Pantheon covers a lot of cool sci-fi concepts, the main one being the idea of “Uploaded Intelligence,” i.e. the ability to scan a person’s brain and have them live as a piece of software in the cloud. The conceit is fertile ground for exploring ideas like, what makes a person a person, and what makes this person this specific person? On paper, it’s right up my alley, but I didn’t enjoy the show as much as I expected to.

I think I had trouble connecting with the characters because the animation and voice acting felt a bit flat. The story deals with a lot of heavy emotions, like grief for a departed loved one, and the choice of whether to accept the Uploaded version of that loved one as the same person. But those feelings didn’t come through for me because the animation just didn’t have the same expressiveness as, say, Arcane, or anything from Studio Ghibli.

On the positive side, the action scenes are pretty fun to watch. The various Uploaded characters often “fight” each other in the virtual world. Technically, there shouldn’t be anything to look at, as it’s essentially pieces of software trying to hack into each other’s networks, but the creators of the show chose to visualize it as if the Uploads were superheroes. They fly around and use “powers” against each other… sometimes it feels almost like a Dragon Ball fight.

I’m not a parent. That ship has sailed for me, and there was a time when a twinge of envy would come over me whenever I encountered someone with children. A show like Adolescence takes that feeling of envy and replaces it with a deep appreciation for just how hard parenting can be.

The miniseries tells the story of a teenage boy who gets arrested and charged with stabbing and killing his classmate. It explores his motives, his school life, his relationship with the victim—a girl who he was involved with, in a confused teenage way—and especially, the effect of these events on his parents.

The current hype around this show mostly centres around the fact that each of the four 1-hour episodes is filmed in a single shot. I don’t have much to say about that aspect of it, other than kudos to the whole cast and crew for pulling it off. It’s truly impressive.

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The Dragon Ball franchise will always have a place in my heart. When DBZ was airing on YTV during my high school days, I watched it religiously everyday. I’ll always regret not being able to finish the series because I moved to university and no longer had access to my own TV. More recently, I caught up with Dragon Ball Super during the pandemic lockdown. It didn’t leave much of an impression, to be honest, but I think I needed some comfort viewing during those anxious times.

And now, there’s a new series called Daima. Unlike the previous shows, which went on forever (some would say, dragged on forever), this one is a limited series with only 20 episodes. In the show, Goku and friends are transformed into children, and must adventure through the “demon realm” to restore their normal bodies and defeat the demon king.

I don’t really have much to say about it… it’s mostly mindless action. It seems that the animation quality is more consistent than I remember of the other shows, probably because it’s a limited run. I’m not a huge fan of having the characters be children, though… it feels like a way to increase the cuteness quotient of the whole thing, but doesn’t serve any story purpose.

Anyway, I’ll always get a kick out of it whenever one of our heroes powers up and shows off a new fighting technique or a transformation. A silly but fun nostalgia trip.

I recently caught up with the second season of Pachinko. The show follows the lives of a Korean family living in Japan, spanning from the 1930’s, when the main character, Sunja, was a young woman, all the way to the 1980’s, when she is a grandmother, and her grandson Solomon becomes the protagonist.

One of the main challenges that the entire family encounters is the discrimination that they face as a minority group, and it’s a fascinating to see how little this problem improves despite the decades of progress that has shaped the world around them. Somehow, they survive and thrive, but they end up going through life with a chip on their shoulder. Solomon, especially, uses his profession as a high-flying finance guy to make Succession-style deals and enact revenge against perceived cultural insults. It’s as if he’s getting back at all Japanese people for how they’ve treated his family through the years.

Kudos to the cast, who perform in both Japanese and Korean (and sometimes English). Not easy languages to learn, I’m sure. Speaking of the cast, though, one flaw that I see with the production of the show is that they don’t seem to age enough. The same actress plays Sunja from 1930-something, all the way to 1950, and she looks pretty much the same throughout. By the end of the season, one of her sons is a young man, and the two of them look like they’re the same age, which does make some dramatic scenes less convincing.

I’ll shout out one sequence in particular, where one of the characters lives through the nuclear bombing in Nagasaki. The blast itself is depicted only as a bright light, but the scenes covering the days before the explosion build tension in a cool way, by showing the date in big lettering on the screen. To emphasize the point, there are also conspicuously visible calendars on the wall in the background. It was a very effective way of building suspense.

Like many Apple TV+ shows, it seems like they have spared no expense in recreating the look of multiple historical eras, and I hope that their coffers don’t run out before they can complete the story in subsequent seasons.

I read the trilogy of books¹ around the time that this show premiered, in 2019. I think I had always been curious about the series, and figured that I would read it before jumping into the show. I ended up being disappointed at how the story progressed, so I didn’t feel the need to follow the show as it aired.

On my recent trip to London, I saw an exhibit at the Victoria & Albert Museum with some costumes and props from the show, which reignited my interest. Even if I wasn’t fully satisfied by the books, I still enjoyed a lot of it.

The TV adaptation is so faithful that my reaction to the show pretty much mirrors how I felt about the books. The first season is the best, with a great sense of adventure and world-building, but it becomes overly convoluted by the third, final season. However, even as I lost track of the plot and character motivations, the visual depictions of fantastical beings like angels and witches and armoured bears were still pretty cool. And I like the cast, especially Dafne Keen as Lyra and Ruth Wilson as Mrs. Coulter.

