Reviews

My overall rating of "Animaniacs (2020)"'s Season 1: 5/10.

Watching Season 1 of "Animaniacs (2020)" I've occasionally felt that the series was kind of lost tonally: is it a kids' show, or can it go darker; is it irreverent or politically correct? The end result is sometimes quite weird: in "Good Warner Hunting" segment from Episode 5 the show zigzags from implying dark things, to switching to a lighter tone, to outright showing pretty dark, disturbing things, to inexplicably reversing the dark elements in the finale. Here a similar thing happens with "France France revolution" - the show doesn't know how respectfully and how darkly it wants to portray Marie Antoinette. So we get a portrayal that doesn't end up tormented like the male antagonists, but gets its historical dark finale strongly implied. Imagine if the Warners' fawning over Lincoln in the OG series had them joke about boring theatre making one want to blow one's brains out - that's the dissonance that comes across.

The rapper segment was also weird. It seemed to want to set up a "rap vs Shakespear" thing (pandering to a stereotypical boomer audience, I guess), but ends up just going "rap vs rap", with Shakespear just having been awkwardly shoved in... for some reason... In the end, when some particles interrupt the crowd's applause, I thought the idea was that Yakko's performance magically "cured" a portion of the crowd of their hip-hop "infection" and their outlandish clothes suddenly transformed into business-casual ones - it would've been very lame, but it would've made at least some thematic sense. Instead, that part of the crowd was always there in the background, and it's just one guy randomly disappearing into thin air... from excitement, I guess?.. It wasn't that exciting, my writer dudes...

The first segment is the best, a classic-style Warners story, though also containing disappointing gross-out humour etc.

My overall rating of "Dead like me"'s Season 2: 7/10.

Sometimes the themes that a given "Dead like me" episode operates with seem like a little bit of a medley. George's musings occasionally have a very stream of consciousness quality to them, and tether only to a concrete scene; or to none at all. Other episodes have a singular prominent theme throughout: like life's and death's unhappiness in the great episodes 1 and 2 of this season, or the passage of time in all its forms and with all that follows in another good one, "Hurry". So does this episode, but the brilliance of its sublime, subtle writing is such that it maintains its theme almost entirely throughout - yet you'll only understand it past the midpoint, and then will be struck by the depth with which it is explored. Daisy's catholicism arc is also concluded, while maintaining said theme. And then, in the end, the theme is spelt out rather explicitly, just so you can be sure that you're not seeing patterns where none exist.

The theme is privilege, and its arbitrariness. It's a familiar theme to American media especially, but it's the implementation, not the novelty, that gives me such joy. Be warned, this is going to be a long essay: this episode has inspired me to consider making a YouTube channel in the future to record my musings about the show and suchlike, but for now this will have to suffice.

The episode begins with George's musings about why one star gets to become a part of the Big Dipper, and another just flames out. Initially one thinks that it's just yet another metaphor for death. George has commonly wonders about how death makes its selection after all. After a brief digression with the crazy grandma (an absolutely disgusting character who brings nothing to the story, but is at least not quite as bad in this appearance as in the next episode's one) we get a scene of Daisy reading the Bible to Mason and Roxy, with George soon arriving. It's interesting here that all three (as well as Rube later) explicitly associate themselves with death, like they are many embodiments of death. That's an interesting sentiment, as it's at least not how George usually thinks of herself and death, and not how she explained it all to the schizophrenic guy. Daisy notes that Moses got a special death from god - he wasn't taken by death, but kissed by god. She clearly seems to understand that not only as a sign of god's special favour to the prophet, but also of god's connection to the practice of reaping - god taking Moses' soul via a kiss. Rube later mocks her, noting that god also banished death from heaven, and as such her catholicism is pointless - she won't get in.

Rube brings to the meeting a VIPR package for George, with all the other reapers expressing chagrin at her getting one with only one year of service logged and little experience at handling complicated reaps. Each of the 3 makes arguments why George doesn't deserve the honour while they do, but Rube just swats them away. He explains why Mason didn't get it, but even as he himself doubts George and tries to enlist Roxy's help, the newbie gets the VIPR, and that's it.

