The tragedy of Nacho comes to a righteous end. Death wrought in mythic images - a single flower in the rain in an endless unfeeling desert, a man marked for death emerging from the metal coffin of a truck bed, a pair of profusely bleeding tied hands clutching their liberation. Watching him slowly submerge himself in the oil, getting swallowed by inky darkness, is soul-stirring. His final call to his father might be the most emotionally affecting moment in the entire series, it's so soft and naked and genuine.
Nacho was maybe my favourite character, and Mando's performance lent a certain raw physicality and energy to the show that gave a real muscularity and grit to its darker, filthier movements. So while I'm glad he met his fate on his own terms, blowing up everyone's plan for him in the process, I'm still gonna miss him.
Also fuck Gus
This is Mando's swan song. Brutally physical performance, twitching and tensing and wrestling with fear while still stamping a rugged, weighty physical presence on the episode's mercilessly hot, hazy paranoia. Golden dust everywhere, cramped dirty interiors. Peering through the gap between the curtains. Scorching sunlight engulfing every image. Cool to see Kim take a turn as a fixer and an intimidator too, but Nacho is the beating heart of this one.
Lalo lurks in the grime and filth of the sewers (some gorgeous low-light images there) and yet Jimmy and Kim are the ones getting their hands truly filthy. Their horrific contraption, hastily reassembled with the help of Kim's unflinching commitment to debauchery, goes off perfectly, dropping bombs on Howard's life and career and throwing sly winks at the audience in the process. This while Lalo lies in waiting, swimming his way toward his prey - his sinister intent lurking beneath the surface of every frame, coloring interactions and images with paranoia and anticipation - until the two streams converge once again in the foreboding candlelight of Jimmy and Kim's apartment. An elemental, cataclysmic finale, all of our protagonist's impish machinations laid bare in front of them, but giving them no time for reflection or remorse as a force completely beyond their control, one that appears in the background like a shadow, ephemeral and inhuman, the purest embodiment of evil, punctuates their escapade with the most bone-chilling moment in the series. Forced to watch their torture actually end in tragedy. Gonna go crazy waiting two months for the next half.
formulaic & predictable narratives/structure, toxic contestants, terrible personalities, contestants eliminated/kept based on drama rather than ability, standard competition show bullshit but a huge guilty pleasure for me bc I'm a whore for food industry stuff
man’s selfishness, individuality to a fault, put into human form, runs into fate, karmic justice, the untouchable machinations of an indifferent world, also in human form. cool idea, cool images. not a bad episode
i wish they focused more on the idea of absence. the premise was so strong and the use of terrifyingly empty spaces in the disappearance scenes was masterful but there was so much of just characters verbally expositing screaming about the horror and injustice of it all. the episode is so unforgivingly apathetic, never once revealing its ephemeral, monolithic and insurmountable unseen and unexplained villain, just a bit too much filler. give me more of the cold emptiness, the unfeeling lack of explanation, the psychological fuckery
nazis bad. karma hurts. sins are paid for. what else is new. mystery and hallucinatory/empty boat visual sequences were good
Evil dream catgirl gf when
dream sequences were cool. narrative framing device was boring as fuck
this was like 20 minutes of exposition and then the story started and was over in like two minutes. the setup was beautifully directed, the set was massive and empty and littered with reminders of the humanity that was missing from the empty wreckage, but it was all setup for a center that began, took a turn on a cheaply written snag, and ended on a crappy moral lesson in less than 150 seconds. really fucking weird episode
It's pretty good. Most of the time they make the suburbia seem at once fake and familiar, though occasionally it becomes completely real, loses its uncanny air, and I'm not sure if I like that. Doesn't help that the first half happens too fast - lots of busy images, because things need to be shown in the limited runtime, so it makes the setting feel a bit too regular, too populated, and it doesn't give the main character's off-putting interactions room or time to breathe, they just get caught up in the congestion, normal pieces of normal activity. He just appears to be wandering around in a setting that we are shown is normal, when we ourselves should be as thrown off as he is by the strangeness of it. The second half and all its angles and claustrophobic frames are very transparently trying to play up the psychological edge, the desperation, of it all, but I think it gives way to some cool and trippy things. The point of it all is driven home through a clumsy monologue, but the message is something I needed to hear at this point in my life, even if it is a platitude you could find on one of those crappy inspirational quote websites. If I revisited this my score wouldn't be as high, but I'm coming off a love affair with "Where Is Everybody?" so the images of strange and fake suburbia really fascinate me, and the payoff hits harder right now than it normally would.
