Amazon Prime

Back to the 60’s One More Time

Amazon Prime Video finally let us know when the 5th, and final season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel will premire, April 14th,. So, as we have done in the past I thought we should go back and start from the beginning and watch seasons 1, 2, 3 & 4 in preparation for watching season five. Donna opted out of the rewatch, but I’ve gone ahead and started watching them.

I started five days ago with the very first episode, Since then I’ve finished up to the second episode of the third season, or 20 of the 34 episodes made so far. At the rate I’m going I might have enough time before the 14th, to go back and watch all the episodes over again. I won’t, but I could.

I wonder in what form it will get released in? The first three seasons were dumped all at once, season 4 was released two at a time on Fridays. Seasons 1, 3 & 4 had eight episodes and season 2 had 10. Right now IMDB shows that the fifth season will have 9 episodes, so two shows every Friday really wouldn’t unless the final show is a two hour episode.

Brian Buys A Space Heater

Because I am fond of being warm, and Donna not as much, I like a nice little space heater for when I’m in the “computer room” watching YouTube or writing these sparkling blog posts. A couple of years ago I replaced a heater because it has gotten too noisy. Admittingly the fan is the biggest contributor noise, but I am also fond of feeling the direct heat, so I searched for the quietest room-sized space heater. I ended up with a Lasko 5307 for around $50 and it was noticeably quiet.

Fast forward to today and that quiet heater is no longer nearly as quiet. When it is first turned on it is fine, but after about 10 minutes the sound is quite louder. When that happens I can hear it running even in my over-the-ear headphones. Squeezing or pressing down on the heater will reduce the noise, but that leaves no hands for typing or mousing. I tried adding a foam cushion on the bottom, but that really didn’t help any. I couldn’t stand the noise any longer, so it was time to buy a new one.

Once again I searched for quietest room-sized space heater. The first hit on google was a Consumer Reports article from 5 months ago. Tied at the top was a Vornado VH10 for $90 and that very same $50 Lasko 5307 that I’m trying to replace! Let’s just try that next Google result shall we. The next two hits were called LearnMetrics and Zen Soundproof where the heaters were all over $100 or had no fans.

Google result #4 was you guessed it – Amazon. Even with my search term of quiet spacer heater the total result number was so high that the counter at the top of the results just gave up and said 1-48 of over 1,000 results. I started narrowing the results, must be Prime, higher than 4 stars, coverage size, wattage, his brought it down to 6 to choose from (photo on left.) The prices ranged from $19 to $42. What was entertaining about this is that last item, Eggbert Hopperton Figurine. How did that get in there?

Unwinding my search filters so as to give me more than six to choose from I found a happy medium and started looking at looking a few of the results. One that looked promising was a small Lasko model, but because of my now soured relationship with that brand I hesitated pulling the trigger. While scrolling down on this page I found the Amazon “Compare with similar items” section and there was an Amazon Basics model for around the same price, so I thought, “Okay, how bad can it be?” It looks amazingly similar to the Lasko, so much so that it was probably made by them and just rebranded. Oh well, it will definitely put out more heat than the Eggbert Hopperton figurine, so I ordered the Amazon one.

The Consultant

With apologies to the Addams Family:

He’s creepy and he’s kooky
Mysterious and spooky
He’s all together ooky
The Consultant

Usually I know what is coming up on Amazon Prime, but I didn’t know about this show at all. When poking around on Saturday for something to watch one of the banners for was something called “The Consultant.” I went to its Amazon page and saw just 8 episodes clocking in around 30 minutes each. Intrigued I went to its IMDB page to see what kind of rating it had. It was only a 6.6 out of 10, but I could spare 30 minute for episode one. The next time I looked up I had finished episode six!

It was getting late and I didn’t have time to finish the last two episodes, so I watched them today. In the last episode they basically teed up for a season two. While I certainly enjoyed watching the show and I don’t regret spending roughly 4 hours watching it, I probably won’t watch another season of it.

No Plan B

I know back in February that I said that Better Off Dead, might be my last Jack Reacher book, but it wasn’t.

After buying a couple of new sweatshirts with my self gifted Christmas bonus I still had a wee bit of money leftover. I thought maybe I would get our local bookstore to order for me the latest Jack Reacher book, No Plan B. That way I could pick it up on our every four week visit that coincides with our haircut. The next of which was on the calendar for the 29th.

Donna said go ahead and get it from Amazon, so you could have it for Christmas. So, on the 18th I placed an order. At checkout my estimated delivery date was listed as the 28th, so much for that expedited Prime delivery. In the end they did get it to me earlier than that and even earlier than Christmas to boot, the book arrived on Christmas Eve.

