Semantic Nonsense: Time management
I have to say, I have watched some awful nostalgic things this year. I didn’t go to them looking for awful things to watch, even though I didn’t bail on them after ascertaining their quality.
…though I can’t say doing so constitutes hate-watching. Continuing to watch something you dislike in the hopes or at least flawed expectation that it will get better doesn’t seem to hit that mark. You want it to be good. You keep giving it chance after chance, but in the end it never delivers.
That describes to a T my experience with Paramount +’s Picard from Day One. I could probably fill a CW-sized post picking nits about the show, but that wouldn’t be fun to write or fun to read. And that would miss the point, too.
In its third season, Picard opted to paper over its shortcomings with an extreme helping of fanservice. No, not the Gainax kind. But an endless barrage of callbacks, references and metatextual pats-on-the-back to keep the dopamine pumping in the minds of fans lest they lose engagement.
But it backfired for me. These moments took me right out of the story (such as it was). Details that should remain in the background for the fun of it were dragged into the foreground, pointed at, announced and had entire scenes built around them. It did what Star Wars does when it’s at its worst: making a galaxy tiny by tying its history in knots around itself.
And no matter how obviously the show was getting high off its own supply, I just kept giving it more rope. Even after it hanged itself for the fiftieth time, I somehow believed that it was going to turn things around at some point. But why?
Why did I bother? Why did I invest ever dwindling time that could have been better spent watching something else I may have enjoyed more? If I am to at least try a significant fraction of those 217 movies, 96 TV shows and 62 animes (and counting), I need to be more discriminating than this. But it would be much easier to not throw good time after bad if I understood what my motivation even was.
Likewise was my experience with the more recently released Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Once and Always on Netflix. While it (thankfully) could only steal an hour from my life, a far more sensible friend only let it waste 10 minutes. 50 minutes isn’t a lot of time all by itself, but if I acted with that level of decisiveness in the future, it would surely be joined by many more 50 minuteses and build up to a much more valuable chunk of time to have back.
It would be easy to lay my willingness to see these viewings through at the feet of nostalgia. — And I very nearly did; I had to rewrite the introduction. — But there was an inherent contradiction in blaming nostalgia because the reason I disliked both of these revivals was because they had been poisoned by nostalgia. Picard‘s downfall was not just its sloppy writing and unclear vision, but by trying to elevate itself with narcissistic continuity porn. And Once and Always committed to being hokey as a stylistic choice so hard it needlessly overshot the actual hokiness of its source material.
In any case, these experiences are making me think twice about a few other things I’m looking forward to, as it’s now very clear to me that upcoming movies, e.g. The Flash and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, could all too easily poison themselves, too.
I can hope that by the time I find out, I will be more conscious of it and enforce a higher standard. As with overcoming FOMO for the eShop, life is too short to wait for something to get good later… especially when there’s no guarantee it will.
About The Author
Drew
Features Editor | Drew started behind the 8(bit)-ball in the video game world. He first became interested in anime by chance exposure on the Sci-Fi channel. Drew's the creative force behind blog-wide features, works the movie and food beats, and pioneered Damage Control’s entry into video, podcasts and streaming.
