Review: Netflix's You

The first thing I thought at the end of the first episode of Netflix's You was, Oh no, I really like Joe.

And that's awful, but also the point.

Netflix's You is a psychological thriller that will make you forget that it isn't a 2009 Rom Com film right up until it has a big twist to hit you with. Everything is there, the meet-cute the quirky love interest, the whirlwind romance.

Except of course that Joe is human garbage and he deserves nothing less than to fail at every opportunity.

And that's kind of great. Joe is objectively the bad guy but you can't help but root for him. He deserves to fail, he deserves to get hurt, he deserves all the bad things that happen to him but you want him to succeed, you want him to get the girl and that is terrifying.

It's a unique type of horror, it's grounded in the likeability and charm that real-life stalkers often have. Joe seems like a charming, nice, safe guy on the surface. He reads, he's articulate, he's smart, and super cute. But he will also murder in your name.

Just when you think there's no territory for the show to explore, it often pulls out a surprisingly profound aspect of dating, things like falling out of love with a partner. This show about the worst relationship surprisingly has more insightful things to say about a healthy relationship than most shows about relatively healthy couples. It's meditative on the complexities of intertwining your life with another person, while also making you fear very deeply that the person you're with might be a stalker and murderer.

It's subversive, in a strange way. Sera Gamble and Greg Berlanti have done a wonderful job of bringing the central premise of the book to life, while using all the techniques that makes the medium of television so different.

It's not without its flaws though. The gimmick can lean a little too much on Joe's side and there's a fair bit of plot contrivance to tie together some of the story beats. And for as likeable as Joe is, Beck can kind of be the worst. The finale will either work for you or it won't and it does take eleven episodes for Beck to get a clue.

But despite some hiccups, Netflix's You is compelling, gripping, thrilling and terrifying.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go watch something with Penn Badgeley where I don't feel guilty about thirsting over him.

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Review: Marvel's The Defenders

The Defenders was a breath of fresh air for me. I'd actually started to lose faith in the Netflix shows after Iron Fist soured my opinion to the extent that I couldn't bring myself to rewatch Jessica Jones, which I've wanted to do for a while now. Having watched Daredevil season 1 three times now, I've felt like I've neglected the Marvel/Netflix series that I'd actually enjoyed the most. But Defenders was exactly what I needed, a fun little romp through an adventure that brings these large characters together;

And the result is refreshingly greater than the sum of its parts.

Crossovers are always kind of a fickle thing. They can sometimes end up as pandering fanservice or worse, a mismanagement of several pieces of intellectual property. And because of the rather special circumstances that occur to make a crossover event possible, it's usually very short lived.

Defenders, however, is none of these things; It has a compelling narrative with tastefully handled interactions between characters who all have decent amounts of screen time while being only as long as it needs to be, if perhaps maybe even dragging on a bit too long near the end.

I have my gripes, but they're my favourite kind of gripes, little ones. I think I do want to get those out of the way so that I can sing my praises for what I think is actually one of the best shows you can watch on Netflix to date, so without further delay, let me get on with it, and of course, spoilers ahead.

The ending kind of sucked. Not the last episode, the last thirty minutes or so of it. Elektra's motivations don't make a whole lot of sense to me. She's framed as having now rediscovered her affection for Matt, and even murders Alexandra upon being ordered to kill the Daredevil, whom Alexandra can't even bother to learn the name of. It's an endearing moment, and one that really put me on the side of Elektra; she'd overcome her instinct to blindly obey and did something that was... Well, as heroic as Elektra can manage.

But then she proceeds to kind of beat the snot out of Matt but also kind loving him, and proclaiming how she's doing it all for the sake of fucking with Matt. I was under the impression that her motivation was to now procure the dragon remains in order to craft an elixir that would enable her and Matt to live forever. Which is selfish, but in a human kind of way. It just doesn't sit right, and the ending looks like a lot of outtakes splattered together in order to Frankenstein an ending.

Everyone also starts hailing Matt as heroic, when his actions, in the end, were clearly misguided. Matt still thinks he can save Elektra from herself. Matt didn't sacrifice himself for the city; he died trying to save the love of his life, and in the end, probably endangered his team.