It's so far from perfect in so many little ways, and yet it's still one of the most perfect experiences, one of the most perfect inspirations, I've ever watched. It's got some problems with its editing, especially that horrendous take before the abrupt cut to commercial, the 60s hammy acting and campy dialogue are hammy and campy, but god damn everything about this premise and this setting was done flawlessly. The emptiness was felt. It was massive. The focus on open spaces, tall rooms, empty seats/stations, long shadows, it was all perfectly directed. It all felt liminal, almost ominous, expressionistic, especially toward the end with the oblique angles. The placement of the main character in so many containers that threaten to lock themselves was perfect selection of shooting space. The theatre with the enormous dark curtains and endless empty chairs engulfing everything in frame but the subject and the tiny doorway behind him, like he's standing in the void, stuck on the precipice of his reality. The theatre is a perfect location for all its symbolism, and the watchful camera angles of the projection room scene cut to reveal nothing, making the feeling of being watched that much more ephemeral. The mirror breaks, even though the mirror was reality a second ago, and our reality is revealed to be a mere image that can be shattered by force. The ending is absolute bullshit, all the mystery and psychological nightmarishness revealed to have come from nothing interesting, but it's also absolutely perfect, because the whole dream-like, surreal experience is just a product of the mind's unease, in both the character and the audience. The character is terrified by what he sees that isn't there, and the audience is unnerved by what's missing from what we're shown. The unrest lives in the mind, creating experiences, reality-bending experiences, out of actual nothing.
This has so many problems but it's also a picturesque encapsulation of what I love in art and what I want to do with my own writing and filmmaking. It helps that "alone on empty earth" is one of my favourite tropes. It's a fascinating but often misused premise that's actually done justice here by all the sweeping movements and angles that overwhelm with emptiness, all the shooting in liminal spaces through observant and almost human camera angles, all the rich visual symbolism, the surrealist and expressionist approach that skews the sense of reality. It's art that is experienced rather than watched. There's a million different readings that can come from almost every shot and every detail here, but they all invariably point to the fragile line between mind and reality.
This is what I want to make. 10/10
Lynch is a master of the medium, and his style features so many elements that I love, that I want to apply to my own filmmaking. His blocking, his extravagant use of colour, his surreal and uncanny atmospheres, his bizarre and quirky actor direction, his experimentalism, his pastiching of all sorts of styles and genres, his patiently observant wide shots and meticulous tracking movements, it's all so perfect.
I love this show man. And having seen it I now hate Riverdale even more, just because it's clear to me how much stylistically the latter ripped from this.
WHYYYYY why why why why did they have to bring Archie and Veronica back together. Most bland, chemistry-devoid, toxic relationship on this show. Archie's relationship with Betty felt so much more natural. Archie and Veronica could both date outside the friend group, could they not? Can Veronica not have a spicy relationship with a new character? Someone she has actual chemistry with? Can Archie and Betty find people outside their circle? Can the writers not let Betty and Archie's exciting romance last because they're too uncreative to write Archie with anyone but Veronica? Why does everything always have to be between these four? And why does it always have to return to Archie and Veronica? Why can't they let the old boring relationships die? Shoot me. These writers suck
Anyway besides that, Jughead going crazy is a hilariously bad storyline. Kevin and Fangs' relationship has no stakes in it, because they barely get any screen time, so anything dramatic that happens between them isn't really impactful or affecting. Cheryl continues to be awful and vindictive and entitled and manipulative and she reeks of "peaked in high school and can't get over it". And she's so weird man. The party shit was so contrived and so strange and so obviously driven by some ulterior motive and everyone was just okay with it?
Really didn't enjoy this one.
cheryl continues to be insufferably vain and selfish and spoiled. completely unlikable. archie starts yet another venture whose storyline will likely fizzle out just like the football team he tried to organize. the show goes full on insane, printing its own money and introducing aliens, but it still wants to pretend to be serious. and what the fuck was that dance off scene? and all its stupid sound effects? one of the worst things this show has produced
Making a huge spectacle out of an incomplete story. 75% of the content here is youtube conspiracy theorists postulating what could have happened. "My instincts say it happened this way." "I feel connected to this case and to Elisa Lam." Shut the hell up.
