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September TV Reviews
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Hulu, Season 2) - Rather than the sci-fi time-travel they followed in the first season, they go for supernatural dimensional travel this go-round, but with the same build-up and slowly dropping pieces of the mystery over time. Again, I love the supporting cast they pull in and get sad when bad things happen to them. (Poor Sherlock!) The cast ends up rolled back to where they tried to end last season, starting a new detective agency…but now Amanda has magic powers and the increasingly-ill-named Rowdy 3; Ken is running Blackwing; Director Moron is trapped outside of reality; and apparently something big and bad is coming. (I know they won’t do it, but what I’d love is a season of, say, six one-shot episodes of Dirk and company solving individual cases that don’t tie into anything…until, of course, they do.)
Supergirl (Netflix, Season 5) - Pre-Crisis, Lena was the villain and Eve was her assistant and Andrea was using her shadow-powers to kill for Leviathan, but then they did a “soft reboot” of the show’s timeline (moreso than Flash and MUCH more so than Legends), reviving Lex and putting him and his mother in positions of power, taking the opportunity to change Brainiac’s look and personality, and rewriting a bunch of history to jive with some of the rest of the world. This functionally erased much of the first half of the season, allowing them to re-use Eve Tessmacher and all of this season’s new characters, and rendering everything except the Kara-Lena interactions a shaggy dog story. They also jumped straight into a “lost doppelgangers from dead worlds” plotline. (Random amusing note: Fem!Brainiac apparently had the same DNA that Prime!Brainiac did. Was she trans, or did the writers just forget how chromosomes work?) They bring Winn back for a two-parter to basically catch him up on things and have him advance some plotlines; the part I found most amusing was him being married to Lightning Lass. (Random additional observation: Arrowverse versions of characters who are traditionally redheads in the comics are very often played by black actors. There’s a media studies thesis in there somewhere.) Interestingly, Mxy (played by a new actor!) returns for a clip-show episode that also features guest shots from Mon-El, Wynn, and Sam/Reign—I’m going to guess the budget for that was a weird one, and wonder if Wynn shot his scenes two weeks earlier with his guest star episodes. Dreamer gets a spotlight episode hunting down a transphobe, which was kinda hurt by the transphobe’s inability to use any actual slurs. (Not that I want to hear slurs on TV, but the villain’s dialogue was painfully forced around them.) Like many shows this season, we end on a somewhat different cliffhanger than I suspect they planned, but at least with Leviathan’s main plan thwarted and Lena back on the side of good, it feels like a reasonable stopping point. We left off with Lex and his mother plotting something with the shrunken gods, Ganymede going berserk, Brainy near death (but presumably saved by Dreamer), and the mysterious being Leviathan answers to still unseen.
Euphoria (HBO, Season 1) – This is some super-concentrated Dawson’s Creek teen drama that follows the “It’s not porn, it’s HBO” model; following Zendaya (whose talent is most of the reason to watch this) as a teenage drug addict navigating the already-outdated 2019 high school experience. With waaaay more sex and drugs and associated drama than would ever be realistic…but then again, it’s cramming an entire season’s worth of trope ripped-from-the-headlines teen drama plots into eight episodes and a single friend-circle. Rue is clearly heavily self-medicating, and in retrospect, I found the lack of acknowledgement of that (there’s a whole flashback sequence of her parents putting her on various meds for her various diagnoses; did her mom forget that part?) to be jarring. Then again, I also found the fact no one had locks for their bikes (and yet still had bikes) to be particularly unrealistic, so the things that stand out to me may be unusual. I ended up identifying most with Lexi, the “boring” friend who dresses as Bob Ross on Halloween and just kinda watches all the shit happening to everyone else. And wanting to shove Nate the manipulating psychopath off a bridge. Despite the fact that—rather than actually resolve anything—they end on a psychedelic dance number and leave all the plot threads hanging, I don’t think I need to watch any future seasons.
Supergirl (Netflix, Season 5) - Pre-Crisis, Lena was the villain and Eve was her assistant and Andrea was using her shadow-powers to kill for Leviathan, but then they did a “soft reboot” of the show’s timeline (moreso than Flash and MUCH more so than Legends), reviving Lex and putting him and his mother in positions of power, taking the opportunity to change Brainiac’s look and personality, and rewriting a bunch of history to jive with some of the rest of the world. This functionally erased much of the first half of the season, allowing them to re-use Eve Tessmacher and all of this season’s new characters, and rendering everything except the Kara-Lena interactions a shaggy dog story. They also jumped straight into a “lost doppelgangers from dead worlds” plotline. (Random amusing note: Fem!Brainiac apparently had the same DNA that Prime!Brainiac did. Was she trans, or did the writers just forget how chromosomes work?) They bring Winn back for a two-parter to basically catch him up on things and have him advance some plotlines; the part I found most amusing was him being married to Lightning Lass. (Random additional observation: Arrowverse versions of characters who are traditionally redheads in the comics are very often played by black actors. There’s a media studies thesis in there somewhere.) Interestingly, Mxy (played by a new actor!) returns for a clip-show episode that also features guest shots from Mon-El, Wynn, and Sam/Reign—I’m going to guess the budget for that was a weird one, and wonder if Wynn shot his scenes two weeks earlier with his guest star episodes. Dreamer gets a spotlight episode hunting down a transphobe, which was kinda hurt by the transphobe’s inability to use any actual slurs. (Not that I want to hear slurs on TV, but the villain’s dialogue was painfully forced around them.) Like many shows this season, we end on a somewhat different cliffhanger than I suspect they planned, but at least with Leviathan’s main plan thwarted and Lena back on the side of good, it feels like a reasonable stopping point. We left off with Lex and his mother plotting something with the shrunken gods, Ganymede going berserk, Brainy near death (but presumably saved by Dreamer), and the mysterious being Leviathan answers to still unseen.
Euphoria (HBO, Season 1) – This is some super-concentrated Dawson’s Creek teen drama that follows the “It’s not porn, it’s HBO” model; following Zendaya (whose talent is most of the reason to watch this) as a teenage drug addict navigating the already-outdated 2019 high school experience. With waaaay more sex and drugs and associated drama than would ever be realistic…but then again, it’s cramming an entire season’s worth of trope ripped-from-the-headlines teen drama plots into eight episodes and a single friend-circle. Rue is clearly heavily self-medicating, and in retrospect, I found the lack of acknowledgement of that (there’s a whole flashback sequence of her parents putting her on various meds for her various diagnoses; did her mom forget that part?) to be jarring. Then again, I also found the fact no one had locks for their bikes (and yet still had bikes) to be particularly unrealistic, so the things that stand out to me may be unusual. I ended up identifying most with Lexi, the “boring” friend who dresses as Bob Ross on Halloween and just kinda watches all the shit happening to everyone else. And wanting to shove Nate the manipulating psychopath off a bridge. Despite the fact that—rather than actually resolve anything—they end on a psychedelic dance number and leave all the plot threads hanging, I don’t think I need to watch any future seasons.