So... my brother and I successfully lured my mom into watching The Mandalorian with us. 😉 (By "lured" her, I mean we were watching it when she happened to be in the room, and Baby Yoda is simply too cute to resist). We finally caught up with season 2. I'd (mostly) avoided major spoilers, but without knowing specifics, I'd gotten the impression that there were really mixed feelings about this season.

Maybe that set my expectations low enough, because I ended up liking it pretty much as much as I did the first season. In fact, I think I liked this season better, but I think that had way more to do with my state of mind while watching than the actual quality of the episodes.

I think what have the most mixed feelings about is kind of an unfair criticism (it's more worries about the show going forward), but it's still on my mind.

I will fully admit to two moments of squealing in delight over the nerdiest things, both from episode 5:

I just finished WandaVision

I also liked WandaVision a lot.

I have been rewatching Twilight Zone since I now have a set of the complete episodes in the definitive edition.  The show had an amazing quality which is lacking in today’s television. It aired from 1959 - 1964 and its strength was in the acting and stories.  Some of the episodes I remember watching many years ago.  “Walking Distance” was always one of my favorites. I love the nostalgia of revisiting one’s youth from so many years ago.  Twilight Zone was a wonderful series which will always endure as a classic.

So I've been watching a Filipino telesyre with my mom called "My Love From the Star" which is an adaption of a Korean drama of the same name. I have always wanted to see the K-Drama version (which I still plan to), but when I saw there was a telesyre version of it I was like "okay we're watching this one first!"

It's about an alien that crash landed on earth 300 years ago and has since been stuck there. Now in modern times, he finally finds a chance to go home when a comet is supposed to pass... that's 3 months away though. But his life soon gets intense when he meets a woman that looks like his love he met 300 years ago! Anyway, 7 episodes in so far, and it's a lot of fun! The series gets down right hilarious, but also very emotional too--especially with Matteo's flashbacks which slowly shows us more and more of what he went through back then, which has caused him to be the way he is now about not meddling. I'm really curious how this is gonna end!

@Narnian78, The Twilight Zone is one of my favorite TV series. A friend also has the definitive DVD series and we've watched through it, and are generally impressed with how good many of the episodes are (but by the fifth season, a few of the plots are recycled).

I'm old enough to remember when it originally aired, though my parents discouraged us from watching it since we were pretty young. I remember a few episodes from when they originally aired, like "The Midnight Sun." Definitely scary for a little kid in the early 1960s!

Bill Mumy (of Lost in Space fame) appears in several episodes, and I quite enjoyed listening to his commentary on them. One of them, "It's a Good Life" (in which he plays a kid who "sends people  to the cornfield" if they displease him), had a sequel of sorts in one of the later TZ reboots. In it Mumy is an adult now and has a daughter with similar powers. It's noteworthy because his daughter is played by his real-life daughter, Liliana, who is a cute little girl who manages to have that same creepy expression on her face when she's about to send someone away. It's fun to see daughter and father acting together too.

@stargazer 

I know of some people who dislike Lost in Space because of its campiness. But I think Bill Mumy’s acting was quite good in that series as it was in Twilight Zone. The campiness of the show was mainly because of Irwin Allen’s way of making science fiction. Twilight Zone was much better quality science fiction, and today it is remembered along with Star Trek as being among the best series of that time.  I won’t despise a TV show for being campy, but I have to say that Lost in Space was not the best quality when compared to the well crafted science fiction such as Star Trek, which had far better stories and greater depth and intelligence.  I guess some episodes of the series were worth watching for entertainment, but they weren’t much more than that.  I kind of enjoyed some of the first season episodes since they were less campy than than those of the other two seasons.  But Star Trek was far better quality and much more thoughtful in its stories.

@Narnian78, I agree with your  remarks in the post above.

I remember seeing a few episodes of both Star Trek and Lost in Space when they first aired back in the '60s, but it wasn't until Star Trek went into syndication in the 1970s that I saw them all. I'm not sure I've seen all of the Lost in Space episodes even now.

In the US, there's a channel (MeTV) that has a programming bloc called "Sci Fi Saturday Night" that includes both Star Trek and Lost in Space (along with some other shows I'll mention in a moment). Each series is aired in episode order, and they started anew with Lost in Space recently, so I've tried to watch them from the beginning. The series premiere was, I thought, pretty entertaining. The campiness comes later. Doctor Smith is actually kind of a sinister character who sabotages the robot on the Jupiter 2 before launch. Sadly, it didn't take too long for him to become the whining buffoon he's remembered being (though, kudos to Jonathan Harris for acting like that).

