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brokenmnemonic) wrote2019-08-25 09:15 pm
brokenmnemonic) wrote2019-08-25 09:15 pm
Entry tags:
Recent TV Watching
So, the last week at work has basically been a hellscape, but one of the good things that happened is that while working from home one day recently I mainlined the entire of Wu Assassins on Netflix. Wu Assassins first appeared on my radar because it was brought to my attention that Mark Dacascos was in it, which therefore means it must be watched. That's the law.
I knew I was going to love this show when, partway through the first episode, a very confused chef who recently left a partly-mob-funded restaurant owned and run by his friends (who are bother and sister, and the sister is the chef's sometimes partner) to run his own food truck suddenly finds himself being given the power of a thousand monks in the middle of an alley in San Fransisco by a woman named Ying Ying that he just accidentally hit with his truck.
No, I'm not making that up.condnsdmlk had to put up with me live-messaging a couple of the episodes and then making excited squeeing noises and hand-flappy gestures because I was having a lot of fun watching it.
It took me a little while to be reasonably sure I'd worked out what was who (having a blind spot for names really sucks at times) but the gist is this: Kai Jin is the inheritor of the power of a thousand monks who, throughout history, have been the Wu Assassin. It's the Wu Assasin's job to stop the five Wu Warlords getting together and destroying the world. The five Wu Warlords - each of whom is infused with one of five elements banished from heaven (fire, earth, water, healing and metal) - keep trying to get together to usher in a new era, which will have unfortunate results for everyone who actually likes being alive on earth, so the Wu Assassin has to keep killing them over and over, while the various elements keep passing from warlord to warlord.
Kai Jin and his friends Jenny and Tommy Wah and Lu Xin Lee were all children rescued from a burning building, in a fire they believe Tommy started, and which left Lu Xin with nasty burns on his back and neck. The man who rescued them - who they call Uncle Six - is a big man in the local crime world, and keeps genially trying to control their lives, all the while convinced he's being a good adoptive relative. Tommy and Jenny own a restaurant; Tommy has a bit of a drugs problem, and the local crime world likes eating in their restaurant, leading to unfortunate confrontations with Kai Jin, who's in an on-again off-again relationship with Jenny, who's by far the cleverest of the bunch.
Kai Jin randomly gets advice from a wise old man who lives in the apartment across from his - by which I mean his greengrocer. It's the greengrocer who nudges him to finally strike out on his own after years of procrastinating. Lu Xin spends a lot of time hanging around being cool, ostensibly on the back of his custom car business, while actually being all about stealing expensive cars to order. And being tormented by CG, a goth/punk car thief who makes his acquaintance by deliberately and obviously stealing his car. And he's involved in something involving the Russian mob...
Kai Jin isn't a big fan of killing people, despite Ying Ying insisting that he's now a servant of the Dao and that it's the only way to save the universe, and Kai Jin periodically finds himself being assailed by gangsters, thugs, confused policemen and a variety of other people, all of whom see him as someone else - generally, a rather gaunt looking Mark Dacascos. "Find me the bald chef in Chinatown" Uncle Six orders. "If you can't find him, bring me all the bald chefs." That's a thing that actually happens. Tommy ends up reluctantly helping Uncle Six, while Jenny tries to stop him doing far too many drugs, periodically clashing with Uncle Six's lead henchwoman Zan Hui. Did I mention that CG, Jenny and Zan Hui are all excellent martial artists? And that Jenny and Zan Hui have a long-running grudge acted out through their periodic fights in the underground martial arts grudge maxes that are a part of the local gambling scene?
With trips to the spirit world, medieval Scotland, San Fransisco and other places, and with a cast that includes some familiar faces like Summer Glau, Wu Assassins is both really entertaining and, most of all, all about the four childhood friends as found family and the people in their orbit. They keep getting into danger because of each other and their determination to look after each other, even when the other person doesn't want it, and Uncle Six is really effective as a sympathetic kind-of bad guy. None of the episodes felt like filler, and watching Kai Jin struggle with what being the Wu Assassin means worked really well for me. I'd definitely recommended.