Taking a bit of an aside, I have to praise the props makers for the (otherwise awful) scene with Reggie and the grandma - they've prepared a whole slew of "newspaper clippings", each with a different article. We'd only ever known that the event of George's death made her famous, but never saw any reporters, nor has the lawsuit against the Russian space agency been discussed or depicted in any way. Outside of that seeming discrepancy, I'm also iffy on how they've chosen to name the Russian spokesman quoted in these articles: I can sort of believe that the newspapers just randomly decided - in the respectful Russian way - to refer to him by name and patronym, or made an in-universe mistake by confusing his patronym with his surname, or even that he has a weird surname that just looks like a patronym (after all, Roman Abramovich and Svetlana Alexiyevich exist). Still, that's a bit of an additional annoyance.

In the concert subplot Roxy gets George in, and Mason has a difficult time proving that he has a valid reason, a permission to get in, to the guard until a goth bandmember (?) lady somehow points him out as dead to her crew, which gets him inside. It's interesting how "Dead like me" plays with these sorts of glitches in the world: a guy who just randomly can see Gravelings was an episode's subject, and now a girl (and her goth crew?) who can tell reapers apart from the living without quite realising their nature.

In Daisy's subplot she finds the priest, her reap, renouncing the faith while drunk. She gives herself a stigma - a catholic phenomenon - with a knif,e to show off her undead healing, and tells him what is known to her of the reaper system. She hopes that perhaps her words will enable him to connect the dots in some scriptures, to discover the true secrets of the universe via esoteric christian knowledge, but to him nothing really falls in place. When he later dies, she again asks him a question with the same intention - whether the lights are as the christian afterlife has been described. However, he only says: "I'm as curious as you are". The lights he walks into are a nondescript blue corridor evoking mystery, perhaps, but not divinity. Daisy leaves her cross, a source of so much commotion, in the font with the dead priest. Rube, meeting her at the site, immediately notices that, and asks whether the reap went to her liking. Daisy is disappointed by two things: 1) is that the priest dispensed no deep esoteric knowledge that would help her make sense of the world - whatever christian scriptures he knew turned out to be insufficient; 2) which she says, and which finally states full-throatedly the theme of the episode: he was a priest, yet he got no golden angels and trumpets for his lights, no kiss from god Moses-style (which perhaps would've enabled Daisy to see him!), no honours at all above a secular man.

If the christian god exists in the "Dead like me" universe, he doesn't reward his servants, the men of cloth, even though they're so elevated in the hierarchic catholic faith. No honours are bestowed upon them in death. Mason is having a hard time getting in, but George gets an easy way. George gets the VIPR without having put the hours in, as arbitrary as anything else, as any other death. Some star arbitrarily ends up in a spot, which from Earth makes it a part of an imagined dipper; another doesn't. It all loops around. Privileges aren't earned, they're happenstantial.

It is however interesting in that light (pardon the pun) that the yoga guru whom Rube reaped in Season 1 did get a different kind of light, pink-ish, and a direct visage of a Hindu god; and the gay guy at the gay wedding seemingly had gotten some golden lights (?..) Perhaps in the world of "Dead like me" christianity is a false religion, and hinduism is the true one - hence, the first episode invokes god with a pointedly lowercase "g", as in, one in many?! Deepest lore indeed! Notably, Rube invokes a practice from Mumbai, the Tower of Silence on which sky burials are performed, to make his usual point to Daisy: nothing really has meaning beyond death, it's pointless to wonder about that. Daisy walks away from his offer of a ride, however. She has lost her faith, but still can't come around to Rube's grounded (or obfuscating) views.

Meanwhile, Mason, like Daisy, tells all, but unlike her he does that unprofessionally, to a group of goths none of whom are his reap. The goth leader wants to die and be made a reaper by Mason, and while Mason doesn't state it (and in fact mocks him, trying to take back his revelation), we know that it's impossible: reapers are chosen by fate, and only appear to fulfil a vacancy. Even if it was his time, the goth couldn't guarantee the privilege of becoming a reaper. Arbitrariness again.

George and her new friend, the future killer, discuss how fame changed Lowerdeck's stature, but that he's still a human. When he is shot on live television, he gets a candlelit vigil by at least dozens or hundreds (in spite, ironically, of his lyrical hero asking people not to mourn him in his songs). He asks if everybody gets that, perplexed; George, in what must be a golden example of reaper dad jokes that the poor reaped souls just don't quite get, replies: "No, no lights for me, not yet"; conflating the (candle)lights of the living world with the lights that beckon the departed souls. She does later note that it's easier to mourn somebody famous, whom you didn't know and, bookending the episode, that while some get a candlelit vigil, for others, for "nobodies like her", there's only a sky full of stars. Why do some get the one and others only the other? Well, quite arbitrary, isn't it? Now, of course, Lowerdeck was a famous singer, and Georgia Lass literally had accomplished nothing, and by design too, so it's not quite apples to apples, but the point is clear: nature inherently elevates some, but not others; dispenses honours on some, but not others; kills some earlier and others later, and to others yet offers undeath as a reaper; and none of it seems to take merit into account. After all, is there a reason why VIPRs with their money grants are a thing, beyond the reapers wanting bragging rights, and the difficulty of getting within touching distance of a celebrity?

