It was better than the average Netflix series — which isn’t saying much — but also has a better than average time travel story line, so definitely recommended. The premise, which you get from the promo, is that the same dead body shows up in the same London alley in four different time periods; the following few bullet points have mild spoilers, so, caveat lector:

• In the way it deals with travel through time it most directly resembles Predestination (2014), and if I were to directly compare the two I would say that Bodies makes the point that both of them are attempting to make in a much better way, and adds a few more points that are as important if not more so.
• And yet there is still a plot hole, and of course the plot hole — as in Predestination — has to do with biology. Either writers of science fiction can’t quite grasp how chaotic life is, or are hoping that the general public doesn’t so that they can prove their point.
• You may think, as the story takes its second-to-last turn, that it poo-pooed its own premise, and I had this sinking feeling that we were in Back to the Future land, but this was ultimately unfounded. Whew.
• We are much further away from World War 2 than WW2 was from the Victorian period, and it is one thing to read about progress and stagnation and yet another to see what a person born in the 1870s–1880s experienced in their lifetime.
• There is mercifully little of the future in this series, but what little of it there is serves as an excellent example of humans being better at creating the future than imagining it.
• There is a “Deutsch particle” in Bodies, and it ties with Hofstadter’s Spiderverse… mention as my favorite meta/physical Easter egg, which is, admittedly, a rather narrow category.
• I haven’t read the graphic novel the show was based on, but I much preferred its stylistic choices in how it showed its roots than those that Watchmen (2009) or The Sandman (2022) took. However, Watchmen (2019) is still five heads and ten shoulders above everything else.

📺🎶 The soundtrack of Only Murders in the Building continues to be our commuting go-to. All of the faux-musical numbers are now available, and listening to our 11-year-old sing along to the tongue-twisting Pickwick Triplets… is beyond delightful.

📺 Season 3 of Only Murders in the Building was their best one yet; I wrote as much last week. Meryl Streep deserves all the awards, Martin Short was at his best, even Paul Rudd was tolerable. The mystery itself was better set up than last year’s, which had too many last-minute revelations for my taste.

If there is one nit to pick it is this: ever since Game of Thrones started going all-out in the second to last episode, actual season finales of many shows have become anti-climactic. The Afterparty is a much bigger offender there, but Murders… do suffer from the same ailment, especially since the last few episodes before the finale itself were so over-the-top good.

📺 Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake has more swearing, gore, death, despair, and general dreariness than the original run. In a way, it grew up with its audience, replacing childhood magic with metaverse mythologizing. Still more delightful than most, just not for my 4-year-old.

📺 Next week is the season finale of Only Murders in the Building and I will have my one-paragraph review up then, but I’d like to note now that regardless of how they end up wrapping it up it has been the best season of TV in recent memory for the sheer joy of it. The soundtrack of all 3 seasons makes for great tunes while at work, and the two Season 3 show songs are now mandatory listening on our drive to school. So much better than The Afterparty, but then, I do prefer the East coast.

Update: It ended up being two paragraphs.

📺 Season 2 of The Afterparty was uneven, with a couple of cinematic marvels wedged between a wimpy start and an oddly rushed last episode which seems to have been chopped off at the last minute from the penultimate. The Wes Anderson and Alfred Hitchcock homages in particular were worth bearing the first 60 minutes of Aniq awkwardness.

A new guilty pleasure in our household — and I mean really guilty, as in I could find ten thousand reasons why it’s bad yet still I watch — is Guy’s Grocery Games. All that is good and bad about American TV, packed into 30 minutes. 📺

Excellent shows don’t often get better, so it is with great pleasure that I report that The Bear did. The space still feels cramped — all those close-ups! — but there are no deus ex machina-s and only one somewhat annoying character, the several previously annoying ones now completing their arc towards likeableness. The last two links have spoilers for seasons 1 and 2, respectively, and I have spoiler-ish observations below, so be warned!

Note that the two main characters, Sydney and Carmen, both have a pronounced drive. For Carmen, the drive seems wholly internal — his family is in shambles and the 21st century America is characterized by a distinct lack of a societal drive. ⊕ From that standpoint, how interesting that Carmen’s love interest is an ER physician: talk about a profession that runs on its own fumes. But a single-digit percentage of the population has that much self-contained energy — I guess you could call it grit — to overcome the kinds of obstacles Carmy did; Sydney’s own internal drive is not nearly at those levels. So it’s a good thing that her family, as small as it is, was there to give her an additional kick when she needed it.

And then we have cousin Richie, who spends a season and a half wandering about aimlessly, lacking any initiative of his own, family giving up on him, and society, well, still being the 21st century America: home base of modernity’s many mapless men. So, I misspoke and mislead in the first paragraph. There is a deus ex machina in Season 2: Richie’s transformation from grifter to greeter in the span of one week. And how does it come about? By Richie having an epiphany after speaking to the Deus, played in the dreamlike Season 2 Episode 7 by the great Olivia Colman.

Which is to say that — fittingly for a show centered on Italian-Americans — The Bear presents as good an argument as any for the increasing relevance of religion in everyday life. ⊕ Another observation is about that mildly annoying character, Carmen’s new girlfriend, being just a plot point on a hero’s journey; but a) this has already been made in that article from The Independent to which I linked, and b) I hated Joseph Campbell’s book.

Reading my post from yesterday one may think I have something against Smith Island, Maryland. Nothing could be further from the truth! Between the nature, the solitude, and the food, it has been on our list of places to visit for the better part of this decade. Stars seem to be aligning for August of this year, so fingers crossed.

We have been watching some videos in preparation, and An Island Out of Time (YouTube link) were 25 minutes well-spent. The island has been getting less and less hospitable for humans compared to the mainland, and it has nothing to do with its supposedly sinking.

If there was my type of a long-form article, it would be the making-of any complex project. Like of The Last Unicorn (via Robin Sloan), or Back to the Future (warning: Twitter thread), or Frasier (to which I keep coming back).

And I have never even seen the first one — though I do plan to now!