There are other Irwin Allen shows in that bloc: Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (which I also saw some of as a child; I didn't really remember its campiness - lots of bug-eyed monsters under the ocean - that I notice now); Land of the Giants and Time Tunnel. They're all fun to watch in the very wee hours of a Sunday morning should I have insomnia. 😉

The bloc starts off with Svengoolie - a show in a similar vein to Mystery Science Theater 3000 except that he doesn't riff the movies as they play, but offers his comments (including casting comments and a clever, unique song pertaining to each movie) during commercial breaks. Most of the time, he plays movies from the classic Universal monster collections of the 1930s-1950s with some newer movies thrown in.

The more educational shows such as Voyagers will sometimes get cancelled.  It lasted for only twenty episodes, but it did well with the critics, and today still has many fans.  The time travel stories were much better than The Time Tunnel, which also lasted for only one season. There were also historical stories on the old classic Dr. Who, which were very entertaining, and most of them were well done.  Actually, Voyagers might have lasted longer on PBS if it had aired on that network instead of on NBC.   Educational shows do not make a whole lot of money for commercial networks, however good they may be.  The original Star Trek struggled to stay on the air for three seasons.  Its audience was mainly educated people, and the NBC network thought that the first pilot was “too cerebral”.   But the show was given another chance, which was very fortunate.  Thank goodness that PBS still offers intelligent shows for its audience.  🙂

Finished Season 4 of Cobra Kai and man was this season an intense ride! Action scenes were great, the emotional bits brought tears to my eyes, some of the teenage drama was frustrating but that aside, a great season! I am really hyped for Season 5 because the way this season ended.... just wow. How dare they leave us hanging lol. Gotta wait 'till December, I think, is when the next season is. 

About a year ago I watched Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles for the first time and I had quite the experience with it. I've watched through it two more times since then. I considered posting this in the Vintage Television thread because this show has been off the air for quite some time, but I thought a show from 2008-09 might be pushing the label "vintage" too far.

During the COVID pandemic, I was re-watching a bunch of movies I saw when I was younger but haven't seen in a long time. Many of them were better than I remembered, but the first two Terminator movies stood out. I remembered them as fun sci-fi action movies with classic Arnold Schwarzenegger one-liners, but didn't think much more of them. Watching them now was a completely different experience, and I know count them among my favourite movies. They just hit me in the right time and place. I was feeling concerned about artificial intelligence and the loss of our humanity in the machinery and algorithms of the modern world, and what once felt like a crazy sci fi premise when I was young suddenly felt poignantly relevant as an adult. They are much better movies than my memory gave them credit for.

So I decided to watch the other movies at long last. I always heard they weren't good past the second one, so I never really bothered, but now I was curious. I can confirm that the movies past T2 aren't worth watching (with the possible exception of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines... it's at least a fun movie, but not as good as the first two). The Sarah Connor Chronicles blindsided me though. I remember this show being on when I was in high school and I remember people talking about it at the time, but I never gave it much thought.

It is one of the best TV shows I have ever seen. Terminator  has always been a mix of horror, action, and science fiction, but if The Terminator is predominantly horror and Terminator 2 is predominantly action, then The Sarah Connor Chronicles is predominantly science fiction. It takes the themes of man vs. machine, humanity, and moral choices of the films and takes it to some truly thought-provoking places. This show is very well written and feels almost literary. If I was still in high school, I could imagine writing about one of these episodes for English class. The nature of TV (e.g. a lower budget plus a longer overall run time) forced it out of the two-hour chase movie formula into something a lot more thoughtful and character-driven. Cameron, the main Terminator character, is probably the most fascinating fictional portrayal of a robot (fine, "cybernetic organism" 😉 ) I have ever seen. The only problem is it ended on a tantalizing cliff hanger and, fifteen years and several bad reboots later, it is highly unlikely to ever get resolved. 

Has anyone else seen it? It's strange because this is the first new thing (new to me) in a long time that I want to geek out over and discuss, but it seems like the world has largely moved on or forgotten about it. 

I very much enjoyed the fact that the season finale for Star Wars: Ahsoka this week had the episode title of "The Jedi, the Witch, and the Warlord". 😀 

Not that the rest of the episode had any great Narnia parallels, but I still had a lot of fun with it,

Posted by: @icarus

I very much enjoyed the fact that the season finale for Star Wars: Ahsoka this week had the episode title of "The Jedi, the Witch, and the Warlord". 😀 

Not that the rest of the episode had any great Narnia parallels, but I still had a lot of fun with it,

 Ahsoka_Episode8.jpg

I was grinning ear to ear when I saw the title card. 😊 

On a related note, Dave Filoni was also inspired by the Wood Between the Worlds when creating the World Between Worlds for Rebels before it appeared in Ahsoka.

My brother and I both burst out laughing when we saw the title card because it was so unexpected. Very cool though. I admit we spent more time dissecting the statues at the end and wondering why it took the bird so long to show up. The title did make me wonder about Thrawn and the Nightsisters though. There was an offhand comment about how he "woke them up". You woke up the witches? Was there perchance a bell involved?