On one last note, Lowerdeck's song is interesting: "So that I may die easy; so that I may die young". He got his wish in the end, and it's arguably one of the best deaths receivable - George would disagree with the latter part, of course, but frankly for her it's especially true: would she rather have been a reaper in a decrepit body? Still, I suppose one has to find that life, with all of its undeserved honours and snubs, has a bigger draw than even dying young and leaving behind a pretty corpse.

My overall rating of "Dead like me"'s Season 2: 7/10.

I've not read anything by Asimov myself, but the way I've read his "laws of robotics" series described as is: "First he sets out the rules, and then explores the edge-cases and what happens when the rules are broken or flaws in them reveal themselves". In a way, "Dead like me" can be described the same way: we're given the laws of how the world and the reapers' job work, and then explore the various edge-cases and malfunctions. In this episode we see an interesting one: a spirit that doesn't realise it's dead due to dementia. The gang's attempts at explaining her death to her are fun, and George's eventual solution is pretty cool. We also get a little bit more of the worldbuilding by acquainting ourselves with the Natural Causes division, and how Gravelings are (or at least can be?) made. Finally, there are just a great many fun and cool scenes, such as the spelling bee reap.

There are moments that I enjoyed a bit less: Mason's really cringy behaviour towards Ray; Georgia's strange (admittedly half-hearted) impulse to stop Nina's death (Haven't we been over this before? Like, she just seems to forget occasionally how reaping works); and Nina's disappearing without any real lights. Still, a more-than-great episode overall.

My overall rating of "Dead like me"'s Season 1: 7/10.

This episode makes it easy to dive into "Dead like me" and sets up a good amount of the show's overall plot threads and themes. It's perhaps "Dead like me" at its highest-pitched action note, what's with train crash - however this scene does not overshadow the others due to absolutely fantastic writing and acting in them, their emotional and philosophical depth easily measuring up to the spectacle. When "Dead like me" shines, it really shines, and completely alleviates my concerns that upon a rewatch I'd find this series, which has been so foundational to my personality and worldviews, lacking. The idea of avoidance of experiences being its own virtue had really resonated with me. George starts moving away from it a little bit as the series goes on, "My room" being, maybe, the main crack in this edifice, but it is here where she presents it perhaps with the most conviction and clarity. Now, while I don't believe absolutely in this idea, I do like it at its strongest as shown here. Perhaps it has to do with my tendency to like the characters more in the beginning of their character arcs, when what makes them them is not watered down or averaged out. George indeed has figured stuff out before her peers - not only about the tooth fairy, but about life itself, and the unhappiness people bring to themselves by clinging to arbitrary goals. I guess George takes it a step further than I would by dropping out of college, but the depth of this conviction (or, rather, lack of conviction?) is quite respectable. I guess unlike her I've always seen some activities as worthwhile, and university as being a part of them and a stepping stone towards them - if you don't have such goals, the value of which you can logically justify to yourself, there is indeed no reason why one shouldn't sabotage oneself.

The show addresses its main themes and concepts head-on from the very start. The value of life, the fear of death, and the pointlessness of it all. It's a very soft, comforting nihilism, not at all an aggressive one, but the show is deliciously nihilistic nevertheless. George's reaping of the young girl is not only an immediate allegory and reinterpretation of the events that have transpired in this very episode, of her very own life and death, it's also a middle finger to the more pearl-clutching audiences, which I love. What is brilliant about it is that unlike a lot of protagonists of fantasy series, George isn't going to be abolishing the "injust" system any time soon - she can't help but rebel, yes, but her rebellion is inherently futile, and not only is she made to do penance and actually carry out her job, she actually understands it rationally. The emotional need to rebel being quelled by an intellectual realisation of an impossibility to do so is not a common theme in Western media, and it's a brilliant piece of the wonderful puzzle of this series' worlbuilding and George's appealing character.

