'Stuart...' take 2 - Sep 25

 Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. As soon as I published my opinions on ‘Stuart…’ people began to, err, point out that this was before the S1 finale was published, and that I was wrong. I admit. I was wrong. ‘Stuart…’ isn’t about the multiverse, it is… what is it about?

The show does begin as a show about multiverse – the original Stuart finds the show’s main Stuart (and Bert) and gives her the Interferator (Whatever) for him to go and fix the universe. (An alt-Raj number 1 gives further exposition). They are joined by Denise, Stuart’s estranged ex, and Kripke, who is the dictator in the post-apocalyptic, vaguely Mad-Max-based universe, where the quartet resides. Since Stuart is incompetent, and the other three – mostly too, the foursome begins to travel the multiverse… that is it. That is the whole premise. No fixing, especially intentional one is done. The quartet is just running around, looking for something/someone or other… and if they brought any particular knowhow from their universe, it is quickly forgotten and never mentioned again. Pause.

In fact, in one of the episodes, the ‘main’ Stuart-Denise-Bert-Kripke team meets their variants – an all-scientist team – and aside from their get-up/clothing/etc., the two groups are interchangeable. The original Stuart just as well could have used AI or whatever to clone himself and the other three, and let them lose all over the multiverse – and maybe he did. We do not know. The show’s format has extra-short episodes, impossible for plot development, but wait! We do get it! Pause.

In the episode 1x09, we get to see a Flash fight Mr. Freeze. This is a sharp break away from the rest of S1, where we just saw a bunch of OC crap, and nothing more. I wonder did DC pay to have its’ characters appear on ‘Stuart…’ or were they paid to have this happen. Either way, what happened – happened, and then we got to the season finale, where we learned about the Adversary – we saw neither hide nor hair nor evidence of their activity throughout the S1 – and the team SDBK got trapped/released/stuck/etc. in ‘the real life’, by breaking through the fourth wall. What next?

If ‘Stuart…’ was done correctly and the audiences learned to feel something for the new main 4, then the S1 finale would’ve moved ‘Stuart…’ fully out of the sitcom territory, and into something else. Sci-fi drama, maybe. Instead, there’s nothing, just the epiphany that we are apparently done with the multiverse – the team SDBK appears to be vanquished for the moment – and are doing something more in line with MCU WandaVision, perhaps… or something else entirely.

Again, if ‘Stuart…’ S1 built itself correctly to the S1 finale, we would be honestly worried as to how the universe will fare now that Stuart is unable to fix it for real, but the show did not. Stuart – and his team – have neither done any fixing, and in fact might have caused some of their own damage, as when they moved ‘military Penny’ into a new universe and made her a ‘centaur Penny’ – but we never see the fallout. ‘Stuart’ created at least 6 new universes, but we spent very, very little time in each one, and it’s hard to feel anything for them. In addition, again, we know by now that the original Stuart sent many teams SDBK into the multiverse, and they are interchangeable. This team SDBK is out. Switch onto the next one! We might never know the difference! However ‘Stuart…’ is getting a S2 regardless! Eventually! Did I mention that the real life sucks? Well, ‘Stuart fails to fix the universe’ is certainly doing, and will be doing, its bit to make it even more depressing! Hurrah!

Well, this is it for now. See you all soon!

'Stuart' and 'Steps' - Sep 24

 Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, so let us talk about… what? The movies, lately, are something else – I’d my fill with Nolan’s Odyssey and Tom Holland’s Spider-Man for the moment – and the TV shows… the ‘Lanterns’ are an attempt to combine high-flung space sci-fi adventures and multicolored magic rings with ‘down and dirty’ detective work, and the result is something that seems to be satisfying no one in particular – people are watching it because it still beats real life – a low bar – and then there’s Stuart. He is failing to fix the universe, you see. Que the laugh track. Pause.