I also watched all of Another Life, partly because Katee Sackhoff was the lead, but also because I was busy working and didn't notice Netflix had started autoplaying.
So, this started out feeling like a bizarre cross-over involving Starbuck from BattleStar Galactica being married to Steve from the US version of Shameless, because Katee's character is married to Justin Chatwin's character - sporting a beard - and that caused me a certain amount of mental dissonance initially. The series premise is that a mysterious alien artefact landed on Earth on live tv, and is sending out a signal to a planet around another star, so a spaceship is crewed up and sent to find out what's at the other end. The spaceship is captained by Katee's character, Niko Breckenridge, while Justin's character, Erik Wallace, stays at home with their daughter Jana to investigate the artefact.
In common with a depressing number of sci-fi series, it turns out that the crew of highly-trained experts assembled for the mission are all generally really terrible at acting as a team when faced with any kind of threat, while the government body that's declared itself responsible for the artefact is run by people just looking for something to shoot and/or blow up.
The spaceship finds itself in a variety of crises, each of which gets steadily worse in large part because people - starting with an arrogant white dude - insist that they know best, stir up trouble, inspire mutiny, and then fuck things up dramatically by proving that the risks they were ignoring - which had only an 11% chance of happening - are 100% certain to happen due to drama. I appreciated the show's willingness to kill off members of the cast, but wow, did a lot of the characters annoy me. I'd say it was a clever riff on the old alpha teams experiments, but mostly a lot of it felt like crisis-of-the-week to stretch the season out. There are some generally interesting ideas thrown around, and the dangers of being exposed to alien ecosystems manifest really quickly; the aliens are also set up pretty early as being not cuddly. Watching the crew arguing with each other got annoying pretty early on, but I'll give the show props for giving us a nonbinary actor (JayR Tinaco) playing an interesting character who gets to have a romantic relationship onscreen - and one that's rather sweet, to boot - as well as throwing in a complicated three-way relationship between a female character and two male characters, who are as interested in each other as they are in her.
In the end, the show took a lot of episodes to get to what felt like a fairly obvious ending. Warning for some gory scenes, too.
I knew I was going to love this show when, partway through the first episode, a very confused chef who recently left a partly-mob-funded restaurant owned and run by his friends (who are bother and sister, and the sister is the chef's sometimes partner) to run his own food truck suddenly finds himself being given the power of a thousand monks in the middle of an alley in San Fransisco by a woman named Ying Ying that he just accidentally hit with his truck.
No, I'm not making that up.
condnsdmlk had to put up with me live-messaging a couple of the episodes and then making excited squeeing noises and hand-flappy gestures because I was having a lot of fun watching it.It took me a little while to be reasonably sure I'd worked out what was who (having a blind spot for names really sucks at times) but the gist is this: Kai Jin is the inheritor of the power of a thousand monks who, throughout history, have been the Wu Assassin. It's the Wu Assasin's job to stop the five Wu Warlords getting together and destroying the world. The five Wu Warlords - each of whom is infused with one of five elements banished from heaven (fire, earth, water, healing and metal) - keep trying to get together to usher in a new era, which will have unfortunate results for everyone who actually likes being alive on earth, so the Wu Assassin has to keep killing them over and over, while the various elements keep passing from warlord to warlord.
Kai Jin and his friends Jenny and Tommy Wah and Lu Xin Lee were all children rescued from a burning building, in a fire they believe Tommy started, and which left Lu Xin with nasty burns on his back and neck. The man who rescued them - who they call Uncle Six - is a big man in the local crime world, and keeps genially trying to control their lives, all the while convinced he's being a good adoptive relative. Tommy and Jenny own a restaurant; Tommy has a bit of a drugs problem, and the local crime world likes eating in their restaurant, leading to unfortunate confrontations with Kai Jin, who's in an on-again off-again relationship with Jenny, who's by far the cleverest of the bunch.
Kai Jin randomly gets advice from a wise old man who lives in the apartment across from his - by which I mean his greengrocer. It's the greengrocer who nudges him to finally strike out on his own after years of procrastinating. Lu Xin spends a lot of time hanging around being cool, ostensibly on the back of his custom car business, while actually being all about stealing expensive cars to order. And being tormented by CG, a goth/punk car thief who makes his acquaintance by deliberately and obviously stealing his car. And he's involved in something involving the Russian mob...
