The Diplomat: Season 4 - Netflix Series

The Diplomat: Season 4 | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Episode 1 starts with a motorcade carrying the American President and Vice-President (Hal) being diverted to Windsor Castle because of protests at the airport. They hang out for an hour or so and just as they are loading back into the cars the President gets shot. This might be the most secure place on the planet being as the place is surrounded with high walls and is swarming with police, secret service and soldiers. So getting shot here should be impossible, but it happened. The President gets airlifted to a nearby American aircraft carrier where a surgeon repairs the damage. Meanwhile the manhunt for the shooter goes on.

Sounds like an inside job, the stop at Windsor Castle was a last minute deal, unless the protest was designed to force a delay and someone who was in on the plot managed to get the motorcade diverted to the castle where the assassin was waiting. Terrible assassin. There was one shot from a suppressed firearm and they didn't kill the President, they only wounded her.

Windsor Castle is impressive. Wikipedia has a fine collection of pictures. 

Windsor Castle - Google Earth

You might consider President Grace Penn (a woman) as a stand in for President Trump. They are both blond, they both get shot, and once Grace gets shot she becomes blunter, more confrontational, and according to all the career diplomats, more erratic. If you like her style, which I do, you might be a Trump supporter. Weasel words don't impress me. Say what you mean and follow through on what you said. In any case, they all spend all their time swaning around all the fanciest places in Europe, places where mere peasants are not allowed. Everybody thinks they are important, but they can never come to an agreement to do anything useful. The just issue statements and pray. Useless bunch of twits.

On the plus side, all the petty bickering can be pretty entertaining. I laughed out loud many times over the eight episodes.

Previous posts on this show:

• The Diplomat - Netflix Series
• The Diplomat: Season 3 - Netflix Series

Scandal

The Scandal | Official Trailer | Netflix [ENG SUB]
Netflix K-Content

We've been watching The Scandal, a Korean series set in the Joseon era (1400 - 1900). We have people scheming to either bed someone, or get other people into bed, and yes, we are talking about having sex, so all kinds of lies and double dealing going on. Also considerably more skin than any other Korean show we have seen where there is absolutely no skin besides hands and faces.

Anyway, it's a little hard to follow, mostly because I have a hard time telling the older women apart. Sometimes you can tell similar looking characters apart because they behave differently, but these gals are all stone faced liars. Is that the mother-in-law, or the tobacco lady. No matter, the gist comes through.

Anyway, I'm watching this show and suddenly this old movie pops into my head. I couldn't remember it right off. It took asking Google mutliple questions before I finally hit on the right combination of key words.(hit movie middle ages scheming woman revealed by her lover when he dies).

Dangerous Liaisons (1988) Official Trailer - Glenn Close, John Malkovich Movie HD
Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers

Slow Horses — Season 6 - Apple TV Series

Slow Horses — Season 6 Official Trailer | Apple TV
Apple TV

We started watching season 6 a couple of weeks ago, but it's new so only one episode is released every week. This doesn't work with our usual mode of binge watching two or three episodes a night, so after a couple of episodes we decided to go back and watch some episodes from previous seasons because it's been almost a year since we last watched this show and our memories are a little rusty. We ended up re-watching the entire previous 5 seasons which took us a couple of weeks and it was glorious. Not only was it just as good as the first time, there were all kinds of things we picked up on that we completely missed the first time through. For example, River's father, Frank Harkness shows up in one of the early seasons, but he is not identified until we get to season 6. Also, re-watching them all I realized that they all have a common thread - the rise and fall of First Desk. I don't remember who we started with (maybe they weren't part of the story in the early seasons), but there was Ingrid and then Whelan, the buffoon, and now Diana Taverner.

Jack Lowden as River Cartwright (left) and Christopher Chung as Roddy Ho (right) in front of Ho's computer work station.

Roddy Ho is the Slough House resident hacker extraordinaire. He is also a socially inept, obnoxious jerk. I can relate. I was also a computer nerd, very good at my job and socially inept. I don't think I was an obnoxious jerk, but I probably rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.

Wall of Computer Equipment

I often dreamed of buying up a bunch of obsolete test equipment and building a wall of them and somehow hooking them up so they would look like they were doing something. While that might be entertaining, it's not really going anywhere, except maybe movie prop land, and that ain't me.

