TV: Childhood's End

(Showcase, December 2015) Coming to it without any familiarity with the source material, I found the story rather slow, like it was trying to move deliberately and gracefully in some direction towards a specific, and then it just... ended. The trip back to the homeworld was, ultimately, pointless. The fact that the whole point of the exercise was to harvest humanity's potential before curiosity could place the future of that potential risk (although to what further end is unclear) -- was muddled and only clear to me on reflection. Overall it was a disappointment.

TV: Supergirl Pilot Is Really Bad

We finally watched the pilot. A super hero story with a strong female lead, what could go wrong, right?

Well for starters, the previews made it look like it was some kind of teenager drama, with emphasis on the drama. Not a fan.

Then the pilot actually starts, and we're in some kind of comic-book teen-drama mash-up with The Devil Wears Prada. And I'm not a fan of either genre. And it manages to conflict with the teen-drama aspect too, since our teen lead is not a teenager, she's clearly some kind of young, probably post-college, career woman who behaves like a teenager.

Then the whole episode they manage to go without identifying Superman by name. Did the series not get a license to use that name? It's always "him". And I turn to Jenn and say, why to they refer to Superman that way? He isn't fucking Jesus. Well except at the end of the episode where we hear: "He's proud of you." Maybe he is Jesus! TV rights do strange things.

Then Supergirl's secret identity is the only one to come up with a clear photo of the super hero. A real Peter Parker moment, if you would. And at this point I said to Jenn, have we seen an original idea here yet? And she couldn't think of one.

I'll give the show a pass on how bad the special effects were, too. They were cramming a lot of other bad things into the show and there clearly wasn't the time to design the effects properly.

At the end of it all Jenn didn't want to watch another episode. My view is, we gave Heroes Reborn two episodes before bailing, we should give this at least another episode. 

But on the other hand, Heroes Reborn wasn't this bad.

TV: 12 Monkeys

Two episodes in and it doesn't suck. This Cole is more useful than the one in the movie. It appears to me at this point that the future is busy reinforcing its own past by creating it, just as in the movie. Hopefully the series won't turn into an anti-vaccination screed, that would be unfortunate.

TV: Resurrection

Finally got to the end of Resurrection. (Our PVR is running about two weeks behind the rest of the world.)

We both did a "What the hell!" to the "One Year Later" bit. That seems a bit much like "don't trouble yourself with the details of the immediate aftermath". Felt like a hand-wavey cheat to me. But overall the story was wrapped up well, leaving enough for a second set of stories with the same characters.

I liked the series. No word yet on if there will be more.