Welp, The Morning Show season two finale was a messy disappointment much like the rest of the season. I think Linda Holmes’ recap at NPR really nailed why a season that seemed full of promise never hit the mark, mostly because it couldn’t quite figure out what it wanted to be. The latest season of Succession has yet to steer me wrong, however(and we learned this week that there is a fun Verge-related Succession backstory).
This week’s round up is heavy on the sci-fi, which was unplanned but makes for some nice symmetry.
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The Expanse
The sixth and final season of the sci-fi drama is on the horizon, and is a disappointingly short six episodes. It has a lot of work to do and from the looks of the trailer, wastes no time getting down to business, and the episodes must be jam packed judging by the official synopsis: “Holden and the crew of the Rocinante fight alongside the Combined Fleet of Earth and Mars to protect the Inner Planets from Marco Inaros and his Free Navy’s campaign of death and destruction. Meanwhile, on a distant planet beyond the Rings, a new power rises.” Oooh. The Expanse returns to Amazon Prime Video December 10th, with new episodes weekly.
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Ozark
I’m admittedly about a season behind on the Byrde family saga, so will need to catch up before season 4 drops. This full trailer runs in reverse, from a terrible car crash, back through highlights (lowlights?) of all three seasons of Ozark to the show’s beginning. “Human beings make decisions, they commit acts, and that makes things happen. It creates a snowball effect, causes other people to make decisions. The cycle continues and the snowball keeps rolling,” Marty Byrde tells us in a voiceover. Uplifting as ever, this show. The words “no ending is reached by accident” appear over scenes of explosions, shootings, and all manner of violence, until it closes on the Byrde family driving along in their minivan looking happy. Ha we know that can’t last. Ozark season 4 comes to Netflix on January 22nd, 2022.
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Encounter
Riz Ahmed is a “decorated Marine [who] goes on a rescue mission to save his two young sons from an unhuman threat,” according to the official synopsis. There is something weird swimming around in the one dude’s eyeball that makes Ahmed’s character freak out, there are bugs crawling and flying around everywhere that make him freak out, and all clues point to some kind of alien invasion (probably). Octavia Spencer stars along with Ahmed, Lucian-River Chauhan, and Aditya Geddada in Encounter, which comes to theaters December 3rd and Amazon Prime Video on December 10th.
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Nightmare Alley
We got a teaser for this latest Guillermo del Toro movie in September, but get a fuller look at Bradley Cooper’s mysterious and somewhat menacing carny who can apparently read minds (or believes he can) under the right circumstances. Based on the 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley stars Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, Richard Jenkins, Rooney Mara, Ron Perlman, and David Straithairn, and comes to theaters December 17th.
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Don’t Look Up
This star-studded sci-fi dark comedy (it’s a thing) features Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence as two relatively unknown astronomers who discover a planet-killing comet is headed toward Earth, but get blown off by everyone they try to warn— the president (Meryl Streep), her adviser (Jonah Hill), morning show hosts (Tyler Perry and Cate Blanchett), and pretty much everyone else. Timothee Chalamet, Ariana Grande, Rob Morgan, Ron Perlman, and Mark Rylance also star in Don’t Look Up, which comes to Netflix on December 24th after a limited run in theaters.
