Let's Go Hunt: Umbrella Academy Season 4

This started out as a Friday Grab-Bag but the very first topic ran to more than two thousands words so now it's a post just about that. I guess I'll get to the rest tomorrow. Or next Friday. Or never.

I watched all six episodes of Umbrella Academy Season 4 this week. One a night, the way I do. It was a ride, let me tell you. A bumpy one. The final episode left me feeling a bit like the family must have felt when Gene and Jean t-boned Diego's minivan in Episode 2 - shaken and shocked, dazed and defeated.

It's tempting to concentrate on that really very bad indeed ending, both to the season and the series. A lot of people are doing just that, which is why Season 4 has an audience score on Rotten Tomatoes of just 17% as I write this. 

There's a good overview of the wider audience response to the way the show ended on Screen Rant but the tl:dr is it just wasn't anything like as good as the other three. It felt rushed and cramped and incoherent and that's because it was. 

After the first episode, which sure took its time with the set-up, it always felt like we were skipping stuff we needed to know, always running to the next incursion point, never stopping to explain why we were in such a rush to get there.

Netflix is getting the blame for most of that. Apparently they only wanted to pay for six episodes where the previous three seasons each had ten. Of course, back then people were complaining there was too much padding. TV executives clearly can't catch a break with audiences these days...

The shortened season may explain the lack of space to tell the story but when it comes to the complaints about lack of coherency, that has to be down to the writers. I get the impression the show wasn't suddenly truncated mid-season, leaving them to scramble an ending of sorts. They always knew it was going to be six episodes so they had ample opportunity to pace things accordingly. They just didn't.

But then, for me, the plots in Umbrella Academy never made all that much sense. They weren't particularly memorable, either. It is without doubt one of my favorite shows of the last few years but I couldn't tell you the plotlines of any of the seasons. I could barely follow them, if I'm honest, not even while I was watching. I certainly can't remember any of them in much detail now.

And that's fine. I always thought the whole USP of the show was that it revolved around mysteries that couldn't be unraveled to anyone's satisfaction, neither the characters' nor the audience's. The reality in which the show existed was ineffably fractal, recursive, self-inflected and just flat out weird. I'm pretty sure no-one was expecting or even asking for it all to be tied up with a neat bow at the end but even if they were, the way that was done would surely not have been what anyone had in mind.

So far, other than to say the ending wasn't very good, I haven't let slip any spoilers. Oh, wait, there was the thing about the car crash but I think I got away with that one. Let's not draw attention to it.

From here on in there will be spoilers aplenty so if you haven't watched the show and plan to and you care about keeping the snow pristine and all that, probably best skip the rest and come back when you're as pissed off as I am. 

Warning duly given. Here's a video to break up the flow and give you a chance to leave before you see something you'll regret.

Everyone on board? Okay, here we go ...

Here are just a few of the problems with the ending. It's dramatically inert. It's dull to look at. It goes against much of the character development in the previous thirty-five episodes. It would not happen within the internal logic of the show. It's stupid, basically.

All of that can be argued against. What can't is the way the ending entirely invalidates everything that came before. Literally.

Here's the way it goes: the Academy face another existential threat, a fourth consecutive ending of the world. Instead of finding a way to prevent it or failing to do so, as in the previous three series, they instead discover (Or rather Five tells himself, in a disorienting scene set in a delicatessen, where he is all the customers and all the staff.) that the family themselves are the proximate cause of all the apocalypses and only their annihilation will put an end to the eternal cascade of destruction.

In short, if there had never been an Umbrella Academy there would never have been the need for an Umbrella Academy because there would have been only one thread of existence and it would have gone on, undisturbed and unbroken into eternity, instead of shattering into a myriad diverging timelines, every one of which ends in global catastrophe. 

All the family needs to do is accept that and allow the current apocalyptic threat to overwhelm and assimilate them, so they not only cease to exist but cease ever to have existed. Then everything will be just peachy. So peachy, in fact, that there's both a vision before they agree to self-negation and a confirmatory coda after it happens showing them and us how the timeline is restored to the most anodyne of peaceful existences.

It looks fucking awful. Like an Edwardian nanny's daydream, frankly. It's impossible to imagine any of the crew having a reaction to it that doesn't involve contempt, disdain or despair. They're a bunch of borderline sociopaths with a multiplicity of attitudinal disorders, not one of which involves wanting to live the kind of life usually only found in picture-books for the under-fives. 

