On 1/16/2026 5:15 AM, The True Melissa wrote:
Verily, in article <UBI20260115@dont-email.me>, did weberm@polaris.net deliver unto us this message:
After an arduous workout, I watched:
Nothing.
What did youw atch?
I watched Twinless, a movie available on Hulu.
If I still had Hulu I would be interested in watching this. I need to
make a watch list for things like this and the Malcolm in the Middle
reboot so when I get Hulu again I can catch up.
What did everyone else watch?
This is a multiday catch up. Over the last few days I watched:
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (4K disc) 2018 prequel /
sequel which picks up where the first movie ends with the evil wizard Grindelwald (Johnny Depp) The movie is set mostly in France with
Grindelwald amazing an army of dark wizards to wage war, while
Dumbledore (Jude Law) sends Newt (Eddie Redmayne) and a small army of
good wizards to stop him. I spent the first half of the movie
completely lost not knowing what was going on, but at the half way mark
I realized it wasn't my fault because it wasn't until the half way mark
when they *finally* had an exposition scene that explained what was
happening and why. Nevertheless, I liked this one a lot.
Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (4K disc) 2022 prequel /
sequel and the last in the Fantastic Beast franchise. Grindlewald (now
played by Mads Mikkelsen) is still free and thanks to a bit of
corruption and legal maneuvering, he has been forgiven for his crimes
and is a political candidate to run the German magical world. Once
again Dumbledore sends his small army lead by Newt to stop him. And
once again the plot is intentionally incomprehensible, even more so than
the last one. They actually admit to it up front at the start of the
movie when Dumbledore says Grindlewald will be using magic to see into
the future, therefore to prevent Grindlewald from getting accurate
future readings no one on team Dumbledore will know what they are doing
or why they are doing it. Then they split up and have their own mini adventures. To paraphrase one of the characters when they ask how will
they know if this strategy is working or not, the response, if you're
still alive tomorrow it worked.
The Copenhagen Test (Peacock) - I watched episodes 2 and I think maybe 3.
Law & Order - "Dream On" - I already forgot what happened. LOL. It was mostly background noise anyway.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy (Paramount+) - "Kids These Days" - Pilot
episode for this "Discovery" Spinoff. Set about 1000 years from "TOS" timeline the Federation was fractured after an interstellar accident
destroyed most warp capable ships. This was dealt with in the last
season of "Discovery." This new series focuses on a newly established Starfleet Academy back on Earth. Although the academy itself is a
starship that can leave Earth. The pilot episode introduces the new
cast. Holly Hunter stars as the captain of the ship and chancellor of
the Academy. But the main focus seems to be a young man whose mother
was arrested by Starfleet and sentenced to prison by Hunter. The boy
escaped before he could be shipped off to a Starfleet orphanage, he
spent his youth on the run and committing petty crimes while trying to
find his mother. Hunter felt guilty about this and recruited him to
enroll in the Academy. Or coerced him would be more accurate. I won't
go through all the cast but one of the highlights was Robert Picardo
returning as the Doctor, making his character about 900 years old. The
first adventure for the cadets features Paul Giamatti as a scenery
chewing space pirate who has a connection to both Hunter and the new cadet.
"Beta Test" - Episode 2 is set on Earth and has the Federation trying to
get Betazed to rejoin. The newly elected Betazed President comes to
Earth with a delegation of young people so the Federation decides to use
their young cadets as a way to relate. Overall even though there was no
space action or battles, this was a pretty good episode that continues
to establish the characters. I'm not sure if this is a plot hole or
there's more to the story, but they seemed to have retconned Betazoids
from being telepaths to empaths. But there are ways around this since
those details only came from humans who may not have known otherwise or
could have been using the term interchangeably. Still, as portrayed on
screen it felt very much like a retcon which removed their telepathic abilities.
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