The problem with the rewatch going - so far - better than expected is that I start really dreading the point where it goes wrong. That point being this chapter, with this show failing middle school bio (it's sequences not strands, geniuses), D'av taking unreasonably long to kill the people torturing his brother (and then killing only one of them) and - well, these two things are the big things, but Annoying White Men and Dead Black Women don't help this episode's case.

No real Fact Sheet material in this ep (except noting the Hullen and Human plot-lines are definitely synched here), but on my first rewatch I failed to notice that the aforementioned White men are named Cardiff, James and McAvoy.

Otherwise, this ep was adrenaline-y and fun... if I fast-forwarded the Idiot parts.

CDU/CSU 33,0 % (Conservatives)
SPD 20,5 % (Social Democrats)
AfD 12,6 % (The Neo-Nazis, imho)
FDP 10,7 % (The Liberals)
Linke 9,2 % (The Left)
Grüne 8,9 % (The Greens)

2017 Voter turnout 72,1% (2013 Voter turnout 68,6%)

A decent interactive map can be found at this place. The AfD won direct seats in Saxony.

Rewatching this episode was a surprise. A real nice surprise. I remembered this episode as campy and difficult to take seriously: I mean, it's the one with the gay, hippy space vikings in purple furs. Instead, I discovered an episode that's really fucking serious (pun half-intended, given this episode), and just happens to have two light-and-camp moments that are, apparently, really fucking distracting.

That said, sadly this show's tendency to cast darker men for throwaway antagonist/villain roles is still here, and I still decidedly don't appreciate it.

Thematic statement of the episode: Pree's "We'll see if [Gared] survives Basic Training" and Dutch's "Welcome to Level 5. No more pulling punches."

...though on the matter of that latter one, exactly how did Dutch miss out that Johnny's the guy who'll take a plasma torch to someone's face at point blank and send a bolt through their head from across the room? And that was S1! Level 5 just means he's cleared to take kill warrants, not that he's obligated to take them: it's a matter of skill, not constitution. Which makes me think possibly the reason she rank-blocked him was to lower the chances that he'll take off on his own, which: Dutch, seriously, come the fuck on.

Ironic statement of the episode: Turin saying "If they swore our oath, I've got their backs. Even the assholes get a fair shake; that's the way I lead." Yeah, we know how that one ends when tested.

Other moment of interest: When Kendry establishes a link with the Green, she asks "What is this?" to which Aneela replies, "The beginning." Given the open/close of s03e10... yeah. If I had more patience, I'd go and fish out the images that flash when Kendry establishes said connection; that might help with figuring out if there really is a connection, or if it's window-display only.

Oh! And this time I caught the label of Zeph's petry dish: that's Khlyen's blood, which, are we seriously to believe that Dutch had harvested his body.

...also I think D'av beat up at least half a dozen other killjoys, possibly more. Hee. He and Dutch together really are a powerhouse.

The first time around, I was very excited about this ep. It was genuinely good, it moved along and showed character development, the pacing was nice and slow enough to enjoy things, and if the science side was complete bullshit (neither solar flares nor human vision and brain development work this way) then I could ignore that because the rest was on.

Second time around, I already know how this season is going to go: there's going to be more bullshit "science", and not as much good writing, good pacing and the rest of that jazz. So second time around, I get to deal with the disappointment, and it's harder to enjoy what's good because the bad pops out so much more. And yet, at about halfway through the ep, it started Working anyway. And that? Shows how good it is.

Granted, this episode has one of my favorite moments in the entire season, when D'avin and Johnny get to sit down and talk just the two of them: "This time I got to stay and be the responsible one, and I loved it." In early S1, the D’avin we meet sold himself into slavery the first time he was responsible for his own life, wouldn’t talk about the shit he was going through and over which he hated himself to a degree that could’ve killed him, and generally would’ve been screwed if Dutch hadn’t adopted him. Compare and contrast with the D'avin of this episode, who’ll call attention to his fears and insist on it if he thinks the other person doesn’t take it seriously (Johnny's "D'av the magic pony scale line). This D’avin who neither needs nor wants to run, and will openly say he loves the new state of things.

