29-June-2017 Thursday

DiveMilw · Jun 29, 2017, 10:27 AM

I don't have much of anything to say. I didn't want us to skip a daily so early in the game.

Ummmmm.....I'm waiting for my parents to call me and let me know they are ready for me to pick them up from the restaurant where they are having lunch. I'm surprised they haven't called me yet as it's been over an hour and a half since I dropped them off. After that I have an exciting day of doing nothing in particular. Running the odd errand or two. Maybe filling up the gas tank in the car with gas, a load of laundry, planting one last hanging basket.....that sort of stuff.

Hope your day is more exciting and productive than mine!

DiveMilw · Jun 29, 2017, 10:47 AM

And a minute after I posted this the phone rang! So now I think I will watch and episode or two of Season 4 "Agents of S.H.E.I.L.D.". Then I will be productive again.

Clarification/Justification: I was doing stuff this morning. Mostly helping my parents with their errands. Now I need to do my stuff.

Chris L · Jun 29, 2017, 11:12 AM

Quote from: DiveMilw on Jun 29, 2017, 10:47 AMAnd a minute after I posted this the phone rang! So now I think I will watch and episode or two of Season 4 "Agents of S.H.E.I.L.D.". Then I will be productive again.

Clarification/Justification: I was doing stuff this morning. Mostly helping my parents with their errands. Now I need to do my stuff.

Season Four of Agents of SHIELD becomes amazing about eight or nine episodes in and somehow manages to stay amazing right through the season finale in episode 22. It's the longest the show has managed to sustain a compelling plot arc since it began. Usually the show finds a great premise, like the twist near the end of the first season, pumps several terrific episodes out of it, and then seems to flounder around trying to find something else interesting. This time they take a premise and manage to run with it far longer than I thought they could. Even the weak episodes toward the beginning finally pay off in the end and look like they're going to have a bigger payoff next season. We can only hope that they can actually sustain an arc for the entire season next time.

(They aren't coming back until early 2018, BTW, because they're going to run an Inhumans series in the slot next fall. I have no idea how well that's going to work out.)

DiveMilw · Jun 30, 2017, 02:14 PM

@Chris L you were right. I disliked season three so much that I never even tried to watch season four in "real time". S4 has been on Netflix for a little while and I was never interested in starting up again. I did start to watch the first episode earlier this week but since it took up where season 3 left off I turned it off 1/4 or 1/3 of the way through. Yesterday, I needed something to watch in the background while I did other stuff. That was fine for the first episode. Then the show started to get really good and before I knew it I had watched the entire season. Ooops!

Chris L · Jun 30, 2017, 04:13 PM

Quote from: DiveMilw on Jun 30, 2017, 02:14 PM@Chris L you were right. I disliked season three so much that I never even tried to watch season four in "real time". S4 has been on Netflix for a little while and I was never interested in starting up again. I did start to watch the first episode earlier this week but since it took up where season 3 left off I turned it off 1/4 or 1/3 of the way through. Yesterday, I needed something to watch in the background while I did other stuff. That was fine for the first episode. Then the show started to get really good and before I knew it I had watched the entire season. Ooops!

Glad you stuck it out. Audiences have been leaving the show in droves pretty much since it started, even though it managed to become pretty intense near the end of the first season. But this last season hit a new ratings low, which is too bad, because it actually got good again. Despite the bad ratings it's been renewed for another season. (It doesn't hurt that the show is owned by Disney, which also owns ABC.)

My theory, which I've also explicated on Facebook, is that Executive Producer Joss Whedon finally recovered from his traumatic period as a movie director at Marvel and began showing up at writers room meetings, where he started kicking showrunner butt. (Or maybe he just started watching the show and was appalled at what he saw.) Whedon has a history of meddling in shows, like Angel and Firefly, where he wasn't the showrunner, and the result has generally been excellent. But he's apparently been fairly hands-off with SHIELD, something I hope has changed now that he has time on his hands.

There were things I liked about the third season, but I wish they'd spent more time on the Simmons-trapped-on-an-alien-planet arc, which threatened to be interesting.