Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION The Anywhere Machine So what are you WATCHING?

Sunset Strip. I may have mentioned this documentary before, I don't remember, but it's on Netflix. It takes you on a tour of life from an empty field to a dirt road to the speakeasies and the nightclubs of Sammy Davis Jr. through the upheaval of the sixties, the balls to the walls of the seventies, the glam period of rock and the sad period of grunge into the 2000's.

It is probably the only place in Cali that I would actually LIKE to go to, but just from this documentary you can tell that the place is in a dead spot of time now.

Still, it's pretty great.

So, second episode of Flash:

Still mixed feelings. There's things to like about it, but what it's got wrong it's got so completely wrong that it's really annoying me.

Tonight's Flash episode can be summed up in one word: meh. It was pretty boring and cliched for the most part, though the last minute reveal has me still interested.

I guess we can cross off any hope for a Metamorpho spinoff though!

I finally watched the first episode of Flash and pretty much LOVED it!

I should see episode 2 soon and be able to weigh in on it.

Paladin still owes us his impressions on the back half of Breaking Bad.

I think Metamorpho is next expisode. If not it's the alchemist or Mr. Element.

That said, lordy lordy lordy. Somebody stop writing that over earnest, cheeseball 1950's dialog.

"I don't ride out to save the city in my red tidy's, we all do..." or something to that effect. Seriously? If I was in the room at that point I'd be clubbing baby seals just to get the saccarin out of my nostrils.

That's the problem I have with the tv shows in a nutshell. They write pablum and think that a brightly colored unitard makes up for it.

No. You can be bright and hopeful and not sound like one of the Hardy Boys chums from the 1930's. Sanitized and purified for mass consumption.

Uuggghhhhh.

Only two eps in, and they are already going for the "Long, soulful stare" shit. It's why I couldn't watch smallville. There was more yaking and staring than there was adventure and fun.

GA is the same way. I watched the first two seasons...well, first one and a half, and it was angst ridden pablum. When they got away from that, and did story and action, it was pretty good, nice production values, the fights weren't telegraphed like they used to be in the seventies where the bad guy du jour stood there waiting to be hit.

Here's a hint, DCtv, you audiences are far more sophisticated than you are. Write for them and it's much better. Write for you and you sound like a fucking pablum log from 1936.

They seem to be missing the fact that the Rogue's Gallery is a really important part of Flash's cast. So if you kill off the villain at the end of every episode, it doesn't exactly work.



Apparently it's the Mist.

Dr. Alchemy would make sense as he's one of the Flash rogues, but I really hope that they don't keep using the particle accelerator as the origin of all the villain's powers.

EDE's, I agree on killing Simon Stagg. Maybe he will survive through advanced genetic cloning or some shit. This episode annoyed the hell outta me because of all the bs.

If they want it to succeed, they need to think deeper. Certain characters are made for different things. Stagg is a drive character. It's a character that will act independently of the hero for its own reasons, and then will intersect with the hero because of those reasons. It isn't a one and done character with little backstory. So just grabbing the name and then killing cuts off many different avenues that can be explored.

The thought going into this series...not much more advanced than the previous apparantly. And look how well it turned out.

I really want to like it, but it's just plowing the same rows that Smallville and GA have. Ham acting, bad dialog, over emoting in places because it's a "comic book" show rather than an adventure show based on a comic book.

Yeah, I just don't get that at all. Is it really supposed to appeal to comic geeks that they used the names "Stagg" and "Java" for characters who have, at best, a tenuous connection to their comic counterparts and then killed them off?

I honestly don't know what to say without going into massive spoiler territory. I'm thinking, though, that Breaking bad may, in fact, be the best television series I've ever seen! The pure craft of it and the greatness of the beginning, middle and end without a real lull and everything being fully realized just has to distinguish it from any other series I've ever seen and many of the great ones I've heard of but haven't viewed. It's one of very few series I've watched with no sci-fi aspect to it, and it may be the very best I've ever seen. I can't recommend it highly enough! It's often tough to watch, and I can see how not everyone would really like this sort of thing. But it is so, SO great!!!

That said, I have two small caveats with how two major developments in the final season:

1) How Hank found out felt like a bit of a cheat. I would rather he had found out somehow during the course of his investigation. I know it jibed with connections he'd made in his investigation, but I'd rather it were less....random?

2) How Jessie came to his realization about what Walt did seemed a little out of nowhere and unearned.

But that's just about it. Love me some Breaking Bad and am SO glad I took the opportunity to watch it thru AMC's re-running of it for the past few months!