Previous post - Slow Horses — Apple TV Series

East of Eden - Netflix Series

East of Eden | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
A horrible show full of horrible people. Okay, maybe it's not a horrible show, it's probably just all the horrible people that make it so wretched. A long time ago I read one of Steinbeck's books it was pretty good, or maybe I was too young to appreciate how horrible the characters were. In this case we have a moderately tyrannical father has his two sons under his thumb. Eventually the father dies leaving a substantial fortune behind.

And then a lovely, psychopathic whore appears who gets involved with both of the boys. One son is strong and one is weak. The strong one recognizes the whore for who she is, the weak one is captivated by her. He completely fails to communicate with her. Eventually she runs off to pursue her natural calling of being a whore. As talented as she is, you'd think she could have come up with scheme to separate at least one brother from his fortune.

East of Eden is adapted from the 1952 novel by John Steinbeck.

Strategist Kanbei - Netflix Series

Kuroda Yoshitaka (1546-1604) was a chief strategist under Toyotomi Hideyoshi.

I wrote my take on this show and it doesn't feel wonderful, so I went looking for other reviews and I while I did find some, I didn't find anything wonderful enough to post here. Maybe this post will be better when I get done messing with it.

I am kind of wrapped up in this show. We spent two or three hours a night for the last three weeks watching it.

Suprisingly there is no trailer for this show on YouTube. It's a long series, 50 episodes, roughly 45 minutes each. 

The show sucked us in and didn't let go until we got through it all. I suspect it was due to the acting and the soundtrack. Soundtrack is pretty great, mostly invisible, but occasionally in tense situations it would become heavy. There wasn't much else unless you count the samurai armor, which appears to be half voodoo talismans and half actual armor, if bamboo can be armor. I don't know what their armor is made of, but it ain't plate steel.

The acting is what made it. Several characters had specific traits and after a while we got to where we could tell how a scene was going to go, based on the well-known characteristics of the people involved.

Starts in the mid 16th century and goes till Kanbei's death. Most of the scenes are interiors, about evenly divided between court proceedings and domestic discussions. Everyone is barefoot all the time, unless they are going to war, then they wear straw sandals. Or you are Hideyoshi, when you get to be king you wear golden slippers that look like they are made of Mylar. The buildings are very nice, but the interior furnishings are very sparse. I suspect the show was made on a shoestring budget. Later episodes have more stuff, more outdoor scenes, more elaborate battle scenes, that sort of thing. The earlier episodes are very spare. Frugal, mind you, not stingy (quote from the show).

Map of Japan in the 16th Century CE
Not like any seen in the show

There are some battle scenes, but they are very brief and only serve to show you that there is fighting going on. Maps are frequently shown, sometimes black & white paper maps are shown in court or in commander's meetings, and sometimes color maps are shown on the screen, but I was never able to make head or tails of them. I don't think they were oriented with north at the top.

16th-century Japanese atakebune coastal warship

Once in a while a scene showing dozens of ships would appear on the screen for a few seconds. Evidently the navy was big deal. There was even rumors of an armored ship. We saw a drawing of it, once, in court.

Portuguese carrack in Nagasaki, 17th century

Jesuit priests from Portugal showed up early on, and Christians were present throughout the show. Hideyoshi kicked out the priests when he became king on an account of them getting uppity.

Mostly the show is about the various lords negotiating alliances with their neighbors in anticipation of a battle with another alliance. Half the time these guys renege on their promises and switch sides which leads to lots of teeth knashing and hair pulling. Oh yea, most of the lords have the tops of their heads shaved leaving only hair on the sides and back.

The show mostly makes sense, but every now and then something happens that doesn't, which leaves me wondering wtf is going on here? For instance, there are no instances of single combat. If someone does something they don't like, they just store it away even though everyone is armed with swords. Seems like in Europe, fights got picked at the drop of a hat. Now the fact that there are no chairs and everyone is sitting or kneeling on the floor a good ten to twenty feet away from the others - means that to attack someone, you are going to have to get up. Maybe that's to give the guards time to step in and quell the unruly. No chairs until you go to war, then when the commanders have a meeting everyone has a stool to sit on.

