TV #6 of 2022: Fringe, season 5 A very strange season, and a very strange ending to Fringe. Following up on the flash-forward episode “Letters of Transit” from the previous year, this final run finds the team frozen in amber for two decades, then thawed out to fight the invading Observers who have meanwhile taken …
Tag Archives: rewatch
TV Review: Fringe, season 4
TV #3 of 2022: Fringe, season 4 I didn’t have much patience for this penultimate run the first time I watched through Fringe, as the literal retcon of the rebooted timeline struck me as a lazy excuse for the writers to stop caring about continuity at all. They keep coy about everything that’s now different …
TV Review: ReBoot, season 4
TV #2 of 2022: ReBoot, season 4 Oh, that wicked cliffhanger! 20 years later, it still stings that we leave Mainframe in such a perilous position, and that the eventual semi-sequel to this show, aside from being awful all-around, never even tries to provide any resolution to it. Like the teams on Angel or Animorphs, …
TV Review: Fringe, season 3
TV #88 of 2021: Fringe, season 3 This is my favorite era of Fringe, and I am so tempted to give it a full five stars. Picking up on the cliffhanger escape from the parallel world, this run starts with our Olivia Dunham trapped over there, being brainwashed to believe she’s her doppelgänger, while that …
TV Review: ReBoot, season 3
TV #85 of 2021: ReBoot, season 3 An absolute delight, all the way through to that daft but earned Penzance recap number that closes everything out. This run starts right where the last one left off (although a year and a half had passed for viewers), and it continues the strong streak of serialized plot …
TV Review: Fringe, season 2
TV #82 of 2021: Fringe, season 2 This year drops the ball a few times in terms of maintaining the tension in its serialized plot — say hi to Meghan Markle, whose junior agent disappears after the second hour — but overall it continues the strong streak that developed late in the initial run. The …
TV Review: ReBoot, season 2
TV #81 of 2021: ReBoot, season 2 The first four episodes this season are about on par with the previous year: competent yet disposable pieces of 90s children’s entertainment, more notable for the technological graphics achievement of the time than for any appreciable complexity or storytelling ambitions. (And in the initial airing of the show, …
TV Review: Fringe, season 1
TV #76 of 2021: Fringe, season 1 This series is a little clunkier than I remember at the start, with lots of empty ominous talk about The Pattern (of strange events happening across the world but mostly in Boston that our new team has been created to investigate) that isn’t as inherently compelling as creator …
TV Review: ReBoot, season 1
TV #72 of 2021: ReBoot, season 1 I have a lot of fondness for this old cartoon, which premiered in 1994 as the world’s first all-CGI series (before the movie Toy Story helped popularize the technology). Set inside a computer where the digital heroes have to fend off viruses — plus the users playing games …
Movie Review: Star Wars (1977)
Movie #5 of 2021: Star Wars (1977) As expected, this sci-fi classic absolutely still holds up. The worldbuilding is naturalistic and immersive, the characters are compelling, and the stakes of the storyline make sense at every stage. The pacing is excellent throughout, up until arguably the final attack on the Death Star, which maybe drags …
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 