I’m really torn on the PREACHER show so far. There’s great character work going on, and it feels like they’re setting up some things. But in the mean time there’s so little going on or being given enough exposition to explain it. Even as someone who’s read the comics I’m not sold that it’s really going to go anywhere. It’s four episodes in and it just feels like wheel spinning.
I feel the same (but have only watched the first 2). It has some really great stuff but it honestly feels so boring at the same time. I don’t get what they are trying to do but it’s taking too long for most people I’ve heard from.
I hate comparing so strongly to the comics, but so much of what’s being teased out in the show was given such an immediate feeling in the comic compared to here. My wife is still wondering why they made such a big deal about “the cowboy” from two episodes into the season. He’s a huge deal in the comics, but in the show he’s just…there.
Saw a trailer for a Netflix movie that looks like a great alternative to Me Before You Euthanasia! https://youtu.be/Qg67XjD28UQ It’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but if it follows the original novel at least the crip won’t die at the end!
noooo hey are canceling howard the duck… i haven’t even had a chance to catch up yet…i swear the comic book industry has it out for me canceling all my favorite books
So for anyone who plays the card game Smash Up, I’m currently working on a fan made custom faction of Lumberjacks. Got the rules all sussed out over the last couple days with the nice people (actually, one awesome person) on the Board Game Geek forums and I’ll be working on the artwork for the cards for the next several days/couple weeks. I put together a lineup of the character designs for the minions below, and I’m pretty proud of them.
It retroactively changes the ENTIRE show and I hate everything about it. It doesn’t help that I was spoiled for the ending before watching, which colored my impression of everything.
I can even applaud the performance in THAT scene, it moved me to tears, yet I still HATE IT ALL. I hate that we won’t get Imhotep. I’m pissed Lily didn’t burn Dorian’s portrait to ashes. I hate the generic nod to Mr. Hyde. I HATE HATE HATE that Ethan and Victor are bros while Ethan STILL doesn’t know about Brona. I hate that Catriona Hartedgan was WASTED. I hate that there wasn’t enough Fabulous Ferdinand Lyle.
Wasn’t there enough Ferdinand? For not being a main character, he was there since basically the beginning, and he showed up a lot. In fact, I would say that he was the most used tier two character.
He was not demoted – he was working in West End and no matter how hard they tried to accommodate to his schedule, he could not get out of contract. So we got as much as we could.
I’m calling bullshit on them knowing it was only gonna be three seasons. You can tell this was supposed to be build up, and the season would end with either evil Vanessa, or with word of Lucifer coming through the bodies of the mummies. No, somewhere during writing/filming the episode where Hecate died I believe is when Logan was told it was all over, and he couldn’t back track fast enough so we got this sloppy fucked up mess.
I am with you that it changes the story horribly – particularly because for a show that gave us such great empowered female characters even within an opressive setting such as Victorian London, it managed to erase all of Vanessa and severely limit Brona, and somewhat rewarded the Creature (somewhat).
And what’s worst, because of this ending, they definitely cut out the possibility of continuing in a movie, or a comic book, or a novel – the storyline can’t exist without Vanessa, and bringing her back from the dead would not work because it would negate her sacrifice. See Buffy.
Congratulations, John Logan, you managed to destroy your masterpiece, even if it looked pretty when you did it.
I understand that Beale’s other obligations got in the way, which was ANOTHER reason for a season four.
This would have been an okay ending, if it had ended up with Ethan’s love redeeming Vanessa, that despair fueled her descent into darkness and the reality that she didn’t need to despair, that her family had returned, would bring her back.
It wouldn’t have even needed to be a happy ending. Just better.
And VICTOR not even telling Ethan, “BTW, now that we’re bros, I need to tell you I took your ex girlfriend’s dead body and made her immortal. Also, she’s kinda pissed at the world, maybe you could talk her down from the ledge, IDK?”
I mean, them together as dangerous? I always understood that Ethan would always belong to Vanessa, so if Vanessa went evil Ethan would follow, and that’s why if she went evil she had to die ASAP.
