Do Not Lick Your Television, Pt. 1

I love food.  I’ve never loved the term foodie, but there you have it.  That’s what I am.  Food is such an interesting thing—necessary to live, of course, but it can be as basic as you want or it can be elevated to an art form.  But I’m not here just to talk about food, obviously, that’s not what this blog is about.  Although, I did just do exactly that recently with the delightful podcaster Tom Zalatnai on their podcast No Bad Food, where we discussed the deeper meaning of the pre-dinner bread basket, among other things, if you’d like to check that out.  No, of course I’m not just talking about food.  I’m talking about food TV.

Be forewarned.  There will be food puns.  I’m trying my best not to, but they’re going to creep in and there’s nothing I can do about it.

My first and formative experience with food TV was Iron Chef America.  Flipping channels one day led me to an episode of Iron Chef America and I was reminded of a story of a friend and a destroyed kitchen inspired by the original Iron Chef, so I stuck with it.  That was that for me.  It was the thing that turned me into a foodie.  It’s why I own multiple books by Bobby Flay.

Other shows have caught my attention since then.  Netflix’s Chef’s Table and Salt Fat Acid Heat are particularly good ones, as well as Hulu’s Padma Lakshmi hosted Taste the Nation.  Food is so cultural, it’s infinitely interesting to me to see different dishes from varying cultures and learn why they are the way they are.  Food has its own evolution as well.  And Chef’s Table is a celebration of food artistry that boggles the mind at times.  As beautifully shot and arranged as the dishes themselves, Chef’s Table has become essential viewing for any food lover.  But I always came back to Iron Chef America.

And luckily, Iron Chef is back, this time on Netflix and this time in the form of Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend.  Needless to say, I was chuffed to bits to see Iron Chef back on the small screen.  If you’re not familiar with the Iron Chef formula, the Chairman (actor Mark Dacascos, whom you may remember from the Hawaii 5-0 reboot, if you were unfortunate enough to have watched it, or John Wick 3) has a stable Iron Chefs—chefs who are at the top of their game, delivering meals of incredibly high quality and artfulness in restaurants across the world—who take on a challenger in a culinary gauntlet.  The rules have changed a little over the years, but the gist of it is that there is a secret ingredient that must be featured in each dish of a five course meal.  Sometimes an early dish had to be delivered, sometimes a “culinary curveball” was thrown and mid-challenge a new element was introduced to be used in one of the dishes of the chefs’ choice.  But overall it’s a simple recipe—one secret ingredient, a time crunch, and the boundless creativity of chefs at the forefront of the profession.

This time around, however, things are a bit different.  Gone is the original Kitchen Stadium.  The switch from the Food Network to Netflix probably necessitated the change, but I was sad to see the classic arena go.  It was tight, it was close quarters, and it was frenetic.  The new Kitchen Stadium is slick, state of the art, and Coliseum-like in its structure and scale.  The time limit changes from episode to episode; sometimes it’s the standard 60 minutes, sometimes it’s 70, and I think one time it was even 75.  We’re back to having three judges, but the judging is now…strange.  Three judges would score an initial dish out of a total of 25 points and the chefs were judged on three criteria (taste, originality in the use of the secret ingredient, and plating) for a total of 100 points.  I’ve always been pretty good at math, but even a first grader wouldn’t need to break out the TI-83 to figure out that neither 25 nor 100 divide by three.  They also stopped showing the points breakdown by category, so all transparency in scoring is gone. I don’t know what one chef did over the other to win a tight match anymore and that takes a good deal of the fun out of it.  As a result, the final score feels arbitrary, leaving you with only the edited comments of the judges to guess at what one chef excelled at over the other.

The new, larger Kitchen Stadium gives chefs and their teams more room to breathe, but the downside is that some of that manic energy of the kitchen has been lost, replaced with background music meant to amp up the drama.  But it actually takes away from the action.  The sounds of the kitchen are all the drama Iron Chef ever needed.  I remember when I tried to watch Baking It on Peacock, a Great British Baking Show/Bake-Off (I never know what to call it ever since I was informed it was called different things in the US and UK markets) style baking competition hosted by Maya Rudolph and Jake Peralta’s alter ego, Andy Samberg, the pervasive and nonstop background Christmas music slowly drove me insane.  It was like being stuck in a department store elevator on Christmas Eve that only had public domain music to play, so every moment you were trying to figure out what song was mercilessly attacking your senses, but you could never quite put your finger on which song it was.  The music has to go.  The cooking is dramatic enough.  Also, the changing time limits resulted in a few episodes where the Iron Chefs were almost relaxed, joking around, seemingly free of the pressure cooker that is supposed to be Kitchen Stadium.  That never would have happened in Iron Chef America.  That’s not to say I don’t want the chefs to have fun with it and of course the Iron Chefs themselves are supposed to be more seasoned and in control than their challengers, but it should never be easy.  If it’s easy, it shouldn’t be a competition.  It’s easy for me to boil some water, toss in a box of bucatini and put it all together with some freshly grated cheese, olive oil, and melted butter, while watching episodes of Stranger Things on my iPad, but that would make for a terrible TV show.  No one wants to watch me leisurely make a half-ass cacio e pepe in my kitchen.  The time crunch is half the fun of Iron Chef.

