I think I made it up to Season 5. The problem, and I'm putting it on binging whether by Netflix or by library DVDs and their limited check out, is that I remember so little. I recall really liking the first few seasons, then feeling, like often happens with me, that I was watching the same thing over and over, then dropped it.
Now if I go to a wiki or imdb to try and review to see where I was and pick it up again from there, ultimately I end up spoiling some of the plot when I get too far in the reading. I don't want to restart, thereby "giving up" all the effort I put in to watch the first few seasons and I don't want to spoil the ones I've never seen. So I just go find something else to watch and sit by the side while everyone else has a great time talking about the latest episode.
Life can be complicated when you're me and binging.
I think I made it up to Season 5. The problem, and I'm putting it on binging whether by Netflix or by library DVDs and their limited check out, is that I remember so little. I recall really liking the first few seasons, then feeling, like often happens with me, that I was watching the same thing over and over, then dropped it. .
I get that there are some repetitive happenings in SoA, but I've never once gotten bored with it or thought about stopping. In addition to all the surprises and twists, it's really the great characters and the actors portraying them that make me crave more and care about what happens to them.
So, I normally don't care much for Scy-fy programming, but this year the new shows Killjoys and Dark Matter have been decent mind-candy, and I've gone from watching them in the background while surfing the net, to having to stop what I'm reading and pay attention to the shows, because they seem to be really picking up their game (particularly Dark Matter).
I think I made it up to Season 5. The problem, and I'm putting it on binging whether by Netflix or by library DVDs and their limited check out, is that I remember so little. I recall really liking the first few seasons, then feeling, like often happens with me, that I was watching the same thing over and over, then dropped it. .
I get that there are some repetitive happenings in SoA, but I've never once gotten bored with it or thought about stopping...
The binging has positives and negatives. Positives, it's easy to remember where the story was when watching several different shows. Any show is repetitious to a point but the binging makes it more obvious. These are just for me. No idea how binging affects others.
SOA: I probably made it however far episodes were available at the time I binged out of boredom or obstinacy and just never picked it up (as opposed to what I said, "dropping") when more became available.
Couldn't say for positive why I never picked up SOA again but I don't recall much of it so probably none of the characters stuck with me. I don't recall finding any of them particularly likeable, someone I'd want to hang around with. I don't think they were meant to be likeable but for me to want to watch a show, that's usually important.
I've finally finished the first season of Mad Men and I think the show has finally found it's footing. Those last two episodes were insane!
Pete Campbell continues to be a pompous jerk, but he's easily my favorite character. In many ways, he reminds me of 5YL Sun Boy, a rich kid who's trying to prove himself, but continually is reminded of his privilege in spite of his accomplishments. I'm hoping he doesn't meet a tragic end by the end of the show like his comic book analog! When he
calls out Don on actually being Dick Whitman
, I got chills!
I'm liking the use of flashbacks to give us more of Don's past, especially the stuff involving his time in the Korean War, which the inner history buff in my couldn't get enough of!
I'm hoping the show keeps this momentum as I head into season 2.
As we talked about on FB, this was just devastating. I don't want to repeat myself too much, but it was definitely one of the most "awful gut-punch" type deaths ever in television history.
Amazingly, Kurt Sutter did a death like that on the Shield--similar only in that it was an awful gut-punch--which left me devastated, but even that doesn't compare to SOA.
I also assume you're a few more eps into the season, but in case you aren't, I won't say anything other than it doesn't let up for a second.
SOA is not an easy show for its fans but Season 5 takes things to another level.
Also, Season 4 was a great season wasn't it? I especially like how Jacob Hale gets some comeuppance when the agent dumps all those disgusting sex toys onto his desk in the middle of a town hall meeting. That agent (and for the life of me, I can't remember what agency he worked for) was also on the show Deadwood.
The Clay / Jax / Terra / Gemma happenings in Season 4 were crazy. The show doesn't rest on its laurels and constantly is moving forward towards its conclusion, and you really see that in Season 4.
Lastly, this is my favorite opening to a television show Season ever (Season 4 of SOA).
I love this song, "Coal War" by Joshua James. I probably have listened to it every single day since the rewatch I did of Sons back in the early Spring.
I've finally finished the first season of Mad Men and I think the show has finally found it's footing. Those last two episodes were insane!
