David's Multimedia Blitz Reviews

I've been consuming a variety of media over the past few weeks. Here are assorted thoughts on them(potentially mild spoilers).

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

• Entertaining -- not mindblowing, but I didn't expect it to be.
• Hard to keep track of all the different beasts, which seemed to enter and exit the story at will.
• Speaking of, what was up with the other son of the newspaper magnate? That storyline seemed to get dropped, hard.
• I know that "scrappy investigator is pushed aside by superiors, keeps up her work, is vindicated in the end" is a classic storyline. And I know that the "vindicated in the end" part is supposed to heal all wounds. But was it just me, or was the President of the American wizarding community kind of an unredeemed bitch throughout?

Civilization VI

• Definitely some improvements to the classic formula.
• Still ends up feeling mighty repetitive; a lot of turns of just hitting "enter" and waiting for everyone else to go.
• There is something undeniably delightful about declaring a colonial war on England, though.

Westworld

• A very good show that thinks it's great. That's less of an insult than it seems--maybe if it didn't aspire to be great, it wouldn't even be very good.
• I keep on saying "The Dollhouse vibe is obvious, but there's also a definitive streak of Portal 2." This, I fear, vastly overestimates the number of people who watched Dollhouse (though you should!).
• I know that we're supposed to view Felix and (by the end) Ford as the good guys, but in the midst of our fuzzies let's not forget they may have set off an extinction-level event for humanity.

Shameless

• Best season of this show in awhile (which I continue to think is one of the best on television, period).
• The show has always been pretty explicit about Lip's natural gifts. But it has more subtly been consistent about Fiona having a real knack for business and sales as well. She makes some bad self-sabotaging decisions, of course, but it's not out-of-nowhere that she has real skills too.
• I'm going to miss Svetlana as an integral part of the cast.

Timeless

• Getting too formulaic.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

• Getting too convoluted.

Rayman Legends

• Awesome side-scrolling platformers never go out of style.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine

• Still the funniest show on television right now.
• Stephanie Beatriz could order me to kill a man and I'd probably do it if she smiled at me.

The Good Place

• Kristen Bell stars as a woman who was an asshole in life but accidentally makes it into "The Good Place" after death. I like to think of this as the direct sequel to House of Lies.
• D'Arcy Carden is a treasure as Janet. It even makes me forgive her name being "D'Arcy" (which would be bad enough if she was born with it, but no, she changed it from "Darcy". By all rights everyone should hate her).