Change Your Image
connorgperkins
Lists
An error has ocurred. Please try againReviews
The Mandalorian: Chapter 12: The Siege (2020)
A letdown...
The first three episodes of this season had gotten my hopes up a fair bit. The show had seemingly taken a step up in class in terms of writing, acting, even plot development in the midst of the adventure-of-the-week format. And then we got this clunker.
Outside of the opening with Mando and Baby Yoda, the script was quite weak. It doesn't help that the performances were notably lackluster (even Weathers, whom I liked in season 1, and Esposito's minimal appearance were subpar), but then again, they didn't have much to work with. It's an old-fashioned chicken and egg problem trying to figure out which is more to blame. Also, a strange lack of Mando in this episode...
Other than some Baby Yoda laughs, I spent the entire episode checking the progress bar and wondering if there was enough episode left to give us anything much worth seeing. Some mediocre chase sequences without any real sense of threat or urgency. A tiny bit of larger-plot-related material at the very end. A bunch of meaningless dialogue poorly delivered throughout. This definitely felt like one of the weakest episodes the show has given us in its first 12.
By the way, y'all do know that 1 and 10 aren't the only ratings you can give, right?
The X Files: Ice (1993)
Not sure I quite buy it...
This episode is not an homage to "The Thing," it's a copy. I'm just not sure I buy that something as unimaginative a carbon copy of the original as this episode should be lauded quite so much as it is. It's not a bad episode by any means. I actually thought Duchovny and Anderson showed a greater emotional and tonal range in this episode than in most of the rest of Season 1, and the execution of the episode from a production side is fairly strong. But a bottle episode duplicating another creative work (which itself borrows substantially from Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby's 1951 film "The Thing from Another World" but also reinvents that story in innumerable, riveting ways) is somewhat less impressive to me than it seems to be for others. If a stand-up comedian tells a joke that lands really well and the next comedian to take the stage tells the exact same joke in the exact same way, the joke objectively will be just as good, but I imagine one's perception of the two tellings would not be the same. The first requires (at least perceived) ingenuity, the second only mimicry. "Ice" is mimicry, relatively well-executed mimicry but lacking the creative spark.