And yet they unanimously agree to unalive themselves to bring that vision of the future to life - for everyone, but mainly for their children, who won't miss them at all because they will never know they existed. 

And apparently neither will anyone else, although the explanations are so vague and hand-wavey it's impossible to be sure. How Lila's family, who get the unenviable job of bringing up the four orphaned children, are going to explain their origins to the kids when they start asking questions is left unmentioned, as is how they'll square the whole "We have four more kids and we can't explain were we got them from" thing with the authorities but never mind. I'm sure it'll all be fine.

Seriously, you can pull on any one of a hundred threads in this tapestry of twaddle and the whole thing will fall apart. And not just in the cold rationality of post-season analysis, either. I was yelling this stuff at the screen as I was watching. It's that bloody obvious! No wonder almost everyone hates it.

Apart from making absolutely no sense in terms of diagetic logic, on a metafictional level the ending renders the entire series completely purposeless from the point of view of the audience. Why did we waste our time with these people if they never even existed? What were all those emotions we felt for them worth? I bet you feel stupid now for caring.

Yeah, not really. I hate the ending but it doesn't mar the previous three seasons, each of which can be treated as a standalone story. What can't so easily be shrugged off is the way it makes Season 4 itself totally meaningless. As a conclusion, it's a whisker away from "It was all just a dream.", and that hasn't carried since The Wizard of Oz.

Apart from the ending, though, how did you like the play, Mr Lincoln? Well, I can't say it didn't have its moments. 

I loved the use of popular music, which was satisfyingly sparing for once and which gave a very amusing sense of being trolled by whoever picked the tunes. It was jarring enough in the first episode, when a scene went by to the boneheaded sleaze of the Bloodhound Gang doing The Bad Touch, (A song I always thought was called "Mammals" until I looked it up on YouTube just now...) but when Baby Shark blasted out of the speakers during the road trip and wouldn't fucking stop I literally laughed with joy.

I could do a whole post just based on those music choices but we'd better move on. Another thing I was largely okay with was the romance between Five and Lila, something that seems to have raised hackles right across the fandom. I think the problem with that storyline was the execution not the concept. 

I don't find it too much of a stretch to believe that two people forced to spend seven whole years alone together would end up leaning into each other for emotional support or that if they were of suitable orientation that support wouldn't become physical and/or romantic. Seven years is a long time to live through and even more so if you have to spend most of it in a deserted subway. 

The trouble is, jamming seven years into a five minute montage is just not going to convey the grinding weight of time passing as experienced by the characters. It looks more like they're having a bad holiday than an existential crisis. 

That said, I didn't believe anything much about the entire subway subplot to begin with. It's riven with internal contradictions and almost nothing about it that ought to be explained ever is. It's nonsense, frankly, and the wonder isn't so much that Five and Lila end up sleeping together as that it takes them so long.

Then there are the powers. It's easy to forget sometimes that The Umbrella Academy is, at its core, a superhero show. It's based on a comic book and the characters have a team name and costumes so it should be hard to miss and yet somehow it still isn't always obvious.

For the first three series, in great part that's because the individual powers are so specific and odd, when they're even defined at all. Victor's power always seemed to be getting angry and having to be calmed down, for example, while Klaus may be functionally immortal but he's totally useless in any conceivable super-heroic situation. Alison's rumor is chilling and charismatic but frequently impractical, Luther is a basic strong guy, Five is Nightcrawler in a suit, Diego is good with knives and Ben is mostly dead until Season 3.

All of that changes radically in Season 4, when the gang get dosed by Ben and get their powers back, only they don't. They all get upgrades except Five, who gets stiffed with a subway pass to the multiverse but no map to go with it. 

The changes to the power sets make all the Academy proper superheroes at last and I can't say it isn't fun to watch but it erodes much of what made the team and the show so unusual in the first place.

Alison doesn't rumor any more, she does mind control at a distance and somehow telekenesis, too. She's Jean Grey, basically. Luther's still strong but now he's invulnerable, too, so the rest can use him as a shield when they get shot at, which happens a lot. He's Colossus. Half the team are X-Men, now. 