Pete Campbell continues to be a pompous jerk, but he's easily my favorite character. In many ways, he reminds me of 5YL Sun Boy, a rich kid who's trying to prove himself, but continually is reminded of his privilege in spite of his accomplishments. I'm hoping he doesn't meet a tragic end by the end of the show like his comic book analog! When he
calls out Don on actually being Dick Whitman
, I got chills!
I'm liking the use of flashbacks to give us more of Don's past, especially the stuff involving his time in the Korean War, which the inner history buff in my couldn't get enough of!
I'm hoping the show keeps this momentum as I head into season 2.
Yeah, the last episodes of Season 1 of Mad Men really show what the show can do. Don's sales pitch of the Carousal slide projector is probably his most famous one besides the series premiere tobacco one. I especially like when Harry runs out of the door crying.
The show only gets better from here.
My wife and I will be doing a complete rewatch of this in the near future. I've been following the show since its premiere, but have only watched up to season 5 thus far.
EDIT - to tie this all together, Tara, one of the major characters of Sons of Anarchy, is played by Maggie Siff, who delivered her truly first great performance in Mad Men Season 1 as Rachel Menken.
EDIT - to tie this all together, Tara, one of the major characters of Sons of Anarchy, is played by Maggie Siff, who delivered her truly first great performance in Mad Men Season 1 as Rachel Menken.
I like Rachel Menken a lot, but if the last few episodes were any indication, it doesn't look like her and Don will be seeing each other much anymore.
I can't stand January Jones as Betty Draper though. Her acting is so wooden! Don needs to leave her ASAP!
By around Season 2 I began to notice a certain style of acting by several characters that I found mildly irritating at first, then decided it was a stylistic choice for the show. It became part of the ambience in an effective way, IMO.
"Everything about this is going to feel different." (Saturn Girl, Legion of Super-Heroes #1)
Japan's answer to Superman... STARMAN! A sci-fi superhero flick, the climactic fight scene has to be seen to be believed! it's a combination of Captain America, James Bond and Bruce Lee all at once!!!
Japan's answer to Superman... STARMAN! A sci-fi superhero flick, the climactic fight scene has to be seen to be believed! it's a combination of Captain America, James Bond and Bruce Lee all at once!!!
Please tell me you can find a remastered version. I already tried. This looks great but so blurry on my laptop. Looks like some links on that page to more fun stuff.
Finished Sons of Anarchy Season Six last night. That finale was just gut-wrenching. I was kind of all over the place throughout the season with the major character who died in the finale. And then to have it go down by the hands of one of my favorite characters under the circumstances it did....just gut-wrenching. And then those moments at the end of the episode....heartbreaking.
We lost another pretty important character in the same incident. He was a very appealing actor in the role and will be missed, as well.
Two episodes before that finale came arguably the biggest death of the series to date. It was the only death in SoA that I knew of in advance because of the internet furor that was raised when the episode originally aired. Even if I hadn't known, the character's death had felt inevitable for quite some time. To actually see it finally go down, I was both surprised and unsurprised by how much I pitied the character at the end. In many ways this was the most pivotal character on the show, pretty much responsible for all of the conflict therein. A job very well done on that actor's part.
And so, I'll soon be marching on to the seventh and final season. I've little doubt that it will be the bloodiest one yet with where things appear to be going at the end of Season Six. Honestly, Game of Thrones has nothing on SoA in terms of shocking and gut-wrenching deaths.
Still enjoying Killjoys, Dark Matter and Defiance, although none of them are exactly high cinema (or as fun as Eureka was).
USA programming on deck includes Suits (Gina Torres! Like a boss!) and Graceland.
And that's about it for now.
I re-watched the Daredevil series. It remained cool.
I want to watch Mr. Robot, at some point, I just haven't been able to get past the first five minutes of the first episode. I get bored easy.
Waitin' for all my superhero stuff to come back this fall. (Arrow, Flash, Agents of SHIELD, plus new shows Legends of Tommorrow and Jessica Jones. Supergirl scares me.)
Dark Matter keeps getting better. Characters that just annoyed me at the beginning are getting deeper.
Defiance : I picked up the DVD from the library, forgot about it until the day before it was due, got a few episodes in, now kicking myself because I couldn't renew. Someone else had already reserved it.
Bloodline: it was okay. Kept my interest to watch it but probably won't stay in my consciousness long enough to pick up the second season when it comes around.
The Last Ship: great premise. TERRIFIC bad guy, Joffrey level of hate. Story execution is up and down though. But, I've an interest in naval strategy so it holds my attention.
