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joelrmartin-16283
Reviews
Angel: Guise Will Be Guise (2000)
Fun premise although Wesley commits sexual assault.
I enjoyed the general gist of Wesley pretending to be Angel (laughed out loud when Wesley called blood "nommy") and if that entices you, you won't be disappointed. However there is the unfortunate implication the writers didn't seem to think through that Wesley could be taken to court for "Rape by Deception" after this episode. The episode does acknowledge that Wesley using his false identity for sex is wrong but then puts the effort into making the woman have something worse happen to her (and Wesley ride into her rescue) so that Wesley's crime becomes something of a moral rounding error when all is well and done.
Inside Man (2022)
Lightly entertaining thriller with insultingly contrived writing.
I'm someone who typically enjoys Moffat's writing and predictably I found the basic writing mechanics of the story enjoyable. I also choose willingly to watch this through to the end so I would argue that there's think there's some version of this story that might have worked (everyone's a murderer, crime-solving detective on death row, Vicar torn between his religious convictions and protecting his son yadda yadda). What I unfortunately can't look past however is how fundamentally and completely unbelievable the story is. Unbelievable is even too weak a word with a story that takes place in an unapologetically cartoon-like universe where the plot in large part revolves around a door that has been assigned by the writer the magical property of not propagating any sound (not even through it's keyhole that is later explicitly tapped over as part of the plot). The character's decisions feel like they were chosen by a machine learning algorithm programmed to select out of all possible decisions whichever would maximise the length of the plot and I would say that reflects the precise strategy Steven wrote this story with. This story is formulated, not crafted. It's like how some when some AI's reach a no-win scenario, they keep playing because haven't been programmed with respect for the opponent's intelligence and that's really the fundamental problem with this story. It doesn't realise that its audience have a higher standard of realism than what it's aiming for. There are a number of moments in this story that considered in isolation are so completely ridiculous that it boggles belief as to how Steven didn't realised that he must have written something incredibly silly to get there.
I might have given this a 6/10 if a moment towards the end of the final episode hadn't made me actively angry when a character fundamentally fails to redeem themself or even shown the barest amount of intelligence in learning from their own mistakes.