The TV season started up more fully the last couple of weeks which meant a lot of familiar shows landed again. We’re now moving into a post-Crisis Arrowverse, a few shows are wrapping up and others are launching.
We’re keeping up on the latest on Harley Quinn and we’re planning weekly-ish looks Star Trek: Picard. We also did reviews of the finale of See as well as the finale for The Mandalorian.
This past week saw several finales hit my way, not all of them watched yet. Emergence wrapped up its first season and I’m neutral on whether I’ll stick around for a second. Evil wrapped up its first season as well and I definitely recommend taking the time to settle into this slow brew work as it’s surprisingly engaging. The end of Arrow arrived and while we did get new expanded backward looks for Oliver, I’m really glad that they didn’t try to bring him back to life after Crisis or engage in some otherworldly shenanigans in order to really make him involved directly. This episode brought back nearly everyone in some way, either through flashback or with Oliver fixing the timeline, and it definitely alters how Star City operates and exists. It’s a fascinating way to end the show because it doesn’t quite say “It was all a dream” but it does allow Oliver to do what he set out to do in this opening moments of the story – save the city and those that he loves that live in it. I’m going to miss this show.
This week also saw the end of The Good Place, which was a good but hard watch. I had skipped on the show during its first season because a show about the afterlife when I was in a very bad place emotionally wasn’t a smart thing to watch. I reconnected with it during the third season and while I’m very much back in a bad place, finishing out the show was essentially a must. It definitely plays well and I like the messages that it wants to send as there’s a good simple honest about it. The aftershow needed to be done better than it was but I get the sense that it was kind of rushed. I love seeing the camaraderie of a cast outside of the show itself and that really shines through here with them all. It’s a great ensemble that had a fantastic writing team combination that made each episode a delight. I hope to spend many Jeremy Bearamie’s rewatching this in the afterlife.
The usual sitcoms got hit up this week as well and I finished off the second season of Spaced, which was a bit anticlimactic but at least put Pegg and Wright on the road to movies more. This week also had some catch-up on the CW side with the latest Batwoman and Supergirl along with Riverdale and all of that made for some fun viewing. The new status quo on Supergirl definitely makes for some engaging changes and a chance to really shift the narrative as it goes forward.
And while I’m horrendously behind on it, I did get to start digging into the second season of Mars with my youngest. We watched the first with her sister but college is dominating her life so we opted to move forward on our own. I really enjoy seeing a largely realistic look at colonizing Mars and mixing it in with a number of people from various walks of life that would be involved in it. It’s got a great set design overall and manages its budget to tell an engaging enough story with some neat twists along the way.