Also a neater explanation of how this man survived having a 30 story building dropped on him would be nice. The final shot is of Matt in a church presumably some ways off, but he still technically died in New York. It makes very little sense that he wouldn't end up in a hospital close to the accident. I suppose it's setting up an arch in Daredevil season 3, and that's rumoured to be the acclaimed Born Again story, but I felt even my forgiving suspension of disbelief stretch to its limits.

I hope you like hearing about Kunlun. Because you won't stop hearing about it, and it highlights just how B-grade Iron Fist's mythology is. I don't know if it's the delivery of this word specifically, but it just ends up not sounding right to me. I get that the Kunlun mountains are a real place, but it just doesn't sound like it. It sounds like a fake place with a fake name that I came up with when I wrote bad fanfiction as a twelve-year-old. Maybe that's on me but I cannot be the only one who thinks this.

Finally, god damn, Colleen Wing is sidelined wayyy too often. Everything about Colleen is so well-rounded, from her motivations to her actions, she's human and her jealousy over Danny finding a team to work with is for me a moment to pure for this world. Why the fuck is she not getting top billing? Danny doesn't do any of the notable detective work, Colleen does. Danny doesn't come up with any of the best ideas, Colleen does. Danny can't even motivate himself to stop being such a goddamn downer all the time, Colleen does. She even gets the idea to use the bombs to collapse the building into the tunnel beneath it. Colleen's agency was genuinely refreshing. She's got as much right to be a Defender as everyone else on the team, if not more so. If a blind dude in a bright red costume can be a Defender, a trained swordswoman can too. Colleen Wing is to The Defenders what Stephanie Brown is to the Robins. Part of the club in every sense of the word, always left out of the conversation when we're giving credit.

With all that out of the way, let me gush.

Charlie Cox can make standing still and dramatically flexing his knuckles into a genuinely emotionally impactful scene. I could practically feel Matt's struggle with his inner rage as my own. Matt gets a couple of really hard-hitting emotional beats, and when he talks to the boy he did pro bono work for, explaining life with a disability and where the real strength in overcoming it lies was a heavy scene. Charlie Cox manages to steal the show in all his scenes, and the stunt work during Daredevil's fight scenes are always phenomenal.

Krysten Ritter does Jessica Jones phenomenally. Her cynicism somehow endears her more to me, and you can genuinely see the issues of someone struggling with their identity, not wanting to be a hero, but also being entirely directionless. But my favourite scene was actually watching Jess do her actual job; Being a private investigator. There's an interesting juxtaposition between how each hero does the busy work, the tedious part of the job. Daredevil and Luke usually use fear and intimidation to interrogate, but Matt does sometimes lawyer up to get the job done. But Jess doing the mundane investigation work was just an interesting sight to see. Because Jess is good at her job, make no mistake, but there's just something funny about seeing someone who could punch a man so hard he sees the curvature of the earth digging through public records for information. My favourite part is when Jess shows just how good she is at her job and how freaking insightful she can be, in her own crude way, when she gets Matt to relate to the daughter of the dead architect. I wasn't actually expecting Charlie and Krysten to get as much screen time together as they did, but the two of them knocked it out the park.

Luke Cage gets by far the best introductory scene. "I believe these belong to you" and "And you let them?" are the two best-delivered lines in the whole show, fyt me IRL. Mike somehow has chemistry with whoever he shares a scene with, but his best moments are with Krysten and Finn. Cage and Danny have some bro moments that I just couldn't help but grin wide at. It was endearing and I warmed up to Iron Fist a lot more, and I think that's the biggest strength of the show.

And Danny, Danny, Danny... It took me a while. I eventually warmed up to him. I admit, when Jess punched him the fuck out, I smiled a wide smile. Watching Luke smack Danny around a bit was also just... Deserved. But in the end, I concede; Danny isn't all that bad after all. Danny is the kid of the group, and he's at his best as kind of a lovable goofball. Which is a lot like how he is on the Ultimate Spiderman cartoon, as weird a comparison as that is. Luke humouring Danny's stories about punching out the heart of a dragon was an entirely endearing moment. Yes, Iron Fist is still the weakest character out of all the Defenders, still getting outshined by Colleen. But it was endearing. And Colleen and Danny have some moments of genuine chemistry on screen.

