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factitiousTV show episodes! And theoretically other short-form dramatic presentations, but none of those made it to be finalists this year.
I watched every episode of She-Ra for this. It was fun! Very much a kids show, but the kind that's worth watching. Would have liked if Perfuma being trans had been explicitly stated, the way Double Trouble was explicitly nonbinary. The series finale wasn't as good as the finale of the previous season, which did a lot more to make me excited and worried - this one was pretty clearly all about setting up a happy ending for every character with the exception of Horde Prime, whose role is to become the sole villain and get killed so that the previous villains can join in the happy ending. I did like how devoted the show was to redeeming those villains; I'd been enjoying the strange friendship between Entrapta and Hordak, and appreciated seeing them reunited. "Not my fave She-Ra season finale" is still enough for first place this year.
When I saw there were some Mandalorian episodes on the ballot, I was excited about seeing Werner Herzog. It turns out he doesn't play one of the main characters the way I'd hoped, and in fact doesn't appear at all in either of these episodes. I did get to see him a little bit in episode 1, but overall I'm disappointed with the low level of Werner Herzog.
My impression from episode 1 was that the show seemed fine but not something I felt like watching 16 episodes of, so then I skipped ahead to the finalists. Neither of them felt especially hard to follow when watched this way.
Episode 13, The Jedi, was a fun standalone episode. Very visually appealing, with lots of nicely framed shots. A Mandalorian and a Jedi work together to take down an evil magistrate and get a spear made out of fancy space metal, that's a fine western. It felt a little odd that the Jedi refused to train Grogu because the Mandalorian is too good a father to him, but that's the sort of questionable decision we're supposed to expect from Jedi.
Episode 16, The Rescue, wasn't as good. The threats here are the Dark Troopers, the darksaber, and a Black man. I… genuinely don't think they're going for something bad about race here, and Giancarlo Esposito's good in this, but maybe they should have thought it through more?
Plot-related reactions: The slowly moving unstoppable black robots with evil red glowing eyes were much campier than I thought this series was trying to be. Made it hard to take them seriously as a threat. The darksaber is goofy in its own way, and I wasn't convinced by the bad guy's claim that you have to win it in combat and can't just give it away. I don't know enough about what the Mandalorian's religious head covering means to him to have much of an opinion about him taking it off to say goodbye to Grogu.
16 wasn't nearly as visually interesting as 13, and works less well as a standalone episode. I don't see much reason to put it above No Award.
I'm not a Doctor Who fan, but I've seen a few episodes from various seasons and Doctors, so I figured I'd jump straight into this one without needing much extra context. This worked out fine, and the episode never felt hard to follow. I've heard of Jack Harkness before and I can roll with the idea that his appearance here is probably exciting in the context of the season arc or something. The rhinoceros pigs were silly in the way that Doctor Who aliens are supposed to be.
The episode's big twist is two people being the Doctor at the same time due to time travel. I'm not sure why this is a big twist. Doesn't it happen a lot to the Doctor? It seems like something she should be used to. Maybe I did miss something major here, maybe there's an old episode where William Hartnell tells his granddaughter about an ancient decree that no Time Lord can be present in two reincarnations at the same time if both of them are women, so now we're supposed to be shocked that that decree has been broken.
All that aside, this seemed like a fairly typical episode of a mediocre sci-fi show. Not sure why this one in particular is a finalist. I'll give it a low ranking, but above the shows that were actively bad.
I watched the first few episodes of The Expanse before realizing I wasn't having fun and it wasn't going to get better. Then I skipped ahead to the episode that's a finalist, Gaugamela. It's tough to watch; too many people trying hard to make unnaturally dramatic statements about loss and suffering. The plot payoffs don't work out of context. I assume that part's on me for not watching the whole series, but it would have been nice if people had nominated an episode that stands on its own a bit more. It's the horrible dialogue that really killed this for me.
The Good Place series finale was very disappointing. The show wasn't up to the challenge of coming up with a really good afterlife, so they claimed adding a way to kill yourself in Heaven fixed the problem. Then the episode mostly focused on times when characters get bored with it and choose suicide, since that's the one interesting story that afterlife supports. I get that describing an eternal afterlife that people would actually like is a hard problem, but this show really wants having ideas about the afterlife to be one of its strengths. Not thinking through how an afterlife should work is a terrible failure here. I'm also not sure if the writers realized the extent to which they were depicting suicide? I think they might have some shallow take about it not counting as suicide if you're already dead and in the afterlife, but it seems pretty clear in the fiction that the original death they'd been through was the sort that basically just means moving from Earth to a different place, not a fundamental change in who they are. Which makes it odd that the people running the afterlife ever thought humans would lose the capacity for moral improvement upon death, something that not only turns out to be false, but that nobody ever even claims to have evidence for. There's no actual interrogation of what the afterlife is for, or why they thought the systems in place were a good way of achieving any goals. I'm ranking this last for taking an important topic and wasting it so thoroughly. Gaugamela was a zero; this gets negative points.
