If We Controlled Your Remote… 6/25/20

Have you ever been at a loss as to what to watch? Too many shows to pick from? We’re here to give you our opinions on what we feel is worth watching. Check it out and then let us know in the comments below what you’re choosing for tonight!

Kyle’s Choice

Today the DC Universe original series Doom Patrol returns for its second season, and this year it also airs on HBO Max, which means a lot more folks will be able to see it! In the first season, over the course of several decades, wheelchair-bound scientist Niles Caulder (Timothy Dalton) welcomed various enhanced humans to live with him in his giant mansion, known as Doom Manor, where he tried to help them control their powers. It’s not unlike The X-Men, but these super-powered beings have a lot more personal and emotional baggage to deal with (which we found out about through flashbacks), plus they are a lot less heroic (at least initially).

The team includes 1950s Silver Screen starlet Rita Farr (April Bowlby), who, while shooting a film in 1955 in Africa, fell into the river and was transformed into Elasti-Girl. When her emotions run high, Rita loses control of her body and becomes a massive blob – a far cry from her normally-glamorous Hollywood self. In 1961, Air Force aviator test pilot Larry Trainor (Matt Bomer) was on a test flight in space and encountered cosmic radiation. A Negative Spirit entered his body, and his plane plummeted to Earth, bursting into flames, severely burning his body. Now Larry is constantly covered in bandages, looking like a mummy. The Negative Spirit inside of him can exit his body, but when it does so, it leaves Larry in a lifeless, immobile state – he has become dependent on this cohabitant to stay alive. In the 1970s, Crazy Jane (Diane Guerrero) found her way to Doom Manor. The troubled young woman has 64 personas, each with her own superpower. Jane cannot control which one of the personas controls her body – it could be anyone from the tough Hammerhead, to the teleporting Flit. Even Caulder hasn’t seen all of Jane’s personalities. In 1988, philandering race car driver Cliff Steele (Brendan Fraser) was in a horrible accident, and only his brain survived. Caulder built Steele a brand-new robotic body, turning him into Robotman. And the latest addition to the team is high school football star Victor Stone (Joivan Wade). An explosion at STAR labs left his mother dead, but Silas Stone (Phil Morris) rebuilt the majority of his son’s body using nanites and other high-tech means, turning Victor into the crime-fighting superhero known as Cyborg.

In the first season, the team found itself up against a powerful supervillain known as Mr. Nobody (Alan Tudyk), who had kidnapped The Chief (Niles). As they ventured out of Doom Manor and into the surrounding small town of Cloverton, Ohio for the first time in decades, things almost immediately went horribly wrong, as none of them really had control over their powers. The group soon found itself up against things like Apocalyptic cults and other inter-dimensional obstacles. At the same time, Mr. Nobody was playing mind games with them, trying to make them turn against one another, using their past emotional tragedies against them.

As the season came to a close, the metahumans learned that Niles Caulder had actually been involved in the accidents that caused each of them to obtain their powers. He had been using them as test subjects in his quest to unlock the secret to immortality, in hopes to prolong his own life long in order to protect his daughter, who has the ability to alter reality. Things got very odd and surreal as the team entered the painting of Danny the Street to take on Mr. Nobody and rescue Niles’s daughter, managing to escape just before a nuclear explosion collapsed the dimension inside the painting, trapping Mr. Nobody and the Bead Hunter in the White Space dimension. Afterwards, Niles introduced the team to his daughter, Dorothy Spinner.

The series has a very unique tone, which is largely comedic. The violence and language can be graphic and over-the-top at times, taking full advantage of the fact that this is not a broadcast network DC show. It has a very Deadpool sort of feel to it. The first season episodes were narrated by Mr. Nobody, who constantly made sarcastic remarks, often breaking the fourth wall, referring to the series itself. The world itself is also quite insane, from a flatulating donkey, to a sentient teleporting gender-queer street named Danny, to the talking Ezekiel the Cockroach (Curtis Armstrong) bent on world domination, to The Beard Hunter (Tommy Snider) a man with the power to learn everything about a person just by consuming their beard.