The show follows a lot of these theories, despite them being based on nothing, but then it has moments where it says "these youtube theorists are bad, actually" and then it goes back to interviewing them like they're experts on the subject matter. Feels really gross seeing Netflix focus a documentary on all these people making baseless assumptions about a dead person and claiming they "know her so well" after reading her Tumblr. stupid
Finally Veronica draws some damn boundaries against a shitty person in her life. They're trying desperately to introduce another mystery, but I honestly did not care about it.
i like true crime stuff just like everyone else but this was a bit sensationalist a bit copaganda
Veronica back on her bullshit. Alice and Polly back on their bullshit. Jughead on some entirely new bullshit. Hard to feel bad for any of these characters when they choose to do shitty things or put themselves in very obviously shitty situations and then have to deal with the natural repercussions. At least Betty and Archie finally happened. A romance scene between characters with some damn CHEMISTRY. Thank god
This episode is just 45 minutes of people doing shitty things and avoiding consequences and not learning anything. Is Cheryl taking back the Vixens supposed to be a sassy slay queen girlboss moment? Because she really doesn't deserve them back. Her place was taken by an appointed coach after she missed a billion school days/practices without informing her cheerleaders because she was busy talking to the dead corpse of her brother and thinking her house was haunted. And being made to seem like a lovable little vulnerable sweetheart because of it. And vilifying the family members who wanted to get psychiatric help for the woman who was TALKING TO A CORPSE. She can't fathom that her absence necessitated a replacement, that's so unfair to her. So she locks her replacement in a room and takes over. Most infuriating thing I've ever watched. No consequences will ever fall on Cheryl, she can just do whatever shitty thing she wants and the story will treat it as some kind of empowering moment.
Archie's uncle is the same god damn way. He gives Mad Dog the drugs, and Mad Dog takes them, and Archie is rightfully angry. But then Archie's uncle gives some bullshit speech about "Mad Dog can make his own decisions" and Archie goes oh my god he's my uncle he's family what was I thinking I miss my dad and he forgives him for selling his friend drugs that put his health at risk. Jesus Christ every time Archie is poised to take a step forward he just cries about his dad and reverts to forgiving everyone and clinging to literally everything that has his dad's name on it, no matter how bad it is for him. His uncle has been a consistently shitty person so far, and Archie's mom has told him that Frank is a shitty person, and Archie forgives literally everything he does, and the story acts like that's the right thing for him to do.
Really frustrating episode to watch. Fuck all these characters I hate them.
Gonna do another thought dump like I did for season 3
Betty/Jughead and Archie/Veronica are awful stupid boring sucky relationships. They're super vanilla and built on really thin connections and neither couple has any chemistry and everyone is an awful partner to each other. I wish they would just break up. Constantly talking about how much they love each other and how deep their connection is and how they want to be with each other forever. They're soulmates!!!1!! You guys are in fucking high school. Give me a break.
I did not care at all about the Cheryl Jason haunting plot. Cheryl was firmly unlikable this season. Was I supposed to feel bad for her? After what she did with her brother's corpse? And her family wanted to get her psychiatric help, and they're the bad guys? Fuck you
Also didn't care about the Archie's Uncle subplot. Uncle was a shitty person
Videotapes were interesting but they never went anywhere. Their "resolution" in season 5 makes it very apparent that they kinda just forgot about the tapes and needed to wrap up the story quickly
They telegraph all their "twists"
Jughead is a gullible emotional little bitch this season. Can't decide whether he likes or hates Stonewall. Constantly falls for the preppies' bullshit. Makes it really hard to like him.
Archie never progresses as a character. Every time he's faced with an important decision that tests his character he falls back on his bullshit
They kinda forgot about the whole Hiram Lodge sickness storyline a lot. And the fact that Hermosa exists
Veronica is inconsistent and unlikable as ever. And why was she so distraught over what Archie did with Betty? She was super vindictive over Archie's kiss with Betty in season 2 - when they were broken up - and the one time she had a fight with Archie she started flirting with other guys. And she cheated on him with Reggie? Or did she? Had she broken up with Archie by then? idk my point is she gets really upset despite having been an awful and kind of unfaithful partner
The episode they did to memorialize Luke Perry was nicely done. The follow-up late in the season was another "Archie doesn't make any strides as a character" moment
Mad Dog ceased to exist halfway through the season. Just was not in the story anymore. He was one of the only likable characters
That bullshit "we need to redeem principal honey" stuff was so contrived and obvious. Like ok, he did good things, but he also did shitty things that directly impacted you. You don't need to regret what you did
Payoff of the whole Stonewall Prep mystery was extremely underwhelming. They did a good enough job making the preppies unlikable, but then all their conniving and conspiring adds up to pretty much nothing
Genuinely enjoyed Jughead faking his death, because it allowed for some new stuff to happen. We saw a new dynamic develop between Betty and Archie, we questioned the strength of the two main couples. Exciting stuff. Didn't last very long unfortunately
Nothing Lynchian about the episode "Lynchian". Just another example of the show's pretentious co-opting of other better art to try to seem smart and relevant and clever.