Everybody has like six names: the name they were born with, the name they got when they became an adult, when they achieved a certain rank, when they had some cosmic insight. And as they are all multi-syllable, alien concoctions of letters, we gave them all nicknames, so we could tell who we were talking about. Monkey remained Monkey even when he became king of the world. Kanbei could be Kan-bey or Kan-bee. Nobunaga was No-mumble-mumble. On one hand I want to say No-bun-aga, but on the other hand I think No-bu-na-ga is more like the correct pronunciation, or as close as a western tongue is going to get. So whenever I wanted to say his name I had a dilemma. Do I say it this way? Or that way? And I couldn't make up my mind before the word needed to come out of my mouth, so the tongue was on its own and you get mumble-mumble. As usual, only very rarely I can distinguish the names in the audio.

Japanese arquebuses of the Edo period

The Jesuits brought guns. Lots and lots of guns, which they apparently sold to anyone willing to pay. 

Oh, let's not forget about the invasion of Korea. What a good idea.

The Gentlemen: Season 2 - Netflix Series

The Gentlemen: Season 2 | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Epic. Cross of The Godfather and James Bond. Upper class British dude has built a cannabis empire that is raking in zillions of dollars but he wants more. To that end he wants parliament to pass a bill that will make Mary Jane legal. He reasons that, like in America, the legal business will bring in more revenue without significantly impacting the illegal business. This is because illegal marijuana will be cheaper than the legal stuff. However, his boss does not agree, arguing that while our boy Edouard might be a general in this sprawling criminal enterprise, the boss is a field marshal and so has to consider the bigger picture. Unfortunately, he doesn't explain what the bigger picture is. We'll have to wait for season 3 to find out just what that is.

We get to see what competent former soldiers can do when circumstance dictate. Gentlemen by all accounts during the day, but killers when the need arises. There are a couple of scenes when several bad guys are shot down without any warning. At least one situation was entirely warranted, but there were a couple that seemed unnecessary, but these guys are essentially operating on a war footing, so maybe it was a valid tactical decision.

Best show I've seen in a while. 6 stars out of 5.

Season one here.

Computers

UFO Research Room by Krzysztof Maziarz and Joyce Silva

Vic Cyber Game in Hanoi, Vietnam, designed by Vương Luân Computer

Man From Uncle

1964-1968 Napoleon Solo, played by Robert Vaughn, and Illya Kuryakin, played by David McCallum. Leo G. Carroll played Alexander Waverly, the British chief of the organization. Barbara Moore joined the cast as Lisa Rogers in the final season.

Graveyard: Season 3 - Netflix Series

Graveyard: Season 3 | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

I've been trying to figure out what it is about a show the makes it enjoyable, and it's very difficult to describe. If I like a show, I'll dive in and become engrossed in the story line and won't notice anything about the production. If I don't like a show, I will sweep it from my mind, so describing what makes a show enthralling or excruciating is a bit difficult for me, but I'm gonna give it shot here.

It feels like they are trying very hard to make the show as much like a western show as possible, it feels a little rough around the edges. Most of it is very good but every so often something will happen that upsets the flow of show flowing into you. It's like a roller-coaster ride, where you are rushing by strange stuff and you are enjoying the thrill of the chase, but every so often something will happen, like your car hits bump and you say what was that? but you've already moved way beyond that so you let it slide.

What kind of things? A scene might be rushed, there is no lead in, we jump into the middle of a conversation, we hear a dozen words, and we are back out. It leaves one wondering what was that even about? Some of the bit players don't feel real, a little too wooden in movement and speech.

The entire show is basically about women's rights in half-moslem Turkey. The police have created a special unit to handle femicides and our girl has been assigned to lead it. This season has her gang fighting a well financed program of harassment and intimidation. There's also the usual family drama, I sleep through that, though in this show they are usually pretty short. In the end our girl catches the culprits and that's all that matters.

Season 2 here.

Blood Sacrifice - Netflix Series

Blood Sacrifice | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Another serial killer on the loose. This one is targeting the police. He kills six or seven before the cops finally catch up him. It's not too bad a show but it's not a great one either. The lead detective spends a lot of time dealing with his father, a former cop and a serious curmudgeon. It's not clear what their issue is, maybe it's a subtle language thing that didn't make it through translation, or maybe the old man is just a stinker.

