It’s “What have you been watching?”, your chance to recommend to fellow TMINE readers anything you’ve been watching this week
Star Trek: Picard
This week’s reviews
Week four of Spring 2020 was a little quieter than the previous one, but we had three new shows launch. You can read the TMINE reviews of Outmatched(US: Fox) and Star Trek: Picard (US: CBS All Access; UK: Amazon) elsewhere, but we can talk about Awkwafina is Nora from Queens (US: Comedy Central) after the jump.
Meanwhile, in the film world, Orange Thursday took in Knives Out (2019) and Angel Has Fallen (2019).
Ragnarok
What’s coming next
Starting in the next week are Onisciente (Omniscient) (Netflix), The Stranger (Netflix), Luna Nera (Black Moon) (Netflix) and Ragnarok (Netflix). Yep, while others sleep, Netflix triumphs. I’ll pick one of those to watch over the next week and hopefully, it’ll be your Boxset Monday, but more likely your Boxset Tuesday.
Tomorrow’s Orange Thursday will be reviewing The Personal History of David Copperfield (2020) and X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019). One of those is significantly better than the other.
Daredevil
The regulars
The regulars list is smaller even than normal this week, since both Evil and Lincoln Rhyme: Hunt for the Bone Collector took a break and Lovely Wife has decided she’d quite like to watch Avenue 5, so we’ll be watching episode 2 tonight.
Anyway, that just leaves 9-1-1: Lone Star, Stumptown and The Outsider. Still, it isWhat have you been watching? so now’s your chance to recommend some shows. Even Doctor Who. I hear there was a surprise guest ((spoiler alert) Captain Jack) and a massive development ((spoiler alert) another Doctor Who/alternative Doctor Who). Still not bothering with it.
In case you’ve been wondering what TMINE has been doing with itself, given such a lack of viewing options, the answer is simple: I’ve been rewatching the entire first season of Marvel’sDaredevil. It’s been an interesting experience, since clearly I was in a grumpy mood when I reviewed the first few episodes and still quite grumpy when I didn’t include it in my Top 9 (would have been 10 with Daredevil) shows of 2015.
Because it’s brilliant. Really sublime stuff – possibly my favourite season of all the Marvel shows, even more so than the first season of Iron Fist. It verges on the out and out sadistic at times, sure – you can tell showrunner Steven S DeKnight had just come off Spartacus – but despite having already watched it, I zoomed through all 13 episodes in about three days flat. Even the underwhelming costume reveal at the end was fine and Stick and the Hand didn’t irk me so much this time round.
The scripts explorations of the characters are almost lyrical at times, plus I really enjoyed some of its side-themes more, such as its study of the (diminishing) importance of journalism. There’s some real detective work/journalism going on in the investigation. And even when you know what’s coming, there are still some genuinely surprising choices by the writers, such as Melvyn’s reaction to losing a fight. Of which there are many, all so beautifully choreographed and directed – even Wu Assassinscouldn’t quite match it.
Plus there’s the general tone of the whole season, with some actually thought-provoking discussions of good and evil, morality, vigilantism, killing, rich and poor, Catholicism and more. Properly adult stuff it is.
Lastly, having watched all the other seasons and Netflix Marvel shows since, it’s really surprising to see how much everything fits together and was set up from the beginning. Yep, all that building-buying for the Japanese had a point and Madame Gao really did have to travel further than China to go back to her homeland.
So, if you’ve already watched Daredevil, give it another go, as it might surprise you. If you’ve not, you should definitely try it – provided you’ve got a strong stomach.
In the US: Thursdays, CBS All Access In the UK: Fridays, Amazon
What do you want in a revival show – new stories or old stories? It’s a question particularly relevant to science fiction TV, which often has legions of fans particularly keen on deciding what’s good and what’s bad according to a set of rules they’ve devised that normally involve the word ‘canon’.
We’ve seen it repeatedly with the likes of Doctor Who, which chose initially to be as mainstream as possible when it was revived in 2005, by avoiding mentioning anything much to do with the show’s past in case it was perceived as being too nerdy.
Jamie McShane, Patrick Stewart and Orla Brady in Star Trek: Picard
Let’s look that up
Star Trek: Picard, on the other hand, is going straight in with the nerd fodder. The show resurrects Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s most popular character, 14 years after he’s retired from Starfleet because he believes it’s become morally bankrupt – thanks to events that happened asa result of the movie that killed the franchise roughly 18 years ago, Star Trek: Nemesis.
Retired to his family’s French vineyard where he can speak bad French to his dog and have some migrant Romulans with Irish accents as live-in staff/egalitarian help-mates, Picard is nevertheless dreaming about Commander Data still. Or maybe it’s B4.
Then up pops a girl (Isa Briones) with superpowers (of a sort) who has been dreaming of Picard, but doesn’t know why (or even who he is), and whom various dark suited people with guns have been trying to abduct or kill – but doesn’t know why. And then it turns out that Data was painting pictures of her 30 years previously.
What’s going on? Will it be enough to lure Picard back into action? And how much of it will need hyperlinks to Wikipedia for normal people to understand what’s going on?
