Father Malone's Weekly Roundup - Captain America: Brave New World, Yellowjackets (Season 3)

Weird, weird. Welcome back to Father Malone's Weekly around the Ti'm that fella and beside me the falcon to my other falcon. So many falcons is the delight from missus ripley Jean. If you're not the falcon, who are you, enchantress? That's DC.

I am a nerd. You're the daughter of a nerd. Live in shame. And speaking of DC, Washington, d C. It gets a workout in our first pick this week, no more than it's actually getting.

As I record this, it was an odd experience watching this film. What I imagine watching X Men first Class at the height of the Cuban missile crisis might have been, like, I can't decide which situation is preferable. I suppose I'd want to go with the Cubano. At least we know how it turned out, and first Class was better than our first choice. Last week I spoke fairly at length about my feelings for Captain America in general and Steve Rogers specifically.

But Steve is old news. Back to the funny papers with him. Did you know that that was his occupation before becoming the world's greatest soldier? That's right, Steve Rogers was an illustrator. There's a nod to it in First Avenger, where he draws himself as a performing monkey.

Anyway, Rogers is off the table, might even be off the planet. I keep hearing talk that old man Rogers is currently on the moon. And while rumors have heated up recently about a return of Chris Evans to the MCU, the brass over there have made it very clear that Captain America is Sam Wilson, and here's his first big adventure. Only it's not. It's the second.

After Falcon and the Winter Soldier. That series shared the primary problem plaguing most shows that came stamped by the rat Ie from Disney. It was a two hour idea stretched to ten hours or more. At what point watching Obi Wan did you realize that the majority of the subplots felt completely tacked on. That's probably the best example, because that literally was a two hour script at the start.

What Falcon and the Winter Soldier lacked in brevity, it nearly made up for in star wattage. Sam and Bucky together is a winning combination. On top of which the show had the chaos agent of baron Z running around and fucking shit up and he was motherfucking comic book costume accurate to boot. I said nearly, because no matter how much of a good hang you're having with the main players, they still have a lot of plot to sort through. It should have been very simple Bucky and Sam trying to get the shield away from John Walker and each other.

That's a romp I would have watched for two seasons. But the problem is everyone learned only one lesson from Steve Rogers' tenure as Captain America. Winter Soldier was the most effective standalone cat movie, and since that movie was framed as a seventies political actioner, that's all anyone wants to see. And yeah, sure that would be great if it's going to be executed at that fucking level. But political thrillers aren't everything, and if it isn't your intention to write one when you sit down, you should probably pick a different genre because it weighed down Falcon in the Winter Soldier and it nearly kills Captain America Brave New World before it gets going.

You asked for me here I am you want to help me? Is there anything you remember, Ladies and gentlemen, what president of the United States Thaddeus Walls. Whatever this is, camp, be careful. What do we know? There were five shooters?

This was a coordinated Terrist attack, Sir, I was a wartime in general. I am a wartime president. Your inner circle has been compromised. Let me fix it. Watch yourself.

You're not Steve Rogers. You're right, I'm not wait for it. We're on the brink of war. I can't trust anyone. Nothing about this feels right.

Captain America. Do you ever ask yourself who's playing who? Someone's been pulling the strings on everything you're under arrest. I don't want a variable out there that I can't control. Captain America, caught without his winn You like to play dress up and.

Blindly execute the state's orders? What if you don't even know what this is? Since when were they read. You want me? Baby?

Remember when you called me a nerd? Well, you better call Baron Blood because I'm about to get supernaturally nerdy. Right now, here's the comic book shit that I loved. Red Wing is all over this flick. And even though they've turned that noble bird into an AI drone, it is way more active than we've seen it before.

And I love it. Adamantium makes it to debut in the MCU. Can there be a snake far behind? Obviously not. We get the return of the Raft the Giant super villain prison, which is a perfect opportunity to show us a rogues gallery of Marvel villains, but they don't do that.