I mean, I agree that her using the Verbis Diablo was bad, but I still think her downfall was everybody leaving. I remember talking (probably with you) about how interesting the idea of Christian Camargo being actually God/Jesus/an emissary as a response to her throwing the crucifix into the fire, which would’ve created a more interesting plot regarding the fact that God truly didn’t leave her, but that both angels were after her for real. It would’ve delineated well the downfall point to the crucifix. Using the Verbis Diablo, while it is the downfall, can be seen as inevitable as that was the only way she was able to keep the witches at bay.
I dunno. I have thinky thoughts and I hate them because this show was supposed to be great. Now it’s not.
It wasn’t using the Verbis Diablo. As we saw in the flashback, she had used it before. It was using the Verbis Diablo to murder someone that corrupted her soul.
And yes that was me you had that discussion with. And I think ultimately the show agrees that God never really left her, because the joy and solace she finds in Ethan’s recital of the Lord’s Prayer is too visceral. She never lost her faith. EVER. She felt her faith left her, because the people she cared about left her. But to say that was her downfall, removes her agency from her downfall.
I guess I was thinking of that painting/poem, footprints in the sand, where you see two set of footprints and then one, and the person asks why god abandoned them and god answers that it didn’t – that it was carrying them through the hard times. That’s why I was positing the loss of faith as a downfall, because I was seeing it as a selfish thought, but maybe it can also be seen as something completely external and ergo lacking of agency.
I do wish we had seen god interact with her, even if it hadn’t been the flirty nerdy way Drac did. It would’ve been interesting to see – and I wonder who would’ve filled those shoes. The casting department was always top notch in this show.
I also need to know if Cat was the time traveler or not.
Had a really weird dream last night. But the only things I can remember about it are that it included talking dinosaurs and that the dinosaurs tried to hide in trees for some reason.
Well, that was disappointing. No, really, it was a letdown.
First of all, the fact that we did not see evil Vanessa, at all. Like, NOTHING at all. Not even when she was speaking to Dracula. It was… Disappointing, not to say the least, but also kinda like a spit to Eva Green’s acting – she sold every single scene she was in, and you don’t let her display the range of the Mother of Evil. Why? WHY?
That also made, in my opinion, her final takedown a bit… Lacking. It made it look like she was just there to be finished. No more plot, no more action, just a vehicle.
With that said, Hartnett and Green completely sold me on that last scene together. Their recitation of the Pater Noster almost made me cry. Almost.
Kudos to Logan for giving Piper more time to shine again. Her confession to Frankenstein (which, apparently was good enough to bring him back from the brink) was heartbreaking. And her rebuffing Dorian was… Poetic. I liked how the illumination made him look like a painting in the last frame. Completely fixed in time.
I do want to mention that the editing in Lily’s story of Sarah was weird. Took me out of the scene a couple of times.
Victor and Henry, you can tell their story was the one that was being saved for a future fourth season. How they got the Lord Hyde mention (which, still cool, but come on), and how Victor suddenly happened to be in the right room at the right time when the others came out of Rensfield’s room – “Hey, wanna come finish the plot of this season with us? Sure!”
Speaking of Rensfield, like I said for a while, it was a shame that their introduction back in the first episode was so icky. It would’ve been more powerful if he had been a good man that got stained, but the way they introduced him was awful and it removed some of the impact from this last episode.
I wholly apologized for what I said about LuPone being a box to check. She was wonderful.
Catriona, she looked cool but come on, she was reduced to a “strong woman who kicks ass in heels”, which I believe is a consequence of the fact that nothing on her story got explored. I’m sticking my guns on her being the Time Traveler (HG Wells novel) and that’s why she was so trained, but still, her story got hurt in the process.
Sadly, there’s only one way I can put this. I was disappointed in this finale, and it feels it’s because they were told it was a series finale and went for the full closure, but couldn’t fit everything in.
All in all, tho, the fight choreographies were amazing.