But then again, I ship this. Look at those bedroom eyes. DON'T TELL ME I'M SEEING SOMETHING THAT'S NOT THERE LOOK AT THEM THEY ABOUT TO FRICKLE FRACKLE

Also a quick shout out to Madame Gao's force powers, where were you hiding them, why were they so cool, how come you been holding out on us fam?

Overall, The Defenders really was just.. Fun.

I had fun watching it. I had fun seeing my favourites all interact. This was worth the wait and while eight episodes seem short, it's a bingeable, watchable, fun little adventure and besides an ending that goes on a little too long, Defenders... Was good. Defenders was good.

It's worth your time. It's only eight episodes long. Give it a watch. Have some fun.

If nothing else, you get to see a lot of people punch Finn Jones right in his overly depressive face.

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Iron Fist; What works, and what doesn't

Stop me if you've heard this one before; A rich white guy gets stuck somewhere remote and comes back with scruff on his face and martial arts expertise.

I remember watching Arrow for the first time. It was a breathe of fresh air, this new grittiness. It was grounded. From the first episode, I was in love. Episode after episode, this felt mature. It felt like something unmissable.

It just made it all the more disappointing when after watching the first episode of Iron Fist, I knew I'd just seen all this before, and I've seen it done much better.

This isn't some juvenile Marvel versus DC debate, and while I revel in drunken arguments about which of the two is better, the issue isn't about the respective houses that owns the titans being spoken of here. The issue is simply that Iron Fist has a lot to work with, but somehow comes off as entirely derivative.

In fact, you aren't just getting a shitty version of Arrow here. Episode 2 delivers a scene in a mental hospital that Legion's first episode knocked out of the park.

And after that, a fight with some hatchet wielding henchmen tries to bring the show back to its martial arts roots, but all I could think was that at this point in its runtime, Daredevil had done a continuous take fight scene down a hallway choreographed to perfection that was a feat of cinematographic excellence that comes so rarely it'd be a crime to miss out on it. It was unmissable. Daredevil had already done Rabbit In A Snowstorm, which is probably the best episode of anything ever made, dwarfed perhaps only by Jon Snow's siege upon Ramsay Bolton.

There's another moment where Danny breaks into Joy's apartment and I wanted to be impressed by the clearly CG'd feat of jumping off the tip of a pole onto a second story balcony, but then I remember in Arrow's first season, episode 3, there's a segment where Oli climbs up a wall to dig out a bullet. Stephen Amell doing that physical stuntwork was a beyond entertaining to watch. Danny's balcony scene is... Meh.

And I think that's what Iron Fist comes down to. You've seen it all before, hell, you've seen better in other Netflix series. There's more corporate restructuring and legal banter than any Iron Fisting. As comically laughable as the hatchet henchmen were, at least there was finally some fighting. Iron Fist isn't innovative, or new, but that could have been overlooked if it weren't so damn boring.

The score of Iron Fist isn't anything worth writing home about either. I can't say much about it other than that these cheesy hip hop songs almost make me believe I'm watching something way more interesting than I actually am. There's a bit where a guy murders a whole bunch of people to A-ha's Take On Me and he stops singing just before that falsetto part and I couldn't help but think to myself how if I was a mass murderer singing Take On Me, I'd delay my killing to hit the high notes. At this point I was skim watching, trying to find something to care about.

Finn Jones also has some rather unflattering deliveries. His performance as Loras Tyrell was perfectly passable, hell it was some of my favourite parts of Game Of Thrones, so I'm struggling to understand why his lines come off so awkward. Perhaps it's the accent his forcing, or some bad direction but it just starts to grate after a while.

The thing that works the most against Finn as Danny I think the show makes is just how goddamn interesting Colleen Wing is. She's awesome. I mean, she's stupidly awesome. Every time she's on screen I change my opinion of the entire show. She outshines Danny in every way, despite not having a magic hand that can blow up steel doors and stuff. And when we cut form her scenes, I feel genuine sadness knowing I'm going to have to watch either more corporate dicking about, or Danny trying and failing to woo Joy. Jessica Henwick just gives a stellar performance, and a part of me says fucking fire Iron Fist from the Defenders and add Colleen Wing. If Daredevil can join, so can she, and let's be honest here, this version of Danny's a bit of a wet blanket.

As for the "whitewashing" controversy that followed Iron Fist... Well, that takes a bit of dissecting. Iron Fist isn't as guilty of white-washing as it is of the white savior trope. Danny Reed has always been  a white man. And if you need a strong case for why diversifying white roles can work well and add much needed subtext, remember that The Martian Manhunter's alter ego, John Jones, was white in the silver age, but the now definitive version of his alter ego is a black man.


 And while an Asian American actor could have brought a fresh perspective on the role. I doubt Iron Fist would have much benefited from it, knowing what a snorefest the series is.

Netflix also needs to figure out how to do crossovers. As of yet, Luke Cage and Jessica Jones are the only two Defenders to have even met. Hell, CW has three ex-Glee stars in Vancouver at the same time and they'll use that paperthin excuse to have a musical crossover! As interesting and fun as Claire and Jeri are, neither are half as interesting or as fun as seeing main characters interact. Okay, well Claire has some awesome lines. And so does Jeri. They're background characters of other shows and they're both still more interesting than Danny, how?!

Tom Pelphrey does his very best Michael Shannon impression as Ward Meachum, and I don't hate it, but it does make me wish Michael Shannon was actually in the show. Overall, I actually like Tom as Ward a lot. His performance is at least pretty captivating, and if he ever wants to audition for Mad Men or Boardwalk Empire, he most certainly could.

Joy is love interest. I couldn't really find anything interesting to say about her other than that she mostly reacts the appropriate way to a strange homeless man coming into her life and claiming to be her dead childhood friend.

Even the opening sequence is uninspired, and unlike Jessica Jones' cool 1920s detective theme song, or Daredevil's operatic theme over a bust forming from blood, you could swop out the intro sequence of The Last Airbender (I have to much respect for the original Nicktoons show do drag it into this) and nothing would change, it's just a dude waving limbs about for a minute or so!

Overall, there isn't nearly enough martial arts, mystical fisticuffs or even old fashion street brawls to warrant this show a watch. It's derivative and somehow a fresh flavour of crap at the same time. If you ask me, you can give Iron Fist and Iron Miss.

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13 Reasons Why; My thoughts.

First of all, if you're thinking about watching 13 Reasons Why, it's a show that explicitly shows a suicide, two rapes, and physical assault, as well as I think there was also a point where one of the kids experiences domestic abuse. I'm not someone who usually thinks too much of warnings, but as someone who usually isn't fazed by much shown on television, this is one of those rare circumstances I think that a warning for this kind of thing is in place. I do however support the notion that there are few things that should really be censored or not shown, and I can't fault the show for showing these things, I can only praise or criticize the intent behind it and the usage thereof. I also can't really talk about the show without talking about the things contained inside, which means this will be a post talking explicitly about suicide, rape and physical assault. Either way, spoilers will follow, so maybe watch the show first if you don't want some of the bigger elements to be given away. The show isn't easy to watch, this wasn't easy to write, and this serves as a warning to anyone reading this that might need to prepare themselves or avoid content that is triggering.

Trying to speak to the objective qualities of the show is impossible. It demands feeling and emotion, and anything I write is going to speak from my subjective experience. The shows does have a couple things it does do objectively well, and others it fails in. But for the most part, 13 Reasons Why is as much about what happens to the characters as it is about the experience of the individual watching it.



The ending shook me. As I watched Clay and Tony drive off into the distance in the Mustang, and Clay gives one last smile. After all the awful things that happen, Clay smiles. The tapes have been passed on, he's done what he can. He's said his piece. And maybe, just maybe, things might just get a little better.

But it feels out of place.

13 Reasons Why is heavy, from start to finish. It's a show that never lets up on its oppressive atmosphere. Any moment of levity is undercut by the ever lurking tension. Everything from the sound design, to the lighting, to the cinematography is designed to let you know just how bleak everything is. I think I have to praise just how violent and dreadful 13 Reasons Why has made its setting, which is honestly just another public school. A school that could in fact be your school. Every moment of it feels like something that could happen in the real world, something that can happen to you, or could have happened to you. And to be very honest, it depicts events that do, unsettlingly often, happen in the real world.

A very clever detail you might not notice is in the lighting. The past is bright. It's lit by these warm colours and bathed in a light that makes everything that happens before Hannah eventually commit suicide, seem like there's a small tinge of hope. The present is cold. The colour is drained out of the world. It's bleak.

To be honest, it's hard to watch. I felt like my experience watching the show was mirrored by Clay's listening of the tapes; It just couldn't happen all at once. I had to take breaks in between. I had to turn it off.

There's a beautiful moment where Tony is telling Clay not to listen to the tapes because he wasn't in the right headspace. And I felt the same way. Some of these scenes are genuinely hard to watch. after one big emotional blow, you have to stop for a bit, regain yourself, and come back in again. The show doesn't relent. It's one blow after another to Hannah, who obviously doesn't get a happy ending. I doubt any character really got a happy ending. You don't even know if we get justice for what happens to Hannah and Jessica.

The show just ends, with Clay and Tony driving off, hopeful that things may get better, the only warmth to be found in the picture is the red of the Mustang against a bleak, grey world.

I think I would like to address a criticism about the show, and the most often cited one, that it glorifies or at least romanticizes suicide.13 Reasons Why is not a PSA condemning suicide or a poster on a highschool wall telling you everything will be okay. It's not trying to be, and while I personally don't know if I believe anyone who doesn't already severely need psychological help will attempt to recreate or imitate the events of the show, there are things to remember about 13 Reasons Why. It's not a kids show. Despite the highschool setting and young actors, 13 Reasons Why is a dark, unnerving and graphic. This isn't some boy meets manic pixie dream girl highschool romance. It's about the real darkness in human nature that turns what might seem like a superfluous mistake into a genuine consequential event that leads to the death of a fellow human being. I think when you start, Hannah's suicide is treated as a non-thing. She died, the world moved on without her, everyone has to now deal with the consequences.

For the most part, Hannah's suicide isn't actively condoned or condemned, it just is.

Afterwards, you have to decide whether you agree with Hannah's motivations for doing what she does, and by that I mean leaving the tapes, not committing suicide. You have to ask yourself, if you're going out anyway, if it's okay to put people what Hannah puts people through. Listening to those tapes are genuinely traumatizing. It's akin to psychological torture. But it punishes those who did what they did. Most people get their comeuppance.

I think I have to praise the characters. No one is innocent, but no one is entirely bad. Bryce is a genuine friend and help to Justin, who comes from a broken home with no money. It makes it all the more heartbreaking and unbelievable when you find out what he's on the tapes for. Justin, who is a monumental ass, has a sense of justice. He makes mistakes, but he feels genuine remorse for his part in it all. Zach does a childish and petty thing to Hannah when she rejects him because of a severe to mild case of nice-guy-complex, but the fact remains that Zach is actually one of the nice guys. He's a good big brother. But all of these characters do genuinely bad stuff, with varying degrees. Only Tyler and Marcus come off a little one dimensional, but that's more a flaw with the writing rather than any fault with the performance of their respective actors.

And Clay and Hannah, they are genuinely flawed people. Clay is a compulsive liar, and he's damn good at it. He's stoic, he's awkward, and he just lies. He lies even when it's entirely unnecessary. He's secretive and distrusting. Clay says exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time. But Clay (maybe arguably Zach as well) is one of the only truly innocent people on the tapes.

Hannah can be vindictive and spiteful. She pushes people away, and expects others to understand the hidden intentions in her actions. She can treat Clay especially badly, who does genuinely try to connect with Hannah. She fins amusement in exploiting the awkwardness of others, and often bears this pretentious air of intellectual condescension. None of which justifies any of the things that happen to her, of course, nothing could justify anything that happens to Hannah. But you don't immediately like Hannah. I'd go as far as to say that you're going to get to the end and not really know if you even like Hannah, despite feeling remorse and sympathy for her.

And can I just say, episode 10 can go fuck off. I felt myself getting so angry watching it. Hannah experiences trauma, and it catches up to her during a moment when she and Clay finally connect, causing her to literally repeatedly scream at Clay to "get the fuck out of here", with tears in her eyes, having witnessed exactly what she had just witnessed. Clay, then does exactly this, but Hannah later reveals in the tapes that she didn't want him to leave.

 And I think this is a problem at the heart of the show, for all it's condemnation of ignoring consent, when someone actually listens to someone taking back her consent, and then that someone stops like a rational human being would, the show backtracks with the same mentality of some neurotypical saying "We build up walls to see who cares enough to tear them down". I felt so angry because the entire seen is just condoning ignoring someone explicitly not consenting and I had to stop again.

I understand that this is the logical flaw that Hannah's entire character is based on, and the message is clear, you won't receive help if the way you ask for it is to lash out. But there are hundreds of better ways that scene should have gone down, and I just had to stop fuming for a few moments before I could continue watching.

Another gripe I had with the show was Hannah's narration.

Hannah has a little bit of this aloof, monotonous voice over, and it's meant to indicate how numb she is at this point, where she has decided to end herself, and that she'd punish the people who drove her towards it. This is where it gets a little personal for me, and I'm to try not let my personal experience interfere too much with my thoughts on the show, but I don't think I can write this review competently without bringing them up. I've struggled with depression for years, and I've been where Hannah was. I wrote two suicide letters, or at least, I got halfway through each before the actual act of what I was doing caught up with me, and I managed to pull myself back from the attempt each time, and have since not tried or attempted it again. Things did get better. I did make it out. I got to the other side and I'd like to think I'm a stronger person for it.

But I remember the state I was in.

I remember my hands trembling as I wrote and I remember scream-crying and I remember the gargantuan lump in my throat. I remember being practically unable to breathe. Hannah's voice over, sounding decidedly like a morning radio-host over anyone on the brink of ending themselves, is jarring. At times, it broke my suspension of disbelief, and I think anyone who has ever gotten to that point might experience the same thing.

Otherwise, the rest of my gripes are minor. I think the indie/folk tracks the show use are a little melodramatic, they can take away from a genuinely sad moment and give the show that quirky feel you'd get from your usual boy meets manic pixie dream girl films. The intro sequence also has a little too much quirk for me, it just doesn't mesh very well with the entirely oppressive and bleak atmosphere of the show. Swap out The Social Network or 500 Days Of Summer or It's Kind Of A Funny Story or The Perks Of Being A Wallflower or Easy A for whatever comes after the intro sequence and I doubt anyone would really think it out of place. Some dialogue can be awkward, some lines can be a little cringey, but nothing overly so.

The pacing can be a little slow, but that's more on account of about a two hour film's worth of source material being stretched into twelve hour-long episodes. Nothing deal breaking, but it makes watching the show all it once harder than most other things (like my Jessica Jones binge, and I have absolutely no regrets, Jessica Jones was fucking fantastic).

I do think the overbearing atmosphere works against 13 Reasons Why after a while. There are very few moments of catharsis. And even fewer of levity. An episode that broke the tension and just showed what everyone was like without anything going wrong for once would have been nice. All the hallucination scenes overstay their welcome really quickly, and 13 Reasons Why takes a weird joy in embarrassing Clay, which means as the viewer experiences the story through Clay, you'll be receiving a lot of secondhand embarrassment.

One thing I do like is how little agency Clay has. He is the eleventh person to hold the tapes. He doesn't act, he reacts. Things happen to him, he does make much happen himself. Clay is the lens through which we view, but I think Hannah is really the main character of the story. Clay is the Nick to Hannah's Gatsby.

Overall, 13 Reasons Why is actually a lot more nuanced than it initially seems, it's deep and complex with intensely complex characters. Morality is murky, and it isn't a going to preach anything to you, if anything, the show can be a little nihilistic at times. It's a show that asks you to make up your own mind about it and the themes it contains within. It's hard to watch, it's overbearingly bleak, it's sad and tragic and I definitely don't recommend watching it all at once.

But it's good. It's worth watching at least once, if you have the stomach for it. The show has genuine issues, and I don't even know if I can say I was entertained by any of it, I felt deeply unsettled for most of the experience. But I think that how unsettling it is despite its highschool romance setting speaks to how subversive it really is, and I can almost guarantee you haven't seen anything like it.

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