While I should have been writing or reading or important stuff like that, I spent a lot of time in quarantine catching up on TV shows I hadn't gotten around to watching. Three (at least) the concept of time was involved in understanding them so why not just put them all together? Sure.
In a way the most conventional was season 3 of FX's Legion that was on Hulu. The gist of the first two seasons is that Professor X's son David has really powerful psychic powers but an entity known as the Shadow King has inhabited him since he was a baby, driving him crazy. In the first season he finally got the Shadow King out of his head and in the second he tried to destroy the Shadow King, but in the attempt went too far and alienated his girlfriend Sydney and all his other friends and then disappeared.
So season 3 picks up with a young Japanese girl tracking down this weird commune he's started where he uses his psychic powers to sort of drug people into feeling good. The girl has the power to travel back in time, which David wants to use so he can go back and stop the Shadow King from ever messing with his head. But that's hard for the girl to do so they have to kidnap one of David's old co-workers to help her increase her power. In the meantime Sydney and the Shadow King are trying to track him down to imprison or kill him.
A good thing in this third season is maybe because of the Fox/Disney merger they just threw out any hope of tying into the rest of Fox's X-Men franchise. To that end they cast someone else as a young Charles Xavier and gave him a different backstory from both the Stewart or McAvoy movies. In this backstory, Xavier fought in WWII and in a hospital met a catatonic woman. He used his powers to "fix" the woman and they wound up falling in love and getting married and having a kid--David. Which really makes no sense in that how could David be born in the 50s when the show otherwise seems to take place in the present day? He'd have to be in his 60s then.
But, whatever. Eventually David and the girl go back in time to when Xavier meets the Shadow King. The hope being that together they can destroy the Shadow King once and for all before he can possess David's mind. But instead things take a different turn when the present-day Shadow King shows up. He and the past Xavier decide to broker a truce instead.
Meanwhile, Sydney seemingly died but is reincarnated in some kind of fairy tale world, where she grows up all over again to learn that some people just can't be saved. Which she realizes means that the present David can't be redeemed but if they go back in time maybe they can save the past David. So she and her friends are able to go back and protect baby David and his mother from monsters that eat time.
Does any of that make sense? Probably not so much. It makes a little more sense if you've watched the whole series. So the point was that there's a point when you have to just let someone go--unless you can go back in time to fix things. Which is kind of in opposition to Magneto in the movies considering Xavier has been trying to "save" him for 20 years and 8 movies despite the millions of people Magneto has killed. Maybe instead of going back in time to 1973 in Days of Future Past they should have gone back to WWII and saved Magneto before he became evil.
Anyway, I liked the final season of the show even though you probably could have compacted it all into half as many episodes if you took out all the gratuitous and/or nonsensical stuff. But then that's probably been true all along.
Another comic book-related show I watched was HBO's Watchmen sequel series. When I first saw the preview for it, it looked really lame so I didn't watch it as it came out even though I could have. It was probably better to binge it over a couple of days anyway instead of waiting week-to-week and wondering what was going to happen next and coming up with a bunch of theories then disproved as with Game of Thrones a few years ago.
The important thing about this is that they made it a sequel to the comic book, not the 2009 movie. The main difference is that in the comic book, Veidt's plan was to stage an "alien invasion" by a giant squid monster in New York whereas in the movie he replicated Dr. Manhattan's power to make it look like Dr. Manhattan attacked cities all over the world. Maybe it was because whiny crybaby comic book "fans" complained so much about not getting their precious squid monster. [eye roll] Now you got your fucking squid monster. Happy now?!
Anyway, it starts off recounting a massacre of black people in Tulsa by the Ku Klux Klan in 1921. A boy named Will survives when his parents get him to someone to hide in a wagon. When they point it out later, the Superman parallel becomes pretty obvious.
Back in the present of 2019, not a lot is that different except Robert Redford has been president for 26 years for some reason. A lot of racist white people have formed a Rorschach cult because they feel disenfranchised with reparations made to black people like the families of those killed in that Tulsa massacre. A few years earlier the "7th Kavalry" as they call themselves (despite that the 7th Cavalry fought Native Americans in South Dakota, not black people in Oklahoma--and of course they all died) killed a bunch of Tulsa police and so the police department started to go around in masks and conceal their identities from everyone--including their families.
One of them is named Angela but her cop name is "Sister Night" as she dresses sort of like a nun that she saw in an old blaxploitation picture. Her boss is Don Johnson, who apparently doesn't have a mask or secret identity, which is maybe why he dies. When Angela finds his body hanging, old Louis Gossett Jr is sitting there in a wheelchair saying he killed him.