Diego goes from having super-high dexterity to somehow being able to gather up bullets in flight and send them back to where they came from. I guess he's Gambit, now I think of it. Maybe they're all X-Men and that's the gag...

Klaus summons spirits and lets them use his body for rental sex, which admittedly seems completely in character, but Victor now fires force blasts from his hands, like a few dozen superheroes I could name.  Ben keeps his very dodgy CGI tentacles that make him look like a low-rent Dr. Octopus but also loses any lingering sense of humanity he might have had. 

Best of all is what happens to Lila, who just happens to be there when Ben hands the spiked shots around. She gets fricken' eye lasers! The more I think about this X-Men thing...

Granted, all of this leads to some pretty decent fight scenes but we can get those anywhere. The sheer ordinariness of the new powers smacks of lack of imagination but also of an attempt to put some oomph into a show that otherwise would mostly consist of siblings bickering. 

The thing is, siblings bickering is what The Umbrella Academy is all about. By far the best moments in the show are the ones where two or more of the team are trying to work something out between themselves. All the rest is window-dressing.

Season Three does have a good deal of what made the show so involving in the first place. The party scenes and particularly the episode where the entire team spends most of it jammed together in the minivan are lots of fun. There are some solid starts at sub-plots, too, particularly Lila, Five and Diego trying to navigate their complex feelings towards and against each other, Alison, Klaus and Claire working out how to be a kind of family and everyone coming to terms with being "normal" for the first time in their lives. 

Unfortunately, none of these themes is allowed the space or time it needs to develop. Things begin and then either get left on the sidewalk or wrapped up in a rush. 

As for tying up any of the dangling plotlines from the three previous seasons you can forget about it. Most of them aren't even mentioned in passing, something exemplified by the absolute absence of Sloane, a major character from the preceding season, last seen at the end of the final episode of Season 3 but never once mentioned in the entirety of Season 4.

I could, as must be all too painfully apparent, go on but I'll stop there. Despite all my cavils, complaints and misgivings, I did still enjoy the final season. It mostly rocks along with lots of action and plenty of good lines. It's the plot that falls over and plot is generally the thing I care least about.

If nothing else, it has determined me to go back and watch the first three seasons all over again. I think I'll stop when it gets to the last one, though. Or maybe I won't. By then I won't remember what happened so I'll have the chance to get angry about it all over again.

Endings And Beginnings: A (Pretty Much) Spoiler-Free Spot-Take On Stranger Things Season Four And Umbrella Academy Season Three

Last night I watched the Season Four finale of Stranger Things. The night before I watched the Season Three finale of Umbrella Academy. Netflix chose to release both seasons as a package, although for Stranger Things they split the season in two, for either aesthetic or commercial reasons, depending who you ask.

I chose to watch both shows on my own schedule, one episode per evening, giving me just enough time to process each instalment and still be able to remember the plot. Seriously, with shows that release one episode a week I can barely remember what happened the last time. How we all managed back in the bad old days of broadcast TV I can hardly imagine. Or remember, obviously.

The reviews for both series that I've seen mostly fall into the "good but not great" category, with everyone liking Stranger Things but critics being happier with Umbrella Academy than audiences. As you'd expect, a lot of the commentary tends to be comparative, not so much with other shows as with each's own previous seasons.

On a snap rating, I'd give both shows a high mark on their latest outings but therein lies a problem. My unconsidered opinion is of limited value. I've said before that I'm easily pleased and it's no exaggeration. If I like something enough to bother with it at all, there's a strong chance I'll like it a lot, or at least I'll believe I do. 

I tend to get drawn in quickly and easily and not to notice flaws on a first viewing. It's why I follow the Rule of Three: once for the experience, twice to compare, third time to decide.

Only who has the time? I'm pretty sure the finale of Stranger Things is the longest single episode of a serialized TV show I've ever seen: two hours and nineteen minutes. Although it could have been even longer. 

When it comes to putting particular seasons or episodes in some kind of qualitative order within the context of the life of the show, I run into a different problem. Or perhaps I should say a different iteration of the same old one: I struggle to remember something I watched weeks, months or years ago.

Perhaps I ought to clarify that. I realize I'm starting to make it sound as though I have some kind of clinical condition. It's not that I can't or don't remember what I've seen or heard at all; it's more that I need a trigger for the memories to fire.

