Watched a bit of stuff recently. I'll comment on the tv stuff
here, but movie-wise I watched The Cloverfield Paradox, on Netflix. It's...um...well, it's the first film I've ever watched where I kinda wish I'd actually heeded the advice of all those who said it was rubbish. Because it sadly is. It vexes me, actually, because it
shouldn't have been. It has a good cast, full of people you've seen in other things, and the basic premise is pretty interesting (short version: earth is having an energy shortage, civilisation is almost but not quite breaking down, and it's up to our plucky team of scientists to bang particles together in space to solve the world's crisis. Turns out to be a bad idea because: quantum stuff.)
Unfortunately despite its interesting premise and promise of Cloverfieldy goodness, it totally failed to deliver. Bad, baaaaaaad scriptwriting (there's an energy crisis. The world has no energy. Um yes. What
kind of energy? Has anyone tried, y'know, solar? No? Just vague hand-wavy "oh noes! Energy crisis! plot device!" nonsense. A few lines about how things have been tried and failed would've cleared this right up.) Other more serious issues include pointless characters (the girl who gets rescued from the rubble, f'r example. What is the point of her?) and questions that, again, could've been resolved with a line or two of dialogue (how exactly did she end up in the wall? What were the worms there for in the first place?) result in a movie that leaves a sense of potential completely wasted. Also, the actors are good, but the characters are dull. Except Chris O'Dowd and his arm. He was pretty good. Finally, SF films that have gaping science problems bug me. When your spinning gravity generator thingy is on the fritz, surely the gravity on it would be...fritzy, no? And don't introduce weird stuff and then fail to address its weirdness. It's fine in, say, Event Horizon, to have weird supernatural stuff going on because it's made clear that the ship has, literally, been to hell. In The Cloverfield Paradox exactly zero reason (other than more hand-wavey "chaos!") is given for the clearly malevolent (and sentient) forces at work (the arm! The worms! The magnagel!). More focus (any focus!) on the why/how of this would have gone far towards making this movie fun. But they didnt. And it wasn't.
Oh, and no Clovey, neither.
Overall, not worth your time, but maybe ok as background if you're painting or something.
Incidentally, if you want to watch a better version of this movie, try Life, with Ryan Reynolds in it. It's a much, much better stab at trapped-in-a-space-station-getting-picked-off-one-by-one.