And knowing the show will keep this up, that this thread will be revisited later in the season, and that D'avin'll get something to look after big enough it actually occupies all of his caretaking drive (and given he's got plenty spare even after everything Dutch and Johnny occupy, that's a lot) - that just makes it better.

( Under here. )

And trust me when I say that unless something is seriously biochemically wrong or you try real hard, you're probably going to smile.

We had rain earlier this morning. It was brief, but it was also definitely rain and not a drizzle.

Given today is New Year's Eve, I'm going to take that for the positive omen that it is.

Who got more songs in the Top 40, Idan Amedi or Static & Ben-El?

I suspect it'll be Amedi on the basis of him simply having had more singles this past year, but I'm not committing to anything until the full list is out (two and a half hours in we're still in the 20s).

Also Galgalatz prepared a medley of literally all of Static & Ben-El's hits (on the basis of the kids winning Persons Of The Year two years in a row), and good fucking luck not grinning through it. I'm also pretty sure they just put it on for the second time.

And even as I type this, another Idan Amedi song is up. It's almost as if he released half his latest album as singles over the past year or something. /sarcasm Still not complaining, though.

ETA. OOF. Basically Galgalatz's site did something Weird and I missed half the 20s, and that would be how and why I heard that medley twice. And Yuval Dayan's Leilotai, not that I regret, as it's pretty, but. Shows how much brain I have today.

ETA 2. It's 17:39 and we're in the top five. I found the listing of everything released so far, and the clear leader in charted songs is, unfortunately, Eden Ben-Zaken. Omer Adam is giving her serious competition and he's significantly less annoying, so. However - actually, wait. We hit the Big 3, I need my attention.

ETA 3. Todo Bom came in only at third, and the anchorwoman sounded positively insulted and fairly pissed off. Second place was totally meh, and - Song of the Year just announced and yeah, okay, if the cute boys had to lose, it's to the written-by-Dudu-Tassa song that seriously fucks with one's expectation of whether the speaker in the song is male or female. (The singer is male, but singing in other-gender is a Thing That Happens around here.) So if the boys had to lose, okay, I'm good with this.

One of the jobs at the moment is checking for hedgehogs/random cats before releasing the hounds into the garden......

I opened the door, and discovered the patio covered in blood and bits of something else - five minutes of poking, I discovered that the bits were the remnants of worms (I was concerned I had somehow missed the dogs up to something earlier....though how I would have missed THAT I have no idea but I honestly did not think worms bleed? I've never seen a worm bleed, but apparently, they have red blood, go figure o.o)

Apparently the hedgehog decided to massacre 18 worms on the patio, mere feet away from the unlocked cat flap......which given the crazed charge around the garden by the hounds, was at least partly witnessed by them *face palms*

Rewatching this episode felt a lot like the first time did - which is a good thing! Everything that worked still works, and that's always nice. And as for the things that didn't work as well... well: this episode gets a get-out-of-jail-free card on that one, so to speak.

Both of this episode's plots have a fakeout/bait-and-switch thing going on. On Johnny's side of the plot, the answer to "Where's Clara?" is "Right here", and the answer to "What do the Hullen have to do with this?" is "Nothing." On Dutch and D'avin's side of the plot, the stakes are not what they seem to be.

Two out of these three things have big-ass tells. On the Clara end of things, it really stands out both that Ollie is written an awful lot like Clara, and that she knows things - and acts like she knows people - in a way that doesn't line up with her being fresh from the factory. On Dutch and D'avin's side of things, I remember watching this episode the first time and thinking that the "restore the comm stack" mystery felt a lot as if it was cut-and-pasted from pieces of other episodes - I was thinking s01e05 in particular - and that parts of it (like Dutch in that hallway) felt video-game-like in an odd way. (This, too, goes under "a lot like the first watch" - the same things stood out to me again, in the same way.)

I'm wondering how we're meant to read Turin's leadership. On the first watch I thought we were meant to read him as competent, and was irritated because the way I look at it he really wasn't. On rewatch, knowing how this is going to go, I wonder if this was really a case of the metaphorical seams in the writing showing (and he was meant to seem competent) or if the show was trying to telegraph that actually, Turin's not the shit. If anyone has opinions on this one, I'd love to hear them!