Month: January 2020

As I wrote a few weeks ago, we've cut the cord with cable and have gone to streaming services. At this point I don't know why it took me so long to agree to it.

Apple TV was the gateway drug. It's free for us at the moment, but what enticed me to check it out was one of their initial "signature" shows, For All Mankind. When I first heard of this, I thought it was going to be a docudrama of Apollo 11 and our trip to the moon. Being the space nerd that I am, this was enough to get me interested, but when I found it it was going to be an alternate reality show where Russia first planted a flag there, well..sign me up!

For All Mankind proved to be everything I'd hoped it would be, presenting an alternate reality where not only did we not abandon the moon, but we were on our way to Mars in the 1980s. I can't wait for Season 2.

Unfortunately, nothing else on Apple TV has piqued my interest.

We were already subscribers to Amazon Prime and Netflix, so it was only a matter of adding Hulu and Philo to get everything we'd been watching before, still at a net savings to what we were paying for cable.

Some of the other things I've binged in the last few weeks:

Lost in Space Season 2  (Netflix)

I desperately did not want to like this reboot, but I have to admit I enjoyed Season One last year. I grew up on Lost in Space; my parents' preferred discipline being to deny me access to the show the particular week I misbehaved. That's how much I was into it and why I was expecting so much from the reboot. At first I was put off by the story and ahem—gender—changes in this new version, but came to embrace them as the story developed. Dr. Smith is no longer a bumbling buffoon; she is now an outright psychopath and her expert manipulation of the people around her is frightening. Also, the robot—and in fact the fleet's propulsion and guidance systems—in this reboot were not made, but rather found. This change has produced the backbone and the ultimate arc of the story.

To be honest, Lost in Space plods in places (I found myself fast forwarding through most of the first three episodes of Season 2), and a lot of times you're left shaking your head with "WUT?!" but overall I enjoyed both seasons and I'm looking forward to the third.

Messiah (Netflix)

Not at all what I was expecting and not something I was initially drawn to, but I needed something other than Louis Rossmann (yes, I'm that big of a nerd) videos to watch at lunch. The story quickly drew me in, and while precious few questions were definitively answered by the end of the first season, it left me wanting more. Just when you think you have things figured out, the writers throw you a curve ball (especially during the last 15 minutes of the last episode after all evidence has pointed to the lead characters lack of divinity) that you're left questioning everything you've come to believe.

The Expanse Season 4 (Amazon Prime)

Thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster Amazon took up this production when the original series was canceled by SyFy. (It's rumored that Jeff Bezos was a huge fan and was instrumental in Amazon's acquisition of the property.)

I stumbled upon The Expanse on SyFy back in Season One and it drew me in. I'd never heard of the original source material, but from the beginning it was obvious that it was much more than another space opera. This was what I affectionately call "hard" science fiction, along the lines of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Moon. I was genuinely saddened when I first read that SyFy wasn't renewing it after Season 3.

The Expanse presents a vision of humanity's future in space, colonizing the solar system and our first encounter with undeniably alien intelligence. And as you might expect, those colonization efforts do not produce one big happy human family. The geopolitical aspect of the show is as engaging—and as potentially realistic—as the rest of the story.

The Gift (Netflix)

This one was a surprise. A Turkish production (with English subtitles), The Gift tells the story of…well…even as it finished up I was at a loss to fully wrap my head around exactly what and why things had happened other than to say, "Be careful what you ask for. It just may happen." Centered around the possibly as old as twelve-thousand years Gobekli Tepe archaeological site in Turkey, The Gift explores both the practical and spiritual. It's part soap opera, part In Search Of (for those of you old enough to remember that series). The cinematography is gorgeous, and the male leads are hot, but as I said I'm at a loss to fully describe what I spent the last several days watching, but if you're willing to devote your time to it (being in Turkish you have to pay attention to read the subtitles) you won't come away disappointed. Confused, perhaps, but not disappointed.