It’s not all bad, though.  Returning as the host is Alton Brown, and he seems to be back to normal.  For a while he’d adopted a very “reality competition host/culinary Simon Cowell” energy that was very off-putting, but I didn’t really experience that this time around, which was a pleasant surprise.  An even more pleasant surprise was the addition of chef Kristen Kish as a full on cohost.  No longer is there a floor reporter; Kish and Brown are equals and both take forays into the stadium to talk to chefs about their respective dishes.  And this time around, they actually get to sit and eat with the judges, which is, at the very least, nice for them.  Because I know sitting at home and only being able to look at the tantalizing dishes can be torture at times, I can’t imagine being courtside and smelling all that wonderful food and not being able to partake.  Then there’s the quest aspect of the show.  Rather than gathering a bunch of chefs and pitting them against each other, the way The Next Iron Chef did, the highest scoring challenger returns at the end of the season to take on the entire Iron Chef roster in one knockdown drag out battle to see if they will be crowned the next Iron Legend.  What it means to be an Iron Legend, I don’t know.  But it seems interesting. And these Iron Chefs may be new, but they’re a force to be reckoned with. My particular favorite, Dominique Crenn, shines in the series. And while I haven’t yet had the pleasure of eating at one of her restaurants, my brother has, and he said the food was so good that he literally licked the plate. Suffice it to say, Atelier Crenn is certainly high on my restaurant wish list.

The challenges are bolder now—sometimes including both a secret ingredient and a theme, such as street food.  Sometimes they can go too big, losing focus and adding things like football player sous chefs, but overall, it’s not the worst thing that’s happened to the show. Yes, saddling chefs with guest stars as members of their team is a few steps too far and hurts the integrity of the competition. Top kitchens operate in a very specific, regimented fashion, and it doesn’t feel like you can get the best out of the competitor or the Iron Chef if you surprise insert a celebrity.  I don’t mind too much theming the challenges along with having a secret ingredient, especially if you make them incongruous, but it really needs to be pared back a little.  It all smacks of trying too hard.  There’s only so much that needed to be added to the pot to make it a great show on its own, but theming and the guests and the over the top Chairman, it’s completely unnecessary.  Iron Chef America was excellent as is.  I know, evolve or die, but there is such a thing as too much.

If there’s one thing that the Great British Oven Thingy has taught us, it’s that the cooking can be plenty fun and dramatic on its own, even if it doesn’t get contentious, the way so many American competition shows force themselves to be and thankfully Iron Chef doesn’t lose that good natured core it had before.  Even though some of these changes are positive, I still can’t help but feel some of the magic is gone.  However, it’s not irreparable.  Dump some of the music, tune the microphones to pick up more of Kitchen Stadium, set the challenge length back to an immutable 60 minutes, and return transparency to the scoring, and this shell of its former self will certainly recapture its former glory.  It’s just a few tweaks, Netflix, and you can make Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend even better than Iron Chef America was.  Dial back the theatrics and let these amazing culinary talents be the ones who bring the drama.  Please?

Chris Pratt and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Show

So, The Terminal List is bad.  It’s very bad.  I know, it was a long shot that it was going to be good anyway, as more and more streaming services act as their own production companies, the brands get more and more watered down.  “Netflix Original” doesn’t quite swing as hard as it used to.  Sure, there’s Stranger Things, Dead to Me, and Mindhunter, there’s also The Do-Over, Luke Cage Season 2, and Cowboy Bebop, among others.  I’m not saying it doesn’t count for anything, but it’s not like it once was.  Same thing with Amazon Prime.  In fact, it seems like when Amazon has something really good on their hands, they don’t seem to know it—cancelling The Tick after two fantastic seasons and Truth Seekers after only one—but there are some good shows that endure like the only sometimes problematic Jack Ryan and The Boys.

Chris Pratt flexes his action chops in this by the numbers revenge less-than-thriller. Hair is on point, though.

And this brings me back to The Terminal List.  Chris Pratt’s last tango with a Prime Original was the dismal and forgettable Tomorrow War, where he played someone dead in the future sent to the future to fight future aliens while no one tries to figure out where they came from until it’s apparent that they’ve lost.  So it’s not like I got my hopes up when I first saw the trailer for The Terminal List.  Needless to say, quite a bit of the shine has been taken off Chris Pratt for me in recent years and as I shrugged and hit play, I muttered to myself, in a not-exactly-prescient act of consolation, “at least it’ll be violent”.  And it delivered at first—despite watching it in the dead of night in the rare hour that there are no 4th of July holdouts still setting off fireworks, the dark and murky opening action sequence still managed to be hard to see and poorly mixed, with garbled audio.  The rest of the episode was largely predictable and not very compelling, leading to a final crescendo that begs the question: “Just what the hell was the plan here?”  Just a quick bit of spoiling for the first episode—in an apparent attempt to stage Chris Pratt’s suicide, he’s attacked while having an MRI done.  Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever had an MRI, but I have, so I know a few things about MRIs.  One, they’re big magnets and you’re not allowed to take metal into the room with it.  Two, it’s notoriously hard to conceal anything when wearing little more than a hospital gown.  So attempting to make it look like a man snuck his pistol into an MRI, had the MRI done, which takes about 45 minutes, and shot the MRI technician, and then shot himself in the head seems like a cover story so flimsy even the most keystoney of Keystone Cops could see their way through.  And then he comes home to his dead family, so he can be excused for any level of violence and cruelty he will dish out in return.  Not that I don’t understand the sentiment, but much like Disney killing parents, the unbridled quest for revenge due to murdered family is a bit done.