With TV shows, when I write posts like this, I usually begin by looking at a clip or two. Once I've watched a few seconds it all comes flooding back. Well, some of it does. Usually. If nothing comes it probably means I didn't really watch it properly in the first place.

As I write this, I haven't rewatched a single scene from the earlier seasons of Stranger Things or Umbrella Academy, so I can't in good conscience comment on which is better, worse or about the same. All I can do is say how I felt about them in the moment, as I watched, and now, a fw days later, as I look back.

Of the two, it surprises me to say I think I may have enjoyed Umbrella Academy more. If I was going to develop a full-blown critique of the two shows, which I am not, I'm fairly sure I'd come down on the side of Stranger Things being better-structured, conceived and realized but I don't think it could be described as more fun to watch, not least because the first ninety minutes or so of the show I watched last night was one of the tensest TV experiences of my life.

Asmiroth posted an excellent review of Umbrella Academy in which he makes a whole raft of observations that make complete sense to me, most of which I also noticed while I was watching. I commented on the post to say as much. 

Something I was thinking then but forgot to mention was how, despite the overall tone of Asmiroth's post coming over as unsatisfied or disappointed in some undefined fashion, almost all the specifics are positive. 

That makes sense. Umbrella Academy as a show can sometimes feel less than the sum of its parts. It's bursting with distinctive, interesting characters played by excellent, engaging actors, delivering smart, funny dialog, while doing exciting and surprising things.  

It's fast, supple, sparky and almost effortlessly entertaining, all of which makes it a great watch as you're watching it. It doesn't always make a great deal of sense when you think about it afterwards, though, and not just because the whole thing is predicated on time travel, which never makes any kind of sense.

Seriously, I don't believe I'm exaggerating a whit when I say that there has never been and will never be a time-travel narrative of any kind in any medium that holds up to even the mildest, most casual scrutiny. Time travel itself may or not exist - physicists seem to be divided on the theoretical possibilities - but the human mind is simply incapable of processing the concept without analogizing or metaphoring or anecdotalizing and once any of that begins you're already lost. 

I have a super-simple rule with all time-travel tales. I completely ignore anything that gets in the way of the plot. In the case of Umbrella Academy there's a lot to ignore but I can ignore six impossible things before breakfast and still feel satisfied so that doesn't bother me at all.

Poor character development does. Like Asmiroth I was not a fan of Alison's character arc in UA Season Three. In fact, I was so not a fan I may have yelled at the screen a couple of times. I also had a bit of a suspension of disbelief problem over the sequence where Klaus plays in traffic so he can be killed enough times to refine his powers, something which seemed to me to have certain practical impracticalities, not least what the hell anyone driving the vehicles might have thought about it.

Overall, though, I loved Season Three of Umbrella Academy. I really hope there's another because the way this one ends isn't an ending at all, it's a beginning. But that's what you get with time-travel stories.

The end of Stranger Things Season Four also ends with an obvious lead-in to the next but we already know there's going to be a fifth. Netflix could hardly afford for there not to be and the Duffer Brothers have already told us the have it in hand. Millie Bobby Brown, the show's superhero as the iconic Eleven, would like it to be a bloodbath, as would her onscreen boyfriend, Will, but I agree with the Duffers; that wouldn't be Stranger Things.

Above all, Stranger Things is cosy. It started out as a love letter to the lost 1980s, invoking the spirit of Spielberg, The Goonies and Stand By Me. Every season has seen that comfortable setting further questioned, challenged, threatened and yet even as the gates of Hell open beneath Hawkins, Indiana somehow the cosiness has never really scraped away.

It can't. It's no veneer. Stranger Things is cosy through and through. Even a flower-faced devil dog gnawing through the opened ribcage of a fresh killed corpse somehow contrives to look almost cute doing it. The whole show is wholesome. It's like a Twilight Zone version of The Waltons.

That's a compliment, by the way. I loved The Waltons. I watched the entire series, all nine seasons; more than two hundred episodes. I watched them twice, once when they were new in the 1970s and then again when they were repeated in the '80s. I watched them on broadcast TV, when you had to be there when they showed it, not just whenever you felt like watching. Yep, it's a compliment alright.

Millie Bobby Brown complains about how many characters there are. "It’s way too big. Last night, we couldn’t even take one group picture because there was like 50 of us." It's true but it's also kind of the point. 

