Category Archives: TV Shows

The Haunting of Hill House

A while back, I watched The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix.  I usually find it difficult to sift through all various television that is on these days, and, having been bitten by a few that were supposed to be good (I’m looking at you American Horror Story), I was initially wary of The Haunting of Hill House.  The problem is that I’m a huge fan of haunted house stories and I’ve seen a lot of them (good and bad), but I’m also limited in my television time, so for it to be worth that time, it has to be good.

That being said, The Haunting of Hill House was good.  There are plenty of spoilers after the jump, but that’s how I do my full reviews. Continue reading The Haunting of Hill House

Dark

In the last year or so, I have watched the Netflix series Dark twice – once with subtitles and once dubbed in English (from the original German), and I very nearly considered watching it a third time and doing a series of posts rather than just one.  From that, you might say that I liked this show a fair bit, but the show also had a lot of depth, which I can only make so much time to write about.

A more in-depth analysis with some minor spoilers below: Continue reading Dark

American Horror Story – Murder House

Just after Halloween this year, I binge-watched the first season of American Horror Story, aka Murder House.  I was in the mood for a good haunted house story, and I had heard great things from a variety of people about American Horror Story, so it seemed a good match.  Unfortunately, American Horror Story really failed to deliver on either the promise of a good horror story or a good haunted house story.  There were three things that I think overall worked against the show: the length, the lack of a coherent mystery, and a reason to suspend my disbelief. Continue reading American Horror Story – Murder House

Stranger Things 2

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been watching Stranger Things 2 with Elliot.  Like the first series, I feel like the second series really pulls off dark fantasy quite well.  There was a fair bit less mystery this season and a bit more reliance on the character dynamics to make the show work, but I thought it worked out well enough.

Standard spoiler warning applies – after the jump. Continue reading Stranger Things 2

.hack//GAMES

After writing about .hack//SIGN and poking around on the fan wiki, I decided I wanted to find out what was going on in the follow-on games (.hack//INFECTION, .hack//MUTATION, .hack//OUTBREAK, and .hack//QUARANTINE.)  As I mentioned previously, I don’t have any flavor of Play Station, nor the games themselves, so I sought out condensed playthroughs on Youtube in the hopes that I might at least understand the major plot points and maybe a bit more of the lore of this universe. Continue reading .hack//GAMES

.hack//SIGN

After my tour with Star Trek, I decided to go back to an old favorite and watch .hack//SIGN.  I saw this show the first time when I was working on my undergraduate degree at Mesa State College, and it has stuck with me since as an interesting character study.  I got the Funimation DVDs and was (for the first time) able to watch it with dubbed audio, which helped me just sit back and enjoy it. Continue reading .hack//SIGN

Star Trek

I recently finished the first season of the original Star Trek and I found that I quite enjoyed myself.  There were certainly episodes that are the very definition of campy, but there were also episodes that explored some interesting ideas and made Star Trek a social exploration of its time.  Below, I make some general observations, and talk about a few episodes that stood out to me. Continue reading Star Trek

Read the Book or Watch the Series?

I recently heard about the SyFy TV Series, “The Expanse,” with a close friend of mine mentioning that it was very well worth watching.  When I learned that the show was based on a series of books, I found myself in something of a dilemma – do I make the time to read the books and then watch the series, or do I find time to watch the series and then read the books? Continue reading Read the Book or Watch the Series?