Post-Apocalypse TV

[nacho]

So, basically, I'm just watching Dominion at this point because we I know Lucifer's going to show up in the finale and it'll be like an episode of Buffy when he does. I can't actually make sense or care about anything else in this show.

The show's back. Now that SyFy can show tits, I'm on board.

Show is still a confused mess, though.

And... Where's Satan?!?!

[RottingCorpse]

Satan is inside you!

[nacho]

Satan is inside you!

[nacho]

Season two of The Strain. I'm cautiously hopeful mainly because it looks like they've thrown the books out the window... Which is good because, wow, the books are bad.

So the 90 minute premiere was pretty much everyone standing around drinking giant tumblers of warm vodka and fortifying their Brooklyn warehouse with laughably useless defenses (the bars go inside the window?).

The magic book (that was in the book trilogy) is suddenly on the table without any preamble. That's okay, because it was treated that way in the books. But now we have a bullshit mission. As usual, though, there';s no real focus on any one mission and no cohesion in the group. Everyone has their own little mission. Eph and Nora are working on a cure, the annoying kid is pining for his mom even though I thought we were over all that, the Master creates the feelers, Abraham's after the book, the exterminator dude is spending the whole day installing window bars...

Seemingly off the apocalypse grid for the moment, as soon as they're all together and going to the supply cache in the warehouse they're under attack by an army of vampires. Confusingly, New York is falling slower than in the books. There's still emergency response, the mayor gives a press conference to a crowded room...

Ah well. It wasn't as painful as some episodes.

[nacho]

The Strain. This...fucking...show.

The first five minutes of last night's episode was a VHS-quality black and white rip-off of El Santo Vs the Vampires, presented without preamble or explanation.

This was done to introduce us to one of a slew of new characters who'll join the team -- the now elderly El Santo (he's "The Angel"). He's now a big fat man who ponderously assumes a wrestling stance all the time, whether he's being attacked by vampires or you just come up on him quietly in his own restaurant. (He's a Mexican who runs an Indian restaurant, by the way.)

At this point, all of the main cast are involved in their own non-inter-connecting storyline, so it's a bit of a whirlwind to throw in the new people. Especially when the main cast are behaving so outrageously out of character.

Meanwhile, the apocalypse claims the world and there's still trash service, and cell service, etc. Everyone's acting normally -- even down to going out at night -- and, of course, they get attacked and killed.

[nacho]

So the latest episode of The Last Ship was all about chastising and bringing criminal charges against the woman who cured the disease because she murdered the person who willfully created the disease for the express purpose of destroying the entire human race and is responsible for the death of 5 billion people and was working on a way to perfect the disease so he could kill all the rest.

We're somehow being asked to feel sorry for the greatest genocidal monster in human history and being asked to believe that people actually have a problem with him dying.

Killing that fucker should have been the high point of the season. Like a finale-level destruction of the Big Bad followed by dancing Ewoks and the nub-nub song!

This show makes the writing choices of Falling Skies seem level-headed.

[nacho]

Oh, thank god...

Forced to accept the seemingly impossible conclusion that a post-apocalyptic sequel series to a mildly successful but completely forgettable Adrianne Palicki horror movie might not be the smash hit everyone would automatically expect, Syfy has regretfully announced that it’s canceling Dominion. The two-season series, which starred Kings’ Chris Egan as yet another ratings-felled Chosen One, has apparently been hemorrhaging viewers in key demographics.

[nacho]

Since Z Nation stole the central storyline (heroes have to get an immune/key to the cure across the country to a secret lab), they've decided it's finally time to adapt Y: The Last man into a series.

A report over at The Hollywood Reporter reveals that FX (American Horror Story, The Bastard Executioner, The Strain) will be teaming up with Vaughan and Color Force's Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson in order to adapt the dystopian sci-fi comics as an ongoing television show. They are currently on the hunt to find a writer to adapt the series alongside Vaughan.

A beloved and critically acclaimed comic book that was first launched in 2002, Y: The Last Man ran for 60 issues and was collected in multiple graphic novels. It centers around escape artist Yorick Brown, the last surviving human with a Y chromosome, and his pet capuchin monkey, Ampersand (also a male). Readers follow Yorick as he sets out to find out why a mysterious plague has wiped out the world’s male animals (including humans), and in the process save all of humanity.

The yellow brick road to adapting Y: The Last Man has been a rocky one, to say the least. New Line had originally acquired the rights for a movie adaptation back in 2007, with David S. Goyer, Carl Ellsworth and director D.J. Caruso attached. Caruso left the project after New Line wanted to take the franchise in another direction, turning what was a planned trilogy into a standalone two-hour film. In 2012, Matthew Federman, Stephen Scaia, J.C. Spink, Chris Bender, Mason Novick and Jake Weiner (with David S. Goyer producing) were on board the project, but everything fell through again.

