May 2023 – JG Judgementally Comments…

Forever

What’s the Show? Forever (2018)

What’s It All About, JG? Well, that’s a tricky one. Actually, it’s not all that tricky but this is definitely a show that benefits from knowing as little as possible about it going in and then allowing yourself to be surprised by it. It is, though, a lightly comic drama about relationships and what happens to them, though again saying more is straying into spoiler territory. Spoilers definitely wouldn’t ruin the show (and I’m normally fine with casting spoilers about aplenty) yet at the same time there’s definitely a pleasure to be had from seeing a show start going in one particular direction and then seeing what it develops into. But this isn’t getting us anywhere, so let’s get the basics out of the way.

Knock At The Cabin

Can M Night Shyamalan knock this one out of the park? No. No he cannot.

What’s The Movie? Knock At The Cabin

What’s It All About, JG? A gay couple, Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge), and their daughter Wen (Kristin Cui) are vacationing at an isolated cabin somewhere in the woods. Wen is approached by Leonard (Dave Bautista) while out collecting grasshoppers. Turns out Leonard and three of his cohorts believe the world is about to end in a religious apocalypse and the only thing that can prevent it is one member of the family killing another. They must decide who should die and they have to do the deed – suicide won’t cut it. So who will die, the gay guy, the other gay guy, or the young girl? And are the four cultists/zealots right in what they say about the end of the world? They believe so fervently that every time the family refuses to murder each other, the zealots kill one of their number while a terrible natural disaster occurs. Eventually, one member of the family does indeed kill another as the evidence for an Actual Apocalypse adds up. Is it real? Anyway, the world is saved but only after all four cultists are dead. Was it all just in their heads? Na.

Quantum Leap (2022-)

Can an old early 90s sci-fi show make the leap into the 21st century?

What’s The Show? Quantum Leap, the unexpected return.

What’s It All About, JG? Well, pretty much the same as the original series, unsurprisingly. But for the sake of completeness, Dr. Ben Song (Raymond Lee), Our Hero, is a physicist working on the Quantum Leap time-travel project thirty years after when the original show was set. Ben “leaps” for reasons which remain murky throughout much of the first season, jumping into various different people across time as he “tries to put right what once went wrong”. You know, saving a restaurant, helping a family get over a tragedy, defeating prejudice, giving Brandon Routh some guest-star work, that kind of thing. He’s aided in his missions by his fiancee, Addison (Caitlin Bassett), who appears to him in the form of an insubstantial hologram, and the rest of the Quantum Leap team. In the present they’re trying to figure out how to get Ben back while also trying to understand what it was that drove him to leap in the first place and what he’s really trying to achieve. In the end, he did it to save Addison’s life, which he successfully does despite the machinations of “Leaper X”, another time-traveller hell-bent on stopping him.