Kai Jin isn't a big fan of killing people, despite Ying Ying insisting that he's now a servant of the Dao and that it's the only way to save the universe, and Kai Jin periodically finds himself being assailed by gangsters, thugs, confused policemen and a variety of other people, all of whom see him as someone else - generally, a rather gaunt looking Mark Dacascos. "Find me the bald chef in Chinatown" Uncle Six orders. "If you can't find him, bring me all the bald chefs." That's a thing that actually happens. Tommy ends up reluctantly helping Uncle Six, while Jenny tries to stop him doing far too many drugs, periodically clashing with Uncle Six's lead henchwoman Zan Hui. Did I mention that CG, Jenny and Zan Hui are all excellent martial artists? And that Jenny and Zan Hui have a long-running grudge acted out through their periodic fights in the underground martial arts grudge maxes that are a part of the local gambling scene?
With trips to the spirit world, medieval Scotland, San Fransisco and other places, and with a cast that includes some familiar faces like Summer Glau, Wu Assassins is both really entertaining and, most of all, all about the four childhood friends as found family and the people in their orbit. They keep getting into danger because of each other and their determination to look after each other, even when the other person doesn't want it, and Uncle Six is really effective as a sympathetic kind-of bad guy. None of the episodes felt like filler, and watching Kai Jin struggle with what being the Wu Assassin means worked really well for me. I'd definitely recommended.
I also watched all of Another Life, partly because Katee Sackhoff was the lead, but also because I was busy working and didn't notice Netflix had started autoplaying.
So, this started out feeling like a bizarre cross-over involving Starbuck from BattleStar Galactica being married to Steve from the US version of Shameless, because Katee's character is married to Justin Chatwin's character - sporting a beard - and that caused me a certain amount of mental dissonance initially. The series premise is that a mysterious alien artefact landed on Earth on live tv, and is sending out a signal to a planet around another star, so a spaceship is crewed up and sent to find out what's at the other end. The spaceship is captained by Katee's character, Niko Breckenridge, while Justin's character, Erik Wallace, stays at home with their daughter Jana to investigate the artefact.
In common with a depressing number of sci-fi series, it turns out that the crew of highly-trained experts assembled for the mission are all generally really terrible at acting as a team when faced with any kind of threat, while the government body that's declared itself responsible for the artefact is run by people just looking for something to shoot and/or blow up.
The spaceship finds itself in a variety of crises, each of which gets steadily worse in large part because people - starting with an arrogant white dude - insist that they know best, stir up trouble, inspire mutiny, and then fuck things up dramatically by proving that the risks they were ignoring - which had only an 11% chance of happening - are 100% certain to happen due to drama. I appreciated the show's willingness to kill off members of the cast, but wow, did a lot of the characters annoy me. I'd say it was a clever riff on the old alpha teams experiments, but mostly a lot of it felt like crisis-of-the-week to stretch the season out. There are some generally interesting ideas thrown around, and the dangers of being exposed to alien ecosystems manifest really quickly; the aliens are also set up pretty early as being not cuddly. Watching the crew arguing with each other got annoying pretty early on, but I'll give the show props for giving us a nonbinary actor (JayR Tinaco) playing an interesting character who gets to have a romantic relationship onscreen - and one that's rather sweet, to boot - as well as throwing in a complicated three-way relationship between a female character and two male characters, who are as interested in each other as they are in her.
In the end, the show took a lot of episodes to get to what felt like a fairly obvious ending. Warning for some gory scenes, too.
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I have the feeling from looking back at the show that maybe the writers were trying to go for characters with "strong" personalities, and ended up confusing antagonistic for strong?
Have you managed to watch any more episodes?
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A couple of the relationships were interesting, though, and a while I wouldn't watch it solely for them, I think that it did a little better there than I expected it to.
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I saw Summer Glau smooching a lady on Wu Assassins so that shot straight up on my to watch list :p
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Have you watched Wu Assassins yet? :D
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Nope, but still on the list!
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