[TV] Breaking Bad: Season 5 Review

So our journey of exploring the unique television narrative experience that is Breaking Bad is finally over and it was quite the memorable ride indeed. This fifth and final season is where everything comes to a head and it's both beautiful and tragic all at once. And that's just the nature of the story they crafted for this series.

Five seasons is both a good length for a television series but also a seemingly brief one compared to some of the shows that had longer runs than this one. But what this show achieved was a complete story that ran from beginning to end. And it's not just a story that managed to get a decent ending but a story that was emotionally complex and quite fulfilling.

It didn't feel like it ended before its time. It managed to say all that it needed to say and got its characters to some sort of an ending. But on the whole it's a big reminder that we can't look at things in terms of black or white and in the end it's all just murky gray.

[TV] Pose: Season 1 Review

Our love for RuPaul's Drag Race eventually got us to watch the documentary film Paris Is Burning, which tried to capture the spirit of the ball scene on the time. And watching that feature gave us a better appreciation for which elements of the balls made it into the show and sort of better contextualized RuPaul.

Pose was a surprise as it was a major television series that also tried to capture the feels of this period. Beyond that, the show was promoted to have a strong focus on the transgender side to the balls and also promised to cast transgender actors to fulfill the roles of their transgender characters,

I wasn't quite sure how this was going to go because with the creative team behind the show. They've made same great stuff or at least shows that start strong but don't always end well. So what was this show going to be like?

[TV] Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.- Season 5 Review

The fourth season of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was one of their best with the second half being absolutely phenomenal. As in seriously, it ended as quite the must-watch season for me but it's admittedly hard to convince people to slug through the first three seasons to get to that one.

And that season ended with many of our heroes somehow in space, which is a heck of a setup given the largely terrestrial nature of the group. The fifth season pursues that adventure and takes is above and beyond as the agents are well out of their league in terms of what they have to face.

This season remained fairly interesting given the complete change in setting for the team. As always I wish that it had more connections to the larger MCU. Then again, the drastic change in setting was probably part of an effort to completely side-step MCU continuity. It's not a perfect excuse but it works well enough.

[Books] Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? Audible Review

So Tobie introduced me to the genius that is The Office, particularly the US adaptation of the British series. Watching the show together was one of the highlights of our first few years together and I'll always treasure the experience. A part of watching The Office is discovering the quirky comedic genius of Mindy Kaling, who played Kelly Kapoor.

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? is her first effort at writing something other than a story of a television show episode in the form of a memoir. But the book is distinctly written in her voice and style that you also rather realize that maybe a lot of her work thus far has involved a lot of herself to one degree or another.

And as I strongly feel that autobiography audio books are best read by the authors themselves, I had an extra layer of enjoyment here.

[Movies] London Has Fallen (2016) Review

Well this is a movie that I didn't expect to find myself watching but when you're with family you can end up with weird things. And it's not like this is already a statement of this movie being good or bad - it's just not the sort of thing I'd choose to watch on my own.

London Has Fallen surprised me that it's actually part of what is now a franchise - in fact a trilogy of movies where governments keep "falling" in one way or another. I like to think of them as flashier, less cerebral versions of the Jack Ryan stories, so to speak.

The movies in this franchise have a particular feel to them that is a bit of an acquired taste I guess? So if you enjoyed the first one, things movie then gives you more of the things that sort of worked and other bits that they thought worked but didn't quite do so in my opinion.

But hey, this is not meant to be quite a serious a movie so we just run with it.