Television thread

[Evil Elvis]

11:30 pm

[HaemishM]

NEW VENTURE BROTHERS? 

[Mazakiel]

Hell yeah.  Thanks for the reminder, I'd forgotten. 

[Johny Cee]

Fuck, Venture Bros. is awesome.

Number 21 (talking about Brock Sampson):  Maybe he can kill with words.  Maybe his name is a killing word?

I fucking lost it there.


Monarch quoted the "Kill them all.  God will recognize his own." line from the Albigensian Crusade as well.

[Abagadro]

Speaking of awesome refs, how about Metalocalypse riffing on Fitzcarraldo.  I wonder how many Dethklok fans like Werner Hertzog. 

[Bunk]

NEW VENTURE BROTHERS? 

Nice. We don't actually get Venture Bros. up here, so I wathed torrents of the entire thing and just finished season two about a week ago. Perfect timing.

[HaemishM]

Did anyone watch that Andromeda Strain miniseries on A&E?

So... many... bad... things. It started out well in the first two hours, but just absolutely fell apart on the second episode. The last 30 minutes were just decidely painful piling on, one calamity after another after another. Who builds a vertical maintenance tunnel over a nuclear cooling vent 4 stories high WITHOUT A FUCKING LADDER? Not to mention all the unresolved and unanswered plot twists around the origin of the virus. A lot of decent talent and effects put into a really shitty shit shit shit story.

[Sky]

I liked the original, so I endured the A&E version. I want that time back. At least I had beer to console me.

The bit about flashing lights making the oriental guy epileptic was so tacked on and meaningless, when it was one of the critical plot points of the original. Eh, it was just awful piled on a stack of bad.

And it came through a wormhole from the future? 

[Signe]

That was produced by Ridley Scott.  He just doesn't care anymore, does he?  Do you know that if you buy the DvD you can hear them say "crap" the two times it was bleeped?   

[Jeff Kelly]

Is the original one released on DVD? The andromeda strain and Alien left distinct impressions in my childhood

[Margalis]

Veronica Cartwright almost throwing up for real duing the chestburster scene in Alien is the single greatest line of dialogue ever recorded.

[HaemishM]

That was produced by Ridley Scott.  He just doesn't care anymore, does he?  Do you know that if you buy the DvD you can hear them say "crap" the two times it was bleeped?   

What was weird was that they bleeped the cursing in the first 2 hours (even on such ok words as "ass") but then the second two hours they just let it go. The whole production was just really slapdash and sloppy. I want that time back.

[Sky]

I think the worst part about it was how it highlighted a change from the way movies were made in the 60s and 70s. I loved the long edits, the dialogue-heavy scripts, often you had to pay attention to figure out what was going on. Now it's all beautiful people (well, except maybe Ricky Shroeder) and action scenes and edits chopped all to hell. Movie making has gone to shit.

[bhodi]

Yeah, it was bad bad bad. It started out OK, and then got progressively worse. They kept plot points from the previous movie (epilepsy) but the ceased having any meaning.

So many plot holes, and they built the superbug up to be stronger and stronger and finally just deus ex machina'd it away.

[Sky]

What? I'm sure there were enough helicopters to spray the magic technology spray over several states and not miss a single spot!

[HaemishM]

And of course it would immediately kill the virus and turn every piece of flora and fauna back to its natural color!

[Evil Elvis]

They're putting the new eps of the Venture Bros. online early

[Abagadro]

New mini-series on the U.S. Space program starts tonight on Discovery. Called When We Left Earth. Lots of new, internal NASA footage. The first episode was really good so expect the rest to be as well.

[Signe]

Don't beat me up if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that I saw it advertised that it'll be on On Demand, too.  Which would be awesome since I always miss at least one episode of any mini-series.  It's like a tradition or something. 

[Paelos]

Well I finally caught up on all the LOST episodes by watching them online. This season finale didn't really do much for me outside of Sun's performance when the boat exploded. Honestly, it was all very predictable because of the time travel element. There wasn't a lot they could do with all the flashback/forward nonesense they've been pulling this year. I suspected who was in the coffin from the moment I saw that scene, but the finale did little more for me than to go, WTF about the underground moving lair.

I'm pretty sure they are going to cancel the show before they answer any of the questions they keep avoiding:

1 - What the hell is the smoke monster and where did it come from?
2 - Why does this island possess such unique properties?
3 - Why was there a polar bear on the island?
4 - What's the deal with all the dead people that keep showing up?
5 - Who are these people that never seem to age and move from character to character with seemingly effortless ease?
6 - What is Ben's real backstory? (the only one I really care about) We get endless nonesense about every other dumbass on the island except him.

