Monday Media Musings, 08/22/22

[owlmoose]

Better Call Saul, Season 6.5: Possibly the best prequel ever made. It can be a tall order to tell a story whose ending is known from the very beginning, where the ultimate fate of most of the characters is known, and everyone is set on a downward trajectory. But this show confounded my expectations at every turn: in many ways it was the story I expected, but I could never have imagined how it got there. At the end of episode 9, when Kim left Jimmy and we skipped forward to the Breaking Bad timeframe, I couldn't fathom where the story was going next. It makes perfect sense that we then jumped forward again, to the Gene era, and focused almost entirely on that for the last four episodes. I thought Breaking Bad was brilliant, but Better Call Saul was so much better. Jimmy/Saul/Gene is a more compelling lead than Walt by far, Rhea Seehorn is brilliant as Kim, and I found the details we learned about the characters and the world fascinating.

Oklahoma!: I've never seen any performance of this classic musical, and since I've found that many such shows haven't aged particularly well (as I've discussed before in my comments about My Fair Lady; other revivals that left me cold included Hello Dolly!, Miss Saigon, and An American in Paris), I wasn't particularly excited by the prospect, until I talked to a couple of coworkers who saw different instances of this same touring production -- one in Washington DC, the other in Nashville -- and they told me how interested it was, how the staging completely changed the meaning of the show without altering a word of the text or a single song lyric. So I approached it with curiosity instead, and while I'm not sure I could say I "enjoyed" it -- it's dark and disturbing in many ways, and some of its more experimental aspects were a bit lost on me -- it was a worthwhile and thought-provoking experience. Instead of a frothy costume period piece, this performance is done in a bare-bones style, set entirely on a stage that looks like a high school gym or the rec room of a community center, but for the shotguns that line the walls. There's no chorus, all the actors and the band are on stage most of the time, and every choice helps highlights the darker aspects of the original story. Dark as it was, I think I would find the traditional light and fluffy version much harder to watch -- presenting some of the things that happen in this story (e.g. bullying, murder, treating women as prizes to be won, show trials) as perfectly find and normal is far more disturbing to me.

Supergirl: Since we resubscribed to Netflix specifically for The Sandman, then canceled it again, and I had never gotten around to finishing this series, I decided I had better wrap it up while I still had access. I had four more episodes to go, and I watched them all today. The pacing of this season was really weird, to the point that I wonder when the cast and crew were told that this would be the final one. Lena's plotline, in particular, felt rushed and out of place, and I wasn't really a fan of it. One of the things I've always appreciated about Lena is that her passions are business and science, which puts her in somewhat unusual company among women characters in superhero shows. And I also always like it when "normal" people, without inherent powers, can stand their ground with the rest of the team. So to suddenly introduce the idea that she was secretly a witch all along, and that magic, not science, is her true calling, feels like a betrayal of the character. Especially given that the entire storyline is dealt with in less than half a season! Maybe if I'd had more time to get used to the idea, to watch Lena getting used to the idea, it would have worked better. I have similar issues with Brainy's last storyline, in which the idea of him needing to go permanently back to the future is introduced four episodes from the end, and then resolved offscreen during the finale. This was not at all satisfying; I would much rather have seen it developed more on both ends. Why even bother giving Brainy and Nia an emotional parting if it's going to be undone ten minutes later? Don't get me wrong, this is still my Arrowverse OTP, I'm thrilled they get to stay together, but it just felt rushed and pointless. I did enjoy the final episode overall -- quickly dispensing with the big bads to focus on what Kara and her found family will be up to was the best choice this show could have made. And ending with Kara deciding to live publicly as Supergirl was nice thematically. But I really think they either could have used one more season if these were really the stories they wanted to tell.

The Sandman, Episode 11: Surprise extra episode! This was kind of a genius move on the part of Netflix and Gaiman's team, to drop a special episode just as the initial buzz for the show was starting to wear off. I had been wondering whether they would adapt any of the anthology stories; it seems the answer is yes, and I think this is a good way of going about it. "Dream of a Thousand Cats" is a fun little self-contained story; "Calliope" is disturbing and difficult, and I'm not sure it's the one I would have chosen to end on, although I suppose it makes sense to set up Orpheus for the next arc. Anyway, given that this is the story they decided to tell, I think they did a good job with it.