vital_sol

(A note on perspective: I'm a "gen-X"-aged person from the Bay Area, raised on a diet of Monty Python, Stephen King, and Ducktales. Your own tastes may vary.)

It: Welcome To Derry

Autumn was a good season for this show but instead I binged it all in January. (I struggle with waiting a week between episodes. So instead, I wait much longer!)

The theme of a mid-20th-century white American town slowly revealing its rotten racist and sexist core has gotten pretty tired at this point. Back when I was a child in the 80's I was already surrounded by Baby Boomers who would happily talk about the state of open rebellion they lived in. The good news here is that the show's writers seem to be aware their setting is a sort of double throwback - a memory of a memory - and have deliberately ripped out a lot of the broader context (external events, other places) compelling viewers to take all the anachronisms, unreal lighting, and CGI wide shots that mimic 1962 as set-dressing for what is really a fairytale. So if people don't act quite right and things seem unreal, it's all part of the show.

I rolled with it, and none of the episodes dragged, though it was sometimes frustrating to wonder if a particular episode was going to spend more time mucking about with scary one-off encounters or push the overall plot forward. I like a "monster of the week" format. (Anyone raised on the animated Ghostbusters cartoon would.) But if you have questions at the end it's nice to know whether they'll be answered. For example, the first episode unveils a scary looking demon baby creature and a bunch of callbacks to the movie The Music Man, establishing an interesting theme, and I was looking forward to some kind of explanation or elaboration on both. Neither appeared.

I also confess I might have an unreasonable dislike for writing that establishes rules and then ignores them. The monster in this series apparently causes people to hallucinate their worst fears, in order to feed off their reaction. It can do this from any distance, and at any time that’s convenient for the plot. But it can also decide to climb out of the sewer system and walk around in person, gouging out eyeballs and tearing off heads and cutting people in half, while also changing shape and teleporting randomly around the environment. It can have its head blasted clean off by gunfire at close range, and it will simply grow a new head. It has powers like a Greek god. And at the same time ... it is apparently also extremely stupid.

(I'm at the edge of real spoiler territory here, so be warned that now I'm walking right in...)

This monster has been confined for at least 300 years, and the instant it realizes it can break free from its prison, it doesn’t go running for the gap in the fence, but instead collects a long slow wagon train of children. Then at the end of the same episode, it becomes clear that the creature can grow wings and fly, rather than loping along the ground like a slowpoke. Why didn’t it sprout the damn wings from the beginning? Because the writers thought the end was kinda boring and wanted a Dragonball-Z-style "final form" I suppose?

Still, I was engaged through all eight episodes, and that's pretty good. Six creepy red balloons up out of ten.

Alien Earth (2025)

The titular Alien - the one we associate with the franchise anyway - is almost an accessory to the story here. You could potentially swap out some other alien creature with an entirely different lore, and it would be the same story. But that's always been the case with the franchise: From the first sequel onward, it's been "X but the Alien is involved", where X is some new genre exercise. Which is good, because aside from a cool aesthetic and a sneaky reproduction cycle, there isn't much to the creature itself.

To be specific: When Alien became Aliens, the style and story went from slow-burn horror to action adventure. Alien III jumped a track onto apocalyptic survival. Alien Resurrection told a Frankenstein story, Alien Covenant was Lovecraftian muck-about in the ruins of the elder gods, and recently Alien: Romulus looped back to horror (after waiting an acceptable 45 years), which I suppose is a repeat, but it's pretty well done so fans don't care. (I know I didn't. In particular I enjoyed the sound design, so much so that I made a mostly dialogue-free remix of it for use as background while writing.)

But we're talking about Alien Earth here, the recent television series. And I know it's supposed to be this show's cool new genre flavor, giving it a reason to exist next to the other Alien stuff, but I find the Peter Pan and Lost Boys angle with this particular Ripley to be ... kind of a snooze. Apparently each Alien/Prometheus gig always needs to find a vaguely French fairytale pixie lady as a Sigourney Weaver replacement, and was that really necessary here? I suppose it attracts eyeballs...

Speaking of eyeballs, the Alien is not really the most compelling monster here. That would be a new, smaller alien, little more than an eyeball with legs. Mega-creepy. I would definitely watch a show built around that thing. Also in play is Vyvyan Basterd as an avuncular butler, buttle-ing for a "tech CEO who is actually a sociopath child" stereotype. And, in the middle of the series, you get a self-contained episode aboard a spaceship that is a delicious throwback to the original Alien. So if you're not into Wendy and the Lost Boys, skip to episode five.

Like I said above, I enjoy a "monster of the week" kind of show, and if this show was built that way I would rate it higher. Watching Wendy explore her relationship with the other androids and the Alien was a lot less interesting than the writers thought.

Six creepy creeeeeeepy eyeballs up out of ten.

The Residence (2025)

The most emphatic thing I can say about this series is that the film editors went absolutely bananas, and happily, it works. Sometimes you get a hundred cuts in a single minute of screen time, but there is enough thought behind them to make the barrage worthwhile.

The Residence is a drawn-out cozy murder mystery, scripted like a farce, full of rat-a-tat dialogue and broad acting, and it manages a sustained energy over eight episodes without getting overwhelming. Before I started watching it I was concerned that a single mystery wouldn't be enough material to work with, when other detective shows finish a new case every hour, but the complexity of the semi-historical setting and the wide array of interconnected characters drawn from the source novel fills the running time admirably. Someone is always arriving, arguing, lying, looking shifty, explaining their whereabouts, et cetera, and the detective has an audience surrogate sidekick to explain things to when the plot gets thick, so you never feel like you need a break.

