Final days of the year - Video Distractions, by Mike N.

  It's the Friday between Christmas and New Year's!
  I'm trying to achieve and maintain a festive - or even just pleasantly relaxed - state, but sometimes with little success. Some possibly big worries lurking for me; ones that could drop on me at almost any time now, but which will at best be coming for me very early in the new year. As a result, too much of my viewing over this holiday stretch has been an attempt to lose myself and my concerns for as long as possible. (Yeah, I'm failing at adulting, and even at the perhaps seasonal message of paying forward a gift of peace to my 2020 self by dealing with problems now rather than running away from them.)
   Netflix has gotten a fair chunk of my attention since Christmas Eve, as I watched the newly-arrived, 10-episode, second season of Lost In Space. Continuing the updated version of the Robinson family's adventures, based loosely on the 1960s tv series. My sole regret was that I didn't look through the episode offerings up front, to see and watch the 3 minute season one recap first. There were several important plot and character development arc points from season one that I'd simply forgotten in the interim, only remembering each as the ramifications of it were tapped. Still, I comfortably rolled through it such that I was leisurely through the last of it sometime Thursday morning.

  Most of the characters saw significant developments this season, as the Robinson daughters came into more prominence - largely a matter of fleshed-out backstory for the adopted Judy, but also contemporary developments as their reuniting with the larger body of colonists finds her emergency-expanded medical skills stifled as Authorities put her at the bottom of the pecking order, delegating her to tasks that are beneath her abilities. She perseveres, however, and in time begins to impress ones who were quick to only look at her age and formal point in her education. Meanwhile, Penny struggles with her identity and her sense of personal failure in a family of wild over-achievers. Even at the level of comparison with siblings, she's contending with a natural sibling (Will) who is not only a genius but has already gained a nearly mythological status among the colonists for what he accomplished with the alien techno-life form they call "the robot", and the above mentioned adoptive sister (Judy) whose sharp wits, general intelligence, and dogged determination have made her vital to the survival of more than a few people. Additionally, she has felt crowded out even just in her family because Will's scientific gifts give him a special bond with their mother, while Judy's almost boot camp approach to her endeavors (including physical conditioning) have resulted in a strong bond with their decorated father, John.
   Penny makes great strides in her identity this season, in part because she began to quietly chronicle their adventures, and supportive brother Will, upon reading it, published her book and handed out copies to the family.
  A side-light to this: When Bill Mumy, the original series' Will Robinson, got involved in writing a comics series adaptation of Lost In Space, one of the things he came up with was an explanation for the often goofy stories: They were all how the young Penny Robinson wrote about them in her diary. It was a brilliant move, and he underscored it by contrasting the goofiest of all the '60s series adventures: The Great Vegetable Rebellion, where they found themselves up against intelligent, hostile, active plantlife. Will quickly contrasts it with the horror of the actual situation, coming up against a life form that was naturally predisposed to look at humans as both destructive creatures and a food source. The reality they faced was so terrifying that Penny protectively softened the memory. So, having them tap Penny as a chronicler and storyteller in this new series was a touch I very much appreciated. In this second season she also starts to develop along Nancy Drewish lines, initially setting her at odds with Dr. Smith, but ultimately resulting in arguable improvements for both of them.

