Watching as the current season gets spread out in order to try and have something for the coming weeks has been interesting, but it’s also disheartening – and entirely understandable – as planned spring finales are being adjusted to launch the next season in the fall. That’s going to make for some awkward finales for a few shows I’m sure. but in this time of the coronavirus, it’s the smallest of worries but something tangible that you can latch onto and work with amid the bigger worries. And sometimes that’s a good coping mechanism for many.
At the moment, we just finished our weekly look at the second season of Harley Quinn with its finale as well as working through Star Wars: The Clone Wars. We also did reviews of the finale of See as well as the finale for The Mandalorian and the very enjoyable Star Trek: Picard.
I didn’t start a lot of new material this past week as the exhaustion of quarantine kicked in at times and I had a few other things going on, such as working through some sitcoms and new episodes that came out there. But Friday saw the arrival of the second season of After Life on Netflix. I’m not a huge Ricky Gervais fan by any stretch but his UK work tends to come up with some interesting short-run projects that can be engaging. I really enjoyed the first season of this because it was a hard watch. A main character consumed by grief and lashing out who isn’t trying to find a way to get better may not exactly be compelling. But Gervais made it work with the oddball lot that was around his character and they, in their own way, helped him claw back to something. This season found him trying to do better by other people but also understanding that the refreshed him is the facade for the grief that’s still there, all-consuming. It’s a great way because it doesn’t give easy answers or tries to play everything for the best. And the final sequence alone is just heartbreaking to watch but felt so incredibly honest.
I’ve enjoyed a lot of incarnations of War of the Worlds over the years, including the TV series and I have a particular affection for the Tom Cruise movie as well. Each version of it represents something different from the time and fears of the day and I’ll always go back to both the radio play and the original movie as ways to examine that. So I was excited to see a new multilingual co-pro that hit earlier this year and was available on Epix during its free trial period. It’s one that moves glacially slow at times but I really enjoyed the larger look at things as it operated in both UK and France for character stories that will connect up. Unfortunately, I have to admit, I couldn’t make it past the second episode. Once the show shifted gears and had the first real alien attack that looks to have killed the majority of the population, watching the survivors move about the bodies while trying to understand what’s happening while the real world goes through the COVID-19 pandemic just left me way too unnerved. It’s definitely worth checking out but there are those couple of caveats.