Rewatching is Always Better

As much as I love a certain type of creepy TV show (speculative genres, distinctive ensemble casts, horror drawn from atmosphere/inference, moral questions without tidy solutions and preferably a strong spiritual undercurrent), in general I find them fairly hard going first time through. My all-time favorite speculative show, Angel, gets better on every rewatch but the first time through I thought it was making questionable storytelling decisions by season 3, insulting the audience in 4 and turning downright nihilistic in 5. I wasn't exactly a fan. Having watched it twice since then, I now believe that season 4 is the best season, with 5 in second place, and that is squarely from accepting the plot as it was. This is no easy feat on first viewing because the tendency to want things to go a certain way overshadows what's actually going on.

Looking back over all my favorite speculative shows, this pattern crops up multiple times. I watched the last four American Gothic episodes in one sitting just to make the pain stop and I considered the Ahriman plot a grotesque betrayal of Highlander (nowadays I mostly think it was a good concept mishandled). It took me twice to get through Dollhouse and three tries to get through Jeremiah (though that partly stemmed from a related phenomena wherein I refuse to form attachments or get invested in cancelled shows because I assume they will resolve nothing I cared about; this kept me from bonding with Firefly first go round, and certainly affected Jeremiah).

So this brings me around to 12 Monkeys, which I started watching a couple months back and found quite brilliant in construction and more or less the perfect time travel story.( Read more... )