I wouldn’t mind a Season 4 comic (or some really good fanfiction)
involving Lyle, mummies, Vanessa’s resurrection, Hyde’s monstrous side, and overlap of Dorian
and John Clare into the main cast because they often teetered on the edges of the main plot.
The ending did feel lacking at times without Vanessa around. Overall, the show was a hauntingly beautiful experience where we could soak ourselves in the Victorian gothic atmosphere. So yeah, some feelings of dissonance on the final finale but overall it was pretty good and I’ll survive.
You can see my comment above about what I HATED about it. Which isn’t to say that the performances weren’t excellent, because they were. I just hate EVERYTHING about what this conclusion says about the story it was telling.
Yes. I replied there but so much emphasis on how it changed everything. It literally threw the show into the fire.
Whenever I do rewatches (AND I WILL), I will always end on episode 8. I mean, technically I should end on 7 when Vanessa and Dracula meet, but Lily’s confession about Sarah is too heartbreaking not to keep.
It’s like I kinda feel lied to. I watched this show thinking it was about a woman overcoming her own darkness and learning to live with.
But nope, just ANOTHER show about a woman doomed to fail because she liked sex and finding her own darkness to hard to live with.
I mean, in some ways we saw this coming. Which also ticks me off. The moment “we lost her” was NOT when she threw her cross in the fire, the moment we lost her was when she used the Verbis Diablo to murder someone. Ending up HERE was a no brainer after she did that, that tainted her soul and made her easy prey for Lucifer and Dracula. But the show could have come back from that, and had Vanessa be redeemed.
Also, the way the last two episodes, Ethan and Malcolm are SO paternalistic. “I will save her” over and over again. I’m glad when Ethan found her she at least did want to be “saved”, but if she hadn’t the whole thing would have left a bad taste in my mouth.
Honestly, the show fooled me. I thought the storyline was gonna be Vanessa goes evil, sees her friends coming back for her (which is what Dracula used against her, being alone), and that driving her to use her magic to banish Dracula (which, by the way, nothing happened to him, he just walks away). If the show was to end here, I was expecting to see Vanessa and Ethan living in the cottage being just… At peace. Just that. THAT would’ve been a fitting ending, since it’s saying “She fought so hard for a family to keep her from the brink of evil, and she got it”.
I guess the “sacrifice to prevent evil” sounds cooler, even if it’s suckier.
Once Upon a Time is looking to cast a Middle Eastern/Arabic man as Sinbad, and a Middle Easter/Arabic woman as Scheherezad.
http://tvline.com/2016/06/24/once-upon-a-time-sinbad-scheherezade-casting-season-6/
Oooooh.
**starts reading article** Wait, Sam Witwer is on OuaT?? Dangit, now I have to catch up again…
The new Vixen has been announced. She’s Amaya, the grandmother of the current Vixen, and she’s played by Maisie Richardson-Sellers.
https://twitter.com/TheCW_Legends/status/746097851202076672/photo/1
Wrote about this today at HitFix, she was in The Force Awakens. I’m really excited by it: http://www.hitfix.com/harpy/star-wars-actor-takes-over-as-vixen-on-the-cws-legends-of-tomorrow
The question is, “Does this mean that Ray Palmer will be Mari’s grandfather?”
Why Am I Still Writing About Batman V Superman? https://mattthecatania.wordpress.com/2016/06/22/why-am-i-still-writing-about-batman-v-superman/
I’m really torn on the PREACHER show so far. There’s great character work going on, and it feels like they’re setting up some things. But in the mean time there’s so little going on or being given enough exposition to explain it. Even as someone who’s read the comics I’m not sold that it’s really going to go anywhere. It’s four episodes in and it just feels like wheel spinning.
I feel the same (but have only watched the first 2). It has some really great stuff but it honestly feels so boring at the same time. I don’t get what they are trying to do but it’s taking too long for most people I’ve heard from.
I hate comparing so strongly to the comics, but so much of what’s being teased out in the show was given such an immediate feeling in the comic compared to here. My wife is still wondering why they made such a big deal about “the cowboy” from two episodes into the season. He’s a huge deal in the comics, but in the show he’s just…there.
