It Was His Sled -- OR American Horror Story: Coven Spoilers. Part 1.
Okay, so the wife and I finished American Horror Story: Coven.
What follows is my disjointed ramblings/complaints about it.
First of all, I really like being able to buy a la carte seasons of stuff from Amazon Prime. I'm not going to pay for cable. But I didn't want to wait until (presumably) October to get this for free, so $25 later... Well, I have the moral victory, anyway.
Second of all, I read TV Tropes a lot, but I will try to not have this entry be completely overwhelmed with their (useful, seriously) jargon.
STOP READING HERE IF YOU GIVE A SHIT ABOUT SPOILERS. BUT YOU SHOULDN'T, SINCE NONE OF THIS MATTERS!
Everyone on this show is a dick. The character I didn't actively dislike was an axe-murdering serial killer. His nickname? The Axeman. He played jazz and killed people for not listening to jazz until some witches killed him and brought him back to life (or something?) where he began boning a (hot) old lady and only killed a few more people with an axe. And then he got killed again.
Okay, I tell a lie, I actually liked Nan, the girl with Down's Syndrome. But, to be fair, she was also kind of a dick. And of course she winds up being pointlessly murdered to save a baby's life, except then the baby wound up being taken care of (and I don't know if that's a euphemism or not, since they helpfully never showed what happened to him) by the ghost of a necrophiliac psychopath.
Also, there were two people that were just idiots (well, not *just* idiots as they obviously wound up killing people, too) but they were idiotic rather than actively malevolent.
Everyone else was extra double super loathsome.
The Kathy Bates character was a fucking psychopathic monster. Which made it really weird when they tried to play her situation for sympathy, which they did multiple times, with varying success.
The Angela Basset character had been sacrificing a baby, every year, for the past 200 years or so. But then when she got killed, she was pretty surprised to wind up in hell. NB that she had also sold her soul to some version of the devil. I mean, you're a voodoo lady. You know about the devil, right?
I can't begin to write out all of the horrible, horrible things that pretty much every character did, but lets just say that it was somewhat frustrating when people would die, because there was a greater than even chance they would come back to life in the next episode.
Speaking of that, the writing, jeez!
The dialog was bad. I mean, I get it, you're talking about witchcraft, so you have to earnestly say some very dumb things. But come on. Some of the lines were so clunky that Campbell's should put them in cans and sell them as sloup. <-- Yes, I did that. You see?
In the first or second episode, the Head Bitch Witch says to Kathy Bates, "I can't stand a RACIST!" And the audience was all, "Yeah, you may be the kind of person that kills everyone that slightly inconveniences you, but at least you know that RACISM IS BAD, and WE LIKE YOU FOR IT!"
You know how you can instantly move from one place to another? What do you call that? Transmutation, right? Oh, you don't call it that, on account of that being a completely different word that anyone who has read like, one Harry Potter book knows means something else?
Okay, I could pick nits about the show all night.
The Witches Council? DUMB. The Witch Hunters? WEAK and LAME.
The main problem was the show didn't have protagonists or antagonists. It just had a bunch of people doing a bunch of stupid things for what turned out to be no real reason, at all, while killing a shitload of people along the way. And none of the "cool" stuff even began to make up for it, and in fact just made it drag on longer and more pointlessly. Seriously, there two Stevie Nicks music videos over the course of the 14 episodes. People stood around playing the theremin while talking. A lady was blinded, had her sight restored (by someone killing two people, natch), RE-BLINDED herself, and then had her sight restored AGAIN. And then she killed someone. Almost everyone died, some of them more than once. Some of them more than twice!
They never showed anyone learning, or teaching magic, despite the show taking place at a school for witches. Just being there, I guess, meant you learned pyrokinesis, telekinesis, oculmancy, whatever. Hell, they never even *mentioned* anyone teaching or learning magic. Once in a while, a witch would manifest new powers, but when she did, she immediately knew how to use them.
Sigh.
What follows is my disjointed ramblings/complaints about it.
First of all, I really like being able to buy a la carte seasons of stuff from Amazon Prime. I'm not going to pay for cable. But I didn't want to wait until (presumably) October to get this for free, so $25 later... Well, I have the moral victory, anyway.
Second of all, I read TV Tropes a lot, but I will try to not have this entry be completely overwhelmed with their (useful, seriously) jargon.
STOP READING HERE IF YOU GIVE A SHIT ABOUT SPOILERS. BUT YOU SHOULDN'T, SINCE NONE OF THIS MATTERS!
Everyone on this show is a dick. The character I didn't actively dislike was an axe-murdering serial killer. His nickname? The Axeman. He played jazz and killed people for not listening to jazz until some witches killed him and brought him back to life (or something?) where he began boning a (hot) old lady and only killed a few more people with an axe. And then he got killed again.
Okay, I tell a lie, I actually liked Nan, the girl with Down's Syndrome. But, to be fair, she was also kind of a dick. And of course she winds up being pointlessly murdered to save a baby's life, except then the baby wound up being taken care of (and I don't know if that's a euphemism or not, since they helpfully never showed what happened to him) by the ghost of a necrophiliac psychopath.
Also, there were two people that were just idiots (well, not *just* idiots as they obviously wound up killing people, too) but they were idiotic rather than actively malevolent.
Everyone else was extra double super loathsome.
The Kathy Bates character was a fucking psychopathic monster. Which made it really weird when they tried to play her situation for sympathy, which they did multiple times, with varying success.
The Angela Basset character had been sacrificing a baby, every year, for the past 200 years or so. But then when she got killed, she was pretty surprised to wind up in hell. NB that she had also sold her soul to some version of the devil. I mean, you're a voodoo lady. You know about the devil, right?
I can't begin to write out all of the horrible, horrible things that pretty much every character did, but lets just say that it was somewhat frustrating when people would die, because there was a greater than even chance they would come back to life in the next episode.
Speaking of that, the writing, jeez!
The dialog was bad. I mean, I get it, you're talking about witchcraft, so you have to earnestly say some very dumb things. But come on. Some of the lines were so clunky that Campbell's should put them in cans and sell them as sloup. <-- Yes, I did that. You see?
In the first or second episode, the Head Bitch Witch says to Kathy Bates, "I can't stand a RACIST!" And the audience was all, "Yeah, you may be the kind of person that kills everyone that slightly inconveniences you, but at least you know that RACISM IS BAD, and WE LIKE YOU FOR IT!"
You know how you can instantly move from one place to another? What do you call that? Transmutation, right? Oh, you don't call it that, on account of that being a completely different word that anyone who has read like, one Harry Potter book knows means something else?
Okay, I could pick nits about the show all night.
The Witches Council? DUMB. The Witch Hunters? WEAK and LAME.
The main problem was the show didn't have protagonists or antagonists. It just had a bunch of people doing a bunch of stupid things for what turned out to be no real reason, at all, while killing a shitload of people along the way. And none of the "cool" stuff even began to make up for it, and in fact just made it drag on longer and more pointlessly. Seriously, there two Stevie Nicks music videos over the course of the 14 episodes. People stood around playing the theremin while talking. A lady was blinded, had her sight restored (by someone killing two people, natch), RE-BLINDED herself, and then had her sight restored AGAIN. And then she killed someone. Almost everyone died, some of them more than once. Some of them more than twice!
They never showed anyone learning, or teaching magic, despite the show taking place at a school for witches. Just being there, I guess, meant you learned pyrokinesis, telekinesis, oculmancy, whatever. Hell, they never even *mentioned* anyone teaching or learning magic. Once in a while, a witch would manifest new powers, but when she did, she immediately knew how to use them.
Sigh.