The Serpent Society makes their big screen debut here, and boy we're going to talk about them because they're given as much heft as Batrock the Leaper was given in Winter Soldier. And we get the return of Samuel Stearns. Who oh you remember he's been in the MCU since two thousand and eight and that's the last time he was in anything. None of the forty or so other movies or TV shows. You remember him right?

You probably know him as the Leader. No Tim Blake Nelson not ringing any bells? Well, trust me, he's back. CAP's suit is a huge improvement over the TV series version, which resembled the stealth suit from Winter Soldier. Here we get the more traditional stars and stripes, but you know with wings.

The wings are now segmented like feathers, which he shoots as projectiles. Another comic book thing I was happy to see one thing that didn't need improvement was his headgear. On the TV series, they had more accurate version, with the mask coming up off the shoulders and ending just below his brow. Such a fucking cool look. Here they've given him a helmet, which is fine, It makes sense Captain America needs a helmet, but they've given him one of those nanotech helmets.

Ever since Infinity War, everyone has a mask that sizzles on and off and looks fucking terrible. If you're gonna do that, just make the whole suit nanotech. That'll solve the whole He never got the super Soldier serum. That was the nominal plot of the Falcon in the Winter Soldier and is brought up here a lot, although here they bring it up as kind of like a punchline. There are lots of humor moments in the movie, moments that are meant to be funny and only underscore the film's greater problems.

But we'll get there. What's the story Morning Glory talking to you dog? Never mind? Remember the giant celestial that was half born from the center of the Earth and is now just a head and hand somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Is this another leader situation.

It would be if he didn't see eternals, which none of us did. In any event, that thing exists, and it's made of adamantium, and every country wants it and they're all vying for control. Newly elected President Thanneus Thunderbolt Ross is trying to get all of the nations to be cool and share and sign an accord. He's good at that. He turned the whole world against the Avengers in Civil War with the Socovia Accords.

But there's a monkey in the wrench because the Serpent Society, in the form of Jim Carlo Esposito, have stolen a bunch of adamantium, and it looks like the President was the buyer and Capp and his new Falcon Joaquin introduced in the TV show, He's not great investigate the whole situation, which turns into a Manchurian candidate plot of assassination that frames up also Ran Captain America Isaiah Bradley, also introduced in the TV series. I don't want to get more spoilerrific here, but I assume you all know that Ross eventually turns into the Red Hulk, and that's how the movie's going to end. So anyway, that's the plot. Did the movie work? Is the movie good?

Well? I'll harken back to a rant of a couple episodes ago about the polarization the internet has engendered. Is it the best MCU movie? Fuck no? Is it the worst?

Fuck no? Again? It's pretty good. It's a solid actioner that made me gasp a couple of times. Now.

I rank the Steve Rogers trilogy as the best standalone trilogy from Marvel. So any continuation had some pretty big Red Pirate boots to fill, and this could have done it. At around the literal halfway point of the movie, it finds its footing. It's at the exact moment that it abandons the Winter Soldier framework and dispenses with the tense political thriller and gives us a post endgame look at what Cap should be. This Cap flies man.

He was snapped out of existence for five years. He's battled a literal army from space. He shouldn't be hunting down the leads in back alleys. He should be kicking fighter jets out of the air as they jockey for air superiority over an island made of a celestial being's corpse color me escapist. But I don't need uncovering shit in the government anymore.

We're all fighting. Steve Rogers fight at the moment. Let this cap tangle with the Serpent Society. I told you we get back to them. They made their debut in nineteen eighty five, when I was twelve and in prime comic reading mode, so I might have a slight vested interest in Sidewinder and his pack of mercenaries.

They were like Murder Incorporated was for may Or Lansky and Lucky Luciano Syndicate, a labor union of villains who could be rented out by any Marvel villain. They worked for Kingpin and Hydra and Aim remember them from Iron Man three? Meant neither anyway. One of the facets of the Society was you know, they were snake themed. So there was cotton Mouth and puff Adder and the Asp and Diamondback.

And they had outfits. Oh baby, they had fucking outrageous outfits. So if ever there was a time to get them on screen, take those freaky frocks and make them real world possible, it's right now. They got Ryan Minerding there after all. And look, I know Sidewinder isn't going to end up in skin tight green and purple and yellow with a frilled collar and a cape.