Saw a trailer for a Netflix movie that looks like a great alternative to Me Before
YouEuthanasia! https://youtu.be/Qg67XjD28UQ It’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but if it follows the original novel at least the crip won’t die at the end!Saw it today. Not bad, kinda cute.
this is cool http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-06-21-korean-teenager-answers-her-pro-overwatch-accusers-with-live-demonstration-of-skills
Lynda Carter to recur on season two of Supergirl.
http://www.spoilertv.com/2016/06/supergirl-season-2-lynda-carter-to-recur.html
Can anyone recommend any good sci-fi or fantasy books? Looking for something different and not quite so heavy like GoT.
noooo hey are canceling howard the duck… i haven’t even had a chance to catch up yet…i swear the comic book industry has it out for me canceling all my favorite books
Didn’t the first trade just hit store shelves? Goodness.
So for anyone who plays the card game Smash Up, I’m currently working on a fan made custom faction of Lumberjacks. Got the rules all sussed out over the last couple days with the nice people (actually, one awesome person) on the Board Game Geek forums and I’ll be working on the artwork for the cards for the next several days/couple weeks. I put together a lineup of the character designs for the minions below, and I’m pretty proud of them.
Lumberjacks is an awesome theme for a faction
Thank you. Me and another guy are working on the rules for the faction on the Board Game Geek forum, if you want to check it out and/or contribute.
https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1593308/custom-faction-lumberjacks-feedback-appreciated
Penny Dreadful‘s season finale was a series finale, and I am so very sad.
It retroactively changes the ENTIRE show and I hate everything about it. It doesn’t help that I was spoiled for the ending before watching, which colored my impression of everything.
I can even applaud the performance in THAT scene, it moved me to tears, yet I still HATE IT ALL. I hate that we won’t get Imhotep. I’m pissed Lily didn’t burn Dorian’s portrait to ashes. I hate the generic nod to Mr. Hyde. I HATE HATE HATE that Ethan and Victor are bros while Ethan STILL doesn’t know about Brona. I hate that Catriona Hartedgan was WASTED. I hate that there wasn’t enough Fabulous Ferdinand Lyle.
Wasn’t there enough Ferdinand? For not being a main character, he was there since basically the beginning, and he showed up a lot. In fact, I would say that he was the most used tier two character.
He was a main character in Season two and was demoted in S3, which BOO!
He was not demoted – he was working in West End and no matter how hard they tried to accommodate to his schedule, he could not get out of contract. So we got as much as we could.
I’m calling bullshit on them knowing it was only gonna be three seasons. You can tell this was supposed to be build up, and the season would end with either evil Vanessa, or with word of Lucifer coming through the bodies of the mummies. No, somewhere during writing/filming the episode where Hecate died I believe is when Logan was told it was all over, and he couldn’t back track fast enough so we got this sloppy fucked up mess.
I am with you that it changes the story horribly – particularly because for a show that gave us such great empowered female characters even within an opressive setting such as Victorian London, it managed to erase all of Vanessa and severely limit Brona, and somewhat rewarded the Creature (somewhat).
And what’s worst, because of this ending, they definitely cut out the possibility of continuing in a movie, or a comic book, or a novel – the storyline can’t exist without Vanessa, and bringing her back from the dead would not work because it would negate her sacrifice. See Buffy.
Congratulations, John Logan, you managed to destroy your masterpiece, even if it looked pretty when you did it.
I understand that Beale’s other obligations got in the way, which was ANOTHER reason for a season four.
This would have been an okay ending, if it had ended up with Ethan’s love redeeming Vanessa, that despair fueled her descent into darkness and the reality that she didn’t need to despair, that her family had returned, would bring her back.
It wouldn’t have even needed to be a happy ending. Just better.
And VICTOR not even telling Ethan, “BTW, now that we’re bros, I need to tell you I took your ex girlfriend’s dead body and made her immortal. Also, she’s kinda pissed at the world, maybe you could talk her down from the ledge, IDK?”