She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: Heart (parts 1 and 2) > The Mandalorian: Chapter 13: The Jedi > No Award > The Mandalorian: Chapter 16: The Rescue > Doctor Who: Fugitive of the Judoon > The Expanse: Gaugamela > The Good Place: Whenever You’re Ready
I watched every episode of She-Ra for this. It was fun! Very much a kids show, but the kind that's worth watching. Would have liked if Perfuma being trans had been explicitly stated, the way Double Trouble was explicitly nonbinary. The series finale wasn't as good as the finale of the previous season, which did a lot more to make me excited and worried - this one was pretty clearly all about setting up a happy ending for every character with the exception of Horde Prime, whose role is to become the sole villain and get killed so that the previous villains can join in the happy ending. I did like how devoted the show was to redeeming those villains; I'd been enjoying the strange friendship between Entrapta and Hordak, and appreciated seeing them reunited. "Not my fave She-Ra season finale" is still enough for first place this year.
When I saw there were some Mandalorian episodes on the ballot, I was excited about seeing Werner Herzog. It turns out he doesn't play one of the main characters the way I'd hoped, and in fact doesn't appear at all in either of these episodes. I did get to see him a little bit in episode 1, but overall I'm disappointed with the low level of Werner Herzog.
My impression from episode 1 was that the show seemed fine but not something I felt like watching 16 episodes of, so then I skipped ahead to the finalists. Neither of them felt especially hard to follow when watched this way.
Episode 13, The Jedi, was a fun standalone episode. Very visually appealing, with lots of nicely framed shots. A Mandalorian and a Jedi work together to take down an evil magistrate and get a spear made out of fancy space metal, that's a fine western. It felt a little odd that the Jedi refused to train Grogu because the Mandalorian is too good a father to him, but that's the sort of questionable decision we're supposed to expect from Jedi.
Episode 16, The Rescue, wasn't as good. The threats here are the Dark Troopers, the darksaber, and a Black man. I… genuinely don't think they're going for something bad about race here, and Giancarlo Esposito's good in this, but maybe they should have thought it through more?
Plot-related reactions: The slowly moving unstoppable black robots with evil red glowing eyes were much campier than I thought this series was trying to be. Made it hard to take them seriously as a threat. The darksaber is goofy in its own way, and I wasn't convinced by the bad guy's claim that you have to win it in combat and can't just give it away. I don't know enough about what the Mandalorian's religious head covering means to him to have much of an opinion about him taking it off to say goodbye to Grogu.
16 wasn't nearly as visually interesting as 13, and works less well as a standalone episode. I don't see much reason to put it above No Award.
I'm not a Doctor Who fan, but I've seen a few episodes from various seasons and Doctors, so I figured I'd jump straight into this one without needing much extra context. This worked out fine, and the episode never felt hard to follow. I've heard of Jack Harkness before and I can roll with the idea that his appearance here is probably exciting in the context of the season arc or something. The rhinoceros pigs were silly in the way that Doctor Who aliens are supposed to be.
The episode's big twist is two people being the Doctor at the same time due to time travel. I'm not sure why this is a big twist. Doesn't it happen a lot to the Doctor? It seems like something she should be used to. Maybe I did miss something major here, maybe there's an old episode where William Hartnell tells his granddaughter about an ancient decree that no Time Lord can be present in two reincarnations at the same time if both of them are women, so now we're supposed to be shocked that that decree has been broken.
All that aside, this seemed like a fairly typical episode of a mediocre sci-fi show. Not sure why this one in particular is a finalist. I'll give it a low ranking, but above the shows that were actively bad.
I watched the first few episodes of The Expanse before realizing I wasn't having fun and it wasn't going to get better. Then I skipped ahead to the episode that's a finalist, Gaugamela. It's tough to watch; too many people trying hard to make unnaturally dramatic statements about loss and suffering. The plot payoffs don't work out of context. I assume that part's on me for not watching the whole series, but it would have been nice if people had nominated an episode that stands on its own a bit more. It's the horrible dialogue that really killed this for me.
The Good Place series finale was very disappointing. The show wasn't up to the challenge of coming up with a really good afterlife, so they claimed adding a way to kill yourself in Heaven fixed the problem. Then the episode mostly focused on times when characters get bored with it and choose suicide, since that's the one interesting story that afterlife supports. I get that describing an eternal afterlife that people would actually like is a hard problem, but this show really wants having ideas about the afterlife to be one of its strengths. Not thinking through how an afterlife should work is a terrible failure here. I'm also not sure if the writers realized the extent to which they were depicting suicide? I think they might have some shallow take about it not counting as suicide if you're already dead and in the afterlife, but it seems pretty clear in the fiction that the original death they'd been through was the sort that basically just means moving from Earth to a different place, not a fundamental change in who they are. Which makes it odd that the people running the afterlife ever thought humans would lose the capacity for moral improvement upon death, something that not only turns out to be false, but that nobody ever even claims to have evidence for. There's no actual interrogation of what the afterlife is for, or why they thought the systems in place were a good way of achieving any goals. I'm ranking this last for taking an important topic and wasting it so thoroughly. Gaugamela was a zero; this gets negative points.
She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: Heart (parts 1 and 2) > The Mandalorian: Chapter 13: The Jedi > No Award > The Mandalorian: Chapter 16: The Rescue > Doctor Who: Fugitive of the Judoon > The Expanse: Gaugamela > The Good Place: Whenever You’re Ready