Pratt desperately seeking revenge—and a shirt

After three episodes, which is just about all I could sit through, it seem the show has settled into a pattern.  Chris Pratt mopes a bit, someone tries to kill him, he finds a name, and then uses his seemingly never-ending resources and skills to kill someone just before the credits roll.  Just in time; if it weren’t for the occasional bursts of violence, the show would be terminally boring.  However, it really does make me wonder what’s going on in the world of The Terminal List.  Finding the first name on his list was easy enough—the person’s actions were so obvious that anyone could see through them.  From there, he connects one dot to the next, crossing names off his Arya List as he goes.  One thing that gets me, however, is that his list, written on the back of a drawing his daughter made for him, really only gets one name added to the list before he crosses it off.  Does he really need a list?  It’s not like he’s investigating, gathering names, and then going to cross them off one by one.  I would think he could remember one name at a time.  But, I digress; in between these “missions”, he also survives multiple assassination attempts.  The one in the third episode is the most interesting to me.  While meeting with an ally to his cause, he catches the slightest glimpse of a bearded man in a hat and sunglasses.  This, predictably, ends in a violent shootout in broad daylight on the street, as these lunch meetings tend to.  However, it seems like this massive firefight goes unnoticed by everyone, other than Pratt, his ally, the dead guy, and the shadowy employers of the dead guy.  Now, I’m not asking for the full CSI treatment, but the idea that someone can get into shootout in broad daylight on the street outside of a seemingly popular restaurant and the show doesn’t even pay lip service to things like an investigation or CCTV footage or red light cameras or anything that like makes the writing feel amateurish and inattentive to detail.  And for a show that goes into painstaking detail of every type of gun used, it really shows where the priorities are—it’s not about the storytelling, because stuff like that rips me right out of my suspension of disbelief way more than someone not knowing the nitty gritty details of a gun’s specs, like I’m watching an episode of Call of Duty’s loadout gunsmith.  Leave aside the fact that Call of Duty’s gun customization has taken a sharp right turn away from reality for a moment, please.  Don’t get me wrong, I love a bit of gun porn as much as the next guy—the scene between Keanu Reeves and Peter Serafinowicz in John Wick Chapter 2 was great fun for me—but you’ve got have your priorities.

When it comes right down to it, if Prime suggests you should watch The Terminal List, don’t.  Watch one of these shows instead of this Punisher pretender:

Jack Ryan (Amazon Prime Video)

Jim Halpert isn’t messing around anymore

Yes, it’s a missed opportunity that Jack Ryan never even once put Greer’s gun in Jell-O

If you’ve only ever seen John Krasinski in The Office, seeing him as Tom Clancy’s former Marine turned CIA analyst might come as a bit of a shock to you.  And if that is the case, definitely go watch A Quiet Place, his excellent sci-fi/horror film which he stars in and directs.  Anyway, back to Jack Ryan.  Two seasons are currently available with a third on the way and Krasinski steps into the role quite well, speaking as someone who grew up on Harrison Ford’s portrayal of Jack Ryan.  There have been reboot attempts in the past—Ben Affleck’s Sum of All Fears and Chris Pine’s Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit both fell woefully short of the highs of films such as Clear and Present Danger and Patriot Games, but this iteration does the series justice.  The globetrotting spy series offers smart writing, with nuanced characters, only resorting to blatant stereotyping on relatively rare occasions, but if you’re on the lookout for expansive globetrotting action intertwined with international intrigue, Jack Ryan is well worth a look.  The first season finds Jack working on tracking down a new breed of super terrorist, largely in a Middle Eastern and European theater, with big set pieces in Yemen and France.  The second season takes Jack to South America, tracking a mysterious shipment from Russia to an unstable Venezuela.  While another Middle Eastern terrorist might not exactly break any expectations, it’s handled fairly well and the second season feels very keyed in to current worldwide concerns.  Personally, I felt the second season was an improvement on the first, which I thoroughly enjoyed.  I’m due for a rewatch of this myself, so I might be following my own advice shortly.

The Punisher (Disney+)

Two dead men ponder existence

Special Ops.  Betrayal.  A murdered family.  A man looking for revenge.  A conspiracy.  A web of lies.  These are the ideas The Terminal List lifted from The Punisher.  Watching the pilot episode, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d seen this all before and I’d seen it done much better when it starred Jon Bernthal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach.  The Terminal List is what happens when you have a pale facsimile of The Punisher mixed with Arya Stark’s penchant for making lists.  So why not watch the better version?