[Ironwood]

At least one of those questions has already been answered...

[Paelos]

At least one of those questions has already been answered...

Care to fill me in?

[Signe]

I have been enjoying this show much more since I stopped trying to figure out the story.  Srsly.

[Ironwood]

The polar bears were brought to the island for experiments and were kept in the pens that Sawyer and Vagina were held captive in.

[tazelbain]

Very happy with season 4.  Plenty of action, little downtime.  Still got 2 more seasons to go.

[Paelos]

The polar bears were brought to the island for experiments and were kept in the pens that Sawyer and Vagina were held captive in.

Fair enough, I must have glossed over that fact. Still, what the hell is up with the moving island?

Next time on LOST: The island enters an amateur magic competition...

[Miasma]

I think we know most of Ben's back story too, all we're really missing is his falling out with Rousseau and how he went from traitor to leader with Jacob's blessing.

But yes those other questions will never be answered with any satisfaction, we have to accept that the ending will either be incomplete or really stupid and just enjoy the ride until we hit that brick wall.

As for my guess on:

4 - What's the deal with all the dead people that keep showing up?
5 - Who are these people that never seem to age and move from character to character with seemingly effortless ease?

I fear it might be a time travel thing.  The dead people have traveled forward before their deaths and that one guy with the mascara travels backwards.

Edit: They might even explain the island moving via time travel.

[Teleku]

I don't know why you guys think that.  This season has been awesome, and they are moving forward with answering questions faster than they ever have.  They got the studios to give them an exact date to end by, and now they are writing ahead with a full plot to have everything worked out.  I'm confident it will all be explained (minus some random side crap they wrote in back in season 2/3 that they just abandon).  They've been revealing more and more about the island, and I already have a much much better idea now of how the island works and the story behind the others.  Obviously just theories, but they given us so much more information to work with that I feel much confident in working it out.

The show is on fire.  Loved this entire season.  Very confident now that they will wrap it up in the next two seasons perfectly.

We NEED to have more series that have a finite start/end date.  You just can't make a truly deep storyline for a series if you have no idea when its going to end and have to keep making up shit along the way.

[Miasma]

We're agreeing the season was great, I don't think anyone has said otherwise.  But they have done so much bizarre stuff there is no way they will be able to clearly answer the "how" questions without resorting to something really weak like aliens or ghosts or time travel.

They seem to be headed on the time travel route which is the lesser of the evils but is still a cop out.

And for every answer they give they also create two new questions.

[tazelbain]

We're agreeing the season was great, I don't think anyone has said otherwise.  But they have done so much bizarre stuff there is no way they will be able to clearly answer the "how" questions without resorting to something really weak like aliens or ghosts or time travel.

They seem to be headed on the time travel route which is the lesser of the evils but is still a cop out.

And for every answer they give they also create two new questions.

If its presented in a compelling story, I don't see how its a cop out.  We have clearly left the realm of mundane realty.  As long it's a good story and doesn't contradict itself, Lost could go to Mystism or Science Fiction to explain what is happening.  Finding out a mundane explanation would be the biggest cop out.  "It was all an elaborate prank!"  "Mushrooms of the island release hallucinogens!" "It's just a videogame!"

[HaemishM]

We're agreeing the season was great, I don't think anyone has said otherwise.  But they have done so much bizarre stuff there is no way they will be able to clearly answer the "how" questions without resorting to something really weak like aliens or ghosts or time travel.

They seem to be headed on the time travel route which is the lesser of the evils but is still a cop out.

How is any of those a copout? From the minute we heard the RAAWWWRRGGGG ZOMG DINOSAUR in the first episode, it was clear there was going to be some kind of bizarre, time-travelling/aliens/mystical shit going on. Dead people walking in the 3rd episode? Polar bears in the tropics? A crippled man walking while claiming the island is speaking to him?

I'm not sure what kind of "non-cop-out" explanation you were expecting.

[Nevermore]

It was all the dream of some autistic kid!

[HaemishM]

Now see THAT would have been a copout.

[Teleku]

Yeah, basically what they said.  Time travel/sci-fi is perfectly fine, if its done well.  And they way they've shown it so far (with Desmond) has been really bad ass and well done.  I like the way its going.

And I don't know how you think they can't tie up everything in two more seasons.  I feel if they tried, they could easily do it in one.  But 2 should be more than enough, especially now that they have focus.

Of course they could easily still fuck it all to hell and gone, but after season 4, I have a lot more faith, heh.

[Abagadro]

Polar bears were used to turn the donkey wheel that moved the island because it was so cold in there.  That's why Charlotte found the polarbear skeleton with a Dharma colar in Tunesia, the same place that Ben ended up after he activated the machine.