The 2013 Wrap-UP

It’s that time guys, time for my big, 2013 wrap up post! As usual I’m going to be talking about all media I consume in one big post since not only is that just easier for me but also because while some areas are easy to talk about (like anime) there are a lot of areas where it’s going to be a little, messy. But I’ll talk about that as I go along! First though a bit of housekeeping, as people have already noticed I’ve started using ads on the site, I’m trying to be more diligent about putting in referral links (should have some to Right Stuf soon, although sadly the reviews that get the most views are the ones which don’t have a physical release yet), and I’m going to change it up a bit more next year as well. When I started the site three years ago the format I chose, breaking everything up into their own sections, was a good idea since it made me consider multiple parts of the show and often made it easier to get going while writing. However I feel like I’ve grown past that point so starting January first I’m going to shift to a more free form style just like almost everyone else uses, and that will be for everything I review. Also, I feel like by doing this the infrequent little essays I write, which for the past year have just been going on my tumblr, will fit in better and I can post those here as well, just trying to catch up to the rest of the blogging community since I like what they’re doing and want to be part of it myself.

So, with that out of the way, here’s what my favorite things of 2013 were!

TV Review: The Day of the Doctor: The Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special

As long time readers of the blog probably already know, my feelings towards Doctor Who are mixed. At times I love it and at other times I grumble with my friends over what the show is doing and a lot of the news about the 50th had me grumbling. There were two ways they could have done this, one would have been a silly thing that was more about celebrating the show itself and the other was using the 50th as a chance to have a big story that would affect the entire show. Given the fact that the pre-revivial Doctors were saying that they hadn't been invited, and the news that they were suddenly adding in another Doctor, which really messed with the "mythology" of the show, it was clear they were taking the second route and I was getting rather nervous about it. I felt a bit reassured when they put out the Night of the Doctor short just before, and interested to see that in doing so they seem to have canonized a lot of the Big Finnish radio dramas (which I still really need to get around to listening to), but I was still a bit nervous going into the simulcast, who knew what was going to happen!

The Day of the Doctor (Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special)

Summary: The Doctor has just been summoned to UNIT (with Clara in tow, having just picked her up for another round of adventures) where he runs into a series of curious things, a painting of Gallifrey as it burned, pictures with their frames broken from the inside and missing figures, and a time vortex which seems to lead him to a past self we never knew of who is just about the destroy his home planet. Wait huh?!

The Good: I really did like about 2/3rds of this story (the part I liked the least was of course the ending so I can't really talk about it here) and the story was a far better one than I expected. The story was a large enough one that it made sense that there were multiple Doctors involved and it was fun to see Smith and Tennant bounce off of each other (and the show did a good job at keeping the side characters involved but without dominating the story and detracting from that interaction, I feel like the writers have finally hit their groove for how to balance Clara into the story and I like that). Really that's what made it for me, the UNIT side of the story would have been a pretty good episode if it had been just a regular tv one and I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's just the other half of the story, dealing with the impending blowing-up of Gallifrey, that I had some problems with.

The Bad: I'm still confused as to what the purpose of the UNIT lab assistant wearing a homemade version of the Doctor's scarf was, I've seen people say she was supposed to be a stand in for the fans (and the show has done that several times since the revival) but I'm still rather confused about it. Minor quibbles aside, it's been two weeks and I'm still a bit torn on how I feel about how the story ended. On the one hand it does neatly tie up a problem that the story has had since the revival and gives the Doctor new purpose again, on the other hand I feel like it cheapens some of the emotions the Doctor went through and considering that the current doctor is going to regenerate in his next appearance, well, I feel like that quest just won't have the same emotional punch as it could have been. So I am left with the same feeling I have had after many an episode of the show, while I really did like parts of it I can't help but feel like they tried to write a "cleverer" story than needed and in the process made it weaker instead. I know that a lot of people liked John Hurt in this as the War Doctor but honestly I never warmed up to him, I can see they were trying to imitate the dynamic that The Three Doctors had but for one it just didn't work since we didn't have that connection to him (I saw a lot of people saying that you could tell the lines were written for Nine and, while I didn't feel that way when watching the show itself, I have to admit it would have worked so much better if he had consented to come back*). Two, you have to be a broken person to truly believe that eliminating every man, woman, and child of two races is the best solution to an unwinnable problem and Hurt didn't seem that broken to me, I just had a hard time believing that this character was supposed to have already been pushed to that point which made a lot of the conflict feel rather flat. Finally, I also feel like the plotline with Queen Elizabeth I was just odd, yes I know it culminates in a call-back (multiple ones actually!) but her acting just felt odd to me the entire time.

The Production Values: I guess the BBC realized they needed to give the show a larger budget than usual considering how many sets the characters go through. I thought everything looked fine, the zygons didn't quite work but having seen some 3rd/4th Doctor stories with some terrible alien costumes I'm just thankful it wasn't worse. Honestly I don't have much to say on it other than the fact that I really did like how the story had so many different sets and all the visual bonuses in them, that should make rewatching it with friends sometime rather fun.


Despite how lengthy that bad section is I did enjoy this way more than I expected and even if my expectations hadn't been super low I feel like I would have said the same thing. In many ways the ending is fitting but if it had just been a bit different, if it had been Nine's struggle, a character whom we've already seen deal with the fall-out, and knowing that Eleven would be the one to deal with a different kind of fall-out from the event, then I think I would have been much more satisfied with the event.

For those who have already seen the series and need more to watch, or haven't and want more to watch anyway, in addition to the short mentioned earlier I recommend The Five(ish) Doctors for people who are fans of the original show (in short, the fifth, sixth, and seventh Doctor's all team up to try and appear on the finale with a heck of a lot of in jokes and shout-outs for classic fans) and I still need to see An Adventure in Time and Space, a documentary on making the show, myself. Sadly it looks like neither of those are legally available online at the moment but since Netflix currently has all of NuWho streaming I bet both of them will pop up in the next few months or so, just when we need something to tide us over between the Christmas Special and whenever the next season starts!




*and from what I've read I understand why he didn't, sounds like the tensions were high when he had to leave and it has to do with the particular set of classism that still exists in Britain and not quite anywhere else.

TV Series Review: Dance Academy (season two)

Today I'm continuing with my adventures in Australian tv with the second season of Dance Academy. I suppose the real reason I watched this show is a lot like why I kept watching Heros of Cosplay, I love watching dance and wanted to be lazy and not have to search all over youtube or the rest of Netflix for it. Thankfully (practically) no matter what this show does it will always be better than HoC, although that doesn't mean that I liked what it did all the time....

