The View From The Mountain

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is returning (finally!) on the 17th of July with an all-new third season. To celebrate the return what has become my favorite of the new Star Trek shows on Paramount+, I decided to create a list of my top five episodes from the first two seasons. Memento Mori After several episodes of hinting at their presence, Memento Mori is the first big confrontation between the Federation and the Gorn. First introduced in the TOS episode Arena , with a memorable fight between Captain Kirk and a slow moving, green-skinned humanoid lizard, the Gorn have popped up in the episode The Time Trap of ST: The Animated Series , and in the In A Mirror, Darkly Part Two episode of ST: Enterprise (using really bad CGI that wasn’t much of an improvement over the Gorn suit used in Arena ). We never actually see the Gorn in Memento Mori , except for their ships, which look like angry claws ripping their way through space. This is a wise move, because not showing the...

While I’m not a big fan of medical shows, I decided to give Pulse , the new medical drama on Netflix, a try for one basic reason: its lead actress, Willa Fitzgerald. She was memorable and charming as officer Roscoe Conklin in the first season of Reacher on Amazon Prime. She made a great sidekick for the lead character, vagabond adventurer Jack Reacher. Thanks to Reacher being a drifter, the series changes its supporting cast every season, leaving Willa free to get cast in Pulse as Danielle “Danny” Simms, a third year resident working the ER at Maguire Hospital in Miami. Pulse starts out very good, with a major hurricane bearing down on the Miami area, and eventually rolling right over the hospital itself. The hospital, newly built, was designed to withstand massive storms like this, but that doesn’t mean everything is just hunky dory. Despite being protected from the hurricane, there are still major problems for the ER staff to deal with. And the episodes with the hurrica...

3 Body Problem , Netflix’s latest TV series, is loosely based on the first novel in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, by Chinese author Liu Cixin (who also wrote the book The Wandering Earth ). Simply put, it’s an alien invasion story, but one that’s a lot more sophisticated than your average ‘pew-pew-pew’ cliché-fest. For one thing, this series begins in the 1960s, in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, which was the nationwide purge instigated within China by then-Chairman Mao to keep himself in power. A young woman named Ye Wenjie arises from the chaos to become a central figure in the overall story. The 3 Body Problem of this series’ name refers to a far-flung solar system that has three suns. Any planet within this tri-sun system would have a hard time of it, taking turns orbiting one belligerent sun after another, and it just so happens that the aliens who set their eyes on invading Earth--known as the San-Ti--come from this embattled world. ...

I was a huge fan of Jenna Coleman when she played Clara Osborn, the companion to the eleventh and twelfth Doctor Who (played by Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi, respectively). Doctor Who, a sort of mad magician who literally travels through space and time, can be an intimidating character, but Coleman more than held her own, plying an engaging performance that was self-assured without being too arrogant. Her time on the program, stretched across the better episodes of two of the Doctors, was extremely memorable for me. So when I heard that Coleman was starring in Wilderness, a mini-series for the Amazon Prime streaming service, I was more than happy to give it a shot. Of course, I waited until all of the episodes were up. I hate the trend with some streamers reverting to the old ’one episode per week’ tactic; I’d rather binge-watch the whole thing over a day or two, which was easy to do with Wilderness, seeing how it only had six episodes, overall. But the fi...

Back in January of this year, Netflix premiered Woman of the Dead , a crime thriller from Austria with slight supernatural overtones. I figured I’d give it a shot, since I was in the mood for a good Lifetime-type crime story. Do you know what I mean when I refer to these Lifetime TV movies? They’re goofy crime “thrillers” regarding soccer moms who become amateur sleuths that wind up being so silly that they’re more unintentionally funny than anything else. But within the first fifteen minutes of its first episode, Woman of the Dead proves itself to be more of a Hitchcockian thriller: a darker, high-brow, and sophisticated thriller that’s genuinely exciting. Anna Maria Mühe stars as Brunhilde Blum (everybody calls her Blum), an undertaker in a small Austrian mountain town where it seemingly snows all year round. Her beloved husband works as a cop with the local police force--until the moment when he gets savagely run down on his motorcycle by a black Range Rover that abr...

I’ve always loved the paranoid thriller. It’s the type of thriller that sees our hero either go on the run (usually for something that they didn’t do), or try to deal with such a vast, monolithic conspiracy that it makes them want to go on the run. Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest , Oliver Stone’s JFK , and The X-Files all immediately come to mind as the type of paranoid thriller that I love. These are the kind of manic, gotta-keep-moving, paranoid thrillers that leave their heroes unable to trust anybody, even their dogs (“Et tu, Rover? You little Shih Tzu!”). Three new paranoid thriller TV series are available on streaming right now, and the first of these I’ve watched is The Diplomat , on Netflix, starring the sublime Keri Russell. An explosion aboard a British aircraft carrier creates an international crisis that Kate Wyler (Russell), the newly appointed American ambassador to England, must avert. Wyler is a veteran Foreign Service officer who’s used to doing a l...

"Satre said, 'Hell is other people.' He was my first crush." -- Wednesday Addams. Back when I heard they were making a TV series out of the Addams Family character Wednesday for Netflix, I really didn’t have much faith that it would be very good. And when I read what the basic plot would be: that Wednesday would be sent to a special school of the dark and wicked, I figured this was going to be much worse than I had initially thought. The Addams Family had been around for decades; it didn’t need to be “modernized” with a bastardized format that merged it with Harry Potter (and I’m really sick and tired of the frigging “magical school for kids” plot that has seemingly overtaken nearly every movie and TV show within the last twenty years). But when I finally saw Wednesday , you know what? It didn’t suck. In fact, the new Wednesday show on Netflix is really very good. What the heck happened? It’s several things. The firs...

Looking at the reviews for Andor , the latest Star Wars series produced by and exclusively for Disney Plus, they all say the same thing: that Andor is a vastly mature TV series--and it is. But many of these reviews also appear to be a back-handed insult to the Star Wars franchise in general, by stating how Andor was made for the adults in the room, and how it lacked the dopey ‘pew-pew-pew’ action of space wizards fighting each other with their laser swords that we get in Star Wars . And yeah, Star Wars does have its silly moments (and that’s pretty much all of Return of the Jedi ). But the very best of Star Wars (the original Star Wars film, The Empire Strikes Back , Rogue One , The Last Jedi ) strived mightily to be far more than the simple space operas they appeared to be. And even the films that didn’t have such lofty goals ( Solo , SW: Revenge of the Sith ) are still vastly entertaining. But it doesn’t appear that most people are really complaining abo...

I re-watched some old episodes of Stargate: Atlantis, the sequel series to Stargate: SG-1 (which was the TV sequel to Stargate, the movie, released back in 1994), and I came across the fifth season episode Whispers. Whispers was this series' loving take on horror movies, and re-watching it some ten years later, I have to say that it holds up very well. Directed by William Waring, Whispers uses all of the cliches of the horror genre--but instead of being a jokey (and forgettable) send off, the episode treats its threat very seriously, and winds up giving us some truly scary moments. The SG team consists of Sheppard (Joe Flanigan) and Dr. Beckett (Paul McGillion), along with an all-women Stargate unit led by Christina Cox (Blood Ties), with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's Nicole de Boer rounding out the team as its science expert.  While the episode has plenty of jump scares, many of which feature real threats, it's the overall creepiness of Whispers that makes it so good--espec...