What TV Shows Are You Watching? Series VI - Programmes of Power

I'm binge-watching Monk.

 

Binge watching Taskmaster. Up to season 5 in a few days.

Early seasons only 5-6 episodes.

Also been watching Robin of Sherwood, Blackadder and going to rewatch Bottom soon.

British month.

 

Is that thread title directed at me/our last conversation? If so... very clever

 

Yep ran out of stuff to watch so seeing what in the vaults of Amazon prime.

TVNZ on demand has 10 seasons of taskmaster we have the week off so binge watching since Sunday.

Up to season 3 of Robin of Sherwood.

I'm guessing its region locked but who knows?

https://www.tvnz.co.nz/shows

Apps not great but it's free.

 

Three series - Lead Balloon, Mayo and Outnumbered - will fill in the next few days for us

 

I tried to rewatch half the first season of True Detective, but gave up in ep2.

 

The utter absurdity of The Amazing World of Gumball is therapeutic in the age of lockdown.

 

Still going through MODERN FAMILY.

As my second show, I picked FUTURE MAN. I had seen the first season but not the second and third, so I decided to rewatch the first and then find out what I missed. It honestly might have been better to have left it as a mystery. I'm almost done with the second season and it has been... not good.

Really coming around to the idea of doing a rewatch of SCRUBS... except I just discovered that Prime Video has removed it.

It looks like it's on Disney+ now. TIL Disney owns its rights. Guess I won't let my subscription lapse.

 

Loki finale:

Spoiler :

Someone on a podcast made an observation that hadn't occurred to me, that Mobius didn't even recognize Loki as a Loki. It's possible Mobius simply isn't the TVA's resident Loki expert anymore, but it would be interesting if one of the things the newly-ascendant Kang variant did was wipe out Lokis, knowing that it was they who killed He Who Remains, and Our Loki and Sylvie are the only ones left.

I've found myself getting into the circular, cause-and-effect questions that inevitably arise from time travel stories. Loki had sidestepped these, to some degree, by placing the TVA "outside" of time itself, existing in its own limited continuity. But that final scene, where Mobius doesn't know who Loki is and there was a new statue, throws that into the cause-and-effect blender with everything else. There lies madness, obviously, but I can't help it. "If we start talking about time travel, we're gonna be here all day, making diagrams with straws."

 

Spoiler I guess spoiler general how stuff works? :

I take it as taking a very pop sci view of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, with TVA able to move between the many worlds and time points within them, as well as "kill" universes. So both time travel and alternative universes rolled into one.

 

Yes, I think that's it exactly. Endgame introduced the idea of "alternate timelines." The rooftop conversation between Bruce and the Ancient One sort of suggested that while timelines could coexist for a little while, they were also fragile . She was worried her reality would cease to exist if even one Infinity Stone was removed*. That's why Steve had to return the Infinity Stones to their original places**.

iirc, the idea of a Marvel 'multiverse' was technically introduced in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, but at the time it was presumed that movie was just a one-off and not part of MCU canon (it was a Sony movie, and the fact that it was an animated film probably helped to think of it as separate from the other Spider-Man movies***). I think the title of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is what introduced the term 'multiverse' to the MCU. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania reinforces the idea that the MCU is playing with a "pop sci view of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics." They're definitely combining 'alternate timeline' and 'alternate universe/dimension' into a single concept that isn't well-defined yet.

Okay, here's another brain-twister (Endgame and Loki spoilers):

Spoiler :

The reality from which Loki picked up the Tesseract and used it to escape had to have been pruned by the TVA a few minutes later. So how did elderly Steve end up on the bench with Sam at the end of Endgame? The timeline from which the Avengers "borrowed" the Infinity Stones would have ceased to exist shortly after Our Loki escaped from it, even if Steve successfully returned all of them. Elderly Steve ought to have been pruned in 2012 with the rest of the timeline, just after the Avengers defeated the Chitauri invasion, even if his mission to return the Infinity Stones to their original positions was 100% successful and didn't produce any "Nexus Events." The scenes at the end of Endgame all had to have taken place on the Sacred Timeline, which Steve couldn't have been on anymore.

There's one possibility that I can think of: Steve didn't succeed 100%, and somewhere caused a "Nexus Event", but it was a Nexus Event that benefited He Who Remains and thus was never pruned and became part of the Sacred Timeline.