In fact, when it does slow down to take a few character-building detours, you'd expect those scenes to be a welcome rest, letting you recover your breath before the investigation plunges forward again ... but instead I found myself just waiting impatiently for each detour to finish so I could gather more clues. That might seem like a strike against this show but I have a hard time saying so. It's not that the asides are boring exactly, it's that you know something more interesting is waiting for you afterward. Like ordering dinner at Fenton's Ice Cream parlor.

Partway though the mystery you will grow suspicious that you're being led into a "Murder On The Orient Express" situation, and the thought will annoy you. Thankfully the writer doesn't go that way. This series will drift out of your head quickly when it's done, but you'll have a good time watching it.

Seven-and-a-half pairs of binoculars out of ten.

Creature commandos (2024)

James Gunn jumped his own shark way back in 2006, with the movie Slither. That movie is an amazing mash-up of practical gore, dumb action fun, and a surprisingly effective exploration of multiple deeply uncomfortable topics - for example, addiction and eating disorders - in fine horror tradition.

After that he started making the same thing over and over: A ragtag group of smart-mouthed anti-heroes must fight through their differences while facing down one or more depressingly one-dimensional villains. And so, Guardians Of The Galaxy (1, 2, and 3), The Suicide Squad, Peacemaker, and now Creature Commandos. In fact, if you count Scooby-Doo and Scooby-Doo 2, he was doing this before Slither, so perhaps it's just his niche and he likes being in it.

This series has the same flippant approach to dramatic stakes, and the same selective disregard for basic physics in the action scenes like everything else he's written and directed in the last 20-ish years. I watched it and it mostly held my attention and I could tell there were things happening that were supposed to be jokes, so it was good while I was on the couch recovering from getting five vaccinations at once, but eh, I dunno. Go watch Ducktales or The Venture Brothers instead.

4.5 out of ten super-duper-duper radioactive limbs that can melt stone but otherwise have no effect on living things up.

Fallout (2024)

Game-to-series adaptations are rare, and it's fun to see how they make the leap from interactive fiction to screenplay. What's too awkward or nuanced to bring across? What's going to alienate viewers who haven't played the game? Is there even enough drama in the source material to work with?

That last dilemma is why (in my opinion) the Halo and Castlevania adaptations feel simultaneously arbitrary and lacking in depth: The games they draw from are all about action, and the lore is window-dressing, meant to be dismissed between rounds of shooting and jumping. This is awful source material for writers, whose job is to tell a story with dramatic conflict and neat ideas, with the action as the window-dressing instead. Beyond the title card, the existing fan base is actually a disadvantage: What do players of the game want, going in? Probably nonstop action, but if that's all they get, they'll be dissatisfied. By the end of the first episode they'll say "I'd rather just be playing the game."

Games in the role-playing category have a better chance. There's plenty of drama and lore, and players aren't expecting an actiontastic explodaganza. Fallout seems like a great choice. So why doesn't it hold together? Because it has the opposite problem: There's too dang much drama and lore to cover!

This is obvious from the first episode, which kicks off four separate stories with four (almost) entirely different sets of characters. When the episode finished I was immediately worried that I would be splitting time across four separate histories that didn't intersect, like I was playing various sequels of the game Fallout, even though I was only interested in two of them. (The vault story felt like great satire, and the ghoul was a badass. The knights made no sense and seemed like a downer.)

Thank goodness they all did intersect in due time. Yeah, it felt really contrived how they did, but it was interesting, and that always matters more than anything else. From there it was a bunch of episodes combining a MacGuffin hunt, a mysterious tragedy, and lots more vault-centered satire. Sometimes the series is playing the apocalyptic survival straight, sometimes it's mocking the whole idea, as well as the idea of it being appealing. Either way it stays sharp, and thankfully it resolves enough conflict by the end that I didn't feel cheated by the cliffhanger.

As I post this, I just finished season 2, and I'm glad it came back for another round. After shoving too many parts onto the workbench in the first season, the second season takes time fitting them together.

Seven and a half radioactive axolotl up.

Outlaw Star (1998)

I missed this anime back in 1998 when it appeared. At the time it sounded like a knockoff of Robotech, and a less stylish version of Cowboy Bebop, so I didn't put much effort into finding it.

It got a Bluray release a while back, so it looks way better than any version I could have seen in 1998, which would have been a second-hand VHS dub played in a cluttered dorm room. The transfer is top-notch and you can really get into the whole hand-drawn pastel 70's space aesthetic. But really, what's interesting is how a goofy sci-fi anime from 27 years ago stands up as viewing today.

Not very well. To a modern eye it's composed entirely of tropes that have been so exercised they can only be interesting when they're subverted, or done with obvious self-awareness. The young male hero with an attitude, the magical MacGuffin girl everyone fights over, the tight-lipped ronin companion, the OP antagonist who is Just Plain Evil, the homosexual supporting character who exists to cause gay panic in the protagonist... Catgirls, giant space robots, a Star-Wars-style transplanting of the Wild West out into the galaxy... Done to death, I'm afraid, before or after the era of this show. The sexism was also uncomfortably dated in its own era.

But those 70's-style space backgrounds! Sumptuous. And though the show is a tonal mess, there are some fun one-off episodes late in the series that almost make it worthwhile. Though alas, not enough to run the whole set.

Four spazzy catgirl tails up out of ten.