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Reviews
Velma: Creaky Friday (2024)
You hate rich people, got it
I actually enjoyed the first season of this show, despite all the completely unnecessary progressive cruft, but this season is ladling it on a bit too thick. Just tell a story, with humorous callbacks to Scooby Doo, without injecting a bunch of politics, *of any stripe*, into your story.
Also, the storytelling this season is way too frenetic. We get a few seconds of Norville's goofy father pushing pot at him, then a few seconds of Fred's goofy faux Catholicism, then a few seconds of Velma's mom's self-sabotage, and then we're off on something else I can't even remember because it went by in a heartbeat.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Memento Mori (2022)
Wisecracks and Feeeelings
I've been a ST fan since childhood, and I really want to like this show, but it suffers from the same problems as the other recent ST shows: too much time is devoted to people talking about their feelings, and people are generally so undisciplined that it seems far-fetched that they survive any encounter with anything difficult.
The bridge crew is idiotically wisecracking in the midst of a crisis, when they're not verbally freaking out. The Ortegas character can't seem to carry out a single order without making some sort of supposedly witty remark. Crew members are disrespectful to the captain, order him around without explaining why he should do what they recommend (and yes, this is true even when there's time for them to explain). They recycle the ST:D "Burnham knows the Klingons are dangerous from her personal tragedy but no one will take her seriously" into the "Noonien-Singh knows the Gorn are dangerous from her personal tragedy but no one will take her seriously". I guess I should be happy Noonien-Singh didn't actually *mutiny* like Burnam did. And that conversation with Noonien-Singh about how the crew "needs hope" ... blech. How saccharine. That goes double for the captain's sappy speech to the crew just before they do "the Pike maneuver". The goofily ebullient Uhura/pointlessly irascible Hemmer scenes contributed little or nothing, and seemed to go on forever. I had to laugh when Number 1 responded to Chapel's joke about how painful a procedure would be with "Who says something like that?". Who indeed? I had that reaction to most of the dialogue in this episode.
I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Watching this show made me want to re-watch The Last Ship (2014) to see a more reasonable depiction of how a ship's crew behaves in a crisis.
Honestly, it seems like the writers are so incapable of coming up with a plot that involves actual *events* that they have to have scenes in which next to nothing happens other than people emoting at each other. Dear writers: you're not Shakespeare, and neither is /Star Trek/. It's supposed to be science fiction: things are supposed to *happen*, people are supposed to *solve problems*, there's supposed to be a "sense of wonder". Even if it were supposed to be like Shakespeare, too many of the new ST shows read like they're written by a bunch of middle school students who imagine that adults are just middle school students with jobs.
Raised by Wolves: Good Creatures (2022)
Too mysterious
Three episodes into the season and it's still very unclear what's going on. There are a lot of what seem like separate plot threads, and we just have to keep a lot of details in memory while waiting for some sort of explanation to make it all make sense. I don't know if the writers are trying to fuel a lot of internet "buzz" about what's going on (this was a feature of /Westworld/), but it would be better story-telling to give us little bits of explanation along with all of the seemingly random events. Otherwise, it's not intriguing, just random-seeming. Also, some of the threads from the first season seem to have been dropped now that they're in a different area of the planet. Will they be relevant in the future? Who knows?
I liked the first season, but the second one's really leaving me cold.
And really, acid oceans? What in the world are the rocks that ocean's washing against made of?
Young Justice: Kaerb Ym traeh! (2021)
More interesting action, still some soap opera
This season so far has put significant emphasis on relationships and characters' psychological problems (what I meant by "soap opera" in the title). This episode had less of that, and more actual action that advanced matters not related to people's personal problems.
If, like me, you watch shows like /Young Justice/ to see metahumans being, well, meta-human, then you probably don't want to see characters staging interventions for other characters, or crashing their lives because they're having trouble accepting the death of people they care about, or resolving family problems. We all have real life for those things, or countless other shows that are not about metahumans. This season has been very disappointing for those who want to see metahumans using their abilities to go beyond ordinary human concerns. This episode was better, but still far worse than just about any episode of the earlier seasons (which were by no means devoid of relationship stuff!).
On top of the above, it seemed almost surreal to see some characters trying to talk to others about getting their lives together while, quite visibly, the whole world was in peril.
Young Justice: Teg Ydaer! (2021)
More soul-searching
I'm *really* not enjoying this season anywhere near as much as previous seasons. Episode after episode (this one included) focuses almost exclusively on characters wrestling with their emotional issues, instead of, say, engaging in conflict with the bad guys. If this had been the first season, I would just have given the entire show a miss. Unfortunately, I don't see much movement in a better direction.
Young Justice: Volatile (2021)
Does everything have to be a soap opera now?
I don't watch superhero fiction for the relationships or the tearful apologies. Season 4 seems to have kicked up the emoting several notches from previous seasons. I hope future episodes get back to the protagonists using their powers to oppose the antagonists and pursuing some of the mysteries instead of superheroes exploring their feeeelings.