Eleven and her friends are like a snowball of goodness rolling downhill, bouncing over the evil rocks and picking up more goodness wherever they land. It's one of those series, like Roswell (I love Roswell so much...), where you want more and more people to get in on the secret because everyone who does just gets better as a human being. 

Steve says as much in his heartfelt speech to Nancy, right before they head off on yet another stupid, suicidal adventure and he should know. He's pretty much the poster child for self-actualization.

Stranger Things is a better show than Umbrella Academy. It's a more important show with more important things to say and it says those things more convincingly. I like many more characters in Stranger Things than I do characters in Umbrella Academy. The plot makes more sense, the events it describes have more weight, everything seems to matter more.

Umbrella Academy is more fun though and the characters would be way cooler to hang out with. And it's funnier. It's almost a sitcom at times. Most characters are funny most of the time uinless they're having a moment. Even Victor gets a few one-liners. Alison doesn't, which is why her character is the one that rarely works, this time.

Stranger Things is funny, too, but the funny parts and the serious parts almost feel like different shows. In fact, certain characters in STS4 are funny all the time, like clowns. They seem to have been added to the cast for that specific purpose because characters who used to be the funny ones in earlier seasons have undergone character development and can't just make jokes all the time. (Hi, Erica!).

As I write ths post the thing that always happens is happening. Those occluded memories are coming back, faster and thicker. I don't always need to watch old clips to pull the trigger. Putting words down on paper does it too.

It means I'd better stop before things get out of hand. All I really wanted to do was acknowledge the moment. I thoroughly enjoyed both seasons of both shows. I feel priviliged to be living in a time when such visions are being brought to screen. 

We're very lucky. 

Now, what's next?

Stargirl Interlude

By the time I'd watched three seasons of the brutal, nihilistic Titans, followed immediately by two seasons of the occasionally sadistic if mostly playful Umbrella Academy, I was more than ready for something lighter, fluffier and, above all, more unironically and unequivocally heroic. There were several more superhero shows waiting in my Netflix watchlist - Defenders, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage - but before I could take a look to see if any of them might fit the bill I got an alert from my alternate streaming service, Amazon Prime.

I've found the prompts from both Prime and Netflix reliably useful so far. Their algorithms seem to be working well for me. This one felt exceptionally well-judged. It came at exactly the right moment, it featured a character whose guest appearances in another show I'd very much enjoyed and best of all I had absolutely no idea the show even existed.

The show in question is Stargirl, which is, I believe, the latest to roll off the DC Universe production line. As a lifelong DC fan I was very slow to pick up on the bleedthrough from comics to small screen. I'm still very much playing catch-up. Now I'm back in the fold, though, I do try to keep up with what's happening and I would have been quite annoyed with myself for missing this one.

Luckily, I didn't. I might not have known anyone was making a Stargirl tv show but thanks to the Prime prompt I still managed to watch the first season at the earleist opportunity. Earliest in the U.K. at least. We get everything good late.

So, was it any good? And did it manage to wash away some of the bitter aftertaste left by the self-serving cynicism of the aforementioned shows?

Well... yes and no. To both questions.

Whether you're likely to think Stargirl is any good or not depends on your tolerance for typical teen angst as served up by any number of previous CW dramas. That's somewhat misleading, since the CW didn't make Stargirl. DC Universe did. Only DC Universe is no more and Stargirl, whose second season has been commissioned, has gone not to HBO Max but to the CW. Which, honestly, does feel like its natural home.

Even with my extremely high tolerance for high school drama, I was hoping the show would keep the school stuff in the background. It does, although whether it will when the production moves across is another matter. But that's a problem for another day, another Season.

The other thing you'll probably need to have if you're going to enjoy Stargirl is an extremely robust suspension of disbelief. Even by the standards of superhero comics there's one heck of a lot of handwaving required if you're going to get past some of the extremely unlikely choices and decisions made by various characters at pretty much every turn.

I inevitably end up comparing almost every ensemble show with a supernormal teenage cast to the lodestone, Buffy. That's patently unfair but it's often revealing. Take a single, pertinent event that occurs in both shows: the discovery by the title character's mother that she has a daughter who spends her evenings climbing out of her bedroom window to do battle with the superpowerful entities who infest the supposedly sleepy small town in which they live.