It's got all the standard Netflix diversity stuff: the competent, immigrant, gay, cop; the hot chick playing second fiddle to our lead detective; women in high level positions, and a white male in charge who falsified records that pushed our killer over the edge.

The last episode was pretty bad. Alfred (the grandfather) meets the killer at the museum, gets in a car with him and rides away. You'd think he would be a little more circumspect. Things go from bad to worse and then his son shows up and things just get ridiculous.

Midvinterblot (1915) by Carl Larsson, which depicts the offering of king Domalde

The killer spends a lot of time at the museum looking at this painting. Grandpa notes the similarity between the contortions of the people on the ground the positions of the slain police officers when they were found. Note also the tree with skulls.

5 episodes

Mousetrap - Netflix Series

Mousetrap | Official Trailer | Netflix [ENG SUB]
Netflix K-Content

Excellent. Successful novelist has his identity stolen so completely that he is left homeless, broke and living on the street. Now a thug who has been searching for him for three years catches up with him demanding payment of an old debt. Our boy obviously can't pay so the thug beats the snot out of him. In between punches our boy manages to convince the thug that he will get paid if they can figure out who stole his identity, and they are off, racing around Seoul, chasing down clues all to a bangin' soundtrack.

Stealing identities is both an ongoing business and a problem. Unidentified bodies keep turning up and now it is beginning to look like these people can't be identified because their identity has been stolen and now all the government records of this identity now point to the person who bought the stolen identity.

It gets a little confusing because there are different gangs, or maybe just different factions of the same gang, all trying to collect the loot. Also, it begins to look like the identity thief might be the real guy and the real guy might be the fake. 

There are several brutal mass fighting scenes and one spectacular smash up of a bunch of police cars. 

The Girl from Oslo - Netflix Series

What Happened in Oslo (Bortført) - Trailer - Netflix
FanCat

Norwegian girl goes to Sinai for fun in the sun with a couple of Israeli friends and they all get kidnapped by ISIS terrorists. Chaos ensues.

The show is about evenly divided between what's going on with the kidnappers and what's going on on the home front, both is Oslo and Israel, which is mostly politics and emotional caterwauling. Israel won't take direct action because that would mean crossing the border into Egypt, and that would offend the Egyptians. That's weak (fuck the Egyptians), but we get to see drones and spy satellites at work trying to keep track of the kidnappers and their victims.

Some of the details are a little weak, and there is the usual Netflix claptrap, but overall the show does a good job of telling the story.

City of Gaza
Area shown is about five miles across.

Gaza is like a big city. ISIS and Hamas are bitter enemies and would love to kill each other.

CIA map of the Sinai Peninsula, 1992

The Sinai is a desert. The northern edge is on the Mediterranean Sea. The southeastern edge borders the Gulf of Aqaba. 

We prefer to watch shows in their native language with English subtitles, even when the show is in English. It doesn't work here because it only shows the subtitles when they are not speaking English, so to get subtitles all the time you have to switch to English, which means much of it is dubbed and the dubbing sucks.

Bortført translates as abducted.

Operation Safed Sagar: The Untold Story of the Kargil War - Netflix Series

Operation Safed Sagar: The Untold Story of the Kargil War | Official Trailer | Netflix India
Netflix India

Pakistan and India have been fighting over Kashmir since forever. It's basically been a stalemate, but back in 1999 Pakistan got a bee in their bonnet and decided to push a little harder.

I was looking for a map of the area but I'm not finding anything that's making me happy, but then I noticed we've got the Indus River running through the area. This video lays essential ground work if you want to understand what's going on here:

Indus River explained in under 3 minutes
FactSpark

Kashmir is basically a bunch of snow covered mountains. Every spring the Indian and Pakistan armies advance into Kashmir and approach the Line of Control. In 1999 Pakistan decides to advance early and pushes past the Line of Control into territory normally held by India. Now things get hot and the Indian Army is having a tough time so the Indian Air Force gets called in to see if they can do something about it.

This show is basically an Indian version of Top Gun expanded into a series. It's pretty good. The shots of the jets are wonderful and the scenes of domestic life are not too tedious, so it's fine.

There are some very tense scenes of jet fighters zooming through canyons in the Himalayas. Sometimes these scenes get very intense, although if you look at it objectively the scenes are impossible. Jet fighters do not sideslip at 45 degrees when they are traveling at 500 knots, but the scenes are so well crafted that you get carried along emotionally. So now you are watching a scene that is simultaneously believable and unbelievable. Great stuff.

