Stranger Things 5 & Schrodinger’s Eleven

Sigh. I’ve gone back and forth about 500 times about whether I want to bother typing my thoughts out on the Stranger Things finale. As you can see from the entire theme of this blog, I have a penchant for getting unhealthily (is that a word?) obsessed with TV shows. But you won’t find any other Stranger Things reviews on this blog because ST was not actually one of the shows I ever got that obsessed with. I never had time to do a rewatch before S5 started either, I just watched a ~25 minute recap of the first 4 seasons to refresh my memory on some of the plot details before starting it.

I partly say that as a caveat, because I’m writing this post as kind of a normie in this realm … if you’re coming here as someone who has the expertise and encyclopedic knowledge on the show that many do, you’re not going to learn anything new from me here. Even worse, I may say something wrong or misunderstand something because I’m not the leading expert on the details. But if you’re interested in finding out how an old rando slight-above-casual-watcher feels about how it all wrapped up, then you’re in the right place.

Wynonna Earp: Vengeance Review

I watched Wynonna Earp for the first time just a bit over a year ago, and of course I quickly binged the entire series on Netflix. When I finished watching it, I was left frustrated to find out that the show was originally supposed to get a season 5, which was then later yanked away from them by SyFy, it seems. The series had a thoroughly satisfying ending with the S4 finale, but there was just still so much story they could have told, and I wanted to spend more time with these characters.

So imagine my delight when not even a year later, we got the news that we’d be getting new stories with these characters after all, via a 90 minute special on Tubi. What the fuck is Tubi, anyway?  I’d never watched it before, but the stakes seemed low, given how low-budge this show always has been anyway. Emily Andras and team have always seemed quite capable of telling compelling stories with some basic special effects on a shoestring budget.

So I counted myself as really damn lucky, as fandom fortune goes – I felt like I had hit the jackpot. I waltzed into this series 7 years late, fell in love with it, did absolutely nothing to petition for more content, and then, voila!  New content was just dropped into my lap like a gift from the heavens, as a reward for me doing nothing but sitting on my ass and wishing.  Ask and ye shall receive.

‘Wynonna Earp’ Season 4 (3+ Years Late)

O.k., to be fair, I originally wrote this post a year ago (2023), but I never posted it. The main reason was simply that I wanted to get more S4 episode stills in here to make it look nicer, but doing this is a lot of work in itself. Then I got busy and distracted, and now here we are a year later and the Wynonna Earp: Vengeance 90-minute special is out. The existence of new Wynonna content is amazing and not something I ever thought I’d get to see when I wrote this S4 review. Yay!! But now that I’ve seen that, I want to come on here and complain about it, lmao. Or about one aspect of it, anyway. Which means I need to post my damn S4 review first.

So here we go, let’s talk Wynonna season 4.

The Marvels Thoughts + Review

Remember 4 and a half years ago?  March, 2019.  The Before Times.  We were so innocent back then, in many ways.  Captain Marvel had the bad fortune to exist at the same time as multitudes of sad, insecure man-babies on the internet, but!  It had the good fortune to serve as the prelude to Endgame, the pinnacle of the MCU’s popularity and its crowning achievement.  Everyone on the goddamn planet was chomping at the bit for that movie to come out, it was like one of those rare moments when it seemed the entire world was on the same page, if just for a hot minute.

It’s kinda coincidental that Endgame told the story of a 5 year gap in time, when the world paused and fell apart all at once after half the planet was wiped out.  It was less than a year later that the world was thrust into something a little bit like that IRL.  And like in Endgame, we’ve all come out of it a bit worse for the wear.  Truth be told, Marvel had already sealed its fate regardless of the pandemic, with its Disney+ launch, birth of a thousand MCU TV shows of diminishing quality, and getting a bit too big for its britches.  Lately we’ve been hearing the story of the realization that Marvel’s eyes had been bigger than their stomachs ad nauseum, so I won’t rehash it.

‘Wynonna Earp’: Ships, Funny Moments and Other Stuff

I recently wrote a blog post about having just watched Wynonna Earp for the first time, because I feel like these days in order to find shows that really get me, I need to start digging into the archives for shows I never saw in their original run.  It seems hard to find that perfect hit of TV crack I really need these days, even though there are still shows I enjoy.  But there’s a particular type of story that gets me more giddy and obsessed than the rest, and Wynonna fits that bill.  It’s got that special blend of humor, heart, hijinks, ass-kicking, ships, trailer park demons, and undead western outlaws that a girl really needs in her entertainment.

