Cobra Kai

When we got Netflix, I was pleasantly surprised to find "Cobra Kai" available on the service. This was a show I'd seen some trailers for and being intrigued by, but never expected to get to watch. I therefore raced through the first two seasons, and was not disappointed.

Unfortunately, as time went on the show became more and more convoluted, always trying to top the last twist, and if I'm honest it was all the weaker for that. By the end of the fifth season, my distinct feeling was that it had gone on too long. (That said, the structure they had meant that it couldn't have stopped - every season except the first and maybe the fifth ended in such a manner that you had to know what happened next.)

I've recently finished the sixth and final season. And I'm afraid in many ways it's like the lackluster final season of "Babylon 5" - they've ended up with not quite enough story stretched across too many episodes.

And yet, and yet...

The final season of "Bablyon 5" has five final episodes that are nothing short of outstanding, providing a great and massively cathartic ending for the season - they wrapped everything up in the neatest of possible bows. It is truly one of the great endings in TV history.

And "Cobra Kai" is another, because it also has a final five episodes that twist and turn, and yet somehow manage to bring everything together into an ending that on one hand seems to come out of nowhere... and on the other is obviously how it had to end. The finale, in particular, manages to sum up everything that the show was about.

So... "Cobra Kai": starts great, loses steam a bit, but the ending is great.

One Week Only

Since the start of the year, my commute to and from work has just been awful - it has seemed that every single road has had roadworks on it, with the inevitably lengthy delays. Though I did find one that didn't just after Storm Eowyn - largely by virtue of the roadwork-infested route I would have usually taken being completely closed.

Anyway, last Friday was a banner day, because finally, finally all the key roads on my main route to work were blessedly free of roadworks. Oh the joy of being able to travel to and from work in a less than hellish manner!

Spin forward to today, a scant four commutes later, and the roadworks are back. Because of course they are.

Free Time

I've recently been finding that free time has been at a serious shortage, and free time with access to a computer even more so. I'm hoping to get caught back up on the blog in the next couple of days, but I guess we'll see - this was probably about the point I started to lose track last year, so it's not impossible that the same is about to happen again.

Cassandra

My latest TV show has been "Cassandra", a six-part German miniseries on Netflix about a murderous AI/smart home.

Unfortunately, it's not great. The title is very clever, but other than that I'm afraid it's basically a standard "AI gone wrong" sequence of cliches one after another. The final episode in particular, and all the twists therein, were things that I'd seen many times before.

Which is a shame. The trailers looked really good, and some aspects of it were genuinely well-made and sometimes quite disturbing. But, alas, the rest of it didn't live up to the promise.