Indian Air Force MiG-21

The show focuses on the Golden Arrows squadron. They are flying MiG-21 jet fighter aircraft. They start off flying photo reconnaissance missions but because they are equipped with GPS they soon get tasked with bombing those dirty Pakistanis. It is an Indian movie after all. The show makes a big deal about altitude, and while the Himalayas are tall, the MiG can easily go much, much higher.

Specifications (MiG-21bis)
Length	50	feet
Wingspan	24	feet
Weight: 10 tons	19	tons
Maximum speed	1,350	mph
Landing speed	160	mph
Range	410	miles
Service ceiling	57,000	feet
Guns	1	internal 23 mm Gryazev-Shipunov GSh-23L autocannon with 200 rounds
Hardpoints	4	underwing
Hardpoints	1	ventral, reserved for fuel droptanks

Can't mention Kashmir without mentioning Led Zeppelin:

Led Zeppelin - Kashmir (Remaster) (Official Audio)
Led Zeppelin

Unforgotten - Amazon Prime Series

Unforgotten | Series 1 | ITV
ITV

The show starts off with visiting a number of apparently unrelated old people. This gets my curiousity going. Why are we visiting all these people? Turns out their names are all on a list found in a notebook that was found with the remains of a dead body, a body that died 40 years ago. Now we have a team of like six detectives investigating this death. So tell me, what police department has got the resources to put six detectives on investigating a 40 year old death? There isn't one, unless they've got their head screwed on backwards. However, this is England, and England seems terminally confused these days, so, if you are feeling vindictive about England this show might seem plausible. But it ain't, it's a fantasy. It is a pretty entertaining fantasy.

Until you get to the middle of the season and now we've got all these people losing their minds over what they think might have happened 40 years ago. I don't think I've ever run into a bigger bunch of weak minded people in my life. Of course, the circle of people I associate with is pretty small, so maybe there are hordes of morons out there running around loose.

Then we've got the coppers trying to piece together what happened from what people tell them of what they remember. Half of their memories are missing, and half of the people are lying, so if you are getting any kind of picture, it's going to be very patchy. Hard to imagine building any kind of case for murder.

There are a few bits of fancy forensics, but the lab techs who do this work are entirely too happy about it. Maybe they just wanted a change of pace from the standard dour old lab curmudgeon.

6 seasons, 6 episodes each. Probably finish this season but I don't think I'll watch any more.

P. S. The first season is free but after that you have to pay, even if you are an Amazon Prime subscriber. We're already paying for Netflix and Amazon Prime, I don't need to paying any surcharges.

Blood Coast Season 2 - Netflix Series

Blood Coast: Season 2 - Official Teaser Trailer | Netflix
MVSRS

Season 2 carries on from season 1. Early on our gang (the police narcotics unit) interrupts an altercation between a couple of thugs from rival gangs. One of the thugs is Mehdi who happens to be a childhood friend of Tatoo, one of the coppers. On account of this friendship Tattoo lets Mehdi go. The entire rest of the show has everyone regretting that, especially Tattoo. While Tattoo has grown up to be a law abiding citizen, Mehdi has grown up to be a wild man bent on gaining respect and he doesn't care how many people he kills to get it. He is a genuine, certified, piece of shit. You know early on that his behavior is going to result in him dying an early death. Unfortunately that doesn't happen, so you are going to have to wait for Season 3 to see him (a) shot down in a gun battle with the police, (b) shot down in a gun battle with a rival gang of thugs, or (c) his older brother Yassine finally gets tired of his shit and executes him. No sign of it yet, his brother is totally devoted, but even there are limits to what even the most devoted will tolerate.

6 episodes.

Rivers of Fate - Netflix Series

Rivers of Fate - Official Trailer [English] | Netflix
MVSRS

Very good. The first and maybe the second episodes are nerve wracking. You know something bad is going to happen to our girl. I can't tell you just what techniques the show's makers used to induce this feeling, but it was very effective.