Dance Academy (season two)

Summary: Tara and her friends return to the National Dance Academy for a second year of ballet! Or so they'd like to say, Kat failed last year, Sammy's dad is refusing to pay his tuition so he's working at a part time job to make ends meet, and second year also has some interesting additions that are sure to shake up the group's dynamics even more.

The Good: I really liked the character arc Abigail went through, it started in the previous season and here we can see her continuing to both pull herself out and be pushed out of the destructive tendencies  (both to herself and those around her) that she had grown into to be a more stable and better person and I really liked that progression. I only really noticed it at the end of the season, when the show slightly contrasts her and new character Grace, but I think the show has done a good job at showing how she's grown a lot yet still isn't finished growing by a long shot. The other characters have grown some, new character Ben goes through a lot of character development in just the first few episodes (I think to make sure the audience didn't just start hating him) but other than that the other characters feel like they've grown far less. There is one more season to the show (I asked around and some viewers confirmed that yes that was the end, no going on forever shows here!) so I'm hoping that the writers do have good ideas for how to end the show and have the characters grow even more by the end but I won't be holding my breath for it. I will say however that I like how the overall story is structured here, the season isn't tied around one large thematic idea or even one large plot point (although the dance competition does play a huge role) yet everything manages to feel cohesive. Each episode manages to feel like just an extension of the previous and it's a nice example of how to tie together a show by being mostly character driven yet when Plot pops up it doesn't change the tone of the story at all.

The Bad: My biggest problem with the show happened very close to the end and I'm going to talk about just in a footnote which will have some spoilers because it's One Of Those Moments and I need to articulate just why I thought it was a terrible choice*. That was my biggest problem with the season, although I was less than fond of all of the romantic subplots in the show. Everyone was so confused on what they actually wanted in a relationship, with whom they wanted in a relationship, and all of those different things that they stopped feeling like "teenagers who are confused by life and trying to work it all out" and more like "characters who keep changing their lives just to keep everything dramatic." I'm also on the fence about new character Grace, on the one hand I can see what the writers were going for with her character (horribly self-destructive and emotionally manipulative towards everyone she meets, both because of her life and likely would have been that way even if she had been happier) but I think it was how the characters continuously trust her (including Tara, guys speaking as someone who was one of the more "innocent" high schoolers out there it's hard to take parts of Tara's character seriously) that broke my suspension of disbelief. I also had some trouble with another new character, pro dancer/teacher Saskia, but both of those characters apparently will be returning in the third season so I'll reserve my final judgement of them until I can see where the show decides to end. 

The Production Values: Once again everything continues to look fine with no weird audio or video snafus. There was one point where Abagail was singing and I wondered if she was lip-syncing with another actress doing the singing (or just lip-syncing to a recording of herself, I would understand why the production team might choose to do either of those two things but there was something that was just a hair off in that scene which made me wonder) and it was a bit off-putting once or twice later in the season when the show used some music, which previously had only been used by a particular dancer for their piece and never anywhere else, in a different kind of scene and it gave me an odd feeling of dissonance. It was as if I was watching a movie and they played the theme for character A when character B was having an important moment, except this was the music character A had a dance choreographed to so you wondered why everyone else even had a copy of it. All in all those are nitpicks however, just about everything was perfectly fine.


So, for that ending I'm only giving this 2.5 out of 5 stars for being overly dramatic in way too many cases for me yet when the drama wasn't as large scale I did really enjoy the show and found myself watching episode after episode the way someone grabs a bag of skittles and then discovers they already ate the entire thing. I know that the third season just finished up in Australia and when it pops up on American netflix I will make sure to watch and get my review up as quickly as I can!



*right, prepared for major, end of series spoilers? Good, the short version is that a character is killed off less than five episodes before the end of the show. This character hadn't been sick previously or raised any of what some fandoms call "death flags", they were simply run over by a car off-screen and if it wasn't for the fact that they had the character film some more scenes with them (when the others were remembering them while mourning) I would wonder if the actor had actually died in real life. My problem with this is two-fold, one, this isn't the kind of show where people suddenly die. Yes people are killed in car accidents in real life, and in other ways, but we never see shots that focus on a how busy the streets are or how dangerous the characters lives are and this is fiction, not real life, you must foreshadow these things to make it seem as if the writer has control of their own story. Yes there were one or two references to death earlier in the season but only one of those involved the character who died, I wouldn't call it foreshadowing, so instead of feeling a great loss I just felt like the writers had lost it. Secondly, the show already had a huge number of dramatic plots running at that point. The competition, the Grace vs Tara rivalry that was bringing back stuff from the Tara vs Saskia conflict from earlier in the season. The tension with the school play which was also tied into the tangled romantic plots and, I thought, was supposed to be an interesting contrast with the musical that Abigail had become involved with. There was so much to work with that they could have easily filled up the rest of the season with it. I can understand them not wanting to have the season end exactly the way the previous season had (the dreaded trilogy syndrome) but I still don't think this was the right way to do it. Finally, and this is truly spoilerly territory, it does fall into this particular death trope which I really wish would, pun not intended, die already.

TV Series Review: Ashes to Ashes (season two)

There's not much to say here that I didn't say in my review for the first season, if you haven't seen the first season of Ashes to Ashes don't start here, you'll be lost, and at this point if you haven't already seen Life on Mars you can still follow it but I still recommend watching LoM first.


Ashes to Ashes (season two)

Summary: It's now 1982 and Alex Drake is still stuck in London a police officer more than 20 years before she should be on the force. But she's not the only one with problems, it's become apparent to her and Gene Hunt that the force is practically rotting from the inside out with corruption and the more they try to just find the root of the problem the larger the problems become.

The Good: I'm not sure if the show found it's pace or if I did but I liked this more than the first season and about as much as I liked Life on Mars which is what I was hoping for. It helped that Alex isn't constantly chomping at the bit to get home, she's started settling in which is pointed out repeatedly to the viewer, and some of the elements in this season change even more what Alex and the viewers knew about this strange alternate (or past) world from LoM. That's interesting, the mere existence of A2A shows that not everything was revealed in LoM and I suspect that's why I've seen some places say that it's hard to understand the last season if you haven't seen both, bring it on is all I have to say!

The Bad: I can only hope the story has a good explanation for what was going on at the very end since otherwise that last scene could completely wreck the setting, although I think it's hinted at what's going on a bit with one of the new characters in this season. And I was a bit frustrated by the betrayal by another, long running character this season, since we've now seen them for multiple seasons it just felt completely out of character (even taking into account that there has been a several year time difference between LoM and A2A). That detail I think I'll just have to accept and move on but hopefully the show will be able to wrap up all it's other details satisfactorily.