The show is 4 seasons and 49 episodes, which is not nearly enough for me, but it’s also more than most shows get anymore.  So I’m trying to just appreciate what’s there, even though my nature is to instead be angry about it because I’m comparing it to those rare shows that get 800 seasons.  Still, 49 eps is too many for me to possibly cover everything in my general review of the series, so I decided to do a second blog post to cover the following:

I Watched ‘Wynonna Earp’ 2 Years Late

I guess you could say I’m 7 years late, given that this show started in 2016.  And “late” is probably not the best wording, as it can only be a good thing when new people continue to discover a show in the years after its original run.  I just wanted to specify that this is not a re-watch, this is me watching the show for the first time.

In my Class of ’09 / Daisy Jones blog post from May, I talked about how in the past couple years, it’s been nearly impossible for me to find TV shows (or movies for that matter) that really deliver the things I’m looking for.  It’s not that good stuff doesn’t still exist, it’s just that there’s a genre of TV that does a great job scratching a particular itch for me, that seems to be in short supply these days.  I think to some extent it’s a casualty of the move from traditional cable and broadcast TV to streaming.  And it really bums me out.

Class of ’09 Finale Review

Oh.  k.  Well.  At least they didn’t kill anyone?

This is exactly what I was afraid the finale would be.  38 minutes.  38 tiny little stupid minutes they gave themselves.  And it’s not even really 38 minutes, because a couple of the minutes are “last week on.”  This felt like a Cliff’s Notes version of what the finale could’ve been.  I suppose the pacing during The Present half of the finale was fine.  Let’s just hit replay on this to go through it … It starts with Tayo recovering from his almost-murder, and then giving Poet the backstory of his dad’s death and his motivation for joining the FBI.  Tayo and Poet then team up to try to find the people who hired the hitman to stab him, which gives more of the Poet/Tayo interactions I’ve been looking for in the Present era of the timeline.

Class of ’09 Ep 7 Review

O.k. this show is so weird. I just, again, cannot believe that it has given itself exactly 38 effing minutes to wrap up every goddamn storyline that still needs to be wrapped for the season (and I presume the entire series) in the finale next week.  This week’s ep was 48 minutes, thank god, but next week’s finale is only 38 minutes!!  There is no way in hell enough happened this week in order to wrap the entire thing up in 38 minutes next week.  Team Future has not even gotten together yet to make so much as a game plan of how they will attempt to defeat this AI monster, let alone start executing on it.  38 minutes!!

Class of ’09 Ep 6 Review

O.k. well this was basically an entire episode of things going wrong without any resolutions.  It really left me hanging in every way.  After a few eps in a row of some really satisfying scenes and character interactions, I guess it was time for one that provided almost nothing but frustrations.

Everyone’s Marriage is in Trouble

It turns out that Lennix’s marriage isn’t the only one suffering in 2025, as we find out in this ep that Tayo and Vivian aren’t really doing much better.  Tayo seems somewhat oblivious at first, in a scene at home during dinner prep, when Tayo’s mom asks what’s going on between the two of them.  Tayo thinks everything is fine, but we quickly find out that Vivian is not on the same page.  Mom slinks out of the room the second things get awkward, and then shit really hits the fan.

Class of ’09 Ep 5 Review

O.k., I know in my last blog post, I said that I might write another review after Class of ’09‘s season (series?) ends, to see how it all turned out.  But then ep 5 aired, and it answered a couple open questions I had from my earlier post, plus it also proved one of my theories wrong.  So I decided to write about it because goddamnit, these characters just keep pulling me in.

Tayo and Vivian’s Meet-Cute + The Irony of His AI Vision

In my previous review I mentioned that we hadn’t yet seen Tayo and his wife’s origin story, and we got it in ep 5.  In 2009 Vivian is the “esteemed civil rights attorney” who gives the FBI trainees a tour of MLK’s childhood home, and Tayo basically falls head over heels for her the second he’s in her presence.  Who can blame him?  Vivian is smart as a whip, accomplished, and trying to improve the justice system for vulnerable people.  She is someone that he can look to and learn from when shaping how he wants to approach his life philosophy and his career in the FBI.  And the fact that she’s also cute as a button doesn’t hurt.