Yeah, he’s scary, but he’s far from the indiscriminate killing machine we’re used to seeing

When The Punisher first released on Netflix, it received a fair bit of criticism.  Some people felt it was too slow, some people wished for a more indiscriminately violent Punisher.  But when you stick with the first season, you see not only a portrait of a man’s guilt and grief driving his sometimes merciless actions, but also a deep, personal look at PTSD in veterans.  The Punisher isn’t just a showcase for Jon Bernthal’s excellent acting, but it also acts a reminder.  We ask a great deal of our soldiers—whether you agree with the decisions that put them in war or not, we often take very young men and women and ask them to do the worst things that humans do to each other and put them in incredibly stressful life and death situations.  Humanity has been waging war since before the loincloth and our psyches are still not built for doling out that kind of destruction to one another.  War is a horrible thing.  It is violent, it is gruesome, and it leaves a stain on all of humanity.  The Punisher reminds us that we’re not doing enough to support veterans when they come back to a home that feels foreign at times, with dangers, perceived or real, they’ve been trained to be hypersensitive to.  Was The Punisher slow?  No, I don’t believe it was—it was deliberate.  It takes time to paint a picture and the show had to take its time to color the canvas.  A show or film is only really slow if the payoff isn’t worth it.  And in this case, it very much is.  As much as I am burnt out on the MCU, this show doesn’t feel the same as the quippy, bright sky beam slug fests you’re used to seeing on the big screen.  It’s quiet, it’s dark, it’s an intimate portrait of two men living as ghosts, each of them half alive, trying to make themselves whole again.  If you overlooked this show the first time around or listened to the negative buzz, it’s time to load this one up and give it a watch.

Moon Knight (Disney+)

Steven Grant wonders if this Glock is the worst cupcake he’s ever seen

The man in the mirror routine can often look cheesy, but Oscar Isaac pulls it off with aplomb

Moon Knight, on the other hand, does have its more MCU-y moments, but it also feels different enough that I was able to enjoy every moment of Oscar Isaac’s performance as Steven Grant and Marc Spector.  Now, dear reader, you deserve a warning here—I am a huge fan of Oscar Isaac.  One of the biggest.  I think he’s an incredible actor who elevates anything that he’s in.  And I really mean that.  I’ve seen Triple Frontier twice if you don’t believe me.  Yeah, twice.  I know.  Despite the conceit of Egyptian gods and magical powers and another super suit, Moon Knight delivers a lot of down to earth action and another look at trauma, different this time from The Punisher.  Yes, Marc Spector has a military background, but the pain in him comes from the deepest place; a place so embedded in your soul that it makes you wonder if you can ever come back from it.  It makes you question how we cope with our lives and the bad things that we have to deal with on a daily basis.  Most of us don’t go to war.  Most of us are not operators who can kill their way out of any problems that may arise.  Most of us are just regular people who hurt, who take the pain that life hands out with reckless abandon and internalize it, living in societies that stigmatize mental healthcare, placing people in a position to perpetuate the trauma imparted on them.  Marc and Steven didn’t ask for what happened to them—in some ways, their tragedy is so normal and accessible to those of us who don’t become SEALs or Delta Force that it may even be written off as mundane, which is in itself tragic.  But while The Punisher makes us look at how we treat the people we ask to do our dirty work, Moon Knight asks us to look at how we treat each other and ourselves.  Moon Knight wants us to look at our own pain, our own struggles, our own traumas and begs us to find a way to be kind to ourselves.

Steven Grant is what happens when Paddington Bear becomes a real boy

Of course, Moon Knight doesn’t just offer this—it also has moments of genuine laugh out loud comedy, suitably disorienting direction that puts you in the shoes of the character (or rather, the character’s then-dominant personality), and some very fun and intense action sequences.  The use of time cuts puts you on your heels and leads to some very interesting storytelling.

Bodyguard (Netflix)

Robb Stark has traded in the leather armor for a half Windsor. It works for him, not going to lie.

Bodyguarding requires a lot more standing next to cars than being King of the North did

Bodyguard may not be groundbreaking and it’s not as elevated the way some of the other shows on this list are, but it’s still a great, tension-filled, twisting and turning watch.  Robb Stark (aka Richard Madden) stars as PTSD-afflicted officer of the Royalty and Specialist Branch of the London Metropolitan David Budd who is tasked with protecting a politician whose beliefs run counter to his.  Not only that, she was behind some of the decision making that put him into war, that caused him to lose friends, and struggle with his mental health after returning home.  From minute one, the show is filled with edge of your seat moments that leave you and the characters pointing fingers in just about every direction.

Madden does a great job portraying the volatile Budd, a man trying to keep it together and reconnect with a family from which he’s become alienated.  If you want 24-like action and political intrigue without the “blame the closest brown person and torture them as much as possible” approach of Jack Bauer, this miniseries might be for you.  While it doesn’t feel as significant emotionally as shows like The Punisher and Moon Knight, Bodyguard is well written, well acted, well shot, and well worth your time.

The Old Man and the Dune Sea: A Kenobi Story

[In this article, the first two episodes of Obi-Wan Kenobi will be discussed with light, non-story-essential spoilers.  Content warning: sensitive topics such as school shootings and genocide will be discussed.  In the wake of recent events, I am at a loss for words to describe the tragedy that has not only befallen the families of the children and teachers killed and their community, but wounded the soul of a nation.  My heart goes out to everyone touched by this senseless act of mass violence that has become too familiar in the American landscape.]