Going by this episode, I'd actually expected Mason to end up having a closer connection with George - they have wonderful chemistry in the scene at the bank, the actors are great even when clearly just having fun - but he actually ends up drifting away from her a little bit. In a way, maybe it's a reflection of George's relationship with her father as shown in "Sunday mornings" - she can hold a serious grudge, and Mason's too unreliable and prone to petty betrayals to really be worth putting faith in, even if he's fun to be around. Maybe that's reaching, Betty's not dissimilar and it goes very differently with her after all, although there's also the fact that George specifically wants girls' company.

Really, this episode is just great. Yes, it's not without cringier or unexplained moments (so what exactly happens between the autopsy and the funeral, what does George do all that time while a disembodied ghost with the reapers? Is most of that time just walking to her home, if it's far away enough?), nor without my usual nitpicks such as usage of the imperial system, but that doesn't overshadow true greatness, and not at all is it an one-off shot.

My overall rating of "Dead like me"'s Season 1: 7/10.

The main plotline is pretty great: it is comedic, but also thoughtful, and gives us a bit more worldbuilding still. Mary Kate is a very fun character, although a bit of a cliche. Her walking into the lights was absolutely beautiful.

The writing did feel a bit inelegant at times, however. Daisy gives Rube a cause for suspicion a bit too easily; I didn't particularly like the type of "closure" that Rube gives Roxy (and her whole plotline is a bit questionable); and while the end scene of George sailing is beautiful, I'm not sure what it's supposed to depict - is it a far-ish future, when George has settled her financial difficulties and taken up sailing? She seems to have some skill handling a rather large sailboat, and travelling pretty sharply to the wind - I don't know whether it takes a lot (or any) money to join up an adult yacht-club in the US Northwest, but she's surely spent some time at it, which doesn't really gel with the following episodes and her story at the moment.

My overall rating of "Dead like me"'s Season 1: 7/10.

Going by the "popular vote" on this site, this episode is the least liked one of the show, and for a good reason: much of it is just randomly recycled short clips from prior episodes. That really sucks, not much to discuss here. But my personal least liked episode of the series' Season 1 is a different one, "A cook", even though I've ended up rating it higher. The reason being "A cook" is just very lame plot-wise and doesn't actually give much food for thought, whereas when "Nighthawks" stops self-plagiarising it's actually a damn good episode. While some things seemed a bit contrived to me, it has its own mood, and it very much taps into these themes and questions that "Dead like me" so brilliantly explores, so it's just sad to see the clipshow weigh it down to drown.

One thing that I've enjoyed would be the delightful bit of continuity with George's insomnia - in "Reaper madness" Mason did warn Georgia that insomnia is an occupational illness for the reapers. Now you may say: "Hold on, that's not really been shown before!", but what Rube suggests in this episode rather clears things up: his take is that George only cannot sleep because she's "standing too close", emotionally connecting with her "reaps". Is it true is an open question: Rube not only sees nothing wrong with concealing information from George, he actually thinks it's the right thing to do; and he's the sort of person who in general would associate an illness with a person's failings, rather than with it just being the state of things. However, the other reapers indeed don't seem to have these difficulties, so either Mason's supplies really go around, or emotional and mental self-discipline does at least help. It's interesting then that in a way that characterises Mason as also "standing too close", something we don't actually see in him - if nothing else, other than George you would at most expect Daisy to react that way, and she's probably usually too busy rifling through the dead's pockets on most days to get emotionally contaminated. Mason is not at all without his sentimentality, but you'd think he's way too desensitised by the job, and nevertheless...

The other thing is, of course, the main plotline, which I'd absolutely score a 7 or something on its own merits. Rube is acted out brilliantly in again teaching George the lessons that she absolutely understands, but cannot quite internalise: you cannot meddle with death, and you cannot let it bring you down. He's both paternal and patronising; and George is likewise brilliantly shown as an incredibly confused and conflicted person, who wants to rebel against the system where in her past life she'd just swum along, but now it's even more futile, as the system is not the beatable (or relatively ignorable) social expectations or soullessness of corporate job, but the unavoidable death itself, and absence of information caused by the physical world itself (lying on her porch George has to admit to Rube that she doesn't _actually_ know if her family is OK). That whole scene is just excellent, and is a storylet worth imbibing. Now, of course one would have preferred to see it standalone, but outside of "Pilot", "Dead like me" doesn't seem to like to play with variable episode runtimes - a blemish of the old series of course, slaves to their dedicated slots and not yet free to spread their wings on the on-demand media as they were.