All in all, I would still recommend the show if you want to see some cool magical concepts and special effects, as long as you’re prepared to be confused and frustrated by the end.

Footnotes

1. I got my hands on a copy of an omnibus version, which has the entire trilogy in one volume. I’ve always had a thing for this idea, of having multiple books in one. Don’t ask me why… ↩

Previously…

I was a big fan of Lost while it was airing. I know it had its naysayers, because I used to passionately defend the show against them. With the benefit of hindsight, I can definitely see how the plot became a mess; it’s clear that the writers didn’t have it all fully planned out, and had to sacrifice many loose threads in order to bring the story to a conclusion. But I felt at the time, and still maintain, that the ending was emotionally satisfying on a character level, even if some/many of the mysteries went unexplained.

The same could be said of Servant, which also offers plenty of supernatural twists, albeit on a much smaller scale. (Instead of a whole island, with dozens of characters, Servant takes place almost entirely in one house, with a primary cast of four.)

I said in my previous comments that in the end, I only cared about the main emotional resolution, and the show delivered. (I was also right that it waited until the second-to-last episode to deliver it.) When Dorothy, the mother, finally realizes the truth that she’s been suppressing for the entirety of the show so far, it’s appropriately heart-wrenching, but also feels like a relief. It’s the only way they can move forward from the tragedy.

Nell Tiger Free as Leanne remains the MVP for me, even though I didn’t love the turn that her character takes in season 4, becoming a full-on evil wacko killer. She was much more interesting when her nature was ambiguous, even to herself. But the disquieted, damaged innocence that she carried in earlier seasons does return in the finale, which makes her fate bittersweet.

I’ll also shout out the rest of the main cast (Toby Kebbell, Lauren Ambrose, Rupert Grint). The show works mainly on the strength of their performances. They make the more ridiculous supernatural plot elements much more believable.

I was so impressed with Nell Tiger Free’s performance in The First Omen that I sought out some of her other work. Servant is a suspense/thriller series on Apple TV+, and also boasts the involvement of M. Night Shyamalan, who I still have a soft spot for, despite the roller-coaster ride that his reputation has (not undeservedly) gone through over the years.

The show has four seasons, and I think it’s worth giving my impressions about halfway through. The premise alone is a great source of suspense: a couple welcomes a nanny, Leanne, to their home to care for their infant, but we find out that the baby is a doll, and that the actual baby had died sometime before. Substituting the child with a lifelike doll was the only way for the mother to cope with the loss, but her delusion is so deep that she went ahead with her plans to hire a nanny. When Leanne comes onboard, strange things start happening around the house, not least of which is the doll’s transformation into—gasp!—a real, live baby!

Leanne (played by Free) carries herself in a creepy, detached way. Her performance is one of the highlights of the show for me. She has the kind of face where the smallest change in expression can switch her vibe from innocence to malice, from fear to aggression, in a split second.

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This show caught my attention because I have fond memories of a road trip with my wife, during which we listened to an audiobook of Recursion, by the same author, Blake Crouch. The common thread between these two stories, and what I suppose is the strength of the author, is a mind-bending, twisty sci-fi plot, featuring a character who is motivated by a specific kind of romantic love, that of loyal, long-term partners. It’s this latter emotional element that makes me a fan of his work.¹

It’s an unfortunate consequence of marketing that one usually knows a bit about the premise of a show before watching it. As a result, the first few episodes of Dark Matter feel a little slow, because we already know the basic explanation for what’s going on. I think it would be cool to dive in completely fresh.

Having said that, I need to reveal some spoilers ahead to discuss what I enjoyed about the show.

During the middle episodes, as the protagonist Jason explores the many worlds of the multiverse, the question comes up: knowing that there are infinite variations of every person, where each one made different decisions in their lives, what defines the core of a person? By the end, as those infinite variations of Jason appear in the “home” world, the show answers the question in a fascinating, tragic way: he’s defined by his desire to be with his family, and the one copy that we’re rooting for just happens to have been the one that we’ve been following. They all have equal right to their happy ending, but they won’t be able to get it.

Footnotes

1. I’m reminded a bit of Robert J. Sawyer, who I read a lot when I was younger. ↩

Foundation is based on the classic series of novels by Isaac Asimov. I read them a long time ago, for an undergrad sci-fi literature course, and from what I recall, the adaptation is a loose one.

The show depicts a powerful interplanetary Empire, and a mathematician who develops a method of calculating the course of history, extending thousands of years into the future. He predicts that the Empire will fall, and is allowed to form a Foundation to ease the process of rebuilding afterwards.

It’s a complicated premise and I think the show struggles to stick to its own rules. Characters keep saying that the math is indisputable, that the fall of the Empire is inevitable, but gradually, the Foundation becomes like an organized rebellion, actively attacking the Empire. I don’t need to root for another David against another Goliath, and I would have been more interested by a story that shows how unpredictable “black swans” can turn the tide of history.

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An enjoyable feel-good sports documentary about a Welsh soccer team as they try to ascend the ranks of the English league system. The whole thing is possible because of an injection of Hollywood money, in the form of new owners Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds.

The first couple seasons of the show are a bit more rough, with a tendency to veer off into tangents that feature somewhat narcissistic attempts at comedy by the two “stars.” They also lean a bit too hard on the “football is more than a sport, it’s a way of life” angle, in my opinion. Having said that, by season 3, they’ve found a better balance between exciting game footage and slice-of-life stories about the players and the townspeople.