 |
||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Contrasting: School Spirits by posting percussively Today, 4:50am PDT | ||||
 |
 |
|||
| I dropped the show halfway into episode 2. Felt like a room of housewives got together to watch their Buffy DVD collection over a glass of wine and vocalized, "We can do that too!" before passing out to This is Us.
Twin Peaks? Laura Palmer washes up right away. Breaking Bad? Man is into cooking meth in first episode. Dexter? First murder and normal life facade in first 10 minutes. Even Lost started out on the beach. Over an hour and a half into Yellowjackets and where is the central hook? Yeah, we know they were stranded for a long time and there was cannibalism to survive but they got rescued and are living their lives 25 years later. A fake reporter wanted to do an interview, and there's a blank postcard with a cryptic symbol that has everyone worried. This is blackmail? The DHARMA Initiative? Metal Gear? You keep some stuff mysterious in a mystery, but you present a mystery. An episode and a half in, Yellowjackets has no central conflict. Instead of constantly shifting between the timelines like so many Lost flashbacks, I think this show would have been a lot better off if they had kept the first half of the pilot entirely in 1996 up to the crash, then the entire next half in present 2022. Hell, it was looking like every episode would have been better off with that. I also can't shake how much worse the performances of the adult stars are than their teen counterparts. It's all well known stars who can act. Feels like the inexperienced showrunners were in awe of the big name stars their show managed to snag, and never had the courage to ask for 2nd takes or say no to bad creative choices. Or the stars just wanted a payday and figured early on it would quickly get cancelled so who gives a shit. Anyway, I want to compare this to another show I just started watching that I'll keep watching even if I don't think it's that great. 
The dialog is also trying to be witty by people not witty enough to pull it off, but there is a hook. In the first 15 minutes, you meet a high school girl. She is stuck as a ghost at school that nobody but her and the other ghosts can see. School assembly how she's a missing person and blood was found everywhere in the boiler room. She meets The Breakfast Club cast of other ghosts who died at the school...but what's this??? She can't remember dying, and this spooks(lol) the other ghosts! This has never happened before! Find out what really happened to her, deal with seeing your school think you're dead, preparing for it to be true. What if The Lovely Bones wasn't a shitty tween novel? It's not great. Teens are obviously written by middle aged people who think they're so cool that all the cool modern teens are into the same stuff when they were teens. Retro movies and Kurt Cobain! Do today's teachers really accuse students of "Kurt Cobain cosplay" every time someone wears a flannel shirt? But there's at least a mystery and goal I mildly care about right away. I'll give it more than 1 1/2 episodes. What is Caltrops watching? It doesn't ALL have to be games. |
||||
 |
 |
|||
|