I can accept that, But what do we get instead? A bunch of dudes in matching body armor and nondescript camo type shit. Not only that Esposito Sidewinder is the only member on display, and they treat him like the Winter Soldier in the Captain America Winter Soldier movie. He just pops up, causes a ruckus, and then phades. Now, there's no secret that this movie had extensive reshoots.

I wish to would just call them pickups. Reshoots conjures up the notion that a movie needs remaking whole sale, when nine times out of ten it's usually why did I cover this whole scene in a close up? I need some geography here, put up the green screens. In this case, I understand they had one, if not more Serpent Society members that they had shot scenes with that are basically identical to the scenes we ended up with. It's just that Esposito became available, and why not have Bugging Out in your flick if you can.

Yeah, everybody loves him as Gus Fring. He'll always be the fucking instigator in do the right thing for me boycott Sal's pizza, which means originally we would have had a couple of minor villains doing exactly what they're meant to cause minor irritation for our heroes. What we have now is a potential major villain getting short shrift, but giving villain short shrift is all over the menu here. The Leader played by Tim blank Nelson is that halfway point mark when the movie gets good, when it gets all comic book. So where was he for the first half?

Why were they keeping him a mystery? Why was there a mystery at all? There's a moment with him three quarters of the way through the film that would have been a terrific opening scene, would have clarified the entire movie and allowed the Leader's story to be told organically instead of are you ready? It's a running gag here on weekly roundup? An expositional dialogue?

Dump? Who is this guy? What does he want from you? What did you do to him? Oh?

Fuck? Is this a negative review? Started to sound that way, but I was serious when I said the movie's okay, it is. It works once it starts zipping around and punches are getting thrown. But you can't introduce a character halfway through say all the shit you've been watching up until now was his doing, and then jabber on about his history with quick and clumsy flashbacks.

Marvel has always had a villain problem. Lately, the problem is that they're not serving them properly. Take good old Thunderbolt Ross. He's a new man here, not the one we've seen since The Incredible Hulk. Technically we got him in Hulk in the form of Sam Elliott, remember that turned it into a parking lot.

No, this isn't the Ross that showed up as the antagonist of Civil War or Infinity War or Endgame or Black Widow. He's pro Avengers now and he's a man of peace and all because he wants to reconcile with his daughter. Remember Betty, I love Betty Ross speaking of getting short fucking shrift. We haven't even heard a mention of her in forty fucking movies and she's played by liv Tyler. Shame on you mcu.

Anyway, Ross is a new man. Quite literally, Harrison Ford has taken over the role here. Do I have to make a joke about Captain America? The Falcon versus the captain of the Millennium Falcon. No, you're probably right.

Ford has taken over the role for William Hurt, who passed away. Now I love Harrison Ford, the man's in my blood, but this movie needed William Hurt. I'm not saying Ford doesn't have gravitas. He does, it's just different. William Hurt brought credibility to the entirety of the MCU.

So it's a tragedy. Well, it's not a tragedy. The tragedy is that he's dead. Let me be clear about that. But it's a damn shame that they didn't make this movie immediately after Endgame, because I would have believed the turn of the character with William Hurt in the part.

It's not like I don't believe Harrison Ford's earnestness and the lengthy would go for his child. It's just that I don't believe his Thadeus Ross would have ever behaved the way good old Thunderbolt did in the previous movies, or even as he's shown behaving in flashbacks. Here, Harrison Ford exudes decency. William Hurt seem like a prick, you know, like Thunderbolt Ross, So what worked here? I don't know.

I'm not done ranting because I mentioned Joaquin the New Falcon. He's terrible. He's supposed to be attractive and goofy, charming, you know, braggadocious with some skills to back it up. But really he's a comedic foil. Well, he's attractive, so you can check that off the casting qualifications.

I'm not sure if it's the performance of the writing. I suspect it's both. I didn't hate him on the TV show. In fact, I was kind of looking forward to him taking up the mantle either way. His character is completely superfluous.