In September of 2014 plans for the movie were scrapped, and the rights have thankfully reverted back to Vaughan since then.

“We wanted to tell a complete story … but not the whole story,” Vaughan said at the time, noting that he had hoped that “in success, we could get tell the rest of our serialized adventure.”

If you're a fan of Y: The Last Man, then you're in good company. Geek god Joss Whedon, Louis Leterrier (The Incredible Hulk, Clash of the Titans) as well as Chuck and Heroes Reborn alum Zachary Levi have showered nothing but love on the series, with Levi also showing a keen interest in tackling the role of Yorick.

[nacho]

Into the Badlands is actually quite terrible. The saving grace is the truly wonderful kung fu/swordfight stuff. It's like Sunday morning kung fu theater except with better special effects. Equilibrium meets kung fu theater.

There's some bullshit story with a bunch of two dimensional characters driving the whole thing. The mains tory arc is that a kid with special powers befriends the best fighter in the land and they're sorta kinda pursuing a way "out of the Badlands," except they haven't really explained what the Badlands are and why they need out or what that's all about. Is it a giant prison or social experiment? What's beyond the...whatever...?

What the show is really about is obsessing over Emily Beecham, who plays the ass-kicking "Widow."

[RottingCorpse]

Is she the one with the red coifed hair? Because that girl is super dreamy.

[nacho]

Is she the one with the red coifed hair? Because that girl is super dreamy.

Yes. Watch the video if you want to be reborn.

[nacho]

You, Me, and the Apocalypse:

It's a Britcom version of The Last man on Earth. Since LMoE set the bar pretty low, it's easy to do miles and miles better... The show features terrible British actors doing horrible American accents and Rob Lowe being a drunken priest while a comet bears down on Earth...or...does it? It might all be an experiment. Only four episodes in.

It's funny and mindless and just what you need if you're bored.

[nacho]

Childhood's End has some fascinating problems.

First off, it's beautiful. It's beautifully shot, the effects are amazing, and the acting is excellent. Charles Dance can command any scene...even when he's not in it.

So here's the problem. The first episode opens up with a brief text commentary about how Arthur C. Clark changed sci-fi forever when he wrote the book in 1954. It goes on to say how the book has influenced just about every sci-fi show every made. So they're hanging a lampshade, from the first step, on the fact that we've seen every trope in Childhood's End 1001 times.

This weird sort of back-handed apology does not play well when the tropes start up right away. But...okay, I can get over that. They're being loyal to some classic silver age sci-fi, bravo. Good for them.

But then they play with each trope by going super meta. Someone at the newspaper wants to call the aliens "The Visitors," when the ships first show up one of our heroes is watching the scene from the BSG miniseries where the Galactica and her fleet make a desperate escape from the Ragnar nebula. Again and again, we're very subtly reminded of what the opening text told us -- you've seen all this before.

In which case, in the era of nothing but sci-fi and genre television, why am I watching it?

There are also some bizarre editing choices that leave you perplexed during pivotal scenes. The story feels trimmed and forced. The goodnik farmer boy is the speaker of the world bang-boom-done. The cynicism of the newspaper folks has to be carefully explained, and becomes clumsy. Why are they cynical? Because they think this is actually an invasion. Explain, explain, belabor, explain. You don't need to hold our hands here guys because...um...we've seen all this before!

Oh well. I'll tough out the three night event. I sat through Ascension, after all, and that was like dental surgery.

 

[nacho]

Holy shit have they fucked up Childhood's End.

That makes the points in my post above even worse... So they make the excuse that they're being loyal to the source material for exploiting tropes... Buuuuutttt...they clearly have never read the source material and they're just making up their own story.

[nacho]

So Colony is a mixed bag. It's not very engaging, and Sawyer from Lost is just playing Sawyer from Lost. Plus, anyone who watched TWD (which is everyone) still hates Lori. Getting behind her as the revolutionary hero is sort of tough to swallow.

But, it has one aspect that I love -- we don't know what's going on! A year before the events in the series, the big sci-fi walls came down and sealed everybody in Santa Monica or whatever. The overlords took over and now everyone's in a (albeit Utopian) concentration camp.

But...we don't know if the overlords are aliens or Earthbound. And, five episodes in, we get our first glimpse outside the walls -- at an apocalyptic wasteland devoid of people.

The hints being dropped in each episode are that the overlords are actually Earth-based. Some super tech terrorists (or Orwellian government) that's taken control of the planet. I hope that is the case and that hope keeps me watching.