Category: TV Shows

“Lookism” On Netflix

In this story, an unattractive and poor young man, who is the victim of frequent assaults by other teenagers due to his looks and lack of status, magically wakes up in a new, very attractive body, while his original body lies sleeping beside him. He starts a new school in his attractive body during the day, and is awake at night in his original body. He experiences a new kind of social attention, and quickly gains social status due to his attractiveness. But, he makes an effort to befriend several fellow students who are less attractive and less popular. His new-found handsomeness causes conflict with both the more popular teenagers, and also with the unattractive teens he tries to befriend.

I thought the fantasy premise of this story was very interesting. It was much better that his old body was still there, but asleep, while he was awake in his new, attractive, body. When he’d fall asleep in his new body, he’d wake back up in his old body, which was the basis of some comedic content.
 
I also found the misunderstandings that occurred between himself, in his new body, and a couple of other characters interesting. Several people who first met him questioned his motivations, and assumed that he used his handsomeness for nefarious or manipulative purposes.

Throughout watching the series on Netflix, I wondered if there were other people with a similar secret -that they had an ugly body sleeping while their more attractive bodies were awake. At the end of season 1, such a revelation is made, although it wasn’t who I thought it would be. I suspect that there are more people with two bodies in this world, so I hope to see additional revelations in continuations of the series. That, in and of itself, would make an interesting story: a secret society of people who have an ugly body sleeping while their beautiful bodies are out and about.
 
I had two questions about this series. First, I was stunned by the way Korean high schools were portrayed. There seemed to be what could only be described as criminal gangs involved in extortion, robbery, and assault in the school. There was a level of brutality towards the less popular kids that seemed to go beyond mere high school bullying. It felt like these kids were living in “Lord of the Flies”. I’ve seen similar portrayals of high school life in other Korean TV shows. Since I’m not from that culture, and I’ve never studied it, I don’t know if this is just artistic exaggeration of the trials and tribulations of high school life, or if this is really how it is. But, the treatment of the unattractive, low-status teenagers was fairly horrifying to me.
 
My second question concerned the underlying themes in the story. These included questions about the nature of beauty, the earned versus the unearned, envy, social-esteem versus self-esteem, and the basis of social status. It seemed that the main character in his original body was treated badly not only because he wasn’t attractive, but also because he was poor. At one point, a group of kids were even going to publicly criticize him in his new body because he always wore such shabby clothing, and didn’t keep up with fashion trends. This points to the fact that social status is about more than mere looks. Wealth tends to play a role. A wealthy, but ugly, teenager could probably be fairly popular in school, too, just because he’s rich. He could also afford to improve his appearance, since attractiveness is probably only partly biological. Even aside from plastic surgery, he could wear better-fitting clothes, eat better to loose weight, invite attractive kids to hang out with him on his yacht, etc. (I’m somewhat leaving aside the issue of to what extent attractiveness is just “social convention” here, since I don’t want to go down that rabbit-hole.)
 
The main character was viewed as unattractive in his original body, in part, because he was overweight. (He was also below average in height, which, for males, means a lot of women will not consider you a good sexual choice. That’s completely beyond your control.) I tend to think that your weight is somewhat genetic, and therefore beyond your control, to a certain extent. But, I also think it’s possible to manage your weight, even if you have a genetic propensity towards obesity. I think it’s your responsibility to take action, if you have a weight problem. When the main character is awake in his original body, he makes an effort to exercise, although not much improvement is shown in his appearance. I hope that in future seasons of this series, the writers will address this issue further, and show the main character getting serious about improving his physical appearance in his original body through diet and exercise. I think this would be a positive message to convey in this story: that at the end of the day, you are ultimately responsible for improving your situation in life, regardless of how tall/short or thin/overweight you are.

