1. Finished watching Dept Q on Netflix, Saturday. I now understand the mixed reviews it had been getting. The principal characters are engaging, and interesting. But the interesting mystery isn't the featured one. There's two mysteries. One is the "Cold Case" or "Lost File Case" and the other is the mysteries of how each of the four detectives got assigned to it, and why, and what happened to them previously to lead them there. The mysteries about the fours cops is the interesting one - and that hasn't really been solved by the end of the series. So the series has more than one mystery thread, and feels at times like the viewer has been dropped into the middle of the story and needs to spend some time playing catch up.

Also the principal mystery aka Cold Case is the typical sadistic case that haunts nightmares, and if you've watched a lot of these mysteries or read them, may have seen before? It also spends a lot of energy misleading the audience and detectives. I found the Cold Case to be depressing, rather dark, and frustrating at times. I was more interested in solving the shooting at the beginning of the series that started it off - which has not been resolved. [Note this seems to be true of most television mystery dramas - so it may just be something that annoys me and no one else, because they keep doing it. It must be working on some level.]

That said? It has engaging characters, and I wanted to know more about them. So I hope it gets a second season. No reason why it shouldn't - it did well enough on Netflix. But alas, it is on Netflix, and one never knows.

2. Winding my way through Buffy the Vampire Slayer, S2 on Hulu. S2 much like S1, and all television serials in the US, is a mixed bag. I remember liking "Becoming 1" (the second to last) episode better? I actually loved it way back in 1998, when I was 29. Now, I find it to be a bit on the cheesy side, with both Angel and Dru sliding into overacting territory, and theatricality. Amusingly enough, Spike has gone in the opposite direction, and is less theatrical. (Possibly because the actor was spending a lot of time watching Anthony Head on set, and trying to emulate him?) And some of the dialogue is on the cheesy side.

It's saving grace may be Gellar's performance, some the quippy one-liners, and Spike (the little we see of him).

Kendra was a bit of a mistake - they went a bit over the top in the Jamaican or Caribbean Slayer. I've decided that she's trying for Jamaican and failing at it. Good news? She's not on that long.
She does not date well - and is the brunt of one too many of the jokes, most in poor taste. Also, Boreanze can't do an accent to save his life. And his homeless, pathetic Angel lurking and stalking teen Buffy in LA doesn't quite come across in the manner that I think the writers intended? And I didn't realize how much Buffy resembled Angelus's vampiric sire and paramour Darla until I saw those early scenes again. Kind of unsettling, as is Whistler, the guy who is popping in and out of Angel's life since the 1996, and attempting for unknown reasons to get Angel on the straight and narrow.

It does however have the money shot at the end or the oft-quoted scene - which is Whistler's voice over: "the big life changing moments are going to happen, there's nothing we can do about that, but it's what we choose to do after they come that matters, and tells us who we are."

The episode also does a good job of echoing the first episode of the season, where Buffy gets tricked into going somewhere else, while her friends are the real target. Angel was along for the ride the first go around, and uses that trick against her in this episode, and calls her on it. Buffy's biggest flaw - which Angel and various other villains exploit to their advantage - is her desire to take on the world all by herself, and protect people by leaving them safely behind. The series has a heavy theme - regarding how we can't do it by ourselves, we need other people, we need help. We can't do it alone.

3. The Tony's made me want to revisit Hamilton which is available on Disney +. I rewatched the first half of it - still holds up, just very long...

***

Probably will watch Andor next, and Murderbot.