First of all, this cap can fly. He doesn't need air support, so the aerial action scenes, instead of focused on one amazing sequence, have to be divvied up between some unfunny dude we're barely tolerating and fucking Captain America. Not to mention Sam doesn't need the help, but Steve had black widow, so Sam's gotta have a sidekick. How about Isaiah Bradley. One of the parts of the TV show that absolutely sang with the introduction of Karl Lumley as Isaiah Bradley after Steve Rodgers went into the ice, the super Soldier program continued.

The only success was Isaiah Bradley, an African American soldier who went out and performed heroically and then was locked away for decades and experimented on in an attempt to replicate his successes, echoing the horrifying Tuskegee experiments, our own wonderful governments subjected African American soldiers too, not that the Army viewed white soldiers any differently, Go want some of those wonderful atomic test videos with soldiers basically as spectators for mushroom clouds. Jesus Christ. Anyway, what a great potential storyline the consequences of the shield Sam has inherited in the form of a living, breathing never was Captain America. How about pair them up, put them in an adventure where they are in opposition of the president, a former antagonist who locked up Sam Wilson personally during Civil War and is currently being taken apart by a villain who ross also imprisoned and also experimented on all the fucking missed opportunities by elongating Falcon and the soldiers of the series, they pulled in the Isaiah Bradley storyline, making it nothing more than something for Sam to consider when deciding whether or not to take up the shield.

Instead of a vital motivator that could gee I don't know, drive a two hour feature film that chronicles the new Captain America's first trial by fire. Instead, Bradley is used as nothing more than a carrot to drive Sam Wilson forward, and they do it in a way that I fucking hate. It's completely clear to everyone that Isaiah was not acting as himself, and in fact, an entire room full of people were obviously under some form of mind control. Yet they lock him up immediately and it's announced that the death penalty is being sought. They're trying to make it a race against time, except is it.

How's Luigi's trial going? Not so harrowing so far? Even in comic book Land, the gears of Justice grind like fucking molasses. There's no clock here. Bradley's incarcevation is an unnecessary inconvenience, and quite frankly, it should have been him at the end punching the shit out of the Red Hulk.

At least he could have swooped in and saved Captain America's ass now you've all seen some of the Red Hulk carnage in the trailer, and there is a lot of it, and it is spectacular. The CG Hulk is expressive as fuck. It is definitely Harrison Ford as an angry Red Beast. The battle's pretty great. It elicited one of the gaps that I mentioned, but like I also said, it was a bit queasy watching Captain America brawl with a monstrous, rage fueled president that ends up demolishing all of the symbols of democracy for obvious fucking reasons, but also because once again they did it.

Cap did it in Winter Soldier. This movie isn't about a brave new world or a new world order. It's about dealing with the awful parts of the past and forging ahead. At least it should have been. Like everything else these days, it's just a confused jumble of parts.

You're not confused, Well, then I hope you've got something diverting hit it, HPP, Thank you HP. I've got a prime candidate for stupid pet tricks. No, the trick is stupid, not the pet. The pet is doing a trick that's automatically not stupid. Okay, Well, listen, we got to be positive.

We're trying to be positive. And when I think positive, I think about teenage soccer players hunting each other and then devouring the fallen in multiple timelines. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. This is yellowjackets. It's not your fault.

What happened. We were kids and it was awful. The truth is, the plane crashed, a bunch of my friends died. The rest of us scavenged and prayed until they finally found us. What really happened out there, I'm not sure anyone else could ever understand.

Those girls were special. They were champions. Kidnapping, cults, death. Your friendships are a little more complicated than most. There was some darkness out there with us.

No one should have to go through what we went through. We were just innocent kids. So you're a murderer now, I mean yes, kind of. Whatever it is that we communed with out there, it's still nci. We're going to get through this together.

I was like, she is gonna get online. Note worse out here. You're not out of the worlds yet. Okay, third season just premiered. They've allowed two episodes, which somehow tricked me into thinking they were putting the whole season out, and I was going to spend the entire ten straight hours last night binging the fuck out of the show.