I’m tired of superheroes.  I said it.  MCU fatigue has finally fully settled in.  After I shrugged my shoulders through the entirety of the latest increasingly-confusingly named Spider-Man film, not only did I wonder why they all had “home” in the title (Homecoming, Far From Home, No Way Home, Homeward Bound, Home Alone, Home Improvement, and Sweet Home Alabama; it gets hard to keep track of all of these), but I wondered how far we can go on sheer nostalgia.  Especially if the thing I’m supposed to be nostalgic about doesn’t resonate.  I never watched the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man trilogy—I wrote them off as cynical cash grab meant to hold on to the rights to the franchise.  So when he showed up to a silent audience as I watched at home, I felt nothing.  Nostalgia can only get you so far, right?

Far removed from his days as a Jedi and a general, Obi-Wan lives with his roommates, isolation and regret

So let’s fire up the nostalgia machine and go again, this time with Obi-Wan Kenobi, Disney+’s new series about the titular Jedi in a world devoid of Jedi.  Here we see the origins of Ben Kenobi, cutting meat and watching Luke from a distance.  He’s old; much older than the 10 years between Revenge of the Sith and Kenobi would have you believe.  He’s sad.  Everything he knew, fought for, and believed in went up in flames over the span of one radio transmission.  He’s alone.  Self-imposed hermitry as the Inquisitors, who are far too inquisitive, search the galaxy for the remaining Jedi and other force sensitives to either turn to the Dark Side or eradicate.  Hardly a casual chat.  Needless to say, we’re tuning in to a rather tough spot for the galaxy.

Old friends, new enemies

There’s a lot at stake for Kenobi.  Unlike The Mandalorian, which had almost no expectations on its shoulders as it graced the screen, Kenobi comes with a lot of baggage.  I know that the there’s been a push lately and opinions on the prequel trilogy have changed in recent years, but having just rewatched them as recently as last week, I can only place them in the category of bad movies I enjoy watching.  The writing is stiff, the acting is stiffer, and the visuals rely far too heavily on green screen and CGI.  There’s a lot frustrating things about the prequel trilogy (including the treatment of Padme in Revenge; especially after seeing how headstrong and badass she is in The Clone Wars series, ROTS-era Padme was a huge disappointment), but much of it has to happen for us to get the story we had in the original trilogy.  So I can’t be too nitpicky on the story choices, even though they often frustrate me again.  Kenobi is more like The Book of Boba Fett, which aims to redeem a character, not only in the eyes of the story, but in the eyes of the audience as well.  Boba Fett is one of those characters we were never honest about—I loved Boba Fett, I wanted Boba Fett’s action figure, I wanted my AOL Instant Messenger name to reference Boba Fett, I tried boba tea for the first time because of Boba Fett.  But in reality, Fett did very little in the original trilogy other than stand around, complain to Vader, and then die, seemingly.  The Book of Boba Fett had to redeem one character (and did so brilliantly; I am planning an in-depth look at the series soon, as I believe it to be woefully underrated due to misconceived expectations), which is hard enough.  But more than his own legacy is on Obi-Wan’s shoulders.

Obi-Wan’s rat tail and half-ass pony do not make a return, leaving one of the worst hairstyles to grace the silver screen in the past where it belongs

Kenobi has to redeem the entire prequel trilogy.  The show has to make that journey, that aggravating puzzle piece to the Skywalker Saga, worth it.  And while it’s hard to say after just two episodes, I think it’s off to a good start.  The series starts with a recap of the prequel trilogy, which, frankly, gives you just about all the highlights you need and none of the memes.  In just a few minutes, enough story is imparted to the viewer that it kind of makes it obvious that the prequels didn’t need to be made.  As a storytelling device, I’ve always seen the prequels from two differing viewpoints with regards to how they impact the overall story.  On one hand, watching the prequels may spoil one of the most dramatic reveals in movie history (if you’re not familiar, it has to do with one character being the papa of another character, despite the fact that they’re on opposite sides of the war, I explained while winking).  On the other, going into the prequels knowing Lil Orphan Ani’s fate, it tells a fatalistic story that lacks gravitas for the reasons the prequel trilogies faltered in the first place.  But all isn’t lost with Kenobi.  In fact, I’d say he’s off to a very good start.

So uncivilized…but immensely useful in this lawless galaxy

First step to hiding as a Jedi: Dress exactly like a Jedi and hope no one notices you haven’t gotten your style out of 1999.

One of the biggest things Kenobi has done for me so far is to further discredit the idea that Jedi were superheroes.  It was absolutely thrilling, after years of hearing so much about the Jedi but only having some relatively tame lightsaber duels from the original trilogy to base their badassdom on, to see the Jedi at the height of their power.  Far from the lone, tragic whispers in the original trilogy, Jedi were everywhere.  Feared and respected, it was a sight to see.  But here, Obi-Wan has to come to grips with the fact that he’s just a man.  He may have some extraordinary powers, but he’s still only a person.  It hurts when you punch something harder than your hand.  It hurts when someone punches you, too.  Despite this idea of the superhero Jedi growing like weeds in a garden, even the prequel trilogy tries to warn you off.  While The Phantom Menace opens with a great deal of fear over just two Jedi, Attack of the Clones ends with dozens of Jedi gunned down by the most cannon-fodder-y of all cannon-fodder enemies, battle droids.  The battlefield is littered with so many dead Jedi it looks like ten all-Jedi Shakespeare in the Park productions of Hamlet went horribly wrong simultaneously.  And, as the curtain drops on Revenge of the Sith, the vast majority of the Jedi are brought down with their backs turned, in seconds; wiped out in a massive genocide orchestrated by the Jedi’s greatest enemy/then-current boss.  An ending that Kenobi puts right in your face with a new, school-shooter-inspired vibe to it (further adding to the controversy of including an Order 66 scene at all, Kenobi ran without a content warning, and as of the time of writing, continues to do so) as we are forced to relive the ending of ROTS through the lens of a teacher desperately trying to protect her students as clone troopers casually stroll the halls of the Jedi Temple, gunning down everyone in their way.