The Production Values: It only took me a full season but I started recognizing some of the music, wahoo! Other than that, like before I don't have much to say, I barely know anything about the 80s so I can't comment on how accurate or no the settings, props, and clothing is, although in this show I'm always surprised at just how many songs they manage to find that are both apparently period accurate and reflect what is going on in the show.


So for this season I don't have much to say, it's the middle of a trilogy and often it's hard to find something to say about those stories no matter what medium they're in. But I'm giving this season a 3.5 out of 5 and can only hope that the ending doesn't let me down!

TV Series Review: Dance Academy (season one)

As odd as it sounds, not all recommendations I see in the YA community are for books, plenty of authors and fans/reviewers love to talk about what else they love and that includes movies, tv shows, and even music at times. A lot of times my tastes don't quite match up as far as tv series go, a bit too much romance for me and there is that terrible problem that half the time by the time I get around to trying a tv series is has gone from good to ugh which always brings up the point if it's still worth watching. As far as I know this series is still worth watching, the show started it's third season in Australia earlier in the year (and I'm fairly sure it will be the last, otherwise the characters won't be in school anymore and they'll have to change the title) and since I can't seem to read anymore of Swan legally I thought that maybe this would give me the ballet fix I wanted.


Dance Academy (season one)

Summary: Tara Webster is from the Australian countryside and remarks that in her tiny town everyone is known for something and for her it's for doing ballet. She applies and successfully gets into the National Academy of Dance in Sydney and begins her first of hopefully three years preparing to enter the world as a professional ballet dancer.

The Good: I went in hoping that the show would have regular ballet scenes and there is in fact at least a short dance scene in every episode! Sometimes it's hip-hop not ballet but it turns out that hip-hop dancing is rather cool so I was completely fine with that. I'm obviously no expert in either styles of dancing but I thought a lot of that looked rather well done , I could believe (outside of the fact that Tara is somehow both the best and worst student in her class it seems) that these were actual dancers in training and it was a nice change from all the series I've seen which are set in a school yet ignore the school aspect as much as they can.

The Bad: On the one hand I can't knock all of DA's more melodramatic moments, after all Swan shared some of the same ones (a main character who has great talent but terrible fundamentals yet still attracts the attention of the teachers in a good way) but there was way more romantic drama than I bargined on. There are six main characters, three girls and three guys, and in 26 episodes there are about eight and a half hook-ups between them and other side characters (also, they apparently have no idea that bisexuality exists which really threw me, I'll note that all of the hook-ups were straight for the moment). That's just a lot of romance and since a lot of it is short lived, everyone in the relationship is dumb because they're a teenager, romance I didn't find a lot of it very compelling either and hope (probably in vain considering where this recommendation comes from) that it gets toned down a bit next season.

The Production Values: As mentioned earlier, I thought all the dance scenes looked really great with good actors and good choreography which was the biggest draw for me. Not much else stood out to me however, nothing about the setting or the music (actually I believe the show uses the same music for both the opening and closing credits) really grabbed me but in a modern day, realistic fiction setting that's to be expected, there is a limit to how creative you can get with those things.


So in the end I give this season 3 out of 5 stars for nice dancing but entirely too much romance. I'll be checking out the second season soon, they're both streaming on Netflix and we'll see what I think of that I guess!

TV Series Review: Veronica Mars (season three)

So I have finally gotten through all three existing seasons of Veronica Mars, huzzah! By this point there's not much I can say to introduce it (either than "this is a show, if you haven't seen the first two seasons then don't watch this one because that would be just silly) so let's get straight to the review!


Veronica Mars (season three)

Summary: Veronica has survived high school, made it to college, aaaaand she's still in Neptune, which by this point has so much crime going on that the entire town should be on the FBI's watch list. She and her friends stumble their way through college trying both to pass class and to get involved in as few criminal schemes as they can along the way. 

The Good: This season eschews the previous format of having one long, underlying mystery stacked underneath a lot of small mysteries and I actually like this format a bit more. The original format worked well in the first season but in the second season it was starting to work less well, here we manage to have a nice balance of complex mysteries without being so complex that it strains credibility that someone could have committed such a crime that only Veronica was able to solve. And I'm not going to deny that I still enjoy a lot of this series despite it's problems, the problems are often thornier than they first appear and Veronica's snarking makes everything more fun, too bad it couldn't solve all the problems this season had.

The Bad: I had a lot of problems with both this season and with the series as a whole so let's start with this particular season's problems first. To start with, back in the second season Veronica was on Heart College's campus for a couple of days to look around and solved a plot about a serial rapist which I felt like was handled okay. For some unknown reason the writers decided to try and then expand on this plot, as if this was round two, and it was terrible. The college reacts totally differently this time around (which doesn't make much sense), the overall resolution was a bit murky so I'm not exactly sure what happened (I think two things actually did and the show didn't make clear which events belonged to which event), and straw feminists. To elaborate, there are a bunch of really gung-ho, "men suck!" "feminists" in the story and I always abhor this portrayal of feminists, they're such a small minority of the group and that's not what feminism really is, it's about achieving equality for both sexes with the name deriving from the fact that it's almost always the women who have the shorter end of the stick in gender related instances. So any story that involves that particular trope is going to irk me and the way it just dragged on and on here didn't help, neither did the fact that Parker (a character who was introduced during this arc) changed so much between just a few episodes that at first I thought she was a different character altogether, now I just think that the writers completely rewrote her and hoped no one would notice. I'm still on the fence about how I feel about Veronica's love life, the story decided to change everything up rather close to the end and I wish they had started that a bit sooner, it feels odd to see the beginning of a new relationship and not the rest. Speaking of seeing one part of the story but not the rest, I'm still confused on what was going on in the first episode, I know it had something to do with a plot line that was started in the last five minutes of the second season and it was never explained well enough. I don't know if they knew while writing the later episodes here that the third season would be the series last or not, if not that would explain why the series ended on one of it's traditional cliff-hanger season endings but that doesn't make me feel any happier about it. Finally, related to that finale, after three seasons (meaning three years in universe) I'm frustrated with Veronica's overall lack of character development and to some extent the lack of development in some of the extended cast as well. We're still seeing Veronica get into an amazing amount of crap (the running theme throughout the entire show seems to be that the most dangerous situations often don't start out that way), heck at this point I'm wondering why she hasn't taken some martial arts considering how often she gets into physical struggles/fights, and she doesn't seem to have made any progress on her numerous trust issues despite the fact that she's had enough experiences over these three years for her to have made a start. That's part of the reason I'm frustrated that the romance that started late in the season started so late, that one had a chance of really giving her a reason to trust and change which is something she desperately needs by now. I was okay in the first two seasons of Veronica still being this prickly, more of a loner type of character but by this point there should have been a change and I'm frustrated it didn't happen.

