Pantheon (currently on Netflix) Animated sci-fi series in which people learn to upload the brains of the dead to computer servers. I only just heard about this, though it’s a couple of years old now. There are two seasons and it’s genuinely good stuff.

I personally preferred the first season, which is smaller scale, about what this kind of technology would mean for people, and how it might be used and abused. The second season is more full scale, world-changing political events. They’re both interesting aspects to the issue, but the first season was more about the characters themselves, and I got more emotional investment from that.


Doom Patrol season one (HBO) – I know this is years old, but mostly what I heard about it at the time was, ‘It’s fine, but whatever,’ so we never got around to it. A friend recently urged me to watch with considerably more enthusiasm, so we hit up the first season. It starts out very silly (poison gas farting donkey level humour), but we stuck with it, and by about half way through the first season I was much more invested. The characters never become what you’d call nice, but I very much liked the way they developed. Every one of them has their sob story that makes them inclined to want to do nothing but sit and sulk about how their lives went to hell, and they have to be bullied into doing, well, pretty much anything. But as more of their backstories are revealed to one another, they’re learning about themselves too. It developed some very interesting threads beneath the silliness.

The choice to cast one of the most gorgeous gay actors on the planet (Matt Bomer) as a gay man who spends most of the time with his head wrapped in bandages was in some ways a shame🤪 But he does get to be so much more than a pretty face, and really shows his range acting when his expressions can’t be seen. I’m left wondering though, as an American TV series, how many viewers would have got the joke about Danny the Street? I don’t think Danny LaRue ever made much of an impact outside the UK and Ireland.

I enjoyed it and I’ll watch more of it, but I’ll be doing it without spouse – he declared at the end of the season that it was still to silly and not his thing.


Person of Interest – Another one of the ‘sometimes mentioned alongside Burn Notice’ series that was on my list. I’m two seasons in now and definitely enjoying it. I really like the way it ekes out the backstories of its characters as it goes along – always enough to keep you interested, and in a way that makes it clear the stories were there all along. This isn’t a case of inventing bullshit as they go, there’s an actual Plan. And it refuses to make its characters dumb either. Carter spends a while chasing John, and then she has to find him, because she’s smart. FBI agent Donnelly has to figure it out, because he’s an areshole cop, but he’s definitely not stupid, and so the series can’t stagnate and get stuck in a rut. There are some good twists in the writing here and there – the reveal of Elias was a fantastic move.

Person of Interest definitely starts out darker than Burn Notice. BN takes multiple seasons to get to the point where it says, yeah, the US government and the CIA in particular are absolute bastards, because its main character doesn’t want to believe that. Person Of Interest begins at that point, with both main characters having faked their own deaths to get the hell away from their own government.

The first season started out genuinely interesting, flagged somewhat in the middle, then really picked up again at the end. I do feel this is a series that would have been better with slightly shorter seasons. Some of the current TV shows that only get 8 or 10 eps in a season need more. At the other end of the scale, Person of Interest did not need 22 per season. I genuinely think Burn Notice hit the sweet spot with around 16 eps per season. Anyway, it’s great entertainment and I’ll be heading on through the rest!


Castlevania (Netflix). Aaaand yet another oldie we dived into. We will start watching some more recent stuff soon, I swear! We’ve just been waiting for a bunch of current series to end so that we can binge watch once they’re done. Castlevania’s a lot darker than I expected from the impressions I’d got online, and it being based on a video game, which for us is definitely a plus! The quality of the voice actors they got for the roles was impressive too.

I love the character development of Hector and Isaac. They both have awful backstories and histories of betrayal that make them bitter and vengeance-driven, but as events move on around them, and they interact with a range of people, they gain more perspective on themselves and each other. When they met up again in season four, with their differing expectations, it was an absolute delight.

But the ending of season two – OMG, WTF BBQ! Trevor and Sypha, what the hell were you thinking??? Alucard just had to kill his father, because he went mad after the murder of his wife, Alucard’s mother, and you two just say, ‘Here, we’re assigning you a job, you get to be alone forever guarding an empty castle,’ and you two trip off into the sunset. Do you not understand how awful that was? Not to mention dangerous??? Dracula went crazy and became a threat to the entire world because he was lonely and sad, and you go and dump his son in the exact same situation???

And maybe Sypha gets something of a pass because she just didn’t understand what that means for Alucard? She’s early twenties maybe? She’s literally never been alone in her life, and never had a home she had any attachment to. She lived a nomadic life with a group of family and friends and everything was shiny. But Trevor Belmont should know! He's been in the exact same situation. The last survivor of his family, despised for his name, his family home left in ruins. He’s been desperately lonely for years and it made him bitter and antagonistic. Why would he do that to Alucard? He needed to be slapped so hard! They don’t even drop back in from time to time and say, ‘Hi, how are you doing, how about we catch up?’ They just bugger off and never think about Alucard again. Damn. Harsh, guys.

Anyway, my rage at certain characters’ choices aside, it’s a good show 😁