Let us start again. TBBT had its problems. It started as a sitcom, as the next version of ‘Friends’, but if ‘Friends’ were able to pull the plug and quit gracefully, TBBT didn’t, but turned into a sitcom version of a soap opera, since the regular cast allowed to achieve this through sheer size – 7+ people is a lot. Yet, nothing lasts forever, and so even TBBT ended. Hurrah!

…Well, of course not – this is real life. It sucks. TBBT branched off into ‘Young Sheldon’, (YS), which was supposed to be about the childhood of Sheldon from TBBT…but it quickly evolved into something else. The ‘adult’ Sheldon from TBBT fluctuated between a socially maladjusted and selfish man (who came to his senses with the help of not so much his friends as that of a good woman – i.e. Amy) and some sort of an autistic/’special needs’ character, (but TBBT quickly pulled the plug on this, thank you). Put otherwise, whatever the TBBT Sheldon is, conventional he is not, and not necessarily in a good way, either.

Meanwhile, what about the Sheldon in YS? Oh, he has the same problems… and he was dealing with them, and learning how to deal with them, and self-improving/improving with the help of others at a rate that the TBBT Sheldon never did. Put otherwise, if the two characters were the same one, a young and an adult version of the same Sheldon, then the adult Sheldon would never be either an entitled jerk, (if he’s conventionally sane), or a socially disturbed semi-victim (if he is not). No, he would be an ordinary person with an extraordinary IQ… i.e. not someone starred in a sitcom, but that is also important – YS was not really a sitcom, it was a family drama, delivered with a healthy dose of humor, but plenty of other emotions too. It was good, possibly better than TBBT – but it ended.

So, up came ‘The First Marriage of Georgie and Mandy’, designated to be about the first marriage of Georgie, the elder brother of Sheldon and Missy (his twin sister), to Mandy. The twist here is that Mandy is the older one – she is in her 30s, while Georgie is only in his 20s, but they are going to work it out, you will see!

…Since this is only their first marriage, clearly things won’t go as planned…but Georgie is given the ‘young Sheldon’ treatment here – he is already learning from his mistakes, making a divorce unlikely, so… welcome to the multiverse?

Ah yes, dear ole Stuart. He, his girlfriend Denise, best friend Bert, and worst enemy Kripke are travelling the multiverse, failing to fix it. Pause. In reality, they do not appear to be trying to fix anything at all – they are just lugging their huge dimension-jumping machine around the various dimensions, and that is it. Oh, sometimes they play coy by allegedly trying to find Leonard, Sheldon, or Howard, but no luck, and there is no one else that can fix it – just kidding. The original Stuart told his dimensional clones and their friends – at one point it is revealed that their multiverse is full of Stuart-Denise-Bert-Kripke teams that just run around doing diddlysquat – that only Leonard and friends can help them, and this is what they are trying to do. Given that the collective IQ of an average Stuart-Denise-Bert-Kripke team is about as high as a room temperature on a warm September day, this is not surprising. In addition, if a Stuart-Denise-Bert-Kripke (SDBK) would ask someone else for help, their collective stupidity would just create a bigger mess, as they would ask the completely wrong/inappropriate person entirely. Fun.

…Apparently, someone else thought so too for real, and now Stuart will fail to fix the universe for a second season, whenever that will air. It also means that the team SDBK will survive the S1 finale, so that is that for this intrigue. Frankly, when the bleeping Sonic Prime cartoon series (or whatever its’ name was), makes a better multiverse series than you, you really should take a pause and think it over.

In addition, speaking of the cartoons? Let us get back to ‘Steps’. We talked about it before – it is supposed to be a Netflix animated movie where the stepsisters are not wicked at all, but are quite nice to Cinderella. Well, for better or for worse we don’t see them interacting with Cinderella at all in the trailer people, but what we do see is that the movie won’t make them villains at all – a new character named Priscilla will be. In other words, this is less of a subversion, and more of a flat-out remake; it is going to be an original movie, put simply, and given that the same people who gave us K-POP Demon Hunters are making it, it just might work.

Or, it might not. Real life sucks, remember? But, for now, this is it. See you all soon!