My overall rating of "Gravity Falls"'s Season 2: 2/10.

So the scene of Dipper and Pacifica's first encounter with the ghost is absolutely breathtaking: it's beautifully drawn and very dark, wouldn't at all be out of place in a more serious horror work. The way the ghost emerges from the fireplace legitimately invokes a cutscene for some cool "Dark Souls" boss. The Northwest Mansion is a cool and stylish setting for the episode, and Dipper and Pacifica have chemistry as characters. But again, like in the previous episode (and like in the upcoming "Weirdmageddon 2: Escape from reality" with its freaking awesome "fake Wendy falling apart into worms while pointing as the world itself goes "Silent-Hill"" scene), these awesome, atmospheric visuals are wasted on this toddler-targeted hogwash.

Now, looking at this scene where the hunting trophies chant "Ancient sins" as blood pours from their eyes and maws, does it quite track that the ancient sins in question are that some lumberjacks weren't invited to a party? I mean, the show shows the lumberjack's death and environmental destruction - wouldn't these two be better sins? But then they couldn't quite cram in some stupid moral lesson quite as easily, could they? And look, I'm a person very sympathetic to left-wing politics, I am, but surely vandalism-and-lumpens-worship of this episode is taking things a bit too far? Frankly, why are Americans so unable to even entertain the idea of taking their dirty shoes off while inside?! And wouldn't Pacifica be a way more interesting character without the bog-standard "defection from decadence" plotline? Another question is - since when does Dipper have fame as a ghostbuster of some kind, and has technological equipment (!) to help?! Is that a misplaced and belated episode of "Extreme ghostbusters" (god I wish it was, it would actually be _so_ dope)?!

Mabel and her revolting friends continue to be a mistake as well.

When I was reading the user reviews for this series, trying to decide whether to watch it, the "silent movie" episode was mentioned again and again as the peak of the show's creativity. I've got to admit, while calling it a "silent movie" is a bit deceptive, it's "minimal talking movie" at best, the creativity cannot be denied, and they actually manage to tell an amazing story with great humour within this - slightly contrived and inconsistent - format. There were some hiccups to do with shot continuity during the Teddy-Tim conversation; we didn't necessarily need to see the vomit shot; Mabel is astonishingly prophetic about finding secret doors; and I didn't quite get why the Dimases stored the jewellery in urns (you rarely see that outside of computer games), but these are minor flaws.

Zoe's is a pretty interesting plotline. I feel like that was the "perfect" death for her - her final scene fully frames her intriguing character, a narcissistic, egotistical yet self-aware society girl with a heart. I guess we all can only hope for a death that would so encapsulate our very being.

And I loved how the musical Teddy so enjoys and tries to get Theo to hear with such abandon, echoes what Teddy must feel about his son, whose affliction naturally spoils that wish. Very smart, insightful storytelling right there.

For the most part this episode is quite good. The reveal of the villain is cool, and there is the usual amount of quirky, well-written and well-directed moments. However the final confrontation is incredibly lame and poorly done, and doesn't really fit the show. Like, yeah, I guess our heroes act true to their characterisations, but Jan's strange plan, and her being so utterly helpless, somehow failing at the most basic situational awareness (Oliver was talking to Mabel literally a second before Jan stepped out!) as well as her fake fall from Mabel's punch just rubbed me the wrong way. So did some grammar/pronunciation mistakes by some characters. Charles' final sentiment is also kind of lame and cheapens his character a bit.

The episode's ending is really odd, I've got to say. In a way, the randomness and absurdity factor is good at grabbing one's attention - although knowing that there's going to be Season 2 kind of lessens that, because I can't imagine they'll follow this story to its expected, obvious conclusion (to the extent that anything in this strange twist ending is expected or obvious) - perhaps it would be better to just end the series on a puzzling note, with no follow-up. The acting didn't feel particularly strong either. But I guess it's cool to have an explanation for the flashforwards, as well as to finally see Mabel brutally murder somebody with her needle, as she had been hoping for so long.

I just have to wonder - if they don't actually cheaply drop this plotline, is Oscar going to be teaching Mabel the basics of prison life while she's out on bail or something (a comedic plotline angle) or will he abandon her by essentially going: "At least I wasn't a real murderer, whereas you'll get what you deserve!" (a dramatic angle). The latter could be strong, so long as they don't drop it to switch for the former midway.