The Week In A Bad Education Towers #16

Its been too hot this week, way way too hot, so was a good week to go back into the office three times. Yes, the air con is nice in there and yes its only like a twenty minute walk from home but still. Way, way too hot.

If you only get around to watching one wrestling match over the last week, make sure you prioritise the match up between Dax Harwood and Will Ospreay; its an absolute BELTER.

If you don’t know, Dax is one half of FTR previously at WWE/NXT as The Revivial and they are brilliant. Seriously, their run in NXT was amazing with some classic tag team matches. Their run on the main roster was a bit curtailed, initially by an injury that derailed their momentum (but not before they gave us this great moment in their debut when they pushed over The New Day’s ice cream cart) and then by typical WWE intransigence when it comes to pushing Tag Teams. After leaving and moving to AEW they’ve been underlining just how good they are in more great matches, and are now Ring of Honour and AAA Tag Team Champions (although it should but noted that the AAA belt is an absolute honker) and up for the NJPW tag belts shortly. They’re brilliant, and recently they’ve shifted to being faces after working the majority of their career as heels; this was an organic switch thanks to the crowds just loving them due to how good they are in the ring.

And this recent match with Ospreay shows that they’re not just good as a pair, they’re cracking as singles. This isn’t a call for them to be split or anything, its just great to see them showing just how good they are in any situation.

Now The Young Bucks have the AEW belts again I expect FTR to be up in their grill again which is a mouth watering prospect.

Truly they are Living Legends.

A while ago I posted this on the twitters:

And then recently I saw that the first 2 series had dropped on Disney+ so I decided to start watching them, because why not.

And you know what? I’ve been really enjoying it. I’ve bounced off the 2 recent live action Trek series; Discovery I think after a few episodes, then the same for Picard. They looked great and had Trek stuff but they were missing something; they were doing Trek stuff but they didn’t feel like Trek. They were full of plot but not much character. And nope, haven’t tried Strange New Worlds as yet.

The Orville seems to understand that the reason why people love TNG is that they loved the characters. And they grew to love them not through plot but through all the character moments; people painting or playing trombone or having a chat in 10 forward. This was the same for DS9, even though it might have had more of a serial structure it still gave you those beats to hook you in.

Recent Treks have fallen into the trap of other recent streaming shows, as in being a movie length idea being strung out over too many episodes. You get a lot of plot then a cliffhanger, rinse and repeat. This is, ironically enough, usually in less episides that TNG and DS9 had to deal with; the first season of Discovery was 15 episodes split into 2 parts, TNG was 26 episodes per series. Thats a lot of TV, a lot of time to spend with characters.

The Orville wants to do that, it wants to be a character piece telling you a nice little sci-fi story each week. It wants you to enjoy the characters so when something plot-y does happen then you feel it a bit more.

Given that it has even less episodes to deal with it does rely on tropes to get you up to speed; the stoic alien, the intelligent robot, etc. And its a lot more snarky and smug that Trek, which is where we come to Seth McFarlane.

Yep, the guy behind Family Guy and all that. He’s down as the creator of the show, and is the Captain of the eponymous Orville. He’s the crux of the first episode, having walked in on his wife sleeping with someone else. A year later he’s given a ship to command, and guess who is going to be the first officer? The problem is its hard to see beyond him and see his character. He’s doing what he can but he’s working against a lot of baggage, which admittedly I’m bringing to the show.

Connected to McFarlane’s performance, the tone of the show swings hard, from work place comedy to full on melodrama often in the same sentence. Its a hard needle to thread, which the show often doesn’t get right. But I’ve not finished the first season yet and by all acconts the second is much more successful in that regard.

But the main thing is I’ve been enjoying it, just enjoying a show that has good characters that doesn’t shout at me to watch the next episode because I need to know what plot thing is going to happen next, but rather what that group of characters will be up to next.

Took the boys to see Lightyear this weekend and it was good; not top tier Pixar but still fun, a good adventure romp. It has some issues with glaring plot holes and character choices but its charming enough to mostly get past those. And it does look great, with some great chunky design that looks like you can reach out and touch it.

Also; this is the first Pixar film I’ve seen in the cinema since Toy Story 4 in 2019. 3 years! Each film since that one has gone straight to streaming. As much as I enjoyed Lightyear the fact that I could see that in a cinema and not Turning Red is a borderline crime.

Outro

I was going to touch on the current mess at WWE but it feels like that hasn’t finished yet so we’ll see. Maybe we’ll talk about that next week. But as a quick summary of recent wrestling news:

Anyways, bye!

Phil Doyle