![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jedi_of_urth posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
tori_reviewsHow about a kind of weird double feature today (since the TCW review is super short)
Star Wars: The Clone Wars – Part 4: 5x10-5x13 (11)
Look, I only watched the first two episodes of this, and I hate everything this story chooses to be. This is what the R2 and 3PO eps last season just narrowly avoided being. Those ones were almost successful in that I didn’t hate them; but I hate this.
I was put off by the initial idea of a droid focused episode, but then the backtalking droid showed up and I literally sighed. Then frog man showed up and I sighed again, because this was taking shape as a cast of characters I was not going to like. But I hoped when it seemed like the mission was done after the first episode that it was just the opening part of a better storyline. But it wasn’t. The second episode was worse. And as I’ve been known to say, my time isn’t worth much, but it’s worth more than this.
While in a super quick skim, it does look like the other couple episodes might not suck this badly, they don’t look good. It turns out I may not be such a completionist as I normally think, because I don’t need to watch these episodes. You can try and convince me otherwise (or I may come back before I post this section, in which case I won’t stop it here. But for now: bad, bad, bad, bad).
Note: I did not watch the other episodes.
His Dark Materials 2x04: Tower of the Angels
I find myself with very little to comment on in this episode, and not even sure how long it will take me to parse out why I have so little worth saying about it. But that means if you’re looking for an interesting breakdown, I’m not promising anything.
The first thing I kind of want to ponder with this episode, is that it really feels like we’re stretching some book material here. As I said last time, some of subplots feel like things that are gone over quickly after the fact instead of needing to see the steps of it in real time. And that being why we get like two scenes of the witches every so often, because in the book they probably just show up and tell Lyra what they’ve been up to. Maybe the same with Lee, although at least his bits feel a little more like a story told in steps.
But where it’s kind of the worst this time is that Lyra and Will’s story feels the same way. They usually have enough plot that in a given episode it feels like they’ve told a chunk of the story. But this time it feels like that took a chapter or so worth of material and stretched it across the whole episode, and didn’t really know how to expand it. I feel like I learn less about these characters than I would have in the same events of the book and it’s very shallow and detached most of the time.
Especially Will. While I feel Lyra is very detached from this episode, the fact that I couldn’t feel anything for Will in what should have been an episode very focused on him, means there’s something lacking.
I’m sort of getting the sense that the show is just about getting by on the strength of its source material, but it’s lost a lot in translation and isn’t adding much of its own substance through the different medium. And it’s kind of doing that in a way that makes me want to read the books both more and less. More because I feel like I’m getting a very shallow view of the material in this form; but less because it’s not painting a very good superficial picture. But this is another way that my partial exposure to the books circles around to being an issue; because while I’m sure the way this works in the books is a lot better, I can’t get overly excited about trying to read it.
This episode did kind of start off on a bad foot with me, because the exposition monologue was really unnatural. It’s explaining a lot of things to the audience that I think we should have been learning with the characters. I mean, surely Lyra would have a reaction to learning that Azriel screwed up this world so badly; but she doesn’t get to know that. And that does seem like something that they could have learned from tower-man.
And needing to condense the exposition might have been more acceptable if the rest of the episode hadn’t seemed so stretched, and yet not bothering to answer some questions like where the other guy looking for the dagger came from. I ended up expecting some kind of twist that the younger man was the actual bearer of the knife instead of the old man, because both of their appearances are under-established.
I don’t even know what to say about what’s going on with Mary. I kind of knew the plot was going to loop around to something like that, but I’m also confused. Because I always heard the was the atheist Narnia and it doesn’t seem to be. Even if they do go on and kill god, that’s not an atheist story, unless god is a Vorlon (yes, I capitalize Vorlon but not god). Sci-fi is really the better place to kill god and/or claim there never was one. Fantasy muddles things in that regard.
Unless it was that this story has a lot of Paradise Lost to it, in which case I’m probably not going to like whatever moral it comes to. Just because I think god/god-like characters are dicks, doesn’t mean I’m that eager to root for the devil. Again, get the hell out of our galaxy, both of you.