Production Values: Nothing really to see here, nothing looked off setting, clothing, or lighting wise and there was no use of CGI as far as I can remember so I don't have anything to say. Well, I do prefer the original version of the song used in the opening credits versus the remix they used this time around but it's not like that was terrible, just not to my taste.



So, in the end I give this season a 2.5 out of 5, weaker than the other seasons and the fact that it's the last, and therefore highlights that none of the characters got to go through the full character arc they needed (except perhaps Wallace who was rounded out nicely in the second season). Heck, from what I've heard the fourth season would have involved a timeskip where Veronica now work for the FBI and infiltrates schools which sounds like a terrible idea to me so I am rather glad that story didn't get made (and probably wouldn't have helped with either the cliffhangers this season ended on or with that pesky character arc she needs to advance in). So, say you still haven't seen any of this series and are now a bit scared, should you watch Veronica Mars at all? I say yes, the first season really was great and if you finish that and are raring to go for more great, watch the second season and then read a summary of the third season unless, like me, your a completionist who just has to watch that. And if you watch the first season and feel satisfied with it awesome, just go to wikipedia to read how Lily's murder case finishes and you're good to go. Do I plan on seeing the movie? Sure, I didn't pledge to the kickstarter (for a couple of different reasons) but unless everyone says the movie is terrible I plan on seeing it (and might still see it anyway, I did just watch this third season after all) and I'm crossing my fingers that it's great.

TV Series Review: Doctor Who: An Unearthly Child

As I said previously, I really want to watch even more Classic Doctor Who this summer and, presented with a small selection at the local college library and no recommendations I panicked and decided that I might as well start with the beginning. In light of the fact that this episode is just a few months under 50 years old I'm going to cut out the production values part of the review since, well, it's a 50 year old tv episode, it's not going to look fantastic (and I might do this for other first doctor episodes since I rather doubt I'll have more to say on them). With that in mind, onto the review and I'm going to try and make sure that all of my reviews go back to their proper days this week, sorry about all of that everyone!


Doctor Who: An Unearthly Child

Summary: Ian and Barbara are school teachers who both are having trouble with one of their more brilliant students, a young teen named Susan who seems to both know more about their subjects than they do and also is bored by a lot of parts of them. Under the pretense of being concerned about her sudden bad grades the two attempt to find out where she lives with her grandfather but all they find at the address is an old junkyard with, well, junk and a police box inside. As any sci-fi fan knows this is not a police box however and soon all four of them find themselves in 10,000 BCE and caught up in a fight between cavemen.  

The Good: As I believe I've said before, I like it when the Doctor is written as a slightly darker, or even just grumpier, character and the Doctor here is a quite grumpy old man. It's a little hard to reconcile that with the man who stole a TARDIS to explore the universe, although considering that element must have been added in earlier I'll live (heck, here Susan says that she came up with tardis as a nickname which is completely different from what the rest of the series implies, again especially considering these are details I can let them slide here). Funny enough I think I liked the way this serial introduced the companions and the Doctor more than how a lot of the Nu Who companions were introduced, probably because I like the "ordinary people thrown into adventure" trope quite a bit (although I do feel like that scene dragged a bit, although that was certainly just to fill time within the episode) and after seeing Nu Who repeat the "person tries to track down the Doctor" trick a few times it's gotten a bit dull. Plus Ian and Barbara clicked for me almost immediately, I hope they stay around for a while since I want more adventures with them in it, well, I would like one detail to go away though. 

The Bad: There was a lot of screaming in this serial, like enough to fill a slasher horror film. It was a bit jarring since in The Aztecs there was no screaming at all and I've got the second and third serials checked out to watch next so I'll be interested to see if Barbara and Susan (but mostly Barbara) gradually stop screaming or if that was written out early on for being annoying (it also felt a little incongruent with Barbara's character earlier in the episode and with the fact that Susan is an adventurer, I really hope that all the screaming vanishes sooner rather than later). 


I feel like someone told me before that this serial wasn't really worth watching, or maybe that it wasn't that good, and while it certainly wasn't the best there's no reason I'd advise people to not watch it. It drags a bit and the characterization is a bit off but considering that later Doctor Who serials do refer back to it, and that in general it's good to know where something comes from, but it's hardly a bad serial and with the break until November it's not as if fans don't have the time to watch the older stuff.

TV Series Review: Doctor Who 7.2

And to wrap up the live action shows I was following live (as opposed to hearing about them years later and then scouring my libraries/Netflix for them), the latest half season of Doctor Who. Man, guys I hope we go back to full seasons soon, having only six or seven at a time just doesn't feel right, and since I see people talking about the 50th anniversary special in November but not about more episodes I guess we probably won't even get anymore this year beyond that and the Christmas special. 


Doctor Who

Summary: Still grieving after losing Amy and Rory and also Clara in the Christmas special the Doctor has become curious, why did he meet what seems to have been the same girl twice even though that should be impossible? So he tracks her down again, this time to contemporary England where the similarities between her and the others persist and she falls into adventuring with him while he tries to puzzle out this impossible girl. 

The Good: I was a fan who was already okay with Clara when the season started but I didn't have really high hopes for her. But lo and behold I ended up really liking her, more than I liked Amy at points but honestly Amy was never one of my favorite companions. And I seem to be in the minority here but I really liked all the individual episodes too, some of them had weird premises but everything actually managed to work for me. Best of all we got to really see the range of Matt Smith's acting this season, I find it hard whenever I watch something with an unfamiliar actor in it to always tell how much they're acting (especially since from the video interviews it seems like Matt is bit of a silly guy anyway) but here he had a great chance to show his range and now I want to see him play all kinds of different characters in future stories just to see what else he can really do.

The Bad: I think I've figured out why even though I like more of the individual episodes of Moffat's tenure more than RTD (or at least, with those episodes I tend to not remember half of them and when they come up in conversations they feel like something I fever-dreamed) but not the whole show, I just don't like how he structures overall story arcs. It's a bit frustrating how every time the companions are super-special-important people (which RTD didn't do as much, you could argue he did something similar with Donna in Turn Left but more or less Rose/Martha/Donna became special through their travels, Amy/Rory/Clara were already special because they were it feels like) and part of me always goes "how do you expect me to believe that this character is insanely special when we've only had a season or half a season to foreshadow that?" even if I know (logically) that few shows are even written out far enough in advance that they could sprinkle these clues to my satisfaction. And they did actually make an attempt to retcon part of Clara which I did like (although they revealed that at the completely wrong point of the episode, it just completely upset the feel to have the reveal at the very beginning but not get to the moment of the reveal until 3/4ths of the way through) but in any case, can we have some more characters who become awesome and amazing because of what they go through, not characters who start as mere plot devices to ignite a story and only later begin to feel real?

