Episode IV. That’s my hill.
NeuTrek. TNG squeeks by, but any Trek with a dysfunctional, corrupt Federation with a Black Ops team is out.
The West Wing, season 4. After Sorkin left it went to shit.
Ren & Stimpy was hit or miss, but really after the first season it fell off a cliff pretty fast.
Nobody’s ever done an adaptation of Asimov’s The Foundation Trilogy, which is too bad.
TLoTR had 3 movies; everything after has been just a shitty job of milking the success of the first 3. Which is too bad, because Cumberbuzzle was brilliant as Smaug.
So episodes 1 through 4 then stop watching?
You mean R&S? Yeah. There were maybe 4 funny ones, and the rest were crap. Space Madness, however, is IMHO one of the greatest pieces of comedy ever produced. Maybe it was just one-hit-wonder syndrome.
Nobody’s ever done an adaptation of Asimov’s The Foundation Trilogy, which is too bad.
Are you saying that Apple’s adaptation isn’t worthy of acknowledgment or are you not aware they’ve been producing it?
The what? Apple’s never done an adaptation. Nope. Not Apple, that’s for sure.
Honestly, though: brilliant graphics, design, and acting. The writers should all be taken out and shot, though.
I 99 cases out of 100 it’s not writers. It executives.
The Hobbit is one well crafted movie. Two if you want to hang out the story a little.
The Hobbit is not three fucking movies.
Strange New Worlds is great Trek if you haven’t seen it.
I have. It’s not bad, despite my several grievances with it. Mainly the Gorn redesign as cheap knock-offs of Xenomorphs, that Kirk could never have hand-to-handed. And I really, really dislike the whole Spock/nurse Chapel story line. T’Pring was grossly mistreated, and it makes Spock’s surprise at her behavior in Amok Time completely out of character: he knew what he did. I’m also not fond of jumping directly to musical episodes in so early; shows usually only do that when they start running out of other ideas. I had to fast-forward through most of that one. I was really unhappy about killing off… who they killed off. I would have preferred almost any other character be sacrificed if they really felt it necessary.
But all that said, there is a lot of good, and I’ll keep watching it. I think my biggest gripe is that they picked SNW to continue, over Lower Decks‽ That was bogus; LD was a far better show.
I think that Chapel arc s brilliant and it retrospectively fixed part of the TOS that didn’t age well, by adding hidden depth to character who was nothing more than a cheep joke.
Also without it we wouldn’t get “I’m the X”, which is objectively the best thing ever.
That’s not Spock.
I don’t understand, and never will, the compulsion to hyper-sexualize the one character who was not perpetually horny.
I believe that idea behind it is that his future TOS restrain is - partially - caused by his unhealed emotional wounds that he gained during his youth.
Hmm. We don’t see much Vulcan romance in any earlier series, except for the gratuitous “sauna scene” with T’Pol in Enterprise. It’s not just Spock.
One the other hand, we have a lot of evidence that young human males are very horny… I don’t think it takes away from original Spock’s “maybe I’m suppressing more than I should” arc. It ads to it. And writing prequels is always hard, because your characters can’t evolve above certain point. The need to end low, because low is where they started TOS - their journey need to happen there. Most are basically pointless and lead nowhere. Young Sheldon can’t learn his lessons and grow because old Sheldon need to start broken.
Having secret “there is more story behind his silence and cold indifference” is a great way to have the arc and not brake the arc.
I am also a huge fan of Lower Decks. It will be missed! The crossover episode with SNW was fantastic.
Oh, that confused me so much! I restarted the episode 4 times before I realized it was a cross-over! I thought I was getting the wrobg show!
It was fantastic. One of my favorite ST episodes, and so well done.
Andor is probably the last Stars War that I’ll watch unless they come out with another one that learns from it. DS9 took Star Treks seriously and the result was a show that has relevant ideas 30 years later. Until Andor, none of the Stars Wars I’ve seen have taken the universe seriously. They’ve expanded on it in unnecessary detail and obsessed over that detail, but intellectually they’ve all felt flat and liberal. Andor spends three episodes showing the Death Star through Foucault and you get one brief shot of it after a full film-length of watching how a gear is made using slave labour. That dialectical materialist analysis of the empire is so much more interesting than any battle or Jedi scene across the whole canon.
I really liked the Acolyte. Not necessarily for its acting but it leaned into the idea that dark side and light side are not so different and the Jedi can cause a lot of suffering by sticking their noses where they don’t belong. Also, there are force users that don’t fit neatly into those two categories and just want to do their own thing.
Sadly, we won’t see a second season, because some “fans” on the internet got mad that women, people of color and - very shocking - queer people exist in the Star Wars universe.
Sadly, we won’t see a second season, because some “fans” on the internet got mad that women, people of color and - very shocking - queer people exist in the Star Wars universe.
