s descent into severe depression; Violet’s exploration of religon and gender identity; and Rocket’s autistic son. Oh, and L’gann/Lagoon Boy is in a bisexual polyamorous triad.) I wasn’t expecting a fifth season but the creators obviously are: It’s unclear whether the new Emerald Empress arriving on Daxam and Ma'alefa'ak colonizing Durla will come back next season or are completing time-loops for the Legion’s history; but the next season is clearly setting up a new war with Apokolips with Black Mary and Supergirl at the forefront.
A random thing I find interesting is that Wally West was The Flash for over 20 years—the main guy headlining the books, running with the Justice League, all of that—and here he’s one of the few characters who’s stayed dead. But he also vanished from the Flash TV show and hasn’t appeared much elsewhere, and his comics history over the past 15 years has been extremely messy. I mean, this is like if Dick Grayson became Batman for 20 years but then vanished from comics after Bruce returned! I wonder which supervising editor decided they hated Wally; and then which fan-creator my age decided they needed to bring him back and fix all that mess.
The Sex Lives of College Girls (HBOMax, Season 2) – The parts where the comedy is played specifically for the cringe still doesn’t do it for me, but overall this is pretty decent. (Also, this season had virtually no nudity and much less sex comedy than the first; they went for a much more general “college sitcom” approach, which only worked because they’d already established the characters.) It’s interesting where they took each of the characters over the course of the season, resolving pretty much everything that was hanging over last time but burning down most of the successes, too. Kimberly’s tuition money is covered but now she’s in a love triangle; Leighton has given up on sorority life but gotten back the girlfriend she wanted; Whitney is single and separated from the group but has a solid idea what to do with her life; and Bela…well, Bela’s a goddamn mess and wants to transfer for good reason.
Half Bad: The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself (Netflix, Season 1) – This starts with such an insanely YA flair it’s hardly believable: There’s a secret society of witches, but the “pureborn” witches live in fear of the “blood” witches, the most evil of whom has been hunting their council. Our protagonist is the son of that evil blood witch and a (dead) pureborn woman, raised by his grandmother and mercilessly bullied as any sign of anger from him will be taken as a sign that he’s like his father. He’s also—clearly not coincidentally—the only person of color in the entire first episode. This is impressively gory, with a massive body count and multiple instances of a person being split open like a medical diagram before splattering all over the floor. (The novel it’s based on came out in 2014—I guess they were aiming at a YA audience who read it then and are adults now?)
I predicted after the first episode that: 1) The Fairborn and blood witches weren’t actually different, they just traditionally used different magic. 2) The Fairborn were actually responsible for the “massacre” purportedly done by the evil dad, either as a false flag or because they tried to ambush him and he fought back. 3) When they meet evil dad, he will either pretend to be evil but be good, or pretend to be good but really be evil. It turns out that this is a story about colonialism and culture clash, because the bloods are a downtrodden minority who are fighting back against their oppressors. I was basically correct about #1—the only difference between them seems to be magical traditions. (And the “tests” to see if Nathan was a blood witch were utter bullshit.) #2 was pretty close: The Fairborn opened the “peace talks” demanding that the blood witches abandon their traditions and become second-class citizens to Fairborn law, and Edge said no. #3 walked the line, vaguely implying evil dad was going to be evil before revealing he knew how he was going to die (and it wasn’t there), that he loved Nathan’s mother and fled with hopes it would save her, and that he wanted the best for Nathan (though apparently “horrific violence” is all he knows at this point.) This ends on a cliffhanger that sets up Mercury and Jessica as the antagonists for a second season that apparently isn’t happening. So I’ll assume that Nathan eats the heart full of superpowers and eventually roasts all the villains; and he, Annalise and Gabriel go off and have lovely life as a poly trio together. Whether he eventually ends the feud and unites the witches kinda matters less to me.
A random thing I find interesting is that Wally West was The Flash for over 20 years—the main guy headlining the books, running with the Justice League, all of that—and here he’s one of the few characters who’s stayed dead. But he also vanished from the Flash TV show and hasn’t appeared much elsewhere, and his comics history over the past 15 years has been extremely messy. I mean, this is like if Dick Grayson became Batman for 20 years but then vanished from comics after Bruce returned! I wonder which supervising editor decided they hated Wally; and then which fan-creator my age decided they needed to bring him back and fix all that mess.
The Sex Lives of College Girls (HBOMax, Season 2) – The parts where the comedy is played specifically for the cringe still doesn’t do it for me, but overall this is pretty decent. (Also, this season had virtually no nudity and much less sex comedy than the first; they went for a much more general “college sitcom” approach, which only worked because they’d already established the characters.) It’s interesting where they took each of the characters over the course of the season, resolving pretty much everything that was hanging over last time but burning down most of the successes, too. Kimberly’s tuition money is covered but now she’s in a love triangle; Leighton has given up on sorority life but gotten back the girlfriend she wanted; Whitney is single and separated from the group but has a solid idea what to do with her life; and Bela…well, Bela’s a goddamn mess and wants to transfer for good reason.
Half Bad: The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself (Netflix, Season 1) – This starts with such an insanely YA flair it’s hardly believable: There’s a secret society of witches, but the “pureborn” witches live in fear of the “blood” witches, the most evil of whom has been hunting their council. Our protagonist is the son of that evil blood witch and a (dead) pureborn woman, raised by his grandmother and mercilessly bullied as any sign of anger from him will be taken as a sign that he’s like his father. He’s also—clearly not coincidentally—the only person of color in the entire first episode. This is impressively gory, with a massive body count and multiple instances of a person being split open like a medical diagram before splattering all over the floor. (The novel it’s based on came out in 2014—I guess they were aiming at a YA audience who read it then and are adults now?)
I predicted after the first episode that: 1) The Fairborn and blood witches weren’t actually different, they just traditionally used different magic. 2) The Fairborn were actually responsible for the “massacre” purportedly done by the evil dad, either as a false flag or because they tried to ambush him and he fought back. 3) When they meet evil dad, he will either pretend to be evil but be good, or pretend to be good but really be evil. It turns out that this is a story about colonialism and culture clash, because the bloods are a downtrodden minority who are fighting back against their oppressors. I was basically correct about #1—the only difference between them seems to be magical traditions. (And the “tests” to see if Nathan was a blood witch were utter bullshit.) #2 was pretty close: The Fairborn opened the “peace talks” demanding that the blood witches abandon their traditions and become second-class citizens to Fairborn law, and Edge said no. #3 walked the line, vaguely implying evil dad was going to be evil before revealing he knew how he was going to die (and it wasn’t there), that he loved Nathan’s mother and fled with hopes it would save her, and that he wanted the best for Nathan (though apparently “horrific violence” is all he knows at this point.) This ends on a cliffhanger that sets up Mercury and Jessica as the antagonists for a second season that apparently isn’t happening. So I’ll assume that Nathan eats the heart full of superpowers and eventually roasts all the villains; and he, Annalise and Gabriel go off and have lovely life as a poly trio together. Whether he eventually ends the feud and unites the witches kinda matters less to me.