Star Wars: The Clone Wars – Part 4: 5x10-5x
Look, I only watched the first two episodes of this, and I hate everything this story chooses to be. This is what the R2 and 3PO eps last season just narrowly avoided being. Those ones were almost successful in that I didn’t hate them; but I hate this.
I was put off by the initial idea of a droid focused episode, but then the backtalking droid showed up and I literally sighed. Then frog man showed up and I sighed again, because this was taking shape as a cast of characters I was not going to like. But I hoped when it seemed like the mission was done after the first episode that it was just the opening part of a better storyline. But it wasn’t. The second episode was worse. And as I’ve been known to say, my time isn’t worth much, but it’s worth more than this.
While in a super quick skim, it does look like the other couple episodes might not suck this badly, they don’t look good. It turns out I may not be such a completionist as I normally think, because I don’t need to watch these episodes. You can try and convince me otherwise (or I may come back before I post this section, in which case I won’t stop it here. But for now: bad, bad, bad, bad).
Note: I did not watch the other episodes.
His Dark Materials 2x04: Tower of the Angels
I find myself with very little to comment on in this episode, and not even sure how long it will take me to parse out why I have so little worth saying about it. But that means if you’re looking for an interesting breakdown, I’m not promising anything.
The first thing I kind of want to ponder with this episode, is that it really feels like we’re stretching some book material here. As I said last time, some of subplots feel like things that are gone over quickly after the fact instead of needing to see the steps of it in real time. And that being why we get like two scenes of the witches every so often, because in the book they probably just show up and tell Lyra what they’ve been up to. Maybe the same with Lee, although at least his bits feel a little more like a story told in steps.
But where it’s kind of the worst this time is that Lyra and Will’s story feels the same way. They usually have enough plot that in a given episode it feels like they’ve told a chunk of the story. But this time it feels like that took a chapter or so worth of material and stretched it across the whole episode, and didn’t really know how to expand it. I feel like I learn less about these characters than I would have in the same events of the book and it’s very shallow and detached most of the time.
Especially Will. While I feel Lyra is very detached from this episode, the fact that I couldn’t feel anything for Will in what should have been an episode very focused on him, means there’s something lacking.
I’m sort of getting the sense that the show is just about getting by on the strength of its source material, but it’s lost a lot in translation and isn’t adding much of its own substance through the different medium. And it’s kind of doing that in a way that makes me want to read the books both more and less. More because I feel like I’m getting a very shallow view of the material in this form; but less because it’s not painting a very good superficial picture. But this is another way that my partial exposure to the books circles around to being an issue; because while I’m sure the way this works in the books is a lot better, I can’t get overly excited about trying to read it.
This episode did kind of start off on a bad foot with me, because the exposition monologue was really unnatural. It’s explaining a lot of things to the audience that I think we should have been learning with the characters. I mean, surely Lyra would have a reaction to learning that Azriel screwed up this world so badly; but she doesn’t get to know that. And that does seem like something that they could have learned from tower-man.
And needing to condense the exposition might have been more acceptable if the rest of the episode hadn’t seemed so stretched, and yet not bothering to answer some questions like where the other guy looking for the dagger came from. I ended up expecting some kind of twist that the younger man was the actual bearer of the knife instead of the old man, because both of their appearances are under-established.
I don’t even know what to say about what’s going on with Mary. I kind of knew the plot was going to loop around to something like that, but I’m also confused. Because I always heard the was the atheist Narnia and it doesn’t seem to be. Even if they do go on and kill god, that’s not an atheist story, unless god is a Vorlon (yes, I capitalize Vorlon but not god). Sci-fi is really the better place to kill god and/or claim there never was one. Fantasy muddles things in that regard.
Unless it was that this story has a lot of Paradise Lost to it, in which case I’m probably not going to like whatever moral it comes to. Just because I think god/god-like characters are dicks, doesn’t mean I’m that eager to root for the devil. Again, get the hell out of our galaxy, both of you.