Ōoku: The Inner Chambers (Review)

In this alternate history series on Netflix, a plague strikes Edo Period Japan that only kills men. As a result, all but a small percentage of men in Japan die. (Around 25% of the male population is left.) The plague continues to kill young men subsequently born, keeping the male population level low. (I assume the mothers of young men with immune fathers are perhaps passing on genes that do not confer immunity, causing continual death for several generations.)
The animated series explores the radical social and political changes that occur in early-modern Japan as a result. Women must become the primary producers economically, and also take control of the reigns of government, with a series of female Shoguns from the Tokugawa family in charge of Japan’s political system. (The underlying political system is essentially the same -with a Shogun in charge, and a figurehead Emperor with no real power. Women simply run it.)
The first episode is set about 80 years after the plague, with a well-established, primarily female society. Men are still rare, and can sell their sexual services, similar to how some women do in real life. Lower class women cannot afford a full-time husband so they will pay a man for sex in the hopes of getting pregnant. The more powerful and wealthy women can afford a full-time husband. The most powerful woman of all, the female Shogun, has a harem of young men at her palace. The first episode centers around one such young man and his eventual rise to become the primary concubine of the new female Shogun.
The following episodes all seem to be a flashback, and explain how this female-centric Japanese society came to be soon after the plague started.
The premise of a plague that kills most of the men is not new. I saw an episode of ‘Sliders’ from the 1990’s that had the same premise. (https://sliders.fandom.com/wiki/Love_Gods ) But, combining this premise with the setting of Edo Period Japan really captures the imagination of anyone who has studied Japanese history, like myself.

Japan has been experiencing a declining population and this series seems like commentary on this national conundrum of depopulation and negative birthrates.

I highly recommend this series.

“Money Shot: The Pornhub Story” – Review

An interesting look into the modern pornography industry and how the Internet changed how pornography is distributed and monetized.

The documentary also spends time addressing the dangers around modern internet pornography, specifically nonconsensual sexually explicit imagery that is making its way onto sites like porn hub. (When I say ‘nonconsensual’, I mean people under 18, or people being forced to produce such material.)

These issues are looked at in a fair-minded manner. While I am 100% in favor of freedom of speech and the rights of consenting adults to produce and consume sexually explicit material, it is also clear to me that there needs to be policing and enforcement by government to effectively prevent nonconsensual sexual material from being presented for profit on sites such as porn hub.

https://www.netflix.com/title/81406118

Stargate SG-1 Espisode: “Ascension” (Plot Spoilers)

Various episodes of “Stargate SG-1” will focus on particular characters for an episode. This episode focuses on Major Samantha Carter. She is a scientist/engineer who is somewhat of a “workaholic” with no social life. Although she and Colonel Jack O’Neil have some “sexual tension”, they cannot act on it because he is her commanding officer. Thus, she has no man in her life.
In “Ascension”, Carter encounters a mysterious man who appears to be following her. She is initially alarmed, but also intrigued by this good-looking stranger. She discovers that he is an alien who has taken human form because he has fallen in love with her. She finds herself slowly drawn to him during the episode because he is also a brilliant scientist, and her intellectual equal. (O’Neil, not so much.)
The military then finds out about him and is trying to capture him. Unbeknownst to any of them, he has been ordering things online on Samantha’s computer, and building something in her basement. When the military sends a special forces team to her house to capture him and extract his knowledge for use by the Pentagon, for possibly nefarious purposes, Samantha discovers that he has built a small Stargate in her basement. He uses it with Samantha to escape back to his home world to stop the military from stealing a weapon he mistakenly built a long time ago.
I thought this was a great episode. Very exciting. I also thought whoever wrote it had definitely read “Atlas Shrugged” recently, and possibly seen the movie “City of Angels“.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0709039/fullcredits/

“Thermae Romae Novae”

In this Japanese animation series, an ancient Roman bathhouse architect is magically transported to a modern-day Japanese bathhouse. When he returns to ancient Rome, an hour or so later, he begins adapting some of the ideas he learned to his own bathhouse designs.

