Things I Have Been Putting In My Eyeballs

-I had one day off this week, during which I fell into a Luke Cage shaped hole and emerged blinking into the light thirteen hours later. Nothing's been done, the house is a state, my ironing was done by means of hanging it in the bathroom while I showered, and I have no regrets. That was the good shit.

( Incoherent Luke Cage Ramblings )

I think Luke Cage is my favourite Marvel show yet. Jessica Jones was brilliant, I though, but it cut a bit close to the bone for me to actually call watching it enjoyable. I only wish Iron Fist looked better, and less like it was sponsored by the Game of Thrones casting department's off day.

-I belatedly got around to watching Star Trek: Beyond which I hadn't seen right away because all the trailers made it look like a generic action flick in space. But, actually, for a film that destroyed the Enterprise before the thirty minute mark it felt like the first reboot film that had actually been made by people who like Star Trek.

It certainly felt more like Trek than Star Trek: Gap Year or Star Trek: Is This Casting Racist? It helped that the cast, Kirk, specifically, looked like actual grown ups in this one.

Beyond is definitely closer to Actually Good than merely Better Than Into Darkness, but I still hold to my views that Star Trek is better suited to the small screen.

-I tried to watch Batman v Superman last time I was laid up with period pain (Dawn of Justice, quite possible more fun than bleeding from your vagina), largely because the Wonder Woman trailer had looked really good and I wanted to see her bits. I didn't get to Wonder Woman; I'd lost the will to live by twenty minutes in and decided that lying on my bed in silence more fully experiencing my stomach cramps would be more fun. Has anyone done some sort of Diana supercut?

-I've been really enjoying Pitch, this is a bit surprising because I know nothing about baseball and if I'm going to keep watching I should learn something of the rules if only to quiet the voice in my head that keeps saying they're playing cricket wrong. Also baseball is a bit like rounders, right? And once in primary school I broke my teacher's nose playing rounders because my shocked and appalled reaction to actually hitting the ball that had been thrown at me was to hurl the bat backwards over my shoulder.

Tales of my sporting incompetence aside, I think Pitch has been excellent so far. I really like the mentor-student vibe they seem to be going for with Ginny and Mike, with Ginny being Mike's legacy. I'm not shipping them, but I can totally see why people would. If I squint I can see myself shipping Ginny and her agent, but mostly I love the friendships been Ginny and Mike, and Ginny and Blip, and after the last episode want Ginny and Tommy to be unlikely bros forever.

-I have just finished a rewatch of all seven seasons of The West Wing which I started on the night of the Brexit vote. In times of great hardship President Bartlet comes to me...

(Actually this entire post is brought to you by my pre-gaming with Jack Daniels and the Hamilton soundtrack for the second presidential debate.)

At the end of season seven I still feel like Vinick should have won the election, and Santos wasn't characterised enough beyond 'the democrat.' And I hate that Josh ended up chief of staff, I can't imagine that he'd be any good at it.

I really didn't like that they brought perennial nice guy Sam back; his character felt dated even when S7 aired and even more so now. Also, there was an awkward line of Sam's, about America being a nation of centrists and Santos being just the president they needed to bring people together which felt like it had escaped from and earlier draft of the script where Vinick won. And it wasn't even bringing back a character from the earlier seasons that bothered me, because the return of both Amy Garner and Ainsley Hayes to serve on the senior staff worked for me, and actually in light of that it bothered me even more that the final 'what's next?' scene was the president and three guys in identical suits.

Even so, I will defend the finale forever if only for the scene of Donna being shown into her fantabulous new office as First Lady's Chief of Staff.