It sucks that these people exist, for many reasons. One of these reasons (surely not the worst one, but the one I want to focus on) is that it muddies all criticism of a project. Your comment implied that this was the sole, or main, reason that The Acolyte was canceled, so I want to jump in here to say:
Having more women, people of color, and queer characters was the only refreshing thing about The Acolyte, and I wish more Star Wars projects took notice. Other than that though, the show is an utter disaster. It was incompetently written and directed, its story and characters make no sense, and the effects can be jarring.
Characters either have no defined motivations, or their motivations flip flop at the drop of a hat. Scenes dealing with the Jedi order and the republic fuck with established lore and do lasting damage to the Jedi order (not in the sense that they are shown as morally gray, but in that they are utterly incompetent and seemingly don’t remember the appearance of the Sith during living memory, for example).
Speaking of which, yes, the show tries to portray Jedi/Sith as a gray area, but
a) that has been done to death at this point, seriously, every other SW project tries to do a “ooooh but maybe Jedi not completely good!”, and b) The Acolyte is probably the most incompetent version of that I have seen (so far!).
I hope I have demonstrated that this show can be critiqued bar any bigotry, and I think it should be acknowledged that that, together with the giant sum of money it ate, are the reasons it got canceled - I am sure Disney also does not like the bigotry, but sadly, they get that with every project, even those that do not get canceled…
In any case, there is no comparison to Andor to be made, SMH.
That concept is great and truly one worth exploring but the execution left alot to be desired. Character motivation wasn’t explored enough and it left alot of the choices the jedi made seem just ham fisted. Leaving the whole concept of them sticking their noses where they don’t belong as just arbitrary.
The last harry potter movie (deathly hollows pt 2) marks the end of the franchise as far as I am concerned. 8 great movies and 7 great books. I wish there was more but I fail to see how it can be extended. Both fantastic beasts and crushed child do more harm than good to the original franchise
Both fantastic beasts and crushed child do more harm than good to the original franchise
I really liked the first FB movie, it captured the whimsical charm of the intial 3 HP movies and books quite authentically. I could go on and on on how the next film changes the tone, breaks established canon, and generally feels like a cobbled together mess of story beats hastily Scribbled on sticky notes(didn’t anyone proofread the thing?) So for me it ends with newt Scamander helping to apprehend grindelwald and the rest of the story is implied in the main HP books.
Cursed child doesn’t exist, what are you talking about?
If we are going into books, the Hyperion series should have ended at 2. The first 2 books are so good! Books 3 and 4 are terrible.
Endgame is the end of the MCU. After endgame disney pished out too much MCU shit and ruined it. They should’ve stopped at endgame and not try to make many shows that also factor into the overall MCU. Some may argue that this problem was already too much before endgame premiered. That is a valid argument.
S10 E12 (The Doctor Falls) is the end of (Modern) Doctor Who. Such a perfect episode epitomising the character, and closing an arc for one of the longest villains. He even ‘dies’ at the end.
Everything since then has been badly written and purposefully disrespectful to the cannon and the audience, and has wasted so many fantastic actors.
Season 1 of Westworld. It’s okay to have an ambiguous ending, you can leave it to viewer’s imagination. That show went downhill with every season because it was trying too hard to be smart.
Agree.
Saw S2 but the magic was just not there. Never saw anything after.
Aliens ended the franchise. Slightly different answer, nothing occurred between the release of Predator and Prey.
Season 4 of DEXTER, season 5 maybe to see the aftermath. The last 3 seasons were unnecessary.
Surprise motherfucker!
I only wish I ever learned who’s the mother and how he met her…
The last episode of Supernatural should not exist.
I watched this one late and saw all the talk online about stopping after season 5 or 6 whatever and haven’t regretted my decision to follow that advice.
Yep. Season 1-5 is a complete and well done story. Anything after that is just if you really enjoy watching the boys get up hijinks.
I did enjoy watching them get up to hijinks but I didn’t want to get trapped trying to complete 14 more seasons of mediocre story telling. I am I big fan of the “monster of the week” type shows which are few and far between these days, but it didn’t seem worth it from what I read.
I have two Dr Who hot takes:
Remembrance of The Daleks should’ve been the last time Daleks appear in Dr Who. None of their returns have done anything sufficiently interesting (except maybe Dalek), and every one has to be prefaced with some explanation to where these new Daleks are coming from.
And,
Survival, in that same series is the perfect endpoint of the Master as a character and Dr Who as a show.
There’s a lot of horror franchises that shouldn’t’ve been more than a single film. Off the top of my head: Hellraiser, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Blair Witch, and Black Christmas.
Only Fools and Horses shoulda ended on the episode where they finally strike it rich. None of the episodes after that justify bringing it back.
The Gunslinger by Steven King.
He wrote some dark and towerry other books, but they’re unrelated fiction
Walking Dead S07E01. I think that episode could have been a perfect ending. They dragged it a lot after.
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The Office when Michael left.
Terminator 3 is the last of that series in my eyes. The others - although not too shabby (excluding Salvation of course) - I regard as fan fiction.
Arrested Development - that last season just did not agree with me.
Community - things dropped off quickly when Troy left.
