It’s “What have you been watching?”, your chance to recommend to fellow TMINE readers anything you’ve been watching this week
So it turns out that season 2 of Marvel’s Luke Cage is 13 episodes, which makes my ambition to watch it all last weekend very ambitious indeed. I’m up to episode 9, though – spoiler: it’s better than the first season – but it’s probably not going to be Monday now until I can review it. Sorry about that.
However, I did manage to review Strange Angel (US: CBS All Access) and Take Two (US: ABC), as well as pass a third-episode verdict on Condor (US: Audience). I’ll also be reviewing Yellowstone in the next couple of days. Which ain’t bad.
Meanwhile, after the jump, I’ll be looking at the latest episodes in the TMINE viewing queue of Bron/Broen (The Bridge), Marvel’s Cloak and Dagger, Mystery Road and Succession, as well as the season finale of Westworld and the return of Shooter. All that in a mo.
TV shows
TMINE recommends has all the TV shows TMINE has ever recommended and TV Reviews A-Z lists every TV show ever reviewed here
Shows I’m watching but not necessarily recommending
Marvel’s Cloak and Dagger (US: Freeform: UK: Amazon)
1×4 – Call/Response
An uptick from last week’s episode, despite it basically being a bottle episode for the most part, with our hero and heroine sitting around chatting in a church about their lives. We get the return of some interesting socio-economic analysis – Cloak may be rich, Dagger may be poor, but the former is black, the latter white, so who’s more privileged? On top of that, though, both learn from each other and start to become better, more interesting people. Great stuff for a teen superhero show, basically.
Reviews: Initial review
Mystery Road (Australia: ABC)
1×5 – The Waterhole
Things perk up mightily for the first of the final couple of episodes, as we go back to the opening episode’s cultural analysis and aboriginal concerns; the mystery itself seems like it’s already been solved – it just needs some evidence to prove whodunnit. There’s also action, there’s Aaron Pedersen being majestic. Even the tedious stuff with the daughter isn’t tedious this week.
Top stuff, ready to end up in the recommended list if the final episode proves as good.
Reviews: Initial review
Succession (US: HBO; UK: Sky Atlantic)
1×4 – Sad Sack Wasp Trap
And I think I’m done. It’s because this is a bad or unfunny show, more that it’s flipped from being a funny show about business to being a business show that’s occasionally funny. Initial comparisons with The Thick of It were valid, but without those writers behind the scripts following episode two, the show has struggled to maintain my interest, even with the return of (spoiler alert) (spoiler alert) Brian Cox . The characters are just all such gits with whom you can’t really even sympathise that you don’t really care if they succeed and none of them are really so loathsome that you want them to fail instead. It’s just inept rich idiots being ineptly rich, which isn’t really enough for me.
Reviews: Initial review
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ4_c8n6pSg
Recommended shows
Bron/Broen (The Bridge) (Sweden: SVT1; Denmark: DR1; UK: BBC Two)
4×7
Two big revelations here that make you realise why Denmark likes its (red) herrings so much. I think I’d possibly need to rewatch both the episode and the season to really see if everything adds up and there are things, such as a certain character’s peaking Swedish instead of Danish that were probably unnoticed in the UK until now but which needed clumsily explaining in this episode for domestic audiences as a result of the main revelation.
Still, at least Danish cop has a chance of happiness at last. No more hallucinations for him!
Reviews: Initial review
Shooter (US: USA; UK: Netflix)
3×1 – Backroads
And thus we see how season 2 would have ended, had Ryan Phillippe not gone and broken his leg. Whoops. It’s a decent enough episode, too, with decent fights, although now feels like a rushed conclusion to the season 2 plotlines. Slightly more worryingly is that the already silly conspiracy theory element of the show has got even sillier now that Phillippe’s dad is being dragged into things, suggesting a ‘generational deep state’ that pushes the limits of plausibility beyond what the show can really sustain, and I’m not convinced that Memphis would so readily have thrown aside her entire belief system so easily.
But it’s still properly fun, so let’s see what the real season 3 opener does to mix things up.
Episode reviews: Initial review, Verdict
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbN6cIIG2lM
Westworld (US: HBO; UK: Sky Atlantic)
2×10 – The Passenger
Ah, so it isn’t going to be Futureworld – it’s going to be Beyond Westworld. I was wondering.
Obviously miles better than about 90% of the season, despite only about 50% of it making sense thanks to its fractured timeline, and giving conclusions to a whole bunch of storylines that needed rounding off before they began to dominate proceedings. Plenty of imagination on display, too, as well as revelations galore.
Nevertheless, it does underline how much of the season was filler – what was the point of Shogunworld, for example? – and what on earth was going on in that post-credits sequence? I’m sure I’ll be back for next season, my faith at least partially restored by the episode, but it seems clear by now that there are far fewer ghosts in the machine than might have be hoped when the series first began.
Episode reviews: Initial review, Verdict