The Production Values: Gonna try renaming this section, in any case, this season looked pretty good, for once I have no complaints about how anything looked! Sure there were plenty of scenes where the effects weren't movie standard quality but nothing looked so off that I was drawn out of the show visual wise or sound wise, I'm a happy fan here!


Sooooo, I guess I'll give this a 3 or 3.5 out of 5 stars and again, in a bit of an unpopular opinion, I'm not looking forward to November for reasons that come up in the last few minutes of the last episode so it's too spoilerly to state. It shouldn't take most fans long to piece together what's going on but if you aren't sure talk to me and I can fill in some details that I read prior to that episode airing. In any case, now that there's no new Doctor Who for a while I'm going to try and watch some more Classic Who so if anyone has any suggestions for what serials to watch leave them in the comments/shoot them to me on twitter. Ideally I want to start with the First Doctor and work my way forwards but I'll take any suggestions people give me!

TV Series Review: Elementary

I have to admit, I'm really curious what must have been in the water a few years back when writers suddenly started going "you know what we haven't had in a while? SHERLOCK HOLMES STORIES, we should make some!" I suspect that stuff like this is actually part of a cycle, which would also explain weird coincidences like having multiple films in one year based on a certain fairy tale that hasn't been on the silver screen in a number of years, although that didn't make me any less leary when it was announced that there was going to be another tv show based off of Sherlock Holmes, set in the US, and they were making Watson female ("oh great, romance ahoooooy!"). I did change my feelings a tiny bit when I heard that an Asian-American actress had been cast as Joan Watson, the fact that a show was willing to give a non-white actor a leading role gave me some hope that they actually knew what they were doing, and then the first episode leaked and tumblr adored it. Well, not some of the Sherlock fans, but a lot of people did and that sealed the deal, I was going to give this a chance after all and pray that it turned out amazing.


Elementary

Summary: Joan Watson is a sober companion in NYC who helps recovering addicts transistion back into everyday life and her latest client is a British man who is recovering from a heroin addiction, Sherlock Holmes. He's less than thrilled about having a sober companion especially since he's already come up with his own plan for how to transition back into everyday life and stay focused, by working as a consulting detective for the NYPD which means that Joan needs to tag along and in the process discovers that she has a talent for noticing the details and fitting them into the larger puzzle as well.

The Good: Well to cut to the chase, I loved this show. It completely avoided the biggest thing I was worried about, changing Watson to a woman in order to have a romance with Holmes, entirely and instead we got a really good series with a mixed gender leading couple that weren't a couple at all, I liked that! Plus it had a fairy diverse cast of returning characters AND even though things such as prostitution came up several times none of the characters ever made "prostitution is WRONG" comments, the characters just dealt with the cases making it one of the least problematic things I've seen in a long time. The show also managed to have a small overarching story that set everything in motion and ended the story but at the heart of the story it was about Sherlock and Joan and how the two of them grow which was pretty amazing. This is one of the most human versions of Sherlock I've seen, even if he makes a lot of misteps by the end he's apologizing when he realizes, or has it pointed out to him, what he's done wrong and from the first episode Joan is not afraid to call him out on it. Also, I think this is the first time I've seen a Sherlock Holmes story where Watson goes beyond being the audience's point of view character and rises to become a detective themselves, something that amazes me because it's so obvious in retrospect. It was a rather pleasant surprise to see that this series wasn't just about Sherlock getting over his addiction and becoming a better person at the same time but that it was also about Joan moving farther away from her own past and finding something she really took pleasure in.

The Bad: I am a little worried about what the series will do next, if it had ended her I think it would have had a perfectly fine ending and as such I wonder how they'll make the characters continue to change. I saw a snippet of an interview, I think with Lucy Lui (Joan) who said that they were trying/hoping to do more multi-parters in the second season which would be a great idea but I'm also worried that now that the show has proven to be successful more people will try to meddle with it (since I'm told that's what happens with successful shows, everyone wants a finger in the pie and then too many cooks ruin a good stew after all). But, even after being burned by Once Upon A Time's second season I'm going to remain optimistic that the show will continue to be as good and won't simply cover the same ideas over again.

The Audio/Visuals: This being a series that is a procedural crime drama in current day NYC means that there wasn't a lot that could go wrong with the look or sound of this show so I had no problems there. Although again, the show is so contemporary that as long as nothing looked like something I could never, ever theoretically see in the US I wasn't going to have a problem and nothing came even close to that.


So, giving this 4 out of 5 stars and heck yes I'm watching the second season. Unfortunately it's only sort of streaming online, much like certain deals on hulu, CBS only streams the last four episodes (to air) on their site (and none on hulu at all) so at this point I would recommend that people sit tight and hope that it shows up on Netflix soon. Heck, as soon as it does I am shoving several people I know to that page and having them watch it immediately, fingers crossed that this happens sooner rather than later.

TV Series Review: Once Upon A Time (seasons 2)

While I've grown used to having 3/4ths of my anime ending in the same week I was a bit thrown when I realized that all three of the regular, American/British live action shows I was watching all ended the same week so bear with me for a few weeks guys as I sort them out. So, as per my usual strategy, first up is the first to end which was the second season of Once Upon A Time which I was super pumped up for when it started. The first season started weak but got better and ended really strongly and I was pretty curious to see where it was going next which are the best feelings to have when going into a new show/new seasons of a show. Also, something that seems to be happening more and more over here, I'll try to keep the bulk of the review as spoiler free as possible but if I really need to talk about something spoilerly in detail I'll do so in a footnote so read those at your own risk.



Once Upon A Time

Summary: Continuing from where the first season left off, Storybrooke is a little town in Maine entirely populated by fairy tale characters when their land was cursed and they were flung to Earth. For 28 long years nothing changed and they remembered nothing, until Emma, the daughter of the king and queen and the promised savior, returned and somehow lifted the curse. But the characters are confused why they are still in Maine and even though they have their memories back there are still dangers lurking around.

The Good: The show was able to flesh out a few characters which it didn't have a chance to in the first season and I liked that, rounder characters are always preferable to flat ones. And it was nice to see just how the Enchanted Forest has fared over the years, that wasn't something I expected to see nor was it something I especially wanted to see but it cleared up a few questions before I even had them which is a good thing. Oh and the show cleared up a lot of things about Henry's father, although it really had to work to make some things line up, but when it's all said and done I'm actually okay with what they came up with. Honestly it's a little hard for me to be specific for what I liked this season not because it's spoilerly but because most of this happened fairly early on in the run which was back in October. I know there are reasons for why American tv shows have such weird breaks but man it makes it harder to remember specific details when everything is all said and done. 