* At the time, the question was whether the Time Stone was unique in that way. While the Ancient One clearly had supernatural senses, it was unclear whether she knew that Bruce's colleagues were busy stealing other Infinity Stones. It also likely that the Ancient One was aware of alternate timelines vanishing shortly after the event that caused them to branch off, but didn't know why. She may have assumed that was the natural end of branching timelines, but we know now that it wasn't natural at all, it was the TVA "pruning" them.

** iirc, Steve also took the Mjolnir that Thor had stolen from himself. We know now that the sudden disappearance of Mjolnir around the time of Thor 2 would probably have created a "Nexus Event."

*** Although that conceptual division between the live-action and animated stuff may be dissolving: What If..? might be a series of vignettes showing us alternate, canonical timelines, featuring those whose stories won't ever tie back into the main MCU.

 

Spoiler Endgame / Loki stuff :

You're possibly forgetting that because Loki got away with the Tesseract, Steve and Tony had to jump again, this time to 1970, to get it. He later (according to online wiki whateverness, because the film doesn't explicitly show it) returned the Space Stone to 1970, and the Loki / Tesseract interaction remained its own distinct (and thus prunable) branch.

I'm in the middle of the Bad Batch, taking it slowly so I don't quite catch up with the one-a-week release schedule. There are four more episodes left to be released, and I'm four behind that (around episode 8 at the mo, with 12 released currently).

My wife and I have also picked up our Buffy rewatch (after catching up with the hilarious Brooklyn 99), kicking off Season 4 with a lovely reminder that curtains were still a thing around the turn of the millenium.

 

Spoiler :

I think that's true only if there was a "Nexus Event" between when the Infinity Stones were 'borrowed' and when Loki picked up the Tesseract in the lobby of Stark Tower. That's why I proposed the idea that Steve was not entirely successful in his mission to restore the Stones and Mjolnir to their proper places. If he had been, that timeline would have gone essentially unperturbed until Loki escaped with the Tesseract - which was a Nexus Event - and been pruned along with it.

The connection between time travel and alternate universes in the MCU lies with Nexus Events. As long as there's no Nexus Event, you can travel back in time and still be on the same timeline. Timelines in the MCU evidently have some flexibility, and therefore some resistance to "the Butterfly Effect." Only key changes cause a shift that's dramatic enough to spawn a whole new timeline. That was why Steve had to go back and restore the Stones in the first place. for example, Frigga encountering slovenly Thor didn't produce a Nexus Event. She was wise enough to avoid it, and she stopped Thor from telling her any more than he already had. She could handle merely meeting Future-Thor in a corridor and intuiting that whatever was going on was dire without knowing any of the details (iirc, she seemed to know she was doomed). Steve returning Mjolnir and the Stones an instant after they'd been taken wouldn't wipe that memory from Frigga's mind, so we can infer that Frigga encountering Fat Thor and his rabbit friend in the hallway was not a Nexus Event. Frigga, the Ancient One, and the Avengers didn't have the term "Nexus Event" in their vocabulary, but they had grasped the concept.

I watched the heck out of that show when it aired, but I don't think I've seen it since. I'm curious how it holds up, what with everything.

 

Polished off in the past couple of weeks:

Workin' Moms (S5)
More of the same, if you like that kind of thing (we did). The final ep's last scene fairly obviously angling for a Season 6...

Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts (S1–S3)
Started a bit weakly, but got better. A consistent argument for tolerance, peaceful conflict resolution, and being generally excellent to one another (also relatively diverse characters, and LGBTQ+-friendly — to the best of my limited qualification to judge such things — and no end-of-final-season cliffhanger, which was refreshing)

Pacific Rim: The Black (S1)
Wasn't really planning to go back to this, but Netflix didn't take the hint, and left it in my "Continue watching" list, so I figured I might as well, if only to clear it off. Wasn't too bad, in the end.

Stranger Things (S1)
Pretty sure I'm the last person to have watched this series by this point? I liked S1 enough that I'm 2 eps into S2 already.

Loki (S1)
See everyone else's spoilers!

Still in progress:

Community (S2:E17 — according to Wikipedia, but E16 on Netflix because they decided to exclude the original E14)
Supergirl (S3:E12)
Kim's Convenience (S1:E5)
The Bad Batch (S1:E12)
Violet Evergarden (S1:E1)

 

My eye keeps finding the thumbnail for this series on Netflix, but I've yet to pull the trigger. I gather since you're on season 5 that this is a recommendation? I've practically drowned myself in Canadian sci-fi, but I don't know if I've ever watched a Canadian comedy.