Erin Watches: The Acolyte, Taylor Swift, DuckTales, Miraculous Ladybug

Disney+ hiked their prices for an annual subscription, so mine is going away in mid-September. (My family splits up the streaming accounts — we each have profiles on my parents’ Netflix, my Hulu, and my brother’s Disney.) (He’s thinking of giving Peacock a try next. Any recommendations for things they have I should watch?)

Mopping up the watchlist, here’s the progress so far…

The Acolyte (Star Wars)

I’m not the “always ready to check out a Star War” level of fan, so the only one of these shows I already watched was Obi-Wan. (Kid Leia was a treasure who stole every scene, the comedy Force-scamming smuggler was fun, the rest was forgettable.)

This was…meh. Started off strong, had a lot of concepts I wanted to see played out, and then the actual execution was underwhelming. It sets up this mystery, where you can tell something’s off, the stated character motivations don’t make sense…then it starts revealing the hidden secret backstory, and the motivations still don’t make sense! Just in a different way.

It’s set 100-ish years before the Prequel Trilogy, so one of the things I was interested in was, getting to see the Jedi before their “fraying empire in decline” stage. As a functional system of gifted people using their powers to benefit the galaxy.

…Yeah, they’re not that! A single “peaceful contact mission” leaves a swath of accidental death so wide, you can imagine even an American police department would get in trouble for it. So they adopt one non-adult survivor, and cover up the rest. I mean. What.

Taylor Swift – The Eras Tour

Concert movie! Fun songs, beautiful elaborate dance performances, I can only imagine how much stagecraft went into all the shifting of props and quick-change outfits.

Hot take: I’m starting to think this Taylor gal is pretty good at the whole music thing.

DuckTales (2017 reboot)

I watched some of the original series of this as a kid — not enough to remember much, just enough to have nostalgia for the song. (Woo-oo!)

The reboot is cute and fun. Not quite gripping enough that I barreled through it, but solid enough that I kept coming back. Earnest without talking down to its audience, clever without being mean or cynical. The three-part finale has our heroes pull a “what if the real adventure was…” gotcha, so sincerely cheesy that the villain complains “oh, come on, that can’t possibly work” — but it does! The ducks know what kind of show they’re in, and the writers are proud of it.

Miraculous Ladybug, season 5

The final season (for now). That’s right, I caught up!

Spoiler-free observation: I really enjoyed how “invasive tracking, harvesting of personal data, AI deepfakes made without the subject’s permission, and wellness scams, all distributed via smart-device apps” were key parts of the villainy this season. Out with the era of “we can’t give our characters cell phones because they’d solve everything too easily,” in with the era of “what if fiction explored the idea that sometimes…cell phones…are the problem?”

 

( Now, about those spoilers, huh. )