The Bad: Here's the non-spoilerely version, I disliked Regina's character arc*. In fact, I disliked an awful lot of things about this season. I disliked the fact that it seems like the writers are prolonging the character's stay in Maine (I'm guessing now that if the cast was to ever get back to their original world for good then the story would be over) with what feel like really contrived reasons. I like that the side cast has gotten a bit more fleshed out, I don't like how the core cast is left alone for episodes at a time, I liked this show because I liked the growing dynamic between Emma and Regina, don't cut that out! Also, guys there's a limit to how much backstory any individual character can have. Yes a lot of them have lived grand and exciting lives but you can't expect me to buy that they spent all their time having adventures of sort which have a clear influence on who they are now, somehow that breaks my suspension of disbelief even faster than the CGI does. Oh and they seemed to be trying to introduce some sort of Earth based, anti-magic agency in the last few episodes which came out of nowhere and was so sloppy I wasn't even sure that's what they meant until I talked with a few friends and found that they had come to the same conclusion I did.

The Audio/Visuals: I'm of two minds here. On the one hand, the wardrobe/costuming on this show is fantastic and I love a lot of what they do. On the other hand, it seems like they spent the show's entire budget on costumes and had to settle for less than polished CGI. I know that in this day and age, and considering that there have been fantasy movies with terrific special effects lately, but when it looks like you green-screened the actors in front of a fairly simple background for no reason then I'm going to get exasperated.


So I'm giving this just 2.5 out of 5 stars and I'm jumping ship now since, if the last few minutes meant what I think they did, we're about to get wibby-wobbly timey-wimey and that reminded me that this shares several important staff with Lost which is a phrase that fills me with trepidation. I do have a number of friends who plan on still watching the show so if they say that it fixes the problems I had then great, I'll come back. Until then however I'm going to spend my time watching tv shows that I'll hopefully enjoy more.


*and now for the spoilerly version, while I was initially hesitant to see her try and become good, considering how evil she's been, the idea grew on me and I felt like as soon as I started liking it the writers dropped that idea and instead had her revert back to her evil ways. I maintain that it was illogical for her to go and help her mother, considering how much pain her mother had caused for her and what she had done to Cora as retaliation, and just could not get behind that mini-arc. Finally, despite the fact that Regina hadn't changed by the end of the series, and had in some ways become worse since she showed that she couldn't really change, the writers still had her pull the line "I know I'm bad but I really tried to change" which had me wanting to flip tables into walls, when you're that inconsistent about character development trying to evoke sympathy for it seems like the dumbest thing you can do. 

TV Series Review: Veronica Mars (season two)

Through some careful planning I managed to watch the entire second season of Veronica Mars courtesy of the college library I used this past summer for it, although sadly my library has changed their website around so I don't think I can use the inter-library loan system to check out the final season now instead of waiting until May or so. It would just be too easy if I could watch shows that have been out for years and years over a streaming service right?


Veronica Mars Season Two

Summary: It's the beginning of Veronica's senior year and after all of the crazy events of the past year she's put her private work aside. Well, for the time, in a town like Neptune there is always something going on, and usually multiple somethings, so it's only a matter of time before she's back and digging into the seedy underbelly of this messed up town and discovering things that shouldn't even be there.

The Good: More character development for the returning cast which is always a nice thing, although I do feel like Veronica's character arc was rather similar to the one in the first season. Logan, Wallace, and Jackie go through the most but even the smaller characters get a little more fleshed out.  This season was a lot like the first season so this time around it was the details that I appreciated more, like how the show never shames any of it's (teenaged) characters for having sex and never victim blames any of the characters who were raped (although, in browsing the tvtropes page, I'm afraid that one might change next season, crud). And overall I found this season as interesting and engaging as the first season and it even made me realize stuff about my own high school years that I hadn't thought about before. 

The Bad: So at the end of the first season I was so confused if my disc was missing an episode or not that I went to wikipedia and accidentally spoiled myself on the conclusion of the Lily Kane murder trial and I thought "well, at least that won't take too long right?" Nope, it takes them until the end of this season as well to wrap it up and frankly while trials can take a long time in real life they really should've made that one move more speedily. The show also didn't feel quite as tight by the end, looking back on it it had even more large, over-arching plots than the first season did and, even though the show does a pretty good job getting me to suspend my disbelief 90% of the time, some things just got too contrived (one of those things was executive meddling however I've learned) or didn't get addressed as much as it should've. Also, something that's almost a quibble but not quite, it did bug me that the only other girl to appear in the main credits/on the box (Jackie) was someone who spent the first half of the show being an ass and whose personality was almost exclusively defined by her romantic relationship to Wallace (and it sounds like she doesn't come back for the third season, great). She does get much better by the end but I do wish this show had more female characters, it breaks the Bechdal test easily    

The Audio: Nothing really to speak of here, the show keeps the opening and ending themes from the first season, Veronica still has some voice overs and none of the background music really stood out to me so I don't think they added anything to the soundtrack either. Next!

The Visuals: Well, to be honest, there isn't really anything to comment on here. The show  didn't have all the flashbacks/encounters with Lily and they didn't try any tricky camera work or strange filters. The show doesn't really need it now that the supernatural element is gone so as long as everything looks consistent.


Thinking about it I don't think I liked this season quite as much as the first season but I still really enjoyed it, although I'm bracing for disappointment with the third season since I heard that not everything was answered by the end there.

TV Series Review: Doctor Who 7A

Geeze, is it just me or are they making anime shorter these days? ....wait this is a regular tv show not anime, whaddya mean they're making these seasons shorter too? It feels like season seven had barely began before it was over and there's a two month gap until the Christmas special and I don't know when the second half of the season starts after that. So after two years of this kind of pacing I can say quite certainly, no I don't like this half season nonsense and sadly there was a bunch of other stuff in this season I didn't like either.

Doctor Who

Summary: The Doctor continues to travel around all of time and space in his little blue box and companions Amy and Rory return. As the years go on however they're starting to get a little tired of being thrown into adventures at the drop of a hat with no prior warning. But they don't want to completely cut the Doctor out of their lives and finding a balance between these two lives is proving hard. 

The Good: My favorite parts of this season (and the parts I thought were the best) were the ones that really looked at the relationship Amy/Rory/the Doctor have now since, someone correct me if I'm wrong, this is the first time the series has had companions to the Doctor who don't always travel around with him and I loved how they explored that (yes there have been reoccurring characters like that, such as the Brigadier, but that's slightly different). There was also a particular line of the Doctor's from the fourth episode that I liked, where he says that he's tired of giving people second chances, they take advantage of it, and then he has to go and lay down the smack anyway. His change in attitude, from being a "coward" who gives people second chances to someone who is becoming much harder is something that's been happening since the series restarted with the ninth doctor and, given what the 12th Doctor is supposed to be like (as was established in the original series) I think this is on purpose and I really like where it's going. Given how this half season ended I foresee this trend continuing and I really do want to see how the Doctor changes next.