The first few books every story was more or less direct, as if you were walking in Reacher’s shoes, but as the series progressed the stories would occasionally give the point of view of the villain in the story, but still it was very Reacher centric. This last novel written with his real life brother, who will eventually take over by himself, was with four different points of view. Of course Reacher was the center point and there was also the main bad guy, a CEO of a for profit prison that was up to no good. That really was enough, but we also got a thread about a father out for revenge because of his sons death. There was also stuffed into the narrative, the story the story of a teenager boy who is running away from home. Both of these last two story lines were left until the end to fit into the main story and done in such a way that seemed jarring to me. And while both of them were, in some way, used to further the plot along, in the end they both were wrapped in about a paragraph each and they really weren’t really needed.

So, this time I mean it, No Plan B was the last Reacher book I’m going to buy. I’ve got digital copies of the first two dozen books and I’ll probably go back and read each one as they get adapted for the Amazon Prime TV series.

Reacher: Season 2

The first season of Reacher was based on the first book of the series, Killing Floor, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I liked it so much that when I ran out of interesting stuff on Amazon Prime a few days ago, I rewatched it.

Not long after Amazon released Reacher this last February they announced that a second season had been approved. I figured maybe I should reread the second book, Die Trying, in preparation for a hopefully February release of season two on Amazon. Because I have read most of the Reacher books multiple times as soon as I read the first couple pages I knew the basic outline of what happens.

Book #2 starts with a kidnapping that Reacher inadvertently stumbles into and gets swept up along with the kidnappee. Then there is a cross-country trip in the back of a truck along with the victim who turns out is an FBI agent and daughter of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and goddaughter of the President. So far so good, but then it devolves into a Montana militia group declaring independence and stolen nuclear missiles and the US military, etc. I’m thinking that this would be hard to translate into a 8 episode series. Turns out I need not have worried.

I went looking online to see if their were hints as to when the second season would be coming out, February again maybe, and discovered that the second series was based on the eleventh book, Bad Luck and Trouble. Off to the book and after reading the first page I thought, “Ooh, this is a good one.” It also, to me anyway, seems a lot easier to adapt to the small screen.

And maybe they knew this was what they were going next because one of the things I wondered about in season one when they introduced a character that really doesn’t show until book six, Frances Neagley. She was his sergeant back when Reacher was in the Army and part of his command of the 110th MP Special Investigation Unit. Bad Luck and Trouble is about getting the old gang of the 110th back together to find out what happened to one of their members present day. Neagley’s early entry into the series in season one brought a bit of foreshadowing to season two when she uses the phrase, ‘You do not mess with the Special Investigators’ which is a central to the plot of the eleventh book (and perhaps the first time it is used in the books.)

Marvelous

After I finished up watching all of Reacher on Amazon Prime, I was wondering what series I should watch next, a couple days ago I found out, we are getting a fourth season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. The first three seasons came out in 2017, 2018 & 2019 and I had completely forgotten about the show, a show that both Donna and I thoroughly enjoyed.

So, in preparation for the fourth season that starts on the 18th of February, we are rewatching the first 3 seasons again. Right now we are just past the halfway point of the first 26 episodes. In a show about a stand-up comedian the stand-up is not as funny as the fake audiences make it sound, but the cast, the writing and the overall look and feel of the show keeps us coming back.

Remember about a week ago I wrote that I sort of wished that Reacher wasn’t dropped all at once, but doled out a show a week like the sixth season of The Expanse was? Well, Amazon heard me, sort of, if the IMDB page for the fourth season is accurate, the six episodes will be released two at a time on four consecutive Fridays.

17 miles of running to the Running Y.
Times Miata Driven since 01/01/22: 8

 

That Was Fun

So I watched the first episode of Reacher on Thursday. On Friday I watched five in two shifts and on Saturday I finished the last two. Now, I’m almost sorry Amazon didn’t do to Reacher what they did for the sixth season of The Expanse because I have no will power.

For The Expanse‘s first 5 seasons the episodes were dropped all at once, but for the 6th, they released one episode each week, kind of like old school TV. So, because of that lack of will power, I have churned through all 6-1/2 hours of Reacher and now I will have to wait another year or so for more, that is, if they do decide to make more.

Anyway, I enjoyed the series and if you like that sort of tough guy takes on the world with lots of fighting, shooting, blowing things up sort of thing, you should watch it. If you have read the books, the plot of the first book is almost all there and for the most part follows right along with the novel. Almost all of the changes, except for maybe a couple of head scratchers for me anyway, are there for TV purposes, like too expensive to film or nearly impossible to recreate.

Because this was more or less an origin story for our hero, they did give us some flashbacks, that came from a short story called Second Son, to sort of explain Reacher to folks who may not be book readers. And because this is 2022 and the book was written in 1997, some of the supporting characters get some different beats to make it feel up to date. They also introduce a reoccurring character from several other Reacher books, but is not in the Killing Floor that this based is on. But that is fine and probably was done as a carrot for the actor, so she knows that there is more work coming her way.

As with the Tom Cruise movies, and I was unaware of this because of my steadfast refusal to watch them, the author Lee Child has a cameo in the show in the very last episode: