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Tag Archives: HBO
Watchmen Ticks All its Pieces into Place in “See How They Fly”
When I watched the first batch of episodes from Watchmen, I thought it tossed plenty of interesting balls into the air, but I questioned how and whether it would be able to catch all of them. As I discussed on The Serial Fanaticist podcast, showrunner Damon Lindelof (of Lost fame) is not necessarily known for delivering satisfying endings. His new series asked all sorts of intriguing questions about powerful institutions and those marginalized by them, and it threw in one eyebrow-raising plot point after another. But to answer all of the former and resolve all of the latter, seemed like too much for even the smartest [person] in the world to do in a satisfying way.
And yet, somehow, “See How They Fly” does it.
Posted in Other Prestige Dramas, Television
Tagged Damon Lindelof, Dr. Manhattan, Episode Reviews, HBO, Watchmen, Watchmen S01E09
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Watchmen and the Inscrutability of Love and Creation in “A God Walks into Abar”
The beauty of science fiction is that, in the right hands, it can tell stories that other genres can’t. Strip away the limitations of fact; tap into the power of imagination, and you can conjure scenes and situations the shabby metes and bounds of the real world couldn’t sustain. In the best hands, the absence of those limitations — the combination of fiction and abstraction — allows the author and their audience to reach truths that even the most poignant, most trenchant slice of reality cannot possibly match.
So when Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons imagined a god, a living embodiment of quantum entanglement, they used him to explore the bitter ironies of causality. They traced the lines of cause and effect, jumbled up in one man’s life, to find the knotted ends of detachment and transcendence and omniscience turned predestination. Jon Osterman had, like others before him, come unstuck in time. And his creators, like others before them, used that temporal hash to shine a light on the human condition in ways that linear storytelling wouldn’t allow for.
Jeff Jensen & Damon Lindelof use the same approach to tell a story about love and creation, and about how each produces a yearning for something destined to leave us.
Posted in Other Prestige Dramas, Television
Tagged Angela Abar, Damon Lindelof, Dr. Manhattan, Episode Reviews, HBO, Watchmen, Watchmen S01E08
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HBO’s Watchmen Watches Over Trump’s America
More than 30 years after the globe-shaping events of the original Watchmen comic, the ripple effects can still be felt. Adrian “Ozymandias” Veidt is in seclusion somewhere far away and presumed dead. A group of Rorschach-imitating, conspiracy-touting white supremicists threaten the peace and the police at every turn. And the law enforcement officers of Tulsa, Oklahoma have donned capes, cowls, and masks in response, with some even assuming the secret identities that can come with them.
Posted in Other Prestige Dramas, Television
Tagged Damon Lindelof, HBO, Season Reviews, Watchmen
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Deadwood: The Movie Returns and Finally Forms a Fucking Government
It’s 1889, and South Dakota is soon to become the nation’s newest state. With that, the onetime hardscrabble camp of prospectors and cutthroats in Deadwood is being ushered into the future, grumbling but prepared. Picking up ten years after the television series left off, Deadwood: The Movie sees local luminaries like the saloon-owning power broker Al Swearengen and the now-Marshall Seth Bullock having settled into their roles in the town on the cusp of the dreaded-but-long-awaited arrival of law, civilization, and progress.
20 Years Later, The Sopranos Is the New American Tragedy
Send ‘em home happy. If you spend season after season, year after year with a show and a cast of characters, you want their final notes to be pleasant ones. As viewers, we’ve also invested in them. We’ve committed to their journeys by that point. To have them end in pain or tears or frustration would be too much after all of that. And most series, no matter how dark or cynical they may be, oblige their audiences on that account.
In the 20 years since The Sopranos first took to the airwaves, scores of shows followed in its footsteps, imitating its dark-hearted approach, novelistic bent, and antihero bona fides. In the ensuing two decades, television’s level of moral complexity rose; the chances to see protagonists make ethically questionable choices soared, and examinations of the grim underbelly of everything that TV once made bright and clean became legion and fashionable. But for all the titans who emerged in Tony Soprano’s (James Gandolfini) wake, few if any have had the stick-to-your-guns conviction to finish their runs on a note so bleak, a loss so complete, or an ending of such unmitigated tragedy.
Posted in Other Prestige Dramas, Television
Tagged Essays, HBO, The Sopranos, Tony Soprano, Tragedy
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