How long did it take Joyce Summers to come to terms with the knowledge that Buffy was a Slayer? Did she ever, really? It was a long, slow, traumatic process for both of them, one which I sometimes found difficult to watch. Stargirl's mother, Barbara, adjusts to the news within twenty-four hours, mostly by dint of a bit of googling.

Almost every character seems to have a moment like that. Some have several. And even if you're coping well with their apparent emotional flexibility you still need to deal with their astonishing technological prowess. Stargirl's step-dad, Starman's sidekick Stripesy in a former life, somehow manages to construct - out of old car parts, no less -  a "robot" that acts as as a cross between a Transformer and one of Iron Man's suits.

There's a lot of this kind of stuff. I loved it. It was exactly what I was looking for. It could almost have come from the DC comics I grew up with. It has that silly sixties sparkle. Or maybe fifties, because the nineteen-fifties are something of a trope in Stargirl's aesthetics and soundscape, largely via Pat, who gives the impression of having been around back then even though he looks about thirty-eight.

So, all good then? All the blood-smeared scar tissue left by Titans and the Umbrella Academy nicely wiped clean with good, wholesome superheroics? Yeah, not really.

Stargirl herself, along with her once-again sidekicked step-father, now re-branded as S.T.R.I.P.E. are unambiguously honorable, heroic characters. Proper, old-school, duty-driven superheroes. The rest of the teen Justice Society of America, recruited by Stargirl in mid-season, all have significant, well-telegraphed "flaws" (obsessive and self-centered, angry all the time, bitter and betrayed) but they all do a pretty good job of rising above them.

Until one crucial moment in the season finale, that is. When one of them kills someone.

I won't say who kills who because spoilers but it's a genuinely a shocking moment. Not in the stlye of Titans or the Umbrella Academy, where the shock comes from how vicious or violent or psychopathic the supposed heroes are being, but because of how unexpected it is.

And that's good. But it's still a teenage superhero killing someone in a supposedly fluffy show. The rules have changed, after all.

It's tempting to make excuses. After all, while the good guys are, by and large, genuinely good here, the bad guys are really, really bad. Sadistic, brutal, terrifying. There are a lot of them and all of them are completely horrible. I'd struggle to say which one I detested the most.

Which is probably how it should be. Once again, standards have changed. In the sixties the villains would have been buffoons or caricatures. The Injustice Society seem more suited to the eighties and nineties, when sociopaths were very much in vogue.

It's an odd dichotomy, the fifties/sixties heroes up against the eighties/nineties villains. It works, but not comfortably. And heroes still shouldn't kill. Not those heroes.

If what you're after is fundementally decent heroes and existentially evil villains butting heads under comic-book rules, then Stargirl serves it up consistently, even if the premise itself feels far from consistent. It helps that the action is well choreographed, the writing solid and the acting better than decent.

Brec Bassinger as Courtney "Stargirl" Whitmore is close to perfect in the lead and there are some stand-out supporting performances, particularly Luke Wilson as Pat, Stargirl's long-suffering stepdad and Meg De Lacey as Cindy Berman, our hero's ineffably entitled nemesis. Trae Romano, Courtney's "little brother" Mike, steals just about every scene he's in. I could live without the bulldog but at least he doesn't get any lines.

I thoroughly enjoyed every episode and the two-part season finale is one of the better series climaxes I've seen. Except for the slightly bathetic "after the crisis" Christmas cooldown, that is. I'd have left that out.

Of course, as Wilhelm was bemoaning, now we have to wait. That's the problem with watching things when they're new. Plus there's the added frisson of the change of ownership. As I found recently with Lucifer, that can be a bit of a wildcard. I don't find Geoff Johns' promise that Season 2 will be "different" terribly reassuring, either.

Then again, by the time I get to watch it, maybe I won't remember what Season One was like, anyway.

Imaginary Friends

Wilhelm posted on shows he's been watching, these long indoor nights. I could do with a quick and easy idea for a post of my own right now, plus I was looking for an excuse to work my recent Netflix subscription into the conversation, so I'm going to pretend this is a response.

As I think I mentioned, I wanted to watch the fourth season of Lucifer. For arcane (maybe hellish) reasons it's on Netflix in the U.K. rather than Amazon Prime like the first three. I asked Mrs. Bhagpuss about the possibility of my piggybacking on her own piggybacked, daughter-hosted access.

