Obsessive Love, Thanks For No Fish, and Those Poor Horses
SurrealEstate Season 2 Ep. 4, The Swarm Season 1 Ep. 8, Quantum Leap Season 2 Ep. 5, and King Arthur can't ride
Three TV episodes and a movie this week. Themes include love, inter-species diplomacy, and racism. I leave very late tomorrow, so comments are open on this post, but please be nice.
SurrealEstate Season 2, Episode 4 “I Put A Spell On You”
Theme: Obsessive love. Or…something.
Zoeey takes on her first assignment as an agent, and they stick her with a lesbian couple that have been looking for months. She takes evil advice, which works, but it’s still kind of evil. Ahem.
Luke is asked by a client to approach somebody who isn’t selling. She’s a hot redhead. She’s either evil, dead or, how about both? I thought she was a vampire, but she turned out to be the cryptid that sparked the legends of Elizabeth Bathory. Irresistible to “men and boys” and then they went right to her being defeated by a gay man. (Presumably this means lesbians are vulnerable to her…and she was hot. Supposedly from Eastern Europe like all vampires and vampire-adjacent things in Hollywood, but ably played by the seductive and talented Tara Yelland. I want to see more of her.
Susan stays home to decompress. Unfortunately, yes…we were right. The house is obsessed with her and now won’t let her leave and…yeah…she’s trapped in the walls.
Sigh. Time to rescue Susan. I have little sympathy.
I have more for Luke. She was hot and she did whammy him. If he was still a medium he might have been able to sense that she was, you know, dead. But without his mojo, I think he can be 100% forgiven for this one.
Susan, not so much.
The Swarm Season 1, Episode 8
Fish.
Seriously.
Where are all the fish?
Eight episodes, which was supposedly all we’re going to get (although there are rumors and Episode 8 is labeled “Season finale” on the CW’s site) of an ocean based horror/thriller show and they completely forgot about fish.
I was waiting for that somehow to be addressed.
It wasn’t.
They just…forgot…about fish.
Also, they find a way to hurt the Yrr. It’s ketamine. Horse tranquilizer. I’d say I can’t make this up, but somebody did.
Okay. I enjoyed the show. I’m going to be writing a paid post about ocean horror triggered by it. I really did. The ending was not 100% satisfying in a way that means I wouldn’t mind seeing a season two. But it was also an ending that did follow on from what went before.
First contact between human cultures is tough. First contact between humans and an intelligence that works very differently? It’s not surprising that people died. And no, the alien thing was a semi red herring (pink herring). We find out that the Yrr are terrestrial, just very, very old. And they thought we were an invasive land species.
It was an interesting show, nice special effects and I was quite impressed with much of the acting.
But I’m not going to let them live down forgetting fish.
Quantum Leap Season 2, Episode 5 “One Night in Koreatown”
Ben leaps into a Korean teenager helping his dad run a failing shoe shop in Los Angeles…
…right before the Los Angeles race riots.
There’s really two things coming together here. The first is trauma…because it’s not Ian who tags in for Addison. It’s Magic.
Who has his own reasons to fear the police. Bringing in the Black guy as hologram for an episode about police brutality…feels a lot better than having the white woman do it. And Ian is a pretty white queer who also doesn’t quite get it. Only Magic could handle this leap…except that he can’t. He’s off the wagon and fleeing back to the bottle he only just dragged himself out of.
Meanwhile, the father, the storeowner, is racist. He has the kids follow a young Black man around the store to make sure he doesn’t steal anyone. Asian people can, indeed, be racist against Black people (although it sounds like he isn’t so fond of white people either).
The other side of the episode is simplified by the format…you can only do so much nuance in a one hour episode…but it is a racist person doing the work to deal with racism where we all have to deal with it first: Inside ourselves.
I like when fiction redeems a racist because we have to redeem a lot of them if we’re going to make a better world. And I particularly like that it was an older man, set in his ways. It was Damascus Road by its nature, but they did a good job in a short episode.
Good work, team. At the end Ben leaps into…
…an Allied spy.
Tell me he’s going to punch a Nazi. Please let Ben punch a Nazi.
Cinema Disaster: Excalibur Kid
Or The Excalibur Kid? Box says the, title sequence says no the. So we know there are production values here.
This is what I call a “Ren Faire movie” It’s explicitly set in the year 485 (I think, might be 486), but with absolutely no concern for historical accuracy.
Morgause pulls Zach back from the future to put him on the throne instead of Arthur. She wanted somebody with no past. Zach wanted to live in the past. (When somebody in a bad movie says “I wish” I always yell “Don’t” at the screen).
What follows is an Arthuriana romp with strong influences of The Once & Future King down to Merlin living backwards. And shapeshifting. As that, it’s perfectly watchable and even quite entertaining. If you just want to see Morgause chew the scenery and a bunch of swordplay, go ahead and watch it. No production values, the acting is iffy, and the writing is…
However, I have to put a CW on it…for…some of the most terrible horse work I’ve ever seen. One actor had to be led around and there was also a scene where the header kept walking with the driving horse and the reins were slack, so could they not find somebody who could drive? We have horses tied up by the reins. The actor playing Arthur, or at least I hope it was the actor not a stunt double yanked and cranked two different horses around, one of which didn’t look entirely sound. (They cast an old horse to play an old horse so it was probably just a little stiff).
This isn’t just sloppy, it’s borderline abusive and potentially dangerous. It didn’t seem that anyone got hurt, but I felt very sorry for those horses. And yes, it did majorly negatively impact my enjoyment of the movie. I normally love Ren Faire movies, but those poor, poor horses.