I've been bombing around netflix online, pickin' some classics and some crazy stuff, like Troma, just to get some different items come up on my "because you watched" lists.

Everything from "the Longest Day" to "Zeta one" and "Women on the moon".

I don't watch Arrow or the Flash and stopped watching Smallville after about season 2, but I've been interested in this topic ever since I heard that Felicity Smoak ( http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Felicity_Smoak_%28New_Earth%29 ) of all the random characters had become a fan-favourite on Arrow.

I wonder if the reason these characters are "in name only" DC characters is an IP backlash to "the Chloe Sullivan effect". When Chloe became popular and they wanted to introduce her into the DCU, who knows what rights issues came into play and prevented it from happening for so long (and then, not particularly successfully)? But this way, when a character blows up and becomes popular (see: Felicity) DC already owns them. So no murky IP problems with the TV show writers.

I could be wrong though.

Against my better judgement I watched the last half of the 2nd Hobbit (it was on TV), and was about as frustrated as I expected I'd be. I used to love Peter Jackson (Heavenly Creatures is still a favourite of mine), and I love Lord of the Rings, but strangely enough, I really, really dislike Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies.

I guess I'm too much of a purist that I can't stand watching him change wholesale parts of the books that I think are important, or worse yet, adding his own clunky stuff.

Beyond that, Jackson has been obsessed (both here and in Kong), with Spielberg-esque chase/action scenes that are not only interminably long, but are so ridiculously over-the-top and in defiance of physics and logic, that it's impossible to become invested in them at any level.

Two examples: the dwarves are on the run from the dragon inside the mountain (WTF?) and when he unleashes his fire, they all hide behind a pillar as the flames shoot right by them, filling up the room and starting the dwarf forges, but no one is even singed, when they should all be incinerated. A few minutes later, Thorin surfs (again WTF?) down a river of molten metal on a wheelbarrow, and not only doesn't the wheelbarrow melt, he doesn't burst into flames despite being in such close proximity to such a high degree of heat.

That would be my assumption for someone like Felicity, who was intended as a recurring character, but I just don't see the same logic holding for characters that are basically brought in as one-shots to be killed off (though I suppose they did leave the door open for the characters to possibly be brought back...). It just seems like a wink to the fans, followed by spitting on them.

Just so you know: I kind of hate you for this.

I've never watched an episode, either, for the reasons I stated in an earlier post in this thread: if it's not middle-aged, bearded, cantankerous Ollie in the Robin Hood hat, it's just not Ollie to me.

For the record, over the past couple of episodes, especially tonight's, Flash has totally started working for me.

Finally caught up on "Constantine". While it wasn't as bad as I thought it might be, it wasn't particularly great either. It felt too forced, like they were running through a check list: Early appearance quote #1 (Check), Newcastle (Check), call someone "SQUIRE" (check), Chas the Cab driver (check), etc. but it just didn't seem to happen naturally or with anywhere near the right tone. There's some potential there, but I'm not sure how it will fair as the back end of a Friday night line-up.

Also, how is it that Harold Perrineau gets *worse* as he gets older. The man was electrifying earlier in his career, and now he's nearly unwatchable.

So far I’m loving the Flash. I like the corny dialog. I’m happy it’s not grim ‘n gritty. The only thing I thought was a mistake was killing Stag. If they were going to kill him, it should have been some no-name company and guy rather than something they could use at some point. I liked how Snart got his freeze gun by stealing it rather than being a scientist that created it. I always thought it was stupid that a scientist creates a great invention to use as a villain rather than making tons of money selling his product. Can you imagine firemen with that freeze gun?

Loving Agents of Shield. I don’t think of it as a super hero show so much as a super spy show. That makes it good for me. To me it’s getting better and better.

My favorite show that I don’t get to see much because now it’s only online is Legend of Korra. I currently don’t have a computer at home and I can’t see it at work lol. It’s a fantastic show. It’s very mature and the animation is fantastic.

If I didn’t have basic cable I’d be watching Doctor Who. I love the new Doctor so far.

I'm still not big on the Peter Parker-ish version of Barry Allen, but I thought Captain Cold was awesome.

There's a Marvel retrospective special on ABC right now, and I'm surprised to see Jim Shooter included among the interviewees. I didn't know he'd been rehabilitated at Marvel. There's actually quite a lot of people I wouldn't have expected to see on a special aimed at a general audience, like Steve Englehart. Neat.

The Flash show is pretty boring to me honestly. It seems to be following the Smallville pattern of each episode having a new villain of the week. Maybe if they change things up I'll check back into it.