It seemed to be quasi-legal. maybe. I read the Terms of Service but I couldn't make a whole lot of sense of them. There's a a lot of talk about devices but not much about people or accounts. It turned out to be a moot point anyway. Apparently shared access hadn't been working for a while.

We could have looked into that but at this point we both had a simultaneous epiphany. Why not get our own Netflix account? Radical! Sharing that, which would definitely be within the ToS, would cost us less than a fiver a month, each. That's practiacally free!

Why it took us a couple of years to come to this earth-shattering conclusion beats me. Sometimes you see the weave not the pattern, I guess.

So, we got Netflix. Since then Mrs. Bhagpuss has watched around a gajillion episodes of RuPaul's Drag Race, starting from the beginning and working forward. I haven't watched any but I know a surprising amount about it, now, all the same. Hard not to in this house.

I started watching the fourth season of Lucifer but to my own great surprise I quickly found I didn't want to, any more. There were some very obvious changes in the opening couple of episodes that felt  new-network-inspired and while they didn't make things that much different, they made things different enough to throw me off.

Had Lucifer still been on Prime, I'd have stuck with it and I will go back in a while, when I've forgotten enough about how it used to be to be fine with how it is, but the lure of so many fresh-to-me shows on Netflix was too tempting to resist. I dropped the devil for the deep blue sea of possibilites, the first of which, as I've discussed in some detail already, was Titans.

Titans was a rough watch and really not ideal for the last thing I'd see each night before I dreamed. I needed something to take the edge off before I went to sleep. Looking through the myriad possibilites I spotted something I'd wanted to see for years: Bojack Horseman.

Until now, everything I knew about Bojack Horseman came from Wilhelm's blog. That was where I first heard of it and pretty much the only place I ever did. He made it sound so intriguing I put in the effort, years ago, and tried to watch some episodes on YouTube, where everything is up at least until it gets taken down.

I didn't have much luck. All I found were a few clips but they served to whet my appetite further. When I looked into it, though, there seemed to be nowhere to watch the show other than Netflix. There were a few DVDs but they were imports, expensive and incomplete. Reluctantly I put the idea aside. Until now.

I've seen about half the first season. Let me tell you, it's no Mr. Ed. Yeah, I imagine everyone made that joke when it started. Anyone who didn't surely has more self-control than I do.

As I mentioned in that Titans piece, Bojack is rated 18, for absolutely no reason I can fathom. Yes, it's a little bit sweary and there's some sex, but by the standards of just about everything else I've watched in the last five years it's positively genteel.

I love it, so far. It's smart and funny but the real strength is in the characters, many of whom are painfully well-drawn despite not being very well drawn at all. It's also bleak as hell. If these are the early, funny seasons I have to wonder what I'm letting myself in for.

It became apparent pretty quickly that I couldn't rely on Bojack as a mood sweetener after Titans. Looking at the options, if I was looking for something as warm and cosy and familiar as an old sweater, what better choice than than Friends?

Yes, of course I've seen Friends. Like every human being alive in the '90s I watched every episode, some more than once, since it the damn show seemed be on permanent rotation on broadcast t.v. back then. The nineties were a long time ago, though. It must be more than twenty years since I last heard Chandler mis-emphasize a word. Long enough for the memory to feel nostalgic rather than nauseating.

I love sitcoms. Discovering MMORPGs gave me a fifteen year break from watching or even thinking about them but when that glamor began to wear off about the first thing I did was go on something of sitcom binge. Most of the shows I'd liked first time around seemed to have held up well so why not the ubercom? And anyway, to resist would be like avoiding World of Warcraft just because everyone plays it. I like to think I've learned my lesson there.

You'll be glad to hear I'm sure as hell not going to start reviewing Friends in 2020. Suffice it to say I'm onto Season 2 and the most surprising thing about the show so far is how much I remember and in how much detail. Oh, and how many sex jokes there are. Seriously, it's a lot.

When I re-watched all eleven seasons of Frasier a few years back it turned out I remembered nothing past about Season 3, which was hardly surprising because it also turned out I'd never seen anything past Season 3, even though I'd have sworn in a court of law I'd watched the entire series end to end. I think I can already remember entire plotlines in Friends going forward years from where I'm at now but I'm prepared to find out I'm wrong there, too.