The Bad: For me there was something off in nearly every episode and, well, they bugged me. In the first episode sure it's a cool idea to see all the damaged daleks from wars and such, there's just the teensy-weeny problem that Skaro is supposed to be time locked so that episode shouldn't have happened at all (plus Amy's line, I've known some people with a similar problem say it killed a relationship but Amy just wasn't in a relationship where that should've mattered). The second episode was tons of fun and, while I can see the Doctor galloping through the universe with Nekfertiti as a companion, why grab everyone else as well? (Hell, why did the daleks grab Amy and Rory before that? This all feels much too convenient) I didn't like the third episode at all, aside from the Doctor's aforementioned lines, it felt like someone said "hey you know what's cool? WESTERNS" "yeah let's do one!" , they tried too hard to play with gray and grey mortality (I was feeling pretty unsympathetic to both sides by the end) and I also felt like the framing was pointless. While I had no problems with the fourth episode (which shared a writer with the second episode funny enough) the fifth episode, ehhhhhhh. Doctor Who is not a serious science fiction show but it uses time-travel a lot anyway, that's okay. But it's not okay when it says "okay, here are the mechanics the show operates by" (in this specific instance, time paradoxes) and then disregards them when the plot calls for it, it really felt like Moffat was fighting the plot to get the story to go where he wanted it and that's not very encouraging. 

The Audio: While there must have been some new pieces of background music in this season it was music from previous seasons that I noticed the most (also, I hadn't realized it before but a lot of the character's themes are rather similar to each other which I like, it helps give the music some continuity). Honestly I didn't notice the music most of the time, only when things were quite for a moment and then the music picked up as if to say "nope, the worst is yet to come!" but I think during the break I'll make an effort to look up the soundtrack since I do like what I remember.

The Visuals: While various bits of CGI weren't movie quality, nothing this season looked terrible. The dinosaurs on the spaceship looked fine, I've heard that they used a lot of real daleks from collections and such for some of the scenes in Asylum of the Daleks yet I couldn't tell the real daleks apart from the CGI ones. I feel like Doctor Who is becoming a bit smarter with their budget, or maybe the second half of the show is going to look absolutely terrible in comparison.


So in short, this season had a lot of weak spots and some good spots and I'm very confused about how I feel about it. By now I would like someone else to replace Moffat as the showrunner, the way he writes just feels a bit awkward and yes, I'm one of those people who isn't too impressed by how he writes women (I wanted to say some stuff about River Song here but I was afraid that might make the review too long, I'll probably put something on my tumblr in the next month or so when I have a chance). But I'll be back for the second half, fingers crossed that it has more strong episodes than this part did however. 

TV Series Review: Veronica Mars (season one)

I had my way I would've started watching this show right after Life on Mars just for the fact that both shows have "Mars" in the title but sadly neither my school library nor Netflix streaming had the show available for me. But the college library near my home did so I spent all summer watching the show bit by bit (curse their two-dvds-at-a-time limit) and wow do I wish I had watched this show years ago.

Veronica Mars (season one)

Summary: In the town of Neptune there are only two kinds of people, the millionares and the people who work for them. Well, and Veronica Mars, daughter of the town's sheriff which gave her an in with the popular crowd, until her boyfriend dumped her, his sister/her best friend was murdered, and her dad was driven out of office by going after their father and he rallied the town against them. Now Veronica is stuck between those two worlds and instead of being on the pep squad she now assists her dad with his private detective business while she takes on cases of her own from classmates on the side. But recently some new things about her friend Lily's murder have come to light, among others things, and Veronica is finding out that her town has even more secrets that she would have bargained for.

The Good: This show does an amazing number of things right, from the balance of when Veronica is at school and when she's out (I've seen so many stories forget that high school students are, you know, in school for almost 40 hours a week), broke plenty of stereotypes and tropes all over the place and made the show feel a hell of a lot more realistic that way (from the cult one to the episode involving a substitute newspaper teacher). Veronica is an interesting, I'd even say  likable, character but it's very obvious that she's already broken by the time the series starts and that she's trying to figure out how to put herself back together, which I personally prefer to a story that spends more time breaking it's characters than putting them back together. The other reoccurring characters were surprisingly well fleshed out, there are adults who don't stay on the sidelines in order to let the younger characters tell a story, Lily's death has affected over half the cast (one or two of which might be even more broken than Veronica) and Lily herself ends up being very well fleshed out for being, well, dead before the story even began. The show also does a very good job at weaving in details about the overarching mystery in the smaller cases Veronica and her dad take on and it all ties itself together in the end very well.

The Bad: Since this caught me really off-guard I'll say it up front, the ending to this season is a bit abrupt in places and, according to wikipedia (I was convinced something was wrong with my disc so I had to look things up) the remaining threads will be wrapped up in the next season. So while everything comes together, what's revealed in the final episode isn't itself wrapped up (and for once I was mistaken about the episode count so the show was even able to catch me off guard with the ending). That's my only real complaint about the series, since Veronica will still be in high school in the next season there's more than a chance that various side characters will show up again and get more character development (I was confused why wikipedia listed Mac as a main character when she didn't have a lot of screen time compared to many other characters), overall the show made very good use of it's runtime when it came to developing characters. 

The Audio: The show's catchy opening theme is actually the shortened version of an already existing song "We Used to be Friends" by The Dandy Warhols which surprised me, the lyrics fit the show so well ("we used to be friends/a long time ago") that I had assumed it was created specifically for the opening. The rest of the music didn't stand out to be as much, although I did like the music used in the ending credits as well, but given how catchy this opening is I think I can be excused.

The Visuals: The actors do look a bit old to be highschool students but only people who are around high school students on a regular basis are going to notice that, I didn't until I saw someone who looked very similar to Lily Kane and realized that she was technically older than Lily is in the show yet looked much younger.

I could have written even more things about this show I loved (like how Veronica likes multiple guys and she's NOT portrayed as a whore, or the subplot involving her mom) but I didn't want to go on even longer, let it suffice to say that I fell hard for this show and I was wondering why I didn't try out this show earlier. A look at the show's air dates clears that one up, it would've started airing late middle school/early high school for me and even if I had seen the show then I don't think I would've connected with it as strongly. But in any case, this is a great, engaging, gripping, smart story that I really recommend to anyone who has any tolerance for realistic fiction/stories involving high school students. I should probably include a trigger warning for rape so just be careful if that applies to anyone (I'd be willing to post in the comments which episodes to look out for if anyone wanted me to).