Kenobi’s struggles after the fall of the Republic bring to mind another hidden Jedi from the same era, Rebels’ Kanan Jarrus

And yet, it is this vulnerability that makes Kenobi, and by extension, other Jedi survivors, like Star Wars: Rebels’ Kanan Jarrus, such sympathetic, relatable, and heroic characters.  In a moment where Obi-Wan has to choose between what is right and self preservation, he does what his enemies call out as the weakness of the Jedi nature and chooses right.  It was an act of heroism that is unlike those seen in most superhero movies; after all, bravery isn’t acting without fear, it’s acting in the face of fear.  It’s knowing that to do the right thing, you may be sacrificing yourself.  That’s what makes a hero.  Heroes are flesh and blood people who have to make the choice to put the safety of others ahead of their own rather than stand back at a safe distance and simply lament the tragedy that they did nothing to stop.  It could backfire—in my experience, certain segments of the Star Wars audience don’t like to see their childhood heroes as anything but mythic figures.  But for me, it’s their humanity that makes them interesting.

He may be older and sadder now, but he still has a special set of skills. However, is stance on sand is as-of-yet unknown.

It’s here where Kenobi can make real strides.  Far from the bounty hunter in his prime, like Din Djarin, or the cold blooded killer attempting to make peace in the world as recompense for his violence, like Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi is a man lost to a galaxy that rejected him, his religion, and his people.  A man grown weaker and feebler with the passage of time and the weight of his actions, including his own survival.  But deep down, he is still the Jedi who is willing to put his life up for the lives of others.  This version of Obi-Wan may become the most heroic yet.  And while the first two episodes may have been far from flawless, the chance to see Obi-Wan at his most heroic is one I’m absolutely here for.

25 Years Later, Still Searching for a Worthy Sequel

Sequels are hard.  Sometimes they come out better than the original, but that’s a rare feat only achieved by excellent films like Terminator 2, Aliens, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and 2 Fast 2 Furious.  Most of the time, the best you can hope for from a sequel is a par continuation of the story.  And often, what you get is a pale facsimile of the original, like an artist performing their own forgery, or at worst, The Hangover 2 or Frozen 2.

It can’t be a PG13 movie without a needlessly included teenager

One of the things I’ve noticed about most of the great sequels is that they’re not simply continuations or retellings, they’re actually transformative.  Terminator was a gritty chase film, a horror movie where the devil is determined to take everything from the main character.  Alien is pure horror, a film which sets out to isolate and terrify you the way it isolates and terrifies its characters before their ultimate demise.  Then come along T2: Judgment Day and Aliens, not only different movies with different stories, they take on new genres.  While they don’t fully shed their horror roots, they both step more into the action/adventure blockbuster realm to transform how the movie interacts with the audience.  Captain America changes things up as well—from a war film to spy thriller, while also upping the emotional stakes.  The Winter Soldier is so different from The First Avenger, I sometimes have trouble remembering that one is a sequel to the other.  The massive time jump helps the feeling of change as well; gone are the glitzy USO dancers, jaunty montages, and classic struggle between good and evil.  We’re in the present now, where so much of the world is gray, including some of our protagonists.  And I definitely don’t need to tell you how 2 Fast 2 Furious improved over the Point Break clone of the first movie.

In the movie and in real life. Pretty sure I had one of those stuffies

It’s a high bar, I know, to compare anything to T2 and Aliens, as they’re not only two of the best sequels of all time, they’re also two of the greatest blockbusters of all time.  But as good as they are, as good as their predecessors are, they all pale in comparison to Jurassic Park.  Jurassic Park is one of the most brilliant films I’ve ever seen.  The way it sweeps you up into the narrative, the pure visual spectacle of the thing; Jurassic Park captured the imagination of the nation in a way that the other films couldn’t.  And the genius doesn’t end on screen, either; building the whole film as a purchasable real world phenomenon that felt like it could really happen and pushing the merch in the movie itself positioned Jurassic Park as a living entity.  The lunchboxes in the movie were available in stores.  I was seven years old at the time, arguably too young to go see the violent PG-13 movie in theaters, and yet I had Jurassic Park toys, Jurassic Park tie-in cups from various fast food restaurants (I can’t quite recall, but I imagine that they were from McDonald’s), and a Jurassic Park coloring book.  My classroom was practically a showroom for Jurassic Park merchandise, in a way I hadn’t seen before and never saw again.  As much as I can’t look past the Disney machine when I look at Disney animated films and even the MCU, it was Jurassic Park’s machine that was the first example I can remember.  Maybe it created the machine, I don’t know, but certainly in my lifetime, it was the first that I’m aware of.  And yet, when I see Disney’s machine, it takes away from the films and when I see Jurassic Park’s, it only serves to make the movie feel more plausible.

