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 were adjusted to launch the next season in the fall. That’s made 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.
Our weekly show reviews at the moment, going into the summer, is just of Harley Quinn with its second season. We wrapped up pieces for Star Wars: The Clone Wars, See, The Mandalorian, and the very enjoyable Star Trek: Picard during their broadcast/streaming runs.
After a really fun romp through Japan in the shorter fourth season, Queer Eye heads to Philadelphia for this season and it’s moving forward while sticking to what works. The main group remains the same and the ten episodes we get are pretty diverse in terms of who we’ve got. I’ve watched two of them so far, going a bit out of order, but the show continues to hit all the right emotional notes for me. There’s something that’s very welcome in seeing people just being heard, being helped, and simply guiding and helping them a little bit to the next phase of their lives in order to be better people and achieve the things that they want. It’s good uplifting material without a preachy approach to it.
There are a number of shows coming up over the summer as part of binging runs that I’m excited about but there’s a quiet period that’s hitting at the moment. One of those is the third season of Somebody Feed Phil. After taking in the episode about Marrakesh, we shifted gears to spending time in Chicago with him. While I prefer when it’s overseas in places and cultures that are ones I’m not familiar with, there is a delight in seeing things a bit more local and Chicago definitely has some great eats. That city and its food looks positively deadly to me though with all that it offers. But the bits about the architecture were great as well and just really made the city come alive.
I’ve only gotten to the first episode of this but I’m enjoying The Valhalla Murders pretty well so far. It’s Netflix’s first Icelandic co-production but I’ve seen a few series from there before so I’m used to their flavor of Nordic Noir already. The show is working with serial killings of some sort that don’t seem to have any real connection and naturally the fun of puzzling it out is there as you try to understand how it’s happening while the personal and work lives intermingle through it. Again, just one episode in, but it’s got some good locations, a solid cast, and some solid direction so far.
Having burned through the first two seasons quickly, we’ve slowed down a touch on the third season and then hit a night where we do four episodes in a row. We’re at the halfway point of the season and it’s interesting to see how well it feels like this has aged just in a few years since its original broadcast and with the knowledge that more elements of it are looking to make the transition to live-action. I really recommend getting into this if you’re a fan of The Mandalorian as it really does look like a lot of the pieces here are going to become the face of a post-Return of the Jedi universe now that the sequel trilogy is complete.
I’ll say it again, Maul has every single of the best lightsaber fights in the entire animated/live-action portions of the franchise.