TV Series Review: Downton Abbey (season two)

This time around I caught my British-class-based-social-drama show on Hulu+ (they have a one week free trial offer which is *just* long enough to watch almost nine hours of episodes, plus it looked great on our new HD tv) and I was able to clear up something about the first season via Hulu as well. Previously I had been worried that the episodes on Netflix (from the first season) might have been cut/edited in some way, because they had such odd runtimes, but they all matched up with the episode lengths listed on Hulu so it appears I was being overly worried that time. But enough about what I've already covered on this blog, onto the second season!

Downton Abbey (season two)

Summary: World War I has began and all of Europe is effected by it. Even Downton Abbey has gone through changes because of the far off war, they are losing their young men to the front lines and seeing others come back to the local hospital lucky to be alive. The war isn't their only problem though, in a house this large there will always be more than a few secrets and there are some people who have large secrets to hide and friends who are bad at keeping them.

The Good: Once again the show manages to balance about a dozen different subplots and gives resolution, or at least the promise of continuation in a few cases, to all of them. They even give a bit more resolution to one or two subplots from the previous season, and Mr. Bates' woes continue as one of the most prominent subplots, and I was never bored by any of the characters. I was also surprised at how much some of the characters grew on me this season, especially the Dowager Countess who, while not exactly a nice person and certainly not a forward thinking one, always had an interesting opinion and did care about more things than I expected.

The Bad: The show certainly upped the melodrama this season and, while some melodrama is okay (especially with a shorter show like this), the fact that a lot of this was accomplished by either the characters being absolutely incapable of keeping secrets or via Mrs. Bates (who didn't even feel like a character, she honestly felt like a plot device that got away from the writers) was frustrating. I hope that the melodrama is toned down again next season (although I'm not betting on it) since after a while I was starting to roll my eyes when another complication arose in some of the subplots which I had hoped the show was done with. Oh and I would like Thomas to have some actual character development this time, he keeps having all these scenes and problems that seem to give him development but then by the next episode he's back to his old self without even a hint of anything having changed and it's really starting to bug me. 

The Audio: The show used the exact same themes for the opening and closing credits (the same visuals for the opening as well) and I didn't notice any other changes to the music either which means there's not much for me to talk about. I do hope there's more variety in the music the next season (especially since the show is in the 1920s now and, in the US anyway, that was the era of all kinds of amazing music) but for the moment everything continues as it has before.

The Visuals: As with the first season the clothes all look fantastic (well, perhaps not the servants clothes but even the military uniforms look rather dashing) and the setting looks quite nice as well. One nitpick I do have however is how, by the end of the season, it has been five years in story since the beginning of the first season and yet none of the characters seem to have aged. I worked out that the youngest sister would have been 16 when the show started and 21 by this point and frankly she never looked that young in the first season and by that logic the oldest sister must be at least 23 yet again the actress looks just a bit too old for this. Most people do age noticeably in that time period and I do wish they had shown at least a bit of aging for the characters, it might've made the timeskips a bit easier to keep track of as well.

I can seen now why some people said the show went down a bit in the second season (there really is a lot of melodrama) but overall I still found the show rather enjoyable. The third season airs in the UK this fall but not in the US until winter (on, who else has a gap for something like this, PBS) so it's going to be quite a while until I talk about this show again. Guess I'd better find another British tv show or two to watch in the meantime....
 


 

TV Series Review: Downton Abbey (season one)

Whew, I'm cutting it close this time. I always get behind in my viewing schedule when I travel and, even if this season was only 7 episodes long, this was actually a bit longer than your standard, 13 episode anime series. Actually, I watched this on Netflix which had the first and the last episodes listed as 66 minutes long but the other five only 48 minutes long, is that how long the show was in Great Britian or did PBS cut the episodes down again? I remember they made cuts to Sherlock, even the online streaming version (which I still think is silly) and I wouldn't put it past them to have done that here as well with such an odd set-up. In any case, thankfully I didn't feel like anything was missing here (like I felt might have been the case with Sherlock), well, except for the fact that Netflix doesn't have the second season streaming yet.

Downton Abbey 

Summary: The show begins in April 1912 with the news of the sinking of the Titantic and the news that the heir to Downton Abbey, a cousin since the estate is entailed and none of the three daughters can inherit, has perished. And thus life at Downton is going through a state of upheaval as the family decides what to do next and new people filter into all parts of their lives. 

The Good: The season may be a short one but wow does it pack a lot in. Spanning about two years in-universe, there are at least a dozen subplots and nearly every one of them is neatly and satisfying wrapped up (and those which aren't still come to a satisfying stop and I would have been annoyed if they had instead been rushed). The show makes great use of the time-period (I especially the liked the subplot involving the youngest daughter starting to become interested in suffrage and politics) and they characters all felt like they came from the time period (as opposed to the writer coming up with characters that inadvertently reflect more modern views and trying to squeeze them in anyway). All of the characters, likeable or not, were interesting and almost all of them grew and progressed as well, my hat is off to the writers for being able to do that with so many characters.

The Bad: This show should be watched without long gaps between episodes (you don't have to marathon it but don't wait weeks and weeks between episodes) since with nearly every named character having their own subplot that's well over a dozen plots to keep in mind. The show does a good job balancing them but it does dictate that the viewer should either planning on taking a few days to watch the whole show or taking some notes so they don't forget. I am a bit incredulous that some characters in the service stuck around as long as they did with their personalities, although that certainly happens in real life as well, and it does seem a bit strange that the family knows so many of the servants by name and does truly seem to care for all of them. There are some subplots that I would like to see continued in the next season, and I'm a bit worried they won't be given where this season ended, but I found this to be a rather strong show with few flaws to speak of overall.

The Audio: The show has one main theme that is played over the opening and ending credits that I quite liked, it managed to convey both the more relaxed life of countryside gentry and the more frantic life of their servants, and the music in the rest of the show worked well also. No other pieces really stood out to me but they worked well within their scenes.

The Visuals: This is one of the cases where I really prefer a live action show to a cartoon, the amount of detail in the setting and the costuming simply can't be replicated with anything but a huge budget in the animation world. The setting looks authentic and the costuming was gorgeous, normally I'm not a fan of Edwardian(ish) Era clothing but I'll have to give the period another look.


Fully intend to continue the show, although Netflix does not have it for streaming which does put a damper on my plans. However, it appears that Hulu will have it on Hulu+ soon and they offer one week free trials for it, I might be able to make that work out.....