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

[erinptah]

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.

Throughout the show, our villain’s goal has been “get the Ladybug and Cat Noir MacGuffins, so I can use them to get One Wish, which I’ll use to bring my dead wife back to life.”

Our heroes knew he wanted a wish. They never asked him (or themselves) what it was. Not in the sense of “we assume it has to be something evil, sure would be egg on our face if it wasn’t!” — no, the magical critters were very clear that it didn’t matter what the wish was. Granting any wish destroys the existing world to create a new one. That’s a disaster, full stop.

In the finale, he gets the MacGuffins!

…And the critters explain that his wish will follow a Law of Equivalent Exchange. No other caveats, no drawbacks, not inherently disastrous. Just “if you want to bring one person back to life, it has to balance out with someone dying.”

Gabriel does a noble self-sacrifice! Also, he does some last-minute healthy moving-on from his grief over his wife — but still uses the wish, to heal a colleague who’s not dead yet, but was fatally injured by his dysfunctional quest!

Look, on many levels this is great. It’s a nice twist, it’s an emotionally-satisfying payoff to a bunch of plot threads, it’s a strong moment of character growth to end Gabriel’s arc on.

It’s just…so the world in general is fine, I guess? We don’t feel bad about that at all…?

My ability to enjoy the rest of the finale was really thrown off by the distracting emotional dissonance, here.

Bonus oof: a big part of why Gabriel let Emily go was, Marinette showed him a recording of Emily literally saying, “hi babe, it’s a bummer that I’m dying, but please don’t kill anyone to bring me back to life.” Sooooo if our heroes had investigated Hawkmoth’s intended wish, and if they had connected those dots successfully, at any point earlier in the show…they could’ve peacefully short-circuited the whole plot immediately.