Edgar Evernever went from designing an elaborate cult to harvest organs to being a hypnotist and delusional astronaut? Wildly inconsistent with his portrayal in season 3.
There's old-school technology in everyone's house. It's clearly set in the 21st century, but everyone has old tvs and cassette decks and typewriters because...it looks "cute" I guess? Were the writers "born in the wrong generation" or something?
Unless I'm forgetting something, the Dodger story kinda just went nowhere. Like it was just left unresolved.
Not quite as bad as season 3, but still really bad.
Cheryl is a really really unlikable character god damn. Nobody in this damn show ever faces consequences for their shitty actions, but to Cheryl even the idea of consequences that she won't have to face is some kind of injustice. And her dream was to be a high school prom queen? Her whole identity is based around being popular in high school.
Boycott Cheryl Blossom thank you that is all
Graduation montage was overly saccharine. Glad to see "Bughead" and "Varchie" (please shoot me) end, neither of those couples had any substantial chemistry and their relationships were super boring and vanilla and unexciting and only seemed to exist when the show needed a teenage sex scene set to crappy pop music. Did Cole Sprouse gain weight? His face looks fatter.
Not 20 minutes in they've blatantly ripped off Silence of the Lambs AND Uncut Gems. Where are the writers I just want to talk
Probably the best episode of the whole show, for the sole reason that it actually cares about what it's doing. Serious subject matter taken seriously. Not the same self-seriousness and pretentiousness that usually haunts this show, but actual seriousness. There's genuine emotion here, and it's on display in the filmmaking. Reservation in the writing, music, and visuals. Slow pacing. All the gaudy stylistic flourishes and ridiculous plot turns are dropped in favor of a simple look and a simple character examination. The actors all deliver their best performances, especially KJ Apa, his performance is slow and emotional and reactive and vulnerable rather than his usual overly dramatic cool-guy shithead act. He really sells the heartbreak of it all. It has its moments of CW-ness, like the weird dream sequence or the confrontation scene, but they don't detract too much from the seriousness. The latter honestly feels like it would work decently if the episode was like 30 minutes longer and the tonal and emotional changes required for that scene would have time to develop naturally.
I hate this show, I hate it a lot, but this episode was nicely done for the most part.
Gonna write all the thoughts that are flying around in my head.
There are two consistently likable characters in this whole show and they are Mad Dog and Reggie Mantle. Betty and Toni are tolerable. Everyone else takes turns being the shitty person of the week, with Veronica and Cheryl being especially awful. They then try super hard to be endearing and good when they're not being awful human beings.
Everyone in this show is clever and conniving and capable of spinning ridiculous lies and concealing so many things and developing insane and evil machinations, except when it comes to the Farm. When faced with the Farm everyone becomes cataclysmically stupid and gullible.
This show seems like it was written by middle schoolers who think they know what high school is like. All the teenagers get involved in ridiculous plots and they basically run everything in the town of Riverdale. There are teens owning bars, teens doing vigilante work, teens running underground boxing tournaments, it's like the whole town of Riverdale and all its infrastructure and community falls on the mercy of literal 17-year-olds. I guess they did this to try to make it "dark and gritty and realistic," to raise the stakes for these teenagers, but it just makes the show ridiculous and unbelievable. All the adults are cartoonishly evil, they're all lying constantly and they're all doing bad things for the sake of being bad. And the show takes itself so seriously, except the episodes when it tries to be light-hearted and funny, in which it ends up being cringeworthy.
Characters, plot threads/ideas, and central plot elements seem to disappear and reappear whenever they want to.
The dialogue is awful. Everyone's constantly quoting Shakespeare and making pop culture references and using alliterative strings of adjectives.
Archie talks weird. He sounds like he's trying to be a Cool Dude:tm: when he talks. "Veronikyah." Shut up. He's also always sweaty.
The fucking G&G game is so stupid and it seems to only exist when the plot runs out of things to do. The Gargoyle King reveal made me laugh. It was really stupid and disappointing.
