Weekly Streaming Recap: Week of September 23rd, 2022

She-Hulk: Attorney At Law Episode 6 (Disney+): The comedic value of “Daredevil Watch” where fans are just waiting for Daredevil to show up is reaching a peak, especially after last episode ended with a tease about his helmet and this episode does nothing with that. The wedding is entertaining at least and the development of the Intelligencia into a treat going into the final stretch of the show will make for an interesting final three episodes.

Rings of Power Episode 5 (Amazon Prime): This feels like a perfect opportunity to talk about the lasting impact of Lost on serialized storytelling. Lost was probably the best example of the “mystery box” trope since it was brought mainstream, in which the writers will take an important piece of the plot, hide it from the viewer, and turn it into a mystery that the characters need to decode. Beyond the island itself and the character Jacob and the Dharma Initiative and any number of other things on Lost, other examples include Rey’s lineage through Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens and the investigation of the murder of Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks. Rings of Power includes one of these moments surrounding “The Stranger” who arrived with the Harfoots out of a meteor. The problem is that it feels like they are doing a ton of work to make it seem like it’s Sauron, possibly leading to a Mephisto in WandaVision situation where everyone is Mephisto according to the fans, even when no one is. It also doesn’t help that the parts about the Harfoots are the least interesting aspects of the show and the mystery around The Stranger are not doing enough to elevate it.

House of the Dragon Episode 6 (HBOMax): At risk of beating a dead horse, the time jumps are making it very difficult to maintain emotional attachment to any of the characters. The show continues to be visually very interesting and among some of the best looking television shows, but that said there is not nearly the level of character work that Game of Thrones did and a fair amount of the positive response appears to be that the show is better than the final season of the original, but that’s not a fair barometer to use. The relationships move too much with time jumps that a fair amount of the runtime is all about figuring out who is where and what they have been up to since the viewer last saw them.

Andor Episodes 1-3 (Disney+): There was a sizable contingent of the Star Wars fanbase that was not totally sold on a Cassian Andor origin show. For those that may have forgot, Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor made his debut in 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story where he helped lead the raid on Scarif for the Death Star plans and dying in the process. A prequel show about how he joined the Rebel Alliance leading up to his death was not necessarily something that was necessary and was somewhat dismissed similar to Solo: A Star Wars Story was in 2018. This show is far better than expected and explores some of the moral grey areas of the Star Wars universe. Diego Luna is fantastic in the role and the aesthetic of the show feels more like Blade Runner than Star Wars and it benefits from that look and feel. The brutality of the Empire is explored in the most real way in a live action series and there is an interesting look at the intersection of the Empire and the Confederacy from the prequels, considering the way that Darth Sidious used the malcontent of Confederate planets before ending the war decisively and not in their favor. The intersection of “free enterprise” and corporate control with the Empire is an interesting governmental exploration.

You May Have Missed:

Morbius and Moonfall (Netflix and HBOMax): If one is keeping track of the worst movies of this year, two of them hit streaming within the last few weeks. Morbius is the continued adventures of Sony maintaining the rights to the Spider-Man-adjacent characters by making origin movies about their villains while Moonfall is another disaster movie from Roland Emmerich that almost certainly repurposes parts of Independence Day 3 which will probably not happen at this point. Neither movie is particularly good, however if someone is going to pick one to watch, Moonfall
at least has some interesting effects shots.