Victor was a mess of a character, period.
I still would’ve loved to see Brona/Lily with Ethan. The only man that showed her kindness.
And now I have to go back to the cottage episode, because again, that was her downfall.
So HOW exactly was Vanessa and Ethan “dangerous”? Dangerous to who?
There is just SO MUCH that doesn’t make sense anymore with this ending.
I mean, them together as dangerous? I always understood that Ethan would always belong to Vanessa, so if Vanessa went evil Ethan would follow, and that’s why if she went evil she had to die ASAP.
I mean, I agree that her using the Verbis Diablo was bad, but I still think her downfall was everybody leaving. I remember talking (probably with you) about how interesting the idea of Christian Camargo being actually God/Jesus/an emissary as a response to her throwing the crucifix into the fire, which would’ve created a more interesting plot regarding the fact that God truly didn’t leave her, but that both angels were after her for real. It would’ve delineated well the downfall point to the crucifix. Using the Verbis Diablo, while it is the downfall, can be seen as inevitable as that was the only way she was able to keep the witches at bay.
I dunno. I have thinky thoughts and I hate them because this show was supposed to be great. Now it’s not.
It wasn’t using the Verbis Diablo. As we saw in the flashback, she had used it before. It was using the Verbis Diablo to murder someone that corrupted her soul.
And yes that was me you had that discussion with. And I think ultimately the show agrees that God never really left her, because the joy and solace she finds in Ethan’s recital of the Lord’s Prayer is too visceral. She never lost her faith. EVER. She felt her faith left her, because the people she cared about left her. But to say that was her downfall, removes her agency from her downfall.
Hm, I hadn’t thought about it that way.
I guess I was thinking of that painting/poem, footprints in the sand, where you see two set of footprints and then one, and the person asks why god abandoned them and god answers that it didn’t – that it was carrying them through the hard times. That’s why I was positing the loss of faith as a downfall, because I was seeing it as a selfish thought, but maybe it can also be seen as something completely external and ergo lacking of agency.
I do wish we had seen god interact with her, even if it hadn’t been the flirty nerdy way Drac did. It would’ve been interesting to see – and I wonder who would’ve filled those shoes. The casting department was always top notch in this show.
I also need to know if Cat was the time traveler or not.
Well my head canon is that Lyle is Jesus, and he was there for her, and sent her Dr. Seward and everything so she could get better.
My headcanon has been that Lyle is the Wandering Jew. I dunno what it means on my headcanon that he left – did he just have to wander?
Well, mine is that Jesus and the Wandering Jew are the same so…….
GOGs summer sale ends tomorrow? or today? or sometime
thats a thing
I dunno what else nerdsome news is happening..
Had a really weird dream last night. But the only things I can remember about it are that it included talking dinosaurs and that the dinosaurs tried to hide in trees for some reason.
I researched turtle penises to ensure this TMNT2 review is scientifically accurate! https://mattthecatania.wordpress.com/2016/06/16/teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-out-of-the-shadows-is-shellsational/
I may be only half paying attention to my compliance training (flash video in 2016, sigh).
It’s still going.
Woo First! Here to discuss Penny Dreadful double whammy SERIES (no!) finale.
Well, that was disappointing. No, really, it was a letdown.
First of all, the fact that we did not see evil Vanessa, at all. Like, NOTHING at all. Not even when she was speaking to Dracula. It was… Disappointing, not to say the least, but also kinda like a spit to Eva Green’s acting – she sold every single scene she was in, and you don’t let her display the range of the Mother of Evil. Why? WHY?
That also made, in my opinion, her final takedown a bit… Lacking. It made it look like she was just there to be finished. No more plot, no more action, just a vehicle.
With that said, Hartnett and Green completely sold me on that last scene together. Their recitation of the Pater Noster almost made me cry. Almost.