One thing's for sure. In both cases I remember the characters intimately. As if they were people I've met. As if they were people I know.

I'm not saying that's a good thing. As I get older it becomes more and more apparent to me that what makes serial fiction so powerful is the way it  manipulates biology. Our brains haven't evolved sufficiently yet to differentiate the images and voices coming from the screen from those of real people in the room with us. When those images and sounds express an emotion it triggers a chemical reaction and we emote too. Sociopaths excluded, naturally.

The emotion we feel feels no different from a real emotion. That's because it is a real emotion. All emotions are real. It's chemistry, not metaphysics.

My current theory is that that's why I'm repeatedly drawn to ensemble pieces with recurring characters, imaginary people I imagine I like. My stupid brain thinks they're my friends.

With Titans that didn't really happen, probably because I couldn't stand half of them and those were the nice ones. None of them felt like people I'd want to hang with. They were more like family than friends and I've never been much of a family guy.

I guess I'd hang with Bojack and Diane and Princess Carolyn. Maybe even Mr. Peanutbutter. It's a little difficult to be sure. The brain gets a little fuddled with all the cross-species cartooning. I doubt there's evolutionary biology for that. I definitely feel something but it's not like Roswell or Smallville or Buffy or any of the other shows that effortlessly convince me I'm somehow part of a gang. Not a "gang" gang, you understand. Just a gang of friends.

Mrs. Bhagpuss hates to get to the end of novels she likes because what felt good feels bad when it stops. I don't have that problem with books but I do with series t.v.

It never really was an issue when I watched a show half an hour, once a week for a few months. Then a year off, start again. That's how we did it, last century. It sure is a problem now, though. These days I need a cooldown at the end of the final season of anything I really like. I have to read online reviews of the show I've just finished for a few hours to ease me out of the relationship before picking up with something new. Someone new.

Not everything works that way. Sometimes the triggers don't fit the receptors. Titans wasn't snug but I still enjoyed it, even when I hated it (that last episode sucks!), which is an intellectual response rather than an emotional one, I think. When it ended it left a supernatural/paranormal/superhero ensemble-show-sized  hole in my schedule. I filled it with The Umbrella Academy which, bizarrely, put me briefly in tune with the zeitgeist.

Netflix is very keen to tell me how popular that show is. #3 in the United Kingdom last week, apparently. Fell to #4 yesterday. Already I'm going out of fashion.

I could claim to be an early adopter. A while back, quite a while, it feels like at least a year, someone in the blogosphere mentioned the Umbrella Academy. I'm very sorry to say I don't remember who it was, but they were sufficiently convincing in their advocacy that I watched the first couple of episodes, back when we had the borrowed feed.

I had to watch it on Mrs. Bhagpuss's computer when she wasn't using it, which is basically only when she's at work. It wasn't ideal. I'm not generally much for watching shows or movies in the daytime anyway and it made things all a bit too "appointment to view" for my tastes. I was impressed but it was too much trouble. I dropped out after the first couple goes.

Well, now I'm back. Tonight I'll watch the last episode of the first season. It's an excellent show if you like shows that know they're excellent. I highly recommend it. It has convincing, peculiar characters, well-acted. It has a sharp script, some good jokes, exciting action scenes and a compelling plot. I really like it a lot.

And yet, despite the quality and the classic ensemble set up - literally a family of unrelated individuals, the trope could not be more meta - it doesn't do that thing I was talking about. I'm never inside their world. I never feel I'm one of them, there with them, sharing their feelings, their experiences, their lives.

Which isn't all that surprising because the Umbrella Academy is stagey as hell. It's camp and startling and clever and knows it. And because of it, my emotions are buffered. I feel things but at a remove. Which is great. It means I can relax and enjoy it even when bad things happen to people I like, which they do, frequently.

It's strange how these things work out. Noel Coward pointed out the potency of cheap music although I never felt he meant what I would have meant by it. What I do know is that not everything needs to be deep. It's all too easy to drown in shallow water, after all.

I've always trusted my feelings when it comes to art. I believe that makes me a philistine or a barbarian, something along those lines. Maybe an aesthete or a hedonist. An epicure?

I guess if I was more of an academic I'd know what to call myself. But then, what would I call my imaginary friends?