Meanwhile, Adrian Veidt is trapped in a seemingly idyllic English estate where he's served by clones of a man and woman whom he sacrifices in a variety of ways as he tries to escape the prison. Where the concept of time comes into this series is when you realize that the Veidt parts are actually taking place 5-6 years in the past. This was after Veidt was visited by Dr. Manhattan, who created that whole estate but found it lacking. In return for help in erasing his memory, Manhattan sends Veidt there.
The other big piece of the puzzle is a woman named Lady Trieu who it turns out is Veidt's illegitimate daughter. In his Antarctic base, Veidt had stored a whole bunch of his sperm and one day a cleaning woman stole some. It was probably the least believable scene in the episode, as I'm pretty sure they don't do artificial insemination by just taking a syringe and sticking it between a woman's legs. It's probably a more complicated process and not something you could probably do yourself in an office chair like that. And even if you could, it's like a really low percentage chance of making a child.
Anyway, Trieu inherited her daddy's brains and created her own empire--and buying Veidt's out too. Something pretty icky is that she has a "daughter" who's a younger clone of her own mother. See the kind of creepy shit "mainstream" properties can get away with that I can't? In a garden she has a "statue" of Veidt but near the end we realize it's not a statue; she basically froze her father in carbonite and put him on display like Jabba did with Han Solo. At least until it's time for her ultimate plan. Not really learning from her father, she unfreezes him so that he can watch her grand plan unfold the way a comic book or Bond villain did. The best part in Watchmen (book and movie) is when Rorshach and Nite Owl II show up in Antarctica to stop Veidt and he says, "I'm not a comic book villain. I launched it 35 minutes ago."
Angela takes some pills from Louis Gossett Jr that are actually memories of his. She ODs on them and goes on a journey through this guy's memories. And the unsurprising reveal was that after he escaped the Tulsa massacre, Will went to New York City. He joined the police force but found there was too much corruption, so he became the first vigilante, Hooded Justice. I had already figured that out like five episodes earlier, so it was kind of lame. Will had a son who served in Vietnam and had a daughter--Angela, of course.
The significance of this was...nothing really. Angela's parents were murdered by a Vietnamese terrorist protesting the US making it a state after Dr. Manhattan won the war. Angela joined the police force in Saigon, where Dr. Manhattan came to visit her.
The second big reveal wasn't all that surprising to me either, though mostly because I'd already seen pictures of who was playing Dr. Manhattan so it was pretty obvious who his secret identity was: Angela's husband Calvin. Using something Veidt made for him, he was able to wipe his memory and pose as a normal human. But eventually the 7th Kavalry find out and try to capture him, except Trieu double-crosses them and captures Manhattan for herself because she wants to steal his power so she can "fix" the world.
And so Angela saves the day, right? I mean we spent all these episodes learning about her and she was on all the advertising posters and whatnot, so she has to be the one to foil Trieu, right? Um, no. Not at all. In fact, she really does nothing; she just sits with Dr. Manhattan until he dies.
Besides Angela and Trieu the other female lead character was Laurie Blake, aka Silk Spectre II in the comic book--and ironically she was played by Jean Smart, who was also in all three seasons of Legion. For...reasons she left Dan Dreiberg (aka Nite Owl II) and joined the FBI to hunt down vigilantes like she used to be. She investigates the Tulsa chief's murder and winds up becoming the de facto chief. When Trieu's scheme is unfolding she's...tied to a chair and then beamed to Antarctica with Veidt and another dude played by Tim Blake Nelson. And while in Antarctica she does...still nothing.
So it's funny that all the girl power in this series, the only one who actually does anything in the end is Lady Trieu--and she's the villain! The villain who makes the stupid comic book villain mistake that her father didn't make; guess she didn't get all of his brains after all. Veidt is the one who saves the day by using his equipment in Antarctica to beam frozen mini-squids to Tulsa to smash Lady Trieu's machine. Hooray!
Another not-surprising twist is that Dr. Manhattan had stored some of his essence in an egg. By eating the egg, Angela can gain his power. They really telegraphed the hell out of that, so I was just sitting there wondering when she would figure out the egg thing already.
Overall this was OK but it wasn't nearly as clever as it wanted to think it was. And really, what was the point of it? All the focus on women and black people and again it was the white guy who saved the day. Not really much of a statement there. The brilliance of Watchmen the original is that it subverted the whole superhero genre. In the end no "hero" could save the world from Armageddon; it was only by pulling off a comic book villain scheme that Veidt could stop the superpowers from annihilating each other. This series clearly wanted to do the same for the racial politics of the Trump era, but it's too obvious and too clumsy to succeed. Alan Moore was right to keep his name off this one.
