tv review
Reviewing insightful and thought provoking science fiction TV and technology.
Review of 'Emergence' 1.8
To be blunt: I thought Emergence 1.8 was, well, a weak episode. Here's why: I think the series is spinning its wheels, or choose your metaphor for a series that started out ok, got considerably better, and now seems to be going nowhere. This in part is because there have been too many deaths of villains or conflicted characters — Kindred and then Wilkis. And to make up for this, we keep getting new villains emerging on Emergence. Unfortunate, since that presumably is not why the series was so named.
By Paul Levinson6 years ago in Futurism
Review of 'Emergence' 1.7
A fast-moving episode 1.7 of Emergence. I hope the rest of the season continues at this pace. We learn a lot. Emily is Kindred's daughter. She created Piper — or, rather, got Wilkis to create her — to satisfy Emily's need to have someone who really loved her. But, for reasons we still don't completely know or understand, the AI that is Piper wound up with a mind of her own.
By Paul Levinson6 years ago in Futurism
Review of 'The Man in the High Castle' Season 4
I've been saying ever since Trump began running for President with his anti-immigration polices that The Man in the High Castle and its alternate reality of literally Nazi America had special relevance to the reality in which we now all reside, in which the Allies not the Axis won the Second World War. In the final season of this extraordinary adaptation of Philip K. Dick's extraordinary 1962 novel, immigration plays a major role in the story, especially in the very last scene of the series.
By Paul Levinson6 years ago in Futurism
Review of 'The I-Land'
I was going to entitle this review of The I-Land on Netflix, "Lost Opportunity." You know, that ABC series Lost, which had an excellent beginning, an absolutely out-of-the-ballpark brilliant third and fourth season, and then took a turn very much for the worse, with one of the worst series finales ever on television? Except ...
By Paul Levinson6 years ago in Futurism
Review of 'The Rook' Season 1 Finale
The Rook Season 1 finale, just on last night, was an excellent, brilliant episode on all kinds of levels, including Gestalt in unified attack action again, and Myfanwy getting the better of the Russian guy who looked like Putin.
By Paul Levinson7 years ago in Futurism
Review of 'The Rook' 1.7
A great, almost-all explained penultimate-of-the-season episode 1.7 of The Rook last night, in which we learn how Myfanwy knew she was going to lose her memory, and in turn why she wrote that note and left other information for her future amnesiac self, and how specifically she got into that position with no memory on the bridge, surrounded by a bunch of dead guys.
By Paul Levinson7 years ago in Futurism