The show knows it’s crazy and embraces it and just has fun, while also exploring some really dark, dramatic moments. I’m curious to see where the series goes this season and what new characters will be introduced. Will the group still be bitter about Niles’s involvement in their conditions? How will Niles’s daughter fit in with the team? Is Mr. Nobody really gone, and if so, who will be the big bad this season and who will narrate the episodes? I am really happy that the series will be airing on HBO Max this year, as I don’t subscribe to DC Universe. Today the first 3 episodes (“Fun Size Patrol”, “Tyme Patrol” & “Pain Patrol”) will be made available, with a new episode launching each Thursday thereafter. Unfortunately, the second season is going to be short, with only 9 episodes, versus 15 in the first season.

I’ll also be watching/recording Holey Moley, Don’t, To Tell the Truth, Broke, and Celebrity Watch Party.
 
Jump with us to read more and see else we think you should watch.
 

Phoebe’s Choice

After an astounding season last year, Jordan Peele (J.P.) is back with another ten episodes of The Twilight Zone. The show, originally hosted and predominantly written by Rod Sterling, is in its third incarnation now after a brief run with Forrest Whitaker in the role of Narrator. In the age of Netflix, CBS has decided to drop this sophomore season all at once on their streaming service, CBS All Access. The first season had a number of standout episodes that put the show an echelon above “Weird City” or “Dimension 404,” but maybe none so instantly classic as the season finale: “Blurryman.”

It opened with Seth Rogen as a writer struggling to get his story worked out right. When he finally decided on opening with a nuclear blast, his girlfriend came in and we learned that his story had come to life. J.P. made his appearance as the Narrator until – CUT! We broke the 4th and 5th walls at once and saw that this was the set where the show gets filmed. J.P wasn’t satisfied with his monologue and he wanted the episode’s writer, Sophie, to adjust it. After she edited it, they went to shoot again, but the cue cards Jordan read did not contain what Sophie wrote. Instead they told a foreboding warning that Sophie herself was doomed to be pulled into the Twilight Zone because of a mysterious “Blurryman.”

Sophie learned that a blurry man had wound up in the background of several of this season’s episodes, and people wondered if Sophie was pranking the show. Then everyone was dismissed from the set for lunch, but Sophie hung around to try to find J.P. The ominous cue cards haunted her as she searched the set until Blurryman appeared and used telekinesis to throw books at her. She ran from set to set, eventually twisting her ankle and seeing a vision of the Blurryman in every episode from the season, including a shot of her stalked by the apparition. When he showed up to haunt her again, she yelled in defiance and talked a tough game, though once he walked toward her, she again screamed. Her inner monologue voice began to tell her that it was all real as she found people on the set once again – but they could not see or hear her!

Her inner monologue finally got her to calm down so that she could accept the truth of what was happening. She let Blurryman show her the truth. This truth was a flashback to a black & white moment in her childhood, wherein her parents were concerned with how she stared all day at a TV set, playing The Twilight Zone. This vision popped her out into the “real” world, where she was able to give J.P. her final notes on the new monologue for the “episode” that Seth was starring in. Once she gave him that, though, she reverted to a B&W world in her living room from her childhood. The Blurryman once more appeared and revealed that it was Rod Sterling himself! A great CGI job was done to reanimate him too. J.P. then read the new monologue she wrote, and it applied perfectly to both the Rogen episode and to her own situation as she and Sterling walked into dissolving doorways and nebulas as she accepted her fate of being absorbed into The Twilight Zone.

If this new season has any episodes as good as “Blurryman,” I will demand a season three. As it stands, Seth Rogen is returning for another episode, and we also have a Joel McHale episode to look forward to. No matter what the caliber of this batch of installments is, overall this is a great show and worth a watch if not a binge.

Check out the entire second season on CBSAA now.

I’ll also be tuning in for the return of Doom Patrol and The Misery Index.