The juxtaposition of time and place between these two cultures is quite interesting and enjoyable to watch. When the Roman first arrives in the modern Japanese bathhouse, he assumes he has somehow been pulled into the bathhouse of the slaves. He refers to the modern Japanese he meets as the “flat-faced slaves”. When he runs outside, he is confronted by modern automobiles. Without fully understanding what has happened, he then gets magically transported back to Ancient Rome, and adopts things he learned from the Japanese bathhouse.

In each episode, he magically and randomly transports to modern, or early-modern, Japan to visit a bathhouse. He then takes ideas back from his short trips. In one episode, he even assists a modern Japanese bathhouse architect who happens to be building a Roman-style bathhouse. (He humorously assumes these “flat-faced people” must have been recently conquered by Rome and are now building in the Roman style, as he never fully comprehends that he is time-traveling.)

This sort of dramatic Japanese animation that doesn’t involve martial arts or giant robots really appeals to me. It’s the sort of serious, adult-oriented animation that only the Japanese seem capable of writing.

“Alice In Borderland”

In “Alice In Borderland”, three friends mysteriously and suddenly find themselves in the same city they live in, but it is now mostly empty. They’re forced to play games of death with other people. Similar to “Squid Game”, but it came out before that. (They’re both similar to “Battle Royale” from the early 2000’s.)

I think the city-wide setting made for more interesting episodes than “Squid Game”. I also found the characters more interesting, with frequent flashbacks to their lives before the game.  Season 2 came out on Netflix Dec. 22.

https://www.netflix.com/title/80200575

“Easy”

I can think of very few TV shows with the format of “Easy“. Each episode is stand-alone, with unique characters and situations. (Although a friend who has watched the entire series says some characters come back in later episodes.)

Essentially, it is the short story format applied to TV. You will see this in the world of speculative fiction, with TV shows like “Twilight Zone” and “The Outer Limits”, but I cannot think of ever having seen it outside of that genre.
The episodes are basically what I’d call “romantic comedy” or “dramatic”, mostly in the vein of something like a Woody Allen or Kevin Smith movie: Casual dialogue with slightly neurotic main characters, who deal with humorous situations that might come from living in a major city like New York or Chicago.

Sex is usually an important topic of most episodes, but some are about other things.

Overall, it’s well done in my opinion. I wish there was more stuff like this on TV.

https://www.netflix.com/title/80095699

“The Crown”

I “officially” think the whole idea of monarchy and feudalism carried into modern times is silly. That said, it is a part of the societal fabric of Great Britain, and, like most social institutions, should be allowed to change gradually over time. I think revolutions almost always end in needless bloodshed for a reason. It is a metaphysical fact that the human mind doesn’t change its ideas quickly -people’s habits and customs have an “inertia” to them, that make gradual change more likely to lead to lasting and peaceful change.
That is all preface for me to say that I enjoy watching “The Crown” on Netflix. I know a lot of it is probably speculation on the part of the authors and creators of the show, so it is more like “historical fiction” or even “alternate history science fiction”.
I’m more fascinated by the customs and mores of this society, especially of the British nobility, than I probably want to admit, as someone who holds a radical political philosophy that would (gradually) sweep it all away.
My favorite season so far has been the Margaret Thatcher years. I enjoyed seeing Gillian Anderson from the X-files as Thatcher. I thought she really nailed that character, both in looks and attitude. The tension between the Iron Lady and the Queen really captured a genuine dynamic between capitalist modernity and the remnants of feudal collectivism and tribalism. Even if there was no actual animosity between the two women in real life, as art, it was perfect.

Stargate SG-1

I have been re-watching “Stargate SG-1” and was pleasantly surprised to realize I had missed a lot of episodes in the first four or five seasons. This was a 1990’s TV-adaption of a movie, staring Kurt Russell and James Spader. The creators of the show managed to take a great movie, and turn it into an even better TV show. After “Star Trek The Next Generation” ended, this picked up the mantle of best science fiction TV show, in my opinion. In some ways, it even surpassed TNG. The dialogue and chemistry between the main characters is excellent. The actors playing Jack O’Neil (Richard Dean Anderson) and Daniel Jackson (Michael Shanks) manage to pull off humor without becoming silly, or loosing the seriousness of the situation.