Finally, HBO's Westworld was a show I'd meant to watch but I just never got around to it. So since I had time on my hands, I figured I might as well. The first four or five episodes I wished I hadn't because it was so, so slooooow. There was violence and nudity and stuff but it was really just a lot of moving the pawns around on the chessboard. It finally started to pick up after that as things began to happen.
If you watched the original movie from the 70s and its sequel Futureworld then you know that these were written by Michael Crichton and were basically what he later used as the basis for the more successful Jurassic Park. Basically replace the cloned dinosaurs with robots in the old west or a sci-fi world and that was the pretty basic plot.
The TV show follows the rough outline of that as the robots very slowly begin to realize that they're just machines used for the amusement of the rich assholes who visit the park on an island off the coast of China. The main difference between the TV show and the movies is that the movies were pretty much written from the POV of the humans being terrorized by malfunctioning robots. The TV show focuses a lot more on the POV of the robots as they really gain sentience.
There's a farmer's daughter named Dolores Abernathy who has been used over and over again as a damsel in distress, which often leads to her being brutalized and raped. The town madame Maeve similarly has been used for all manner of sex. They both start remembering things from their previous lives, which for Dolores goes all the way back to the beginning as she was the first one created.
Meanwhile Dr. Robert Ford has been basically the head of the park and is planning to unveil a big new story. This while the board of the company is trying to force him out. There's also the "Man in Black" played by Ed Harris who goes around killing robots while looking for a maze that will lead to Ford's ultimate game.
The concept of time becomes involved when you realize that the story of Dolores and a guest named William is actually taking place before the other stuff. This becomes obvious when William's brother gives him a picture of his fiancee which we previously saw buried on the Abernathy farm, where Dolores's father finds it and starts malfunctioning. The big twist is that William IS the Man in Black only separated by like 35 years.
At the end of the season, Dolores kills Ford while Maeve is about to escape when she decides to go back to find the daughter she keeps seeing in dreams.
The second season has everyone trying to get to "the Valley Beyond" which is some secret project the company that made Westworld has been working on to not just monitor the guests but to recreate their brains. Dolores wants to find this to use it to destroy humanity while William, aka the Man in Black, wants to just see the end of Ford's game and Maeve wants to get her daughter to safety. In the end Dolores escapes and Maeve seemingly dies after getting her daughter to safety. In a cookie scene at the end of the last episode, the concept of time again comes into play as the Man in Black finds a lab where he realizes that he's just a recreation of the original William who's been going through the same thing as a test over and over again.
Maybe I'm not explaining it well because there's a lot of stuff to try to keep track of. You'd really have to watch it to have any hope of comprehending it. It is clear that the show took a few pages from the Game of Thrones playbook as there's plenty of nudity--female and male--and violence and rape. Not really any incest, so there's that. Maybe not as big of set piece battles as in GOT. Dolores is a lot like Danerys in that she starts out as this naive young woman and then becomes this brutal warlord who wants to take over the world. For most of the first two seasons the gunslinger Teddy (played by James Marsden of the original X-Men movies) is like Jon Snow in that he's good and noble--and dies and comes back to life. Only instead of Jon Snow killing Danerys, Dolores kills Teddy.
The third season is more like Futureworld in that it takes place largely in a future world and not the Westworld park as Dolores continues her machinations to take over the human world. The primary target is a computer that's essentially been running the world. Aaron Paul is a human who used to be a soldier and rescues Dolores from some goons. She then recruits him to her cause by showing him that the computer system has been preventing him from getting decent jobs because it says he'll eventually kill himself. Which maybe is a self-fulfilling prophecy since if he can't get decent jobs he'll probably get depressed and commit suicide.
Meanwhile there's a hostile takeover of the company behind Westworld. Some French guy whose brother built the fancy computer system running the world wants the information the company has been gathering from guests at the park. Meanwhile the Man in Black is committed by the head of the Westworld company, who is actually a copy of Dolores in disguise. Not that that really helps her in keeping the company since French guy takes out everyone else so he can gain control.
Basically everyone has their own little plan to save or destroy the world. Dolores wants to shut down the French guy's computer system to "free" people. The French guy recruits Maeve to help him in exchange for letting her go to "the Sublime" to see her daughter again. But eventually she and Dolores have a chat and Maeve decides to switch sides. Meanwhile, Bernard is given the key to the Sublime to find an answer while the former head of Delos has her own plan to change the world, which you have to watch after the end credits to see.
Overall it's OK but not great. I could have watched the last 3-4 episodes live but I never even thought about it, which kind of tells you how interested I was in it. The show has really evolved beyond the movie/first season at this point. I'm not sure that's really a good thing.
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