Movies & Television

>Annihilation (2018) is a movie from the director of Ex Machina. You know Ex Machina, the best scifi movie made in forever? Annihilation stars an all female cast of characters who are scientists. None of the characters do stupid shit or make queef jokes. The movie is not based on a comic book. It's based on a book but not a fucking comic book. The movie is well crafted and does not treat the viewer like an idiot.

>True Detective s3

>Doom Patrol

>Umbrella Academy

1. The showrunner repeatedly writes situations that are entirely predictable based on the structure of the show strongly nudging the plot in a certain direction. Take episode two of season one as an example: in the previous episode, White fatally gassed the two gangsters that attempted to make him work for them, only in this episode it turns out that one of the gangsters survived, so White has to deal with him. The episode had two options as to where it could go: either he kills the gangster, making the entire episode pointless, because that character should have died together with his cousin, or the gangster's going to escape and become a recurring threat for the rest of the show; both options are terrible, but the second one is worse, and I wasn't sure watching the episode that the writer won't go with it; in the end, of course, they went with the first option, and it was so predictable that I could barely finish watching the episode because the entire thing felt like filler. (The episode felt so strange that I checked out the behind the scenes stuff, and it turned out that the showrunner liked the gangster's actor so much that he wasted an entire episode on fucking nothing because he wanted to work with the actor some more. Just terrible. People who make such ill-advised decisions shouldn't be showrunners.)
   Or take the DEA in-law. He's a boob, a simpleton, and he obviously isn't fit to be the character who puts a stop to the protagonist's activities, him doing so would have been anticlimactic and terribly disappointing, so his presence in the show serves no purpose but to make the dummies in the audience who are clueless as to how plots are structured feel tense whenever the two characters interact. And yet the showrunner treats his character as if he's important, devoting entire episodes to develop his character, whom I knew from the start would in the end accomplish absolutely nothing. Maybe he does something in the last two seasons, but then either he should only be introduced in the season in which he becomes important, or, if he has to be introduced earlier, he should be entirely a background character of whose presence the audience is reminded every so often so he isn't forgotten, but not too much time must be spent on him. Instead, we got the worst option possible.
   Or White's arguments with his wife. It's an ironic thing where he started making drugs to take care of his family, but the changes the drug lord lifestyle inflicted on him have made him distant from it; it's an expected thing from stories like that, but it's a solid thing to do and definitely time should be dedicated to that plot line. Except that it was the entire first two fucking seasons. Half the running time of every episode was the protagonist bickering with his wife. We know where it's going: sooner or later she's going to discover that he makes drugs and break up with him because of that, stop wasting my fucking time. Of course, that's exactly what happens: the wife finds out, freaks out, packs her bags and leaves… only she doesn't fucking leave, she remains on the show despite her character having served her purpose and having nothing more to do with the story. Ricockolous.
   
2. Bad characters and attempts at character development. The story's supposed to be about a meek chemistry teacher becoming a notorious drug lord, only that transformation is very schizophrenic. In the third episode of the first season White finally adopts the Heisenberg persona, only to immediately abandon it and come back to being the meek chemistry teacher. Now, while that's not the type of character development I expected, — I expected a smoother shift —, it could still work, with the protagonist switching to the drug lord persona more and more often, with the persona be…

>The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire (Documentary)
>At the demise of empire, City of London financial interests created a web of secrecy >jurisdictions that captured wealth from across the globe and hid it in a web of >offshore islands. Today, up to half of global offshore wealth is hidden in British >jurisdictions and Britain and its dependencies are the largest global players in the >world of international finance.