Scans_Daily

Doctor Who 20th Anniversary Rewatch:
Wait the Slitheen prime minter said the aliens have weapons of mass destruction. This is satire on the War on Terror.
Then the Slitheen's plan to sell the charred remains of Earth as cheap starship fuel must be commentary on the oil wars!
This satire on the Iraq War has a lot of zany music in it.

'Alien Hoax' says the headline. sure let's say Big Ben was fake, but 10 Downing Street got blown up with a missile. The Prime Minister died! ah well
so Rose ditches her distraught mother after a year away so she can go on more adventures....

The local film society couldn't get the scheduled film so they decided to take advantage of the Pope's death and show Concalve early.
That was a good film. Had a lot of intrigue

In a second hand bookshop I found:
The Longbow Hunters: I believe this is the story that reinvented Green Arrow by making him socially conscious. Either that or it gave him a beard
Age of Bronze volume one: I hope the fact I know very little about Greek mythology doesn't hinder this grounded retelling of the Trojan war (or the fact the series has managed to release one issue every six years since 2012)

Well I decided to watch the Twilight Zone Movie.
yes Planet of The Apes! Wow it really is a classic and has a lot of layers to it.
Note how the shocking twist answers the movie's question about the nature of man, ties into Professor Cornelius efforts to learn the truth about ape history and re contextualizes the rest of the movie.

But the astronauts mission confuses me. If they were just going on an expedition to deep space and were meant to return to Earth centuries later with their research, sure that almost makes sense, but they talk about colonizing a planet. Which is weird since the crew only has four people.....
Ah well. It's not like the entire space race wasn't an elaborate pissing match.

Well over the last three week I've watched seven seasons of Archer. If your like me and watch Archer for the overarching story and character development I have some observations
Season one:
It's kind of odd watching it from the beginning and see showlong jokes and character elements being introduced (it takes five episodes for Kreiger to have dialogue. Ray first appears in episode eight. Pam starts off as a meek office worker, she gets her crude personality fairly quickly but she won't get her outgoing personal life until midway through season two).
I kind of expected the show to be the character's standing around bickering while the plot happened in another room, the story do have quite a lot of moving parts.

Anyway the ongoing plot is Cyril and Lana's relationship. Cyril cheats on her with Carol, who starts blackmailing him. Lana finds out and gets revenge with the Carol part just sort of petering out.
Well there's also Malory's decade long affair with the head of the KGB which leads to him trying to brainwash Archer into going to Russia once learns he's probably his father

Season two:
This season lacks an overarching plot, but does seem to want to flesh out the various characters and their backgrounds.
We start to see them give Archer a bit more emotional depth like his love of animals, him getting cancer, and showing that he's actually capable of caring about others.

season three:
This is were the shows attempts to have ongoing story arcs basically fall apart. Sure taken on it's own we have a fairly compressive 'Barry hates Archer and is now an evil cyborg. He kills Archer's fiance, and the man who is probably his father.Then Archer's dead fiance is rebuild as a cyborg but leaves him for Barry. Archer recklessly tries to fight Barry but gets beaten up. But then later he manges to outwit Barry'
But Barry talks about having a master plan to destroy Archer which is never mentioned again. Sure there's some potential explanations. He's an insane cyborg. He starts dating Katya who asks him to stop trying to kill Archer. I guess that makes sense, but you'd expect an evil cyborg becoming head of the KGB to have more of an impact.

Also after this the question of who's Archer's father gets dropped with no resolution. it wasn't all that interesting but spent a fair amount of screen time on it and I'm sure they could have done something else with it.

season four:
Lana considers her career and what she wants out of life.
Did they make Archer more of a stupid dick this season? He did do some pretty stupid things previously but it seems to be happening more often.

The Classic Era is over. Now the Gimmick seasons! (I feel like in a better world Archer would have had five seasons of spying and that would have been it. I don't know if it would have had a satisfying conclusions but it wouldn't have dragged on for years)

season five:
The gimmick is that their drug dealers! and the show is much more serialized!
Actually I thought they did a decent enough job introducing and developing the plot threads (well except for the third part of the Columbian adventure which had the awkward shift of them deciding to become international arms dealers).
The show's style of comedy means it's not as jarring shift as you might expect.

season six:
The gimmick is that everything's back to normal and there is no gimmick!
The story is about Archer adapting to being a father and rekindling his relationship with Lana while Cyril tries to sabotage their relationship.
It also has a capstone to a few long-running plot-threads which I appreciated.

season seven:
The gimmick is that they've moved to LA and become private detectives. They do actually make an effort to have the plots this season be more noir-esque (or at least like Magnum PI).
But it's also odd because it opens with a flash forward of Archer floating face down in a swimming pool, implying a season long investigation or mystery that led to this point, but while it does introduces involved the lead-up only happens in the final two episodes.

I did like the episode were Archer meets the rich bastards who bullied him back at boarding school, and how they made him the man he is today. He doesn't seem to learn anything, but at the end talks with Lana about sending their daughter to public school so she can have a better life than he did.