All these characters are inconsistent, but Veronica is especially bad. She constantly flips from "I love my family I want to be involved in their crime business" to "I fucking hate my family they're criminals" and it seems to just change whenever the show needs more stupid drama.
The musical episodes are really annoying and the songs they chose for this year's episode seem to have been a bit challenging for the cast. They didn't all sound super stellar.
Everyone's already talked about the "high school football" line, but god, it was really, really bad. The delivery was worse than I could've imagined.
The episode (episodes? did it last for more than one? I can't remember) where Archie and Jughead are in the middle of nowhere talking to random people was a nice bit of reprieve. A change of scenery, set in this beautiful and haunting empty town, away from the usual bullshit melodrama and ridiculous crime plots of Riverdale. But of course that couldn't last. The writers aren't good enough to let that story end naturally and bring Archie back of his own accord, nor are they patient or creative enough to introduce a new plot element/moment without instantly injecting the "Hiram Lodge owns everyone and he's evil and everyone is his cronies and everyone lies about everything" shit. They just cannot help themselves. Ruined what was honestly the best part of the season.
These actors are all really mediocre.
There's a lot of early-2000s action movie camera angles/movements/transitions and they all look like shit.
The show constantly imitates famous movies (better pieces of filmmaking) and pastiches other genres (also better than Riverdale) and references movies and shows (all of which are better) and it's extremely pretentious and very transparently an attempt to get viewers to go "oooh it's doing like a this type of thing! This episode is so unique!" even though it's still the same bullshit wrapped up in the stylistic and narrative trappings of better filmmaking that doesn't deserve to be wasted on a show like this.
I hate this show. So much.
this show takes itself so damn seriously lmao
This show is so fuckin bad. The writing sucks, the show constantly loses track of story threads and characters, it looks ugly, every single character is a cliche and also a huge piece of shit and they constantly do complete 180s in their emotions and convictions, and they all lie "to protect each other", the protagonists are all Mary Sues and they're bland as hell with boring problems that often come up thanks to their own contrivances, the music sucks, the acting is pretty bad, the pacing is all over the place, and I don't care about literally anything that happens. 3/10
This season's premise makes two deeply flawed assumptions:
This season looks ugly. The colour palette has become super boring and the camera is constantly doing stupid things. The editing is awful and the show is really bad at keeping flashbacks and present clear and separate. It was bad at it before, but it's become worse. One of the central 'mysteries' of this season is "what happened to Tyler?" which is a question the audience already knows the answer to, so all the drama that comes out of it is boring and frustrating and unnecessary. They try to address some themes of sexual assault, but they don't have anything profound or nuanced to say about it, or really anything to say about it beyond the basic platitudes of "my story" and "down with the patriarchy".
This season is just a mess
2/10
The central characters are actually likable people in this season. Especially Mr Porter, his redemptive arc is genuinely engrossing. Poorly written, but affecting. The show still has problems with its great moments of acting/writing/visual storytelling/music peppered across lots of mediocre, and half the storylines here don't feel nearly as urgent as the plots of season 1, and they're not meaty enough to fill up a whole season.
4/10
It's got a lot of moments of genuinely phenomenal scripting, acting, music, cinematography, but they're all so fleeting, and so far between, and everything else is unbelievably annoying. When it's not showing flashes of greatness, the dialogue is awful, most of the acting is unconvincing, the camera is slow zooming on a character for no reason, or it's ridiculously close to a subject's face, and each episode ends with some loud bedroom pop rock song slowly drowning out the diegetic noise. The show overexplains a lot of things, things the audience would be able to parse out given much less information, and yet the show is also really bad at clarifying whether we're looking at the past or the present, so much so that they had to rely on ugly color grading and a cheap and transparent plot device to create a physical difference in the main character between flashbacks and present. The characters are all absolutely infuriating and their behavior is wildly inconsistent, including Hannah Baker, who is made to seem like this helpless perfect victim even though she has several moments where she's just an unpleasant or bad person. And she has waaaay too many moments where through some ephemeral "brain things" and sudden bad feelings she unconsciously puts herself in bad situations because...the story demands it? Like the writers needed to connect all these dramatic situations that pushed Hannah to breaking, so they used some contrivance to explain away why she put herself in each position to be hurt.
The plot and the mystery at the center of it are extremely intriguing, but the filmmaking around it is just not good.
5/10 for season 1. Have yet to watch the rest of them.