Ellie’s fear was palpable, real, and shared by the audience

So then, how is it that nearly three decades after the movie’s release and 25 years after its first sequel, The Lost World, Jurassic Park is still in desperate need of a truly good sequel?  The Lost World was a huge letdown at the time; it did everything a sequel was supposed to do, absolutely by-the-numbers.  Bigger stakes, bigger set pieces, and a much higher body count.  But it was this by-the-numbers approach that was its ultimate downfall.  Mindless violence is fine every once in a while, but horror happens when you care about the characters in peril.  The Lost World serves up large swathes of InGen’s zero-to-one-dimensional PMC red shirts for the dinosaurs of Isla Sorna to feed on, tear apart, and swallow whole by a romantic waterfall.  I don’t care about any of them—they simply exist to show how dangerous the island is.  Not that there isn’t a place for that; but once the protagonists’ party experiences its first casualty, the emotional connection to imperiled characters starts to wane.  Luckily, there are enough characters that were new to the series that they could have bought it when in trouble that you’re still interested, for the most part.  Malcolm and his daughter had dino-proof plot armor, for sure, but Vince Vaughn and the incredibly talented Julianne Moore didn’t, not by default.  But the story of their survival is interspersed with the paramilitary subplot, which acts solely as a ticking clock to worry the protagonists and never threatens any type of emotional resonance.  Even our main protagonists can be hard to empathize with at times; they show concern over the loss of their friend, but while literally hanging on for dear life after a multiple Tyrannosaur attack, they quip about getting cheeseburgers.  Now, mind you, if Ian were to make a joke, or a comment, not only would that be fitting his character’s detached demeanor, for him, this is old hat.  He’s already been almost killed by a T-Rex; he’s one of the few people on the planet who can say that.  But for Moore’s Sarah Harding and Vaughn’s Nick Van Owen, this is the first time they’ve been in this kind of danger.  Awfully cool, calm, and collected of them, almost callous, in the face of novel and fantastic danger.  It’s unbelievable that photographers and paleontologists would be so together in that moment.  In Jurassic Park, the characters felt fear—they felt the danger they were in and imparted that fear to the audience.  That just didn’t happen here.   

He’s happy now, but wait until he sees the average housing costs

We can argue all day about whether the San Diego scenes at the end of the movie add anything or ruin the movie.  I think it’s somewhere in between, but it raises a lot of questions.  Look, I’ve pored over the T-Rex escape scene in Jurassic Park dozens of times.  I’ve all but build a model out of Legos to try and spatially make sense of it.  It doesn’t though; the Tyrannosaur paddock shouldn’t have such a huge drop right there.  But the movie is otherwise so masterful, you do your best to just move on from that.  It was a breathtaking scene, so even if the landscape doesn’t fit what you see in the movie, you forgive it.  However, when the ship runs aground in San Diego, with the crew either dead or missing, with a severed hand hanging on to the controls in the intact wheel house, the suspension of disbelief just stops.  I’ve tried to reconcile this nearly as many times.  As far as I can tell, the drugged Tyrannosaur wakes up, goes into Solid Snake mode, escapes the cargo hold, quietly eliminates the ship captain.  At this point, the T-Rex either kills the rest of the crew or they abandon ship, all but one, whose hand is holding the cargo bay door controls.  The Rex then kills this crew member while he’s still holding on to the controls and jumps back down into the cargo bay before the doors shut and eventually malfunction.  This is clearly quite a clever and dexterous foe, as he lies in wait for the ship to reach San Diego, where he can unleash his next attack.  Obviously, the dinosaur knows all about maritime navigation, as all dinosaurs do.  And before you say “It must have been the juvenile Rex who did it”, they do explain that the recovering T-Rex came on the plane with antagonist Ludlow before being reunited with its papa and chowing down on Ludlow (whose fate, much like Peter Stormare’s Dieter, felt far too convenient).

So, The Lost World had lots of problems.  And yet, years later, it is a half decent action-horror flick, if you approach it with no expectations.  The same can’t be said about Jurassic Park 3; and, frankly, the less said about the film, the better.  With a preposterous plot and velociraptors so intelligent they set traps and pontificate about the meaning of life while sipping on tea and smoking a pipe, it’s the kind of movie you work hard to forget.

