Alright I've done 'em all now. The penultimate one was a weird switch in tone! 

I dunno what to make of it still, really. Like, what was that 'getting bit' all about (keeping it vague for spoilers)? It's nice that they can still make TV that isn't about neatly wrapping everything up or proceeding at breakneck pace the whole time, but on the other hand I don't know what I've particularly got out of watching this.



 

Yeah, and you'd think some fucker would be decent enough to stick up a sign saying don't cross this river if it's unfrozen. But then, if the good kind people who ran 'the loop' were actually good and kind they probably wouldn't have left such astonishingly dangerous junk lying around in the open to ruin their kids' lives.

Afraid that was just a shade too vague for me as I don't recall the 'getting bit' bit.

Oh unless you mean the snake bite thing - which was how he lost his arm and ended up with a robotic prosthesis (which was itself a kind of 'what goes around comes around' thing after their cruelty to another snake earlier) which I suppose was some kind of parallel to the robot 'monster' losing an arm - or something. But, frankly, your guess is as good as mine.

Yeah that's the bit. For some reason the spoiler button doesn't work for me. But, what kind of animal just randomly does that and then fucks off. Weird.

The end with the teacher also made me giggle a bit. Like, haha this poor traumatised child, let's just blow his mind a bit more, why not?

I'd forgotten most of the last two episodes, then when I read your earlier post I went and watched them both again. I'm not sure why they did it that way because there are so many alternatives. It would have been easy to have the young George Willard splash around in the water where he would have been much more likely to get bitten, but they chose to have this snake actually leap at him for no reason and then rush off. Watching it the second time, I had the daft idea that it was supposed to be the snake the boys found under the stone and zapped.

Anyhoo... talking of one-off series with high production values and seriously quirky themes, has anybody seen the new Neill Blomkamp series on Netflix? 

"Oats Studios" a series of short experimental films produced betweem 2017 and 2020 (so not that new). Some more successful/engrossing than others. Various lengths between a couple of minutes and (almost) a full episode. Must have cost a bit with the likes of Sigourney Weaver and Dakota Fanning etc.

I liked it in parts. Would watch the opening "episode" if it was developed into a film or series (unless they replaced Sigourney W).

Overall good fun, but not quite a full meal and not balanced enough for Tapas.

This sounds interesting. We recently re-watched NB's Chappie, which might be -- wrongly -- considered a lightweight version of District 9 (I would have to rewatch that to be sure, but my feeling is Chappie is the better film). Either way, Blomkamp definitely has some awesome sauce up his sleeve.

It was certainly interesting, and most of it was entertaining. It felt a bit like somebody imagining scenes and sections of larger projects and working these imaginings all the way up to finished chunks. In fact, that's likely to be what happened. I thought parts were very successful, others not so much. Some was very original; some was not. 

The opening section dropped us into a post apocalyptic world with an extract from his short film Rakka, which is itself a "part" project. 

The various bits have been produced by Oats Studios, which is Blomkamp's experimental studio. The basic idea (apparently) is to produce snippets for release of YouTube, Steam etc. to see if there's an appetite for the full production.