But it was just two episodes. And this is a review of those via a recap of the entire series with minimal spoilers. It is a mystery show after Also, I will speak broadly, dear listener, and I'll tell you about Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson. They are the creators and showrunners of Yellow Jackets. They're a husband and wife duo.

Anytime I hear about her husband and wife writing do it makes me deeply envious? What could be better? They got their start writing for the Vampire Diaries spinoff The Originals, then worked a bit on Narcos before dragging us into the wilderness. Back in twenty seventeen, Warner Brothers failed to bring an all female adaptation of Lord of the Flies to the big screen. Executives lack confidence that young women would descend into barbarism.

Fuck are they talking about? Apparently Ashley Lyle felt the same, because she and her husband went to work pulling in elements from the Donner Party and then oft filmed tragedy of the footballers that crashed in the andes and ate their teammates. That formula has the potential for a terrific two hour film could be better in design than even Lord of the Flies. Lord of the Flies, for all of its eye opening look at the inherent savagery and young boys, was at its heart a parody of a book called The Coral Island, British book about the wonderful nature of colonialism and missionary work, set against the mackdrop of a typical children's adventure. As such, Lord of the Flies never really breaks out of the confines of the original book structure.

It ends up being an adventure tale with no life before or consequences after, which is way too narrow a scope for what Lyle and Nickerson concocted. The descent into barbarism, even cannibalism is a given here, It was their lives before and after that became as important as any of the actions when the team is lost. So the plot again I'm minding my p's and q's dear listener, is that in nineteen ninety six, a state champion soccer team from New Jersey, the Yellowjackets, and their coach, assistant coach and his two sons bordered a private jet to attend a national match. The plane crashed, leaving them stranded in a mountainous forest for several years. While that story is playing, we get parallel stories set in the present or the present four years ago.

It's twenty five years after the crash with the adults who were rescued, and I've been living as normal in existence as they can, at least until they're drawn back together by circumstances and perhaps something much darker. Did I mention the supernatural? Well, let's hear maybe the series is very cagy, like a really good magician, the kind you would see on TV, and not the kind that would come to your table while you're trying to enjoy a calm salad. Table side is no place for magic. If the magic isn't on the plate, it's not going to be in the hands of some pimply teen in his first public appearance, and you know those hands are going to be gloved anyway.

One of those young Yellow Jackets, Lottie played by Courtney Eaton, has been seeing signs and hearing whispers and having visions and goddamn if they're not coming true and goddamn if Lottie isn't also suffering from schizophrenia and after about a week or two her medication is run out. In a previous episode, I absolutely gushed about Sophie Thatcher and Juliette Lewis in the dual role of Natalie. She's the tough, wild girl with the drug problem who's way too cool for you, so don't even think about asking her out teenage father alone. That adoration continues here. It's a great character and she continues to be a highlight, including the two episodes of season three that I was able to watch.

The acting overall is just phenomenal, especially considering many of the performances of the same dual variety with younger and older actors just perfectly paired with special mention of Christina Ricci and Samantha Hanratty as Misty. And of course, Melanie Lynsky is awesome as fucking usual. I've seen her doing an American accent for so long that I'm always shocked to be reminded that she's actually from New Zealand. Her counterpart is Sophie Nlis, who I think maybe the actual powerhouse on the show, and that's with a lot of powerhouses on display as kind of a bron summation. The first season is fucking perfect, just the right amount of question and answers, mysteries and reveals to keep you positively floating on joyous waves of feral cannibalistic delight.

The second season, like seemingly every second season, except for the second season Millennium, which is one of the best seasons of any show ever, seemingly every second season just seems to meander a little bit. You know, these are talented showrunners, and you know they've got a plan overall, so you're not worried now, near as I can tell. For my decades of television watching, everyone seems to think they have five seasons of story. It's a nice round number, and it seems to make sense. But I think all these writers, whether they're conscious of it or not, are thinking in three acts structures.

