vaguerant
The for-profit childcare system in Australia is profoundly broken. They're chronically understaffed and the pay is awful to boot, so there's tons of burnout and staff turnaround as people move around trying to get hours at different locations, etc. I don't know that 27 different gigs over a decade is actually that unusual in the sector.
If you're interested, ABC News Australia did an article on it:
Fair warning, there are some pretty unpleasant descriptions in the article of things that have been done to kids in the system.
Same here basically, cross-eyed viewing is super easy for me but I have to work for minutes to perform wall-eyed viewing. I was really excited to see a post with cross-eyed stereograms.
Occasionally they take the "investigation bungled by police" angle, but that's the exception rather than the rule.
Oh, I forgot to mention, a cut scene from this episode would have involved an in-universe puppet show where the First Healing was re-enacted for children. It was cut because they didn't feel it worked within the episode, but the puppeteers did show off the Kelly and ... head-cut-girl puppets on Instagram (Imginn mirror link). It's a shame these weren't ever on-screen, they look great. I've attached one of the Instagram photos to this comment.
This episode finally answers the question raised by Futurama: "Is the Space Pope reptilian?" Apparently not, but he's pretty cold-blooded.
And we come to our--First? Second?--major breach of the unofficial Planetary Union Prime Directive. As I mentioned when we watched "If the Stars Should Appear", Seth MacFarlane said early on that there wasn't any formal equivalent to the United Federation of Planets' Prime Directive from Star Trek:
There's no Prime Directive per se, more of a case-by-case analysis among the Admiralty when those situations arise in the show.
However, Commander Grayson gets in Big Trouble™ for causing cultural contamination in this episode. There's clearly some sort of formalized rule against this kind of interference. This episode aired some three months after MacFarlane made that comment. In addition to being the final episode of the season to air, this was also the final one produced, not being completed until two weeks before broadcast. However, the episode had already been both written and filmed by the time MacFarlane made the comment above, which somewhat confuses the timeline.
Getting back to the episode's plot, Captain Mercer takes an oddly cavalier approach to finding clothes, casually causing a second contamination. It's not at all clear how seriously the not-quite-Prime Directive is taken by the Planetary Union and crew of the Orville. Maybe it was just necessary to move the plot forward, but it feels a little bit confused. I think the way to reconcile MacFarlane's explanation is that they have a hard rule against contamination but no precise statutes for how to deliberately manage first contact, and the Orville crew are just a bit lax.
Huge future episode/season spoilers
Isaac agreeing to spend 700 years on Kandar 1 raises some interesting questions about the effect his time there had upon him. I don't think the show ever tells us exactly when the Kaylon revolution took place (correct me?), so we have no direct knowledge of how old the Kaylon race is. However, it is a distinct possibility that by the conclusion of this episode, Isaac is the oldest living Kaylon.
His additional 700 years of emotional and moral development perhaps explains his divergence from Kaylon Primary and the rest of the Kaylon species. He is, by a very long distance, the first Kaylon to see value in allowing humanity's continued existence. Of course, his time spent on the Orville and especially with the Finn family explain a large part of that, but 700 years spent watching an equivalent species eventually develop into pretty cool people might have helped.
One more thing: It's nice to know that Perd Hapley's reporting career continues all the way into our spacefaring future.
While I'm mostly nitpicking the point of what exactly the rules are, I do very much like this episode and its exploration of how religion impacts a developing human-ish culture over the course of 2,100 years. The episode takes a fairly dim view, with it being something which some take comfort in while others use it to oppress them and eventually everybody grows out of it. But you know ... yeah, that's pretty much it. All human cultures seem to develop a religious belief system at some point, so maybe Kelly's contamination didn't actually change much in the scheme of things beyond the specific subject and terminology of worship.
It's great that the season doesn't end on a big bombastic space battle or anything. It doesn't even really feel like an ending of any kind, just another solid episode. It leaves a nice aftertaste that I think does a better job of getting across what The Orville is about than an action sequence would. It leaves us wanting more just because the show is very fucking good, not because we're left worrying about a dramatic cliffhanger. I really like that.
Agree with everything here, this is a great episode that hums along on the strength of its writing and performances. Eccleston's Doctor has a darkness that really suits where he sits in the timeline. Getting that first explanation of the Time War retroactively explains why he's such a dick in this incarnation: he's still deeply wounded by it but close enough to the man who did it that it very much informs who he is as a person, essentially still externalising that pain.
Something else that's interesting is that I feel this episode gives the impression that it was Nine/Eccleston who in fact took part in the Time War, while leaving things open-ended enough that that could change. Jumping ahead a bit, Moffat's earliest plan for "The Day of the Doctor" was to have Eccleston return. However, given his treatment at the hands of the BBC the first time around, Eccleston was unwilling to appear and we got the War Doctor instead. I'm not sure if RTD has ever commented on what it was he envisioned.
I've noted in previous rewatch discussions that I basically arrived fresh at New Who, but this episode reminds me that I did know Daleks couldn't go up stairs. The "ELEVATE!" reveal was a major shock to the audience and canon at the time. In addition to its general invulnerability throughout the episode, this was a scene that really hammered home the Daleks as scary. For people completely new to the series like children, it doesn't really mean anything, but anybody with a passing awareness of the show gets something in that moment to show them that Daleks are still able to do the unexpected. For adult fans, I could see this at least giving them a reminder of why they were afraid of them as kids.