Originally Posted by Myg - Andy S
I am stuck on Sense8 The characters, the narrative movements, the locations! Wow
Netflix has put up a "Making of." Adds more fun. They're like management savants. They had to coordinate 8 cities across six continents, along with major festivals and other real events that no way could have been recreated... They even used the flying everybody from one place to another in the show.
Got me excited to re-watch it already, which for me almost NEVER happens so soon. Not since Across the Universe. I keep thinking it would be a great show to watch with groups of friends, like we did in college but I just don't have the group of friends that would be in tune with a show like Sense8. So, watch it again by myself.
KILLJOYS - Good, fun summer show. "space bounty hunters" pretty much explains it. The characters have good chemistry, there's banter and interesting world-building and it follows the (at this point) standard one mission per episode, but also advancing the larger season arc, which in this case involves the f**d up backstory of two of the characters. (they're like damaged and murder-y, but have hearts of gold) Ex-Jimmy Olsen carries it with his charm, though Hannah John-Kamen is very easy on the eyes.
So I know Lardy has finished SOA! I haven't had much a chance to discuss with him season 6 let alone the final season, though we did talk about the finale a bit on Facebook.
Some thoughts:
- the brutal turn of events and double homicide on the season 6 finale is one of the most shocking and awful moments in television history (though from a storytelling perspective it's fantastic). It's excruciating to watch--if the show wasn't already at a point of no return, there was no going back now.
- and then the subsequent process of Jax learning about the truth in season 7 is as noirish as it gets. The fact that he learns it from a certain character in particular is heartbreaking and really hit me hard.
- lastly, the penultimate episode, with its own double homicide caps it all off. It's the most tragic in the sense that it's the death the show was always heading towards though when you finally realize that it both punches you in the gut and makes you feel a certain sense of closure. It's noir and Greek tragedy to the extreme.
The death of the other character, who is one of the great performances in the series, is equally tragic. "This is all I've got left"--his final lines showing that if he could just have let go some time earlier, or found something in his life to hold on to, he could have prevented his own demise, which was surely going to happen the longer he stayed connected to the Sons.
- I loved the character of Nero. Though a late entrant to the series, he lasted three whole seasons and became in a weird way not only a positive father figure for Jax but also the conscience of the series. His learning of the tragic events of season 6 was heartbreaking and his attempts to prevent Jax from taking the tragedy to the next extreme were noble.
- what's left of the Sons at the end of the series is quite different from where it started. But the loss of a lot of characters throughout the show allowed a lot of lesser characters to really step up and get a ton of screen time, with Chibs being the most obvious.
I personally can't believe Tigg lived through the show though I think that's clearly on purpose, as the man who killed Donna and other innocents never gets any real comeuppance. The storyline with Venus Van Damme, which started out funny ended up being very moving and powerful.
The addition of the final new member of the Sons in the finale was fitting and I liked that.
And lastly, Juice's story ended up being one of the more tragic and brutal stories I've seen on television. His story is a smaller version of Jax's in the sense that his continued attempts to resolve his problems and make "quick fixes" kept making larger and more horrifying problems that eventually led him into a world of shit that he could only escape from by dying.
Lastly, the finale itself, as Lardy and I spoke about briefly, was perfect. Kurt Sutter presents a pretty clear narrative that is straightforward but also loaded with symbolism and metaphor. There is certainly deeper meaning to all the Shakespeare and religious implications, and I have my own ideas I've discussed with my wife at length. I keep hoping there will be some great reviews / "essays" on the series in the same mold you see in a college literature class. This is clearly a series that you can analyze for a long time.
Lardy hasn't posted about it yet on LW, and I suspect it's partially due to the "series finale blues" that I always get when a great series is completed and gone. I'm about to finish Justified myself (starting the final season tonight) so I'm starting to feel that familiar trepidation of losing something you love but also loving the fact that you'll get the ending the series deserves. That's something television has always struggled to do--give a show a great ending--but in recent years has seemed to master. One more reason to prove this is truly a golden age of TV.
DO NOT READ FURTHER IF YOU WISH TO REMAIN UNSPOILED!!! # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # So....some thoughts on a selected character-by character basis for the last couple of seasons:
Gemma. My absolute favorite character in the whole series. A character with major flaws and huge sins but just mesmerizing in every scene she was in. As far as I'm concerned Katey Sagal totally buried Peg Bundy by breathing life into this role.