Kudos to Logan for giving Piper more time to shine again. Her confession to Frankenstein (which, apparently was good enough to bring him back from the brink) was heartbreaking. And her rebuffing Dorian was… Poetic. I liked how the illumination made him look like a painting in the last frame. Completely fixed in time.
I do want to mention that the editing in Lily’s story of Sarah was weird. Took me out of the scene a couple of times.
Victor and Henry, you can tell their story was the one that was being saved for a future fourth season. How they got the Lord Hyde mention (which, still cool, but come on), and how Victor suddenly happened to be in the right room at the right time when the others came out of Rensfield’s room – “Hey, wanna come finish the plot of this season with us? Sure!”
Speaking of Rensfield, like I said for a while, it was a shame that their introduction back in the first episode was so icky. It would’ve been more powerful if he had been a good man that got stained, but the way they introduced him was awful and it removed some of the impact from this last episode.
I wholly apologized for what I said about LuPone being a box to check. She was wonderful.
Catriona, she looked cool but come on, she was reduced to a “strong woman who kicks ass in heels”, which I believe is a consequence of the fact that nothing on her story got explored. I’m sticking my guns on her being the Time Traveler (HG Wells novel) and that’s why she was so trained, but still, her story got hurt in the process.
Sadly, there’s only one way I can put this. I was disappointed in this finale, and it feels it’s because they were told it was a series finale and went for the full closure, but couldn’t fit everything in.
All in all, tho, the fight choreographies were amazing.
I wouldn’t mind a Season 4 comic (or some really good fanfiction)
involving Lyle, mummies, Vanessa’s resurrection, Hyde’s monstrous side, and overlap of Dorian
and John Clare into the main cast because they often teetered on the edges of the main plot.
The ending did feel lacking at times without Vanessa around. Overall, the show was a hauntingly beautiful experience where we could soak ourselves in the Victorian gothic atmosphere. So yeah, some feelings of dissonance on the final finale but overall it was pretty good and I’ll survive.
I don’t watch that show but that’s a huge bummer. They should let them do a movie to wrap it up or something.
That’s the thing. They wrapped things up. As sloppily as one does when they bought the Christmas presents twenty minutes before the store closed.
=(
Boo!
You can see my comment above about what I HATED about it. Which isn’t to say that the performances weren’t excellent, because they were. I just hate EVERYTHING about what this conclusion says about the story it was telling.
Yes. I replied there but so much emphasis on how it changed everything. It literally threw the show into the fire.
Whenever I do rewatches (AND I WILL), I will always end on episode 8. I mean, technically I should end on 7 when Vanessa and Dracula meet, but Lily’s confession about Sarah is too heartbreaking not to keep.
It’s like I kinda feel lied to. I watched this show thinking it was about a woman overcoming her own darkness and learning to live with.
But nope, just ANOTHER show about a woman doomed to fail because she liked sex and finding her own darkness to hard to live with.
I mean, in some ways we saw this coming. Which also ticks me off. The moment “we lost her” was NOT when she threw her cross in the fire, the moment we lost her was when she used the Verbis Diablo to murder someone. Ending up HERE was a no brainer after she did that, that tainted her soul and made her easy prey for Lucifer and Dracula. But the show could have come back from that, and had Vanessa be redeemed.
Also, the way the last two episodes, Ethan and Malcolm are SO paternalistic. “I will save her” over and over again. I’m glad when Ethan found her she at least did want to be “saved”, but if she hadn’t the whole thing would have left a bad taste in my mouth.
UGH
Well, I certainly didn’t see it coming.
Honestly, the show fooled me. I thought the storyline was gonna be Vanessa goes evil, sees her friends coming back for her (which is what Dracula used against her, being alone), and that driving her to use her magic to banish Dracula (which, by the way, nothing happened to him, he just walks away). If the show was to end here, I was expecting to see Vanessa and Ethan living in the cottage being just… At peace. Just that. THAT would’ve been a fitting ending, since it’s saying “She fought so hard for a family to keep her from the brink of evil, and she got it”.
I guess the “sacrifice to prevent evil” sounds cooler, even if it’s suckier.