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!