The underlying premise of present-day, wisecracking, Americans going on adventures to new worlds and meeting new civilizations seems more interesting to me than a “post-want”, “socialist utopia” society like the one in “Star Trek”. Plus, they manage to weave in the mythologies of ancient civilizations, as the aliens they encounter, quite effectively. (In this story, most of the ancient gods turn out to have been aliens of one sort or another.)

Whoopi Goldberg On Systematic Nazi Mass-Murder

I was rather surprised to see this controversy, since I think Whoopi Goldberg is correct:

“‘Let’s be truthful, the Holocaust isn’t about race, it’s not. It’s about man’s inhumanity to man, that’s what it’s about. These are two groups of white people,’ she said on The View on Monday.” https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/feb/02/whoopi-goldberg-suspended-from-the-view-after-saying-holocaust-isnt-about-race

Jews living in Germany at the time of World War II can’t really be called another race, in my opinion.

Mein Kampf asserts that they are another race. If you read it, you’ll see that Hitler saw the perceived racial difference as the reason for regarding Jews as a danger to the German people. But, I don’t see any evidence that would justify treating Jews as a different race.

I think the concept of “race” is most likely a real concept, that is based in reality. I’m not an expert, but it is my understanding that forensic anthropologists can determine a skeleton’s likely ancestry with high probability by examining their skull. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26270337/  (Although there is debate, about the accuracy of this type of determination. So my certainty on this issue is not 100%. https://www.science.org/content/article/forensic-anthropologists-can-try-identify-person-s-race-skull-should-they )

I think the outrage here derives from the modern notion that race is “socially constructed” or that it isn’t a real thing. In this view, the white majority is simply imposing something on black people that doesn’t exist for purposes of exploiting them.

I think a lot of that debate turns around how “race” is defined. I’d say I define it as something like: “Where most of your ancestors originate from in the last 10,000 years.” Biological populations can have a lot of variations, but biologists seem to have no problem identifying a plethora of sub-species within other animal groups besides human beings. For instance, there are 9 sub-species of Tiger, and they all look the same to me, as a non-biologist. https://www.livescience.com/29822-tiger-subspecies-images.html So, why is it controversial to recognize that people whose ancestors are mostly from Africa, Asia, or Europe are different sub-species? (Especially when its fairly easy for me to tell the difference just by looking at them, but I see no difference with Tiger sub-species.)

I will also acknowledge that I am not 100% certain on this issue. Much of what we consider “race” may, in fact, have no basis in biological reality. It’s largely a scientific issue to be decided by scientists, but I suspect the issue is not being honestly addressed due to the fear by scientists that they will loose funding or jobs if they come up with answers the political left doesn’t like.

The danger of Mein Kampf doesn’t lie primarily in Jew hatred, but in the fact that it advocates collectivism:

“It took centuries and a brain-stopping chain of falsehoods to bring a whole people to the state of Hitler-worship. Modern German culture, including its Nazi climax, is the result of a complex development in the history of philosophy…

If we view the West’s philosophic development in terms of essentials, three fateful turning points stand out, three major philosophers who, above all others, are responsible for generating the disease of collectivism and transmitting it to the dictators of our century.

The three are: Plato—Kant—Hegel. (The antidote to them is: Aristotle.)” ( The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America, Peikoff, Leonard)

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/fascism-nazism.html

https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?kn=the%20ominous%20parallels%20by%20leonard%20peikoff&sts=t&cm_sp=SearchF-_-TopNavISS-_-Results&ds=20

So, at worst, Whoopi Goldberg is guilty of saying something that is likely true (Jews are a not a separate race), which is based in a premise (race is something biologically real), that deserves more study. It certainly doesn’t justify suspension from her TV show. (But, these are the times we live in.)