No matter any creator's intention toward longevity, if it's a serialized show with a beginning, middle, and an end, I guarantee you they only have three seasons of story in mind. The rest is filler that gets added to get them to the fifth season. It isn't a precipitous drop here not at all. The stuff in the past remains fucking riveting. It's the stuff in the present that seems to start sliding a bit into the land of well, we know where we've got to get everybody, but we can't get them there yet.

So what do you think they'd be doing. It's a slippery area because once you start sending them down certain paths, it's difficult to settle them back into the day and the life life type episodes. And that's probably all I can say without spoilers, except that trend in the second season seems to have continued unabated into season three. The younger character stories are getting better and better, and the adult stories now seem completely adrift. It's too early to tell if it will course correct, but like I said, these are phenomenally talented people at the Helm, I have total faith they'll guide this freaky ship into shore.

Now. I do want to double back on Lottie and the Supernatural, because the show manages, at least for me personally, to tap into a terrifying aspect of every new society, even if it's a temporary one in the wilderness for a year or two, and it's one that's only hinted at it in Lord of the Flies, but made explicit here the need for answers and the willingness to release control to those who claim to have them. Listen the version of me you hear on these podcasts, this one, This is the most joyous version of Father Malone in existence. When this mic is off, I returned to my regularly scheduled programming of full on existential crisis. That's been my shit for like forty years.

The vastness of the universe, in my absolute insignificant place in it, let's just say, weighs heavily on me. So I completely get the desire, even the fucking need, to have someone step in and tell you that they know what's best and you don't have to worry. Wouldn't that be great? Who wouldn't want to follow someone with the answers? And we should if those people are grounded in reality and realize they don't know everything, just more than you, and will defer to someone who knows more than them.

Not so much when it comes to someone who tells you they know everything because God is telling them and they know God's mind and they know the plan. Get off the fucking planet with that shit. Do you know why scientology is so roundly rejected, because who can believe in a religion that's younger than Batman? But Yellowjackets takes it further thanks to the schizophrenic ambiguity. Yes, Lottie has been hearing voices for years?

Were those supernatural or is it just faulty wiring? And what about now that she's disconnected from civilization? Are those voices still faulty wiring? Or is she now more receptive to hear the voice of the divine? It's a delicious puzzle, though not as delicious as Jackie?

Am I right? So? There are multiple layers of horror going on here, watching people surrender their will to someone claiming to speak for God. That's one the idea that society might be suppressing the actual connections we have to the divine. That's pretty fucking scary too, But worse than all of it, what if it's true?

What if everyone claiming to hear the voice of God actually is? And what if everyone is right to believe them? I guess it would depend on which God is speaking to them. You ever notice on award shows when people refer to the deceased, they look up there's another direction gang. They might be down there and whatever's in the woods and yellow jackets might not be human, might exist only as a vapor or a thought, but it has no love for humans only hunger.

Wow, that's a Somoran to a show called The Weekly Roundup? Shouldn't we be? Yeehan and Toylin Lassos thank you Midnight viewers for joining us once again. We're very nearly close to reaching a total of twenty thousand downloads for the show, which is really fucking exciting. Also exciting, Midnight Viewing has an entry on IMDb.

I guess we've had it for some time, but completely unfucking beknownst to me. Well, it is now a very detailed entry on IMDb with the appropriate artwork for every goddamned episode, one hundred and twenty of them. What'd you do with your weekend? If you want to support us here financially, we're cheaper than eggs, head over to patreon dot com slash fallom alone. Subscribers get all episodes early and commercial free and and free, and you get bonus episodes and bonus shows HP from Noise Junkies and Night Mister Walters co hosts a show over there called Cable Box Theater and it's really fucking fun.

But if money is tight, like I said, eggs man, gooku ka chew, you can support us for free. You hear that free by clicking like or five stars, or writing a nice review or sharing the show on your social media. Let all your Facebook nerd friends know you're cool. Share midnight viewing until next time. I'm gonna leave you with a bit from Captain America.

It was okay. I have dedicated my entire life to serving this country for one person. Matters doesn't seem to understand. But they never forgave me for sending the army after Banner. I had to survive so good.

My daughter that it was more to her father