Monday Media Musings - 4/5/21

[owlmoose]

The Flash, Season 7, Ep 1-3: Looking back on previous journal entries, it looks like I mostly stopped writing about Arrowverse stuff in mid-March, which is also around the time I paused this weekly blog series. So I never did set down my thoughts on the finales of the 2019-20 season (with the exception of the Arrow finale, which aired some months earlier). As best I recall, though, every single one of them felt rushed and unfinished, maybe worthy of mid-season finales but certainly nothing to wrap up a true season with the possible exception of Batwoman. Of course, it's hard to blame them, because production had to shut down so quickly thanks to the pandemic; there's only so many miracles that can be worked in the editing studio. So I was curious about how they would resume when the shows came back into production.

But then I was underwhelmed by the Batwoman S2 premiere, and soon after I lost track of when everything was premiering, and the CW app is a terrible watching experience, and we'd put our YouTubeTV subscription on pause, and let our HBO Max subscription lapse in favor of Disney+, and by the time YouTubeTV was back (we timed it to come back at the beginning of April, to coincide with baseball season), I only had the four most recent episodes of each show available to me -- which means I'm missing several Batwoman eps and, most irritatingly, episodes 2-5 of Superman & Lois, which I'm really eager to check out. (Fortunately the first episode re-runs tonight, so I'll be able to catch it soon). So the only real option was The Flash, and I watched the first three episodes. And it's pretty clear: those three episodes aren't really Season 7 -- they're the final three episodes of Season 6. And a pretty decent finale, as these things go -- all the false starts leading to the final recreation of the Speed Force, Eva turned back to the side of light, Nash Wells and his sacrifice (although I wish they'd stop teasing the real, total, final death of Wells -- I don't believe for a second that he's gone for good. Not amazing, but solid. And now we can get down to the business of a new season for real.

Outlander, Season 4: Well, okay. Things I liked: Brianna and Lord John, Claire and Jamie, a bigger role for Fergus and Marsali. Things I didn't like: the vast changes from the book to the Roger plotline and what's happening with the Regulators. I have a hard time caring much about Roger and Brianna in this version of the universe and almost found myself wishing she'd ended up in the partnership with Lord John instead. I suppose I'll keep watching it, but I wish they'd trusted the source material more.