The final confrontation is just amazing. That this episode manages to reintroduce Daleks, convince us they're a worthy threat, show us their true face and make us feel bad for them across 45 minutes is just excellent work from top to bottom. I'm a broken record on this, but that it's done in such a low-key and probably low-budget episode and not via an episode full of explosions and CGI is a testament to what the show can do at its best.
One thing I'll say is that it might have been interesting to call the episode "Metaltron" instead of "Dalek" to keep the surprise hidden, but I imagine that would have hurt it in terms of viewership. People definitely would have been excited to see the latest take on the Doctor Who enemy in a way that they probably wouldn't have been to see "Metaltron".
Sorry to be a downer, but I was curious why Bruno Langley, who plays Adam Mitchell ("Little Lord Fauntleroy"), seemed to drop off the face of the Earth a few years ago. If you don't want to open it, you can probably guess from the spoiler heading:
tw: sa
Langley sexual assaulted two women in 2017, for which he was convicted and sentenced to a year's community service and 40 days of rehab. He was made to wear an e-tag and added to the sex offender register. Nobody has hired him to act since. He's attempted to start a music career instead. No thanks.
At least he's not around for long!
I AM THE PARK!
Thank you for loving her.
I finished up Poker Face (US: Peacock, CA: Citytv+, UK: Sky/Now, AU: Stan) and Murderbot (Apple TV+) this week.
Poker Face is simply the best time I've had watching TV in recent memory. It's currently two seasons in and consistently has me smiling and laughing. It's not "premium TV" in the way that a Breaking Bad or Severance is; instead, it's very much a throwback to '70s murder mysteries and especially Columbo. While there is some serialization, it's mostly episodic in nature. If you like Rian Johnson's Knives Out trilogy, Columbo, Natasha Lyonne in general, or even the 1970s Incredible Hulk TV series, you should have a good time with it.
The basic concept is that Natasha Lyonne's Charlie Cale is a drifter with the innate ability to detect lies. Broadly she is reading people's involuntary physiological responses to being deceptive, but as Cale says when asked how her ability works, "I'm not exactly sure, but that's not really the point." She travels the country, getting tangled up with a different set of guest stars, one of whom inevitably gets murdered. The structure of Poker Face is such that the week's guest stars get a ton of screen time, which means they're able to cast big in every episode. There's at least a couple of heavy-hitters turning up in every mystery, which often skew toward the comical end of the murder spectrum.
I'm always impressed that they're consistently able to write murder mysteries for a character who has the X-Men mutant superpower of being a perfect lie detector, which in theory should break the entire genre. The perp-of-the-week doesn't just walk into a scene and say "I did not commit any murders recently" and set off Cale's ability. Rather, she catches them in some small innocuous lie that leads her to spiral into figuring out why they would lie about something so outwardly meaningless.
Lyonne is great in it, as are the handful of recurring cast we get besides her, but most of all, getting a star-studded miniature murder-mystery film once a week has just been fantastic. I don't necessarily want to give the impression that these are Knives Out-quality movies, but I don't really want to give the impression that they're not, either. It's kind of damning the show with faint praise to say that it is relentlessly so much fun while not really offering the kind of deep meditation on human nature that is the hallmark of "premium TV", but I can't fault a show where I am consistently having a great time.
No season 3 pick-up yet. I imagine the show is pretty expensive given the names attached, but as far as I know it's Peacock's biggest hit by far, so hopefully they see the benefit of having a show people seem to care about.
Murderbot was also pretty fun. It's a relatively straight retelling of the first book in Martha Wells's The Murderbot Diaries, All Systems Red. Alexander Skarsgård plays a very autistically-coded security android who is deeply uncomfortable with social interaction and self-soothes with futuristic sci-fi soap opera TV. It's a pretty different take on the "android learns how to be human" trope, because his behavior is already very human at the outset. For anybody worried, he doesn't adapt by masking or curing his autism-coded behavior. People do remark on his awkwardness, but it's mostly just accepted as part of his nature.
My one problem with the show is that to me it felt like one long movie cut into 22-minute episodes. The plot of each episode felt unsatisfying on its own. There just weren't enough plot elements introduced and resolved in any individual episode to tell a meaningful story within that episode. I don't have this problem with any other heavily serialized shows, as even then they usually have the standard three-act play structure where some specific event is the focus of the episode. I don't know what it was about Murderbot, but many of the episodes just felt like they were built to serve only the season-long arc.
Obviously, this comes from the fact that the original book is one book, not 10 episodes of television, and the show basically just splits the book into segments of roughly equal length. Now that the series (which released weekly) is complete, I'm thinking about rewatching from the beginning without having to deal with the arbitrary delay to get the next section of one overall story, because I did enjoy basically everything else about it. Generally, I like the slower pace of weekly episode releases, I just don't think that format suited this show at all; it should have gone up all at once as a binge show.
Murderbot has been picked up for a second season and I'm 100% going to continue watching. Maybe I'll wait for the full season to be out before watching, though.
That's right, I don't mean to dispute that he refused to leave. It's only the photoshopping him out of the official image that didn't occur.