Turns out The Critic was positively prescient when it comes to how ridiculous velociraptors would get in the JP series

At least this oft-memed scene gave zookeepers something for their Instagram pages

Then, it was radio silence for nearly 15 years until Jurassic World hit the theaters in the still-ongoing wave of remakes and reboots, somehow becoming one of the biggest films in box office history.  One thing was certain; the film’s success showed there was still a desire to see more of this wonderful world of dinosaurs.  Much like its contemporary, The Force Awakens, Jurassic World leans heavily on the structure of the original film, changing out a few plot points here and there while new characters grace the screen alongside some of the old.  However, where The Force Awakens was successful, Jurassic World doesn’t exactly hit the notes right.  It feels like a song played on the piano, but on the wrong register.  The movie is overly sanitized and corporatized now—the clever in-movie marketing was replaced by product placement so egregiously bad even the characters groan at it.  The real world touches that made the first film feel so plausible instead make you roll your eyes.  Instead of marketing its own merchandise, it became a vehicle for cynical product placement and attempted to pull the wool over your eyes by pointing it out, in a semi-tongue-in-cheek fashion.  Also, in a stunning turn of script that was clearly from a child’s fever dream, the military dreams of using guided velociraptors to hunt terrorists.  If you haven’t seen the movie or just don’t remember it, that’s not a joke.  That’s literally a subplot in the film and it serves up one of the dumbest things I’ve heard in any movie.  Also, remember when they designed a dinosaur for their dinosaur zoo that can turn invisible?  An invisible attraction.  An invisible thing people pay money to look at.  See any minor or possibly major problems with that?  Jurassic World 2: Jurassicker World, or whatever the subtitle was, managed to be even worse.

Trained. Raptors. As. Weapons.

We’re now on the eve of Jurassic Park 6: Jurassickest World 3: End of the World Somehow.  Now, it’s been a while since I’ve seen Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and readers, though I appreciate each and every one of you, because it’s not streaming anywhere, I didn’t rewatch it before writing this.  I couldn’t bring myself to pay money to see it again.  As I recall, in another stunning turn of dumbness, a cloned little girl sees the dinosaurs as the same as herself, and releases them into upstate New York rather than allow them to die.  I guess I should applaud her act of empathy, but at the time I felt that she’d be responsible for dozens of injuries and deaths.  However, based on trailers, it appears that this handful of dinosaurs released in a forested area in the northeastern US (as I recall, it was upstate New York) have now taken over the world to the point that humanity’s very existence is in danger.  As thrilled as I am, at any time, to see Laura Dern on screen, whether it’s a guest spot on The West Wing or as a hyper Type-A mom in Big Little Lies, bringing her back isn’t enough for me to not wonder how a few dinosaurs were able to not only evade the police, National Guard, and any number of military branches to successfully traverse the entire world to create an extinction level event.  I somehow can’t envision a scenario in which a Tyrannosaur boards a plane to head to Europe.  Now, maybe I’m being too harsh on a movie I’ve yet to see and hasn’t even been viewed by critics yet.  But Jurassic World 3 is not off to a promising start.  Let’s face it—dinosaurs aren’t kaiju.  In The Lost World, Roland Tembo came to the island with the express purpose of hunting a Tyrannosaur with a double barrel elephant gun chambered in .600 Nitro.  If you’re not familiar, it’s a big, big bullet meant to kill very large animals (elephants, if that part weren’t obvious).  A Tyrannosaur could reach heights of about 40 feet.  We’re not talking about Godzilla here; these are animals of killable size when you’ve got a military on your side.  Tanks, .50 caliber machine guns, missiles, etc.; I can’t imagine dinosaurs would spread the way they seem to have based on the movie trailers.  I hope I’m wrong about this film the way I hoped I was wrong about the Halo season finale.  But I wasn’t wrong about Halo…

The diverse Scooby Gang of Camp Cretaceous prepares for their next threat

However, one good thing did come of these big, dumb sequels: Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous.  A children’s cartoon with a diverse cast and shockingly more realistic characters than the Jurassic World films, it manages to capture the spirit of Jurassic Park and do it in a way that’s accessible for kids and adults.  It’s kind of the perfect way to keep the brand alive, the way The Clone Wars reinvigorated interest in Star Wars after the disappointment of the prequel trilogy squelched it.  Now, the newest film is being touted as the conclusion, but sleeping dogs don’t lie and billion dollar franchises don’t just die.  Camp Cretaceous plays in the background of the newer films and thus should reach its own conclusion soon, and as the series continues, it becomes less and less believable as part of the Jurassic Park universe (malevolent robot dogs, mind-controlled dinosaur gladiator fights, etc; we’re one brain box away from this becoming Dino-Riders), but it still manages to be more buyable than Jurassic World 3’s supposed storyline.  The kids stranded on the island include a dinosaur enthusiast (hard to call him an expert since he’s, like, 12, and there are actual paleontologists in this series), but more importantly, they had ready made shelter and access to food and water infrastructure, and a group of them to share labor and watch each other’s back (unlike the kid from Jurassic Park 3).  It’s still implausible, that a small group of kids could survive a dinosaur island in chaos, but Camp Cretaceous manages to lean just towards believability.

Camp Cretaceous manages to bring back some of the magic, now if they could only translate this to adult, live action characters

A quarter of a century later and the best thing we’ve seen so far is this cartoon, which, yes, stretches believability quite a bit at times, but overall has been a positive for the series.  I truly believe that.  Maybe it’ll go the way of Star Wars.  I know the sequel trilogy is still rather controversial (and, in my opinion, had two great movies and a stunning act of cowardice for a finale), but it might draw a road map for where Jurassic Park could go.  Hopefully, when the next set of sequels comes around, the filmmakers pare down, really look at what made the first Jurassic Park so special, and do their best to recapture that magic, rather than simply going for bigger and bigger.