Our girl, Janalice, is a very attractive 16 year old girl whose teenage lust leads her to trust a boy that she shouldn't. She becomes a social pariah, so her parents send her to live with her Aunt in Belem and things go wrong. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

We also have a gang of teenage river pirates. They steal cargo from boats traveling on the river. The merchants file an insurance claim and then buy their goods back from pirate's fence for half price and everybody's happy. Well, except for the passengers who got robbed and the insurance company.

4 episodes 45 minutes each.

Ilha de Marajó
Breves at lower left, Belem at lower right

Ilha de Marajó is in the state of Para on the northeast coast of Brazil. It is in between the Amazon River, the Guajará Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. At Belem the bay is ten miles wide.

Belem from the bay

Satellite Thermal Image of the Mouths of the Amazon
Belem is small pink blob at lower right

Cast

Actor		Character	Role
Domithila	Cattete	Janalice	Our girl
Marleyda	Soto	Mariangel	A mother seeking revenge against a river gang that murdered her family. She is a former soldier. She & her husband ran a bar that floats in the middle of the river.
Luca	Dan	Guilherme	Mariangel's gay son.
Lucas	Galvino	Preá	River gang leader who becomes obsessed with Janalice
Claudio	Jaborandy	Zé Elídio	Whore monger
Ademara		Dionete	Crackhead who befriends Janalice
Welket	Bungué	Philippe Soutin	Whore monger and proprietor of Coq d'Or nightclub
Sandro	Guerra	Amadeu
Maycon	Douglas	Zé Do Boi
Felipe	Rocha	Jaime
Ricardo	Teodoro	Ramiro
Andrés	Castañeda	Cristobal
Fátima	Macedo	Daiane

Tokyo Salad Bowl - Netflix Series

東京サラダボウル PR動画 - Tokyo Salad Bowl PR video
NHKスクエア【公式】- NHK Square [Official]

Effervescent young woman detective inadvertently solves crimes that stump the police department big shots. Don't ask how someone so young and bubbly has become a detective. She has enlisted (dragooned) the support of the most stone faced man in the world. He used to be a detective but something bad happened and now he works as an interpreter. He's seen it all and he knows that most everybody is lying most of the time. And oh yeah, our girl has green hair and likes to eat the weirdest food she can find. The first show has her eating scorpions on a stick and ox penis stew and she apparently enjoys it all. Very entertaining.

Interpreting languages is a recurring theme. Slang causes all kinds of problems. Our interpreter used to frequent a bar and his visits there would keep him apprised of Chinese slang. But he stops going and now he's no longer up-to-speed on the current slang, which means he has to fall back on literal translation and you know that isn't going to go well. 

In another episode we hear that Vietnam uses Kanji characters for peoples names, though the pronunciation is completely different. A couple of guys working in a nursing home use the same characters for their names, but the Vietnamese guy is called Tien and the Japanese man is called Susumu.

The Vendetta of An - Netflix Series

Official Trailer】The Vendetta of An: The game is set and the players are gathering in Chang'an!🔥
YOUKU English-Get APP now

Chinese historical drama. Slow moving as in glacial. The lead is seeking revenge on the high court officials who murdered his parents 15 years ago. Seems to be a common theme lately. The show is pretty good, but somewhere past midway, some of the people inexplicably change alliances. Makes them seem inscrutable, but I think the writers were just trying to stir the pot. 

The show starts off with An getting a promotion or something that is sending him to the capital. Before he leaves, he kills a local man, a man who he has had dealings with for years. He kills him because he was somehow connected to his parent's murder. I don't understand why he waited for so long to kill him, other than he will be far away when the murder is discovered. Just weird, man.

I remember one old guy, a general or a mystic or something, in any case someone with clout, a prisoner in an underground prison. Not really clear who's holding him, some northern warlord if I remember correctly. He keeps popping up in the show and eventually we hear he has been released, but I'm not sure we ever see him again before is back in prison. I don't think we ever figured out just who he is or why he's important.

Lisa Nur Maulidia has a slightly overwrought review on Medium.

28 episodes, approximately 45 minutes each. If you're diligent you can finish it in about a week. It's probably been a couple of months since we've seen it. I've just been a little slow about getting this written.

Dark Winds - Netflix Series

Dark Winds Season 4 | Official Trailer ft. Zahn McClarnon | Premieres February 15 on AMC+
amc+

Not very tight, kind of goopy, but the southwest desert scenery is cool.

Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn's wife has left him and moved to Los Angeles. Jim Chee and Bernadette continue their romance. They should not be working together, but when you only have a few people to work with, you make do. So far they've been lucky. Jim is suffering from some kind of psychic crisis. He keeps imagining wounds and nose bleeds. I suspect it has something to do with his mother.

From the cars and the rock and roll sound track I deduce that the show is set in the early 1970s. 

Meanwhile, some kind of criminal enterprise has overflowed from L. A. to the Indian Reservation and a German woman has been dispatched to clean up the mess. So far we've got four dead and she's not done. She operates out of a small van that serves as her living quarters and armory. Her father is an old man living in a fallout shelter in L. A. She is kind of keen on adventure stories about the old west, especially:

Winnetou I is an 1893 adventure novel by German author Karl May, which is featured as a key plot element in Season 4 of the TV series Dark Winds. In the show, the assassin Irene Vaggan (played by Franka Potente) develops a dangerous obsession with Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon) because she links him to the romanticized Apache warrior Winnetou from the books she read as a child. - Google

She also has a complete set of Karl May novels in her van.

Previous season posts:

• Dark Winds - Netflix Series
• Dark Winds Season 3 - Netflix Series

Agent Kim Reactivated - Netflix Series

Agent Kim Reactivated | Official Trailer | Netflix [ENG SUB]
Netflix K-Content

Cross James Bond with Rambo, give him Korean martial arts skills and you've got Agent Kim, indestructible, lethal and devious to the max.

A North Korean team is sent south to assassinate South Korean government leaders. Unfortunately for the team, a North Korean commander has leaked their plans to the South Koreans so the entire assassination team, except agent Kim, is wiped out. The general who organized the assassination plot gets blamed for this disaster, so the general gets purged and the commander gets promoted.

Agent Kim survives and is captured by the South Koreans. His presence presents something of a problem, but they eventually decide to just turn him loose, and as long as he doesn't cause any trouble, they will let him be. Just to be sure, they assign a couple of people to keep an eye on him.

Agent Kim keeps his head down and leads a normal life. He gets a job, at a bank, gets married and they have a kid. His wife dies in childbirth, so he raises his daughter by himself.

Everything goes smoothly until his daughter gets cross-wise with an entitled brat who is the daughter of a corrupt businessman. This guy is the villain with a capital V.

Up till now, Agent Kim, has been a complete Clark Kent, unassuming, timid, hides in the background, but when his daughter disappears the glove comes off and Agent Kim runs amuck and it's great.

It's like they're trying to create a Korean James Bond, and I guess it's not too bad for a first attempt. The brutality of the North Korean training camps seems excessive, but maybe that is what it is really like. Probably depends on who's telling the story and how good a story teller they are. 

Agent Kim is pretty direct and maybe a little crude, but maybe the script didn't ever place him in civilized company. Bond was always suave, except for those few occasions when he to deal with a ruffian.

The other thing might be the scenery. Bond films always have spectacular shots of fabulous places, scenery, hotels, etc. There were a couple big places, but not the sweeping vistas. Not sure what I am saying here, it's just an impression that I get.

Legends - Netflix Series

Legends | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Excellent. One the surface it's just another show about cops operating against drug dealers, but it's very good. I suppose it's because we become involved with the characters, and we've got a few.

1993 England. Heroin is making big inroads in the UK and Margret Thatcher needs some good news to show up in the press, so somebody (a whiz kid? fawning toady? grey man?) comes up with idea of tasking the Customs department with the job of stopping the flow of heroin coming into the country. So right up front we know this just a political stunt, and the guy assigned to the job knows it as well. All he is given is the ability to get a few customs agents reassigned to him, no extra money, no extra support. His plan is to send his agents into the drug dealing world undercover. He puts out a casting call for this operation and gets good response, but he only needs a few and he quickly whittles the mass down. Interesting the things he chose to test people on.

So now we've got dedicated agents of the crown operating undercover, working their way up the food chain in the heroin distribution network, believing drugs are bad, hoping their work in making a difference, and knowing deep down that this is just a political stunt and nothing will really change. The price of heroin will go up for a few weeks, and maybe a couple of people will quit, but in a couple of weeks, we'll all be back in business. I guess that's faith, and maybe that's what Sisyphus thought while he was pushing that rock up that hill. Really great show at any rate.

6 episodes