After Gemma did what she did at the conclusion of Season 6, I was still in her corner while also feeling scared to death for her. Yes, she did something unforgivable, but let's not forget what her victim put her through leading up to it. Honestly, it looked like Jax might have beaten Gemma to it for a while there before he went in another direction. Given the circumstances, the moment and what Gemma believed the person had done, could see why she did it. Even then, it was in the heat of the moment, and I don't think it was premeditated. certainly, we saw Gemma struggling with what she did in the aftermath.
I just love her, flaws and all, and I know SoA owes much of its success to Ms. Sagal.
Tig. He and Opie are my two absolute favorites of the Sons themselves.I'm really super-glad he survived the show and that we got to see so many facets of him after that initial enmity he earned for carrying out Clay's orders in Season 1. He was like something out of a Tarantino film with all of his quirks and sheer oddities. I'd really like to see the actor do more roles. I especially liked how Tig's storyline developed with....
Venus! What a terrific character and how great was it to see her revisited after that initial seemingly one-off comical scenario in which she debuted! When she returned, needing a favor for an endangered teen, I was struck by her dialogue and how she kind of danced around phrasing awful things with a more civilized southern belle style. I was so happy that she and Tig found their way to each other!
Juice. Kind of a polarizing character for me, as he well should be, I suppose. The actor's performance as Juice was kind of...odd?...for me at times. While he was a very good crier, I sometimes felt he was repressing a lot in the performance. In a way that really works for the character. But often I wonder if he's the best--or the worst--actor on the show. I'm still not sure. His was certainly undeniably a tragic story unfolding, especially as the key to the unraveling was something as simple as insecurity about his race.
Unser. Another absolute favorite, along (ironically) with Gemma. As I was assessing the characters early on, I figured (incorrectly) that Unser wouldn't survive very long. I'm glad I was wrong and that he stuck around (almost) as long as possible. The actor lent the show a much-needed air of humanity that grounded it in almost every scene he was in. It was a real pleasure to see this actor do his thing and a tragedy to see how it played out.
Nero. Cobie's right that Nero added some more humanity to the show and gave Gemma an interesting love interest in the wake of her and Clay going down in flames. A welcome addition over those last three seasons.
Bobby and Chibbs. Two really solid Sons behind my favorites. Both with some terrific moments down the stretch. One ending in tragedy and the other elevated to the top of the heap by the end. Both essential in the roles they played. I'm kind of surprised that neither tried to ground Jax at all in that last season spiral. I guess even they were swayed by the blood vendetta driving it all.
Tara. I was always on the fence with her and even more on the opposite side as her role wound down. She definitely had her good moments, but she ultimately chose to go down that path. She made her bed; she should have lain on it.
Chucky! Who in the world couldn't love Chucky?!?! Loved him--and those final scenes with Gemma were heartbreaking....
Clay. Such a powerful presence on the show and one I couldn't blame the producers for keeping around longer than maybe they should have. I liked that the man who caused pretty much all the conflict that built the scenario for the show displayed some humility in his end. Ron Perlman really did a great job in a role with so much more ugliness in it than redemption. That you could actually love Clay at times says a lot about Perlman.
Rat. Easily the best Son that didn't have much meat to his role. The actor shined in every opportunity he was given and really endeared himself to us.
Wendy. Sorry, not a bad actress per se, but I hated Wendy from the get-go and never really warmed up to her. Kinda hated that she survived, really.
And then there's...
Jax. The central character in the show and one who was never anywhere near the top of my personal list of favorite SoA characters. In a very real way, I think this is by design. Jax was very much Hamlet from Shakespeare, and Hamlet is not a particularly likable character. He's all over the place. Indecisive. Wishy-washy. Destructive. And just like hamlet's story, Jax's is fascinating to see unfold, even as you know it's gonna be a trainwreck.
Honestly, I would have been beyond pissed if Jax had survived the series. For a hot minute in the finale, it certainly looked like he might. But instead, Kurt Sutter chose to end the series (and Jax) in a totally perfect manner. I mean, you just can't do the extremely awful things that Jax Teller does in the series and not pay for them, however justified or unjustified they may have been. I like both the noir-ish sensibility to the overall story and the Shakespearean gravitas to it all.
Honestly, if it had ended any other way for Jax, I would have been extremely disappointed. It doesn't make me love the character, but it redeems him by finally having him do the right thing--for once!
More general thoughts later, Cobie, as well as any others you might have being welcome!
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