Meanwhile, Parker Posey's Dr. Smith - it's too convoluted to go into detail, but this is the cover identity she took very early in season one - goes to great lengths to solidify and protect that stolen identity, including putting members of the Robinson clan (including mechanic/pilot Don West) into situations where their fates are increasingly entangled, making it less and less convenient for them to rat her out to the authorities. The audience is toyed with, eventually becoming unsure from moment to moment whether or not she's a sympathetic character with some shreds of redemptive qualities, or is simply a wholly self-absorbed manipulator. By the end of the season my general sense was that she is what she needs to be at any given moment, and how much of a force for good that may be could be largely dependent upon how others choose to engage her. Being with the Robinsons may be the best thing for her and those who have to deal with her in the long run -- but she is still not to be trusted in any situation where it's her self interests in competition with anyone else's.
   More recently, I tried moving onto another Netflix new arrival - though this one had dropped into place back on December 20th: The Witcher.
  Starring Henry Cavill as the monster-hunting Geralt of Rivia, who is called upon when needed, but otherwise usually shunned as a sort of monster himself by nearly all.
  Here is a property that one group of fans knows primarily from the source novels written by Andrzej Sapkowski, while another mainly knows it from video games. Me, I'd had only a nodding acquaintance with it, having seen and heard multiple references to it, and having come across a comics adaptation of one of the short stories a couple years ago.
  The first episode was a slow-grind start for me. I'm open to the notion that the worries I mentioned up top are nagging at me to a point of heavy distraction, and my increasingly threadbare nerves are making it more difficult to relax and lose myself in a story. There's also the factor that I'm very slow to warm up to sword and sorcery fantasy pieces with elaborate character and place names. It's like the worst elements of Tolkien, suddenly finding myself surrounded by people who are way too impressed by the social register, and enjoy dropping the names of "important" people and places I've never heard of and am becoming less interested in learning about with each self-important syllable.
  Whatever the proportions of these factors, it became comical how many times I found myself rolling back 10, 20, 30 seconds to try to catch a name dropped or even a simple bit of dialogue, in no small part because my mind kept wandering and I started to nod off within seconds of watching. I'll try to pick it up with episode two sometime reasonably soon and give it a fairer look. Netflix itself had enough faith in it based on what they saw that they renewed it for a second season over a month before this first one aired.
   In between, I'd been letting the DVR catch various Christmas-themed episodes of sitcoms, which made for light distractions; the holiday timing's critical in making these often saccharine, heartstring-plucking stories momentarily palatable. One example: Enough years had passed since I last saw the first season Happy Days Christmas episode, that it had just the right warm, nostalgic vibration. This was from 1974, when the Cunninghams gradually wore Fonzie down into accepting the invitation to spend the holiday with them once they found out that his stories of an opulent, extended family, holiday get-together he was headed out of town for were pure, face-saving fiction.
  As it was, there was a little too much seasonal entertainment being offered, and as we rolled through Christmas itself I've begun deleting some of it unwatched. I couldn't get myself into watching It's A Wonderful Life after Christmas, for instance. Similarly, I deleted, unwatched for the season, the mid-sixties animated How The Grinch Stole Christmas; seeing that any later than Christmas Eve doesn't seem to work for me this year.
   I'm still curious enough about the new BBC/FX production of A Christmas Carol to want to try giving that a look despite the night of the spirits having passed, so that's still waiting. That it's been referenced as dour, self-consciously edgy (expletives, nudity and some sexual content, reportedly), and feeling more Shakespearean than Dickensian has made it a point of curiosity for me. That its running time is listed as 2 hours, 52 minutes (oddly, four minutes longer than that of the version shown on the BBC - odd bit of censorship, or someone's bookkeeping error, I'm not sure) is now probably the bigger barrier to my wanting to wade into it soon.
  That's as much as I've made time for this week. I hope you've all been enjoying the year-end holidays as best as possible, and that we each have a happier new year than we have any sensible reason to expect.                           - Mike N.

Shows and movies hit on in previous posts:

 Sept. 20th: Mindhunter (Netflix)

     Sept. 27th: What's The Matter With Helen, The French Connection, and Frenzy. (Early '70s R-rated movies I saw with my mom)

     Oct. 3rd:    Preacher (AMC), Stumptown (ABC), Sunnyside (NBC), The Good Place (NBC), and Jack Ryan (Amazon Prime).

     Oct. 11th:  Joker (still in theaters), and In The Tall Grass (Netflix)

     Oct. 18th:  El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (Netflix)

     Oct. 25th: Dolemite Is My Name (Netflix)

     Nov. 1st:   Watchmen (HBO series), The Kominsky Method (Netflix)

     Nov. 8th:   Seconds (1966 movie, currently available as part of Amazon Prime)
     Nov. 15th: Dr. Sleep (current theatrical release, but probably not for long), Horace and Pete (2016 web-produced series, currently on Hulu)
     Nov. 22nd: NOS4A2 (AMC, now on Hulu) and Man In The High Castle (Amazon Prime)

     Nov. 29th: The Irishman (Netflix), The Mandalorian and The World According To Jeff Goldblum (both on Disney+), light touches on Watchmen (HBO) and Ray Donovan (Showtime)
  Dec, 6th: The Booth At the End (Amazon Prime), and Us (HBO).

Dec 13th:  Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Amazon Prime), The Feed (Amazon Prime), 6 Underground (Netflix movie).

  Dec 20th:A Christmas Carol (FX), The Expanse (Amazon Prime), Killing Eve (BBC America)

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