What is a good review for a newcomer to watch?

[Robovski]

I would suggest starting with a familiar franchise so you can gauge how Chuck is reacting vs your feelings. If you are entertained, then I would spread into other areas of interest.

[GreyICE]

Hmmm, you know you're in for a wild ride when you hit things like this:

Sometimes that’s true. For instance, World War I is well known as a conflict where everyone involved wanted to expand their empires.* However, World War II had a clear aggressor that committed terrible atrocities. Any story that suggests the Nazis had a point, the Allies should have felt guilty about fighting back, or that Hitler was a sympathetic figure is committing a grievous moral error. Thankfully, I haven’t seen any well known story do this with World War II, but similar errors are regularly committed with other conflicts.

So you've never heard of a book by Joseph Heller named Catch 22 that painted World War 2 in a more morally grey light, and suggested that the people suffering were the soldiers and civilians while the industry and bankers backing the war grew rich?

We're going to be in for a self-righteous screed that cherry picks to make it's points. And not a particularly well educated one.

This is clearly what happened in the first season of Star Trek: Discovery. The showrunner told the media that the Klingons would be a complex and nuanced people, but in the show, they attack the Federation without provocation, torture their prisoners, and even eat their fallen enemies. Unsurprisingly, Captain Lorca wants to develop new weapons to fight the Klingons off. Even though the Federation is merely defending itself, and losing, the show depicts weapon development like it’s unethical.

Okay, lets pick some parallels. A piece of shit country, say, Libya attacks us. They capture some Americans, torture them, hell, even eat them. Can we nuke 'em? I mean they're the aggressors, we have nukes, lets have some fun with weapons development. Pick a few cities, glass them, show them what they're messing with. We can glass their army bases, glass their president's mansion, whatever we feel like gone in nuclear fire.

Oh, oh wait, using weapons in the real world is morally grey? It's not as simple as "all weapons are good if you're not the aggressor"? Yeah, maybe that's the case.

A similarly twisted black-and-white conflict appears in The Orville episode Krill, named after an antagonistic species. In the episode, two protagonists sneak onto a Krill ship, and they discover the ship is about to deploy a weapon that will annihilate an entire colony. Since the protagonists are greatly outnumbered on the ship, their only option for stopping deployment is to change the environmental systems in a way that will kill all the Krill aboard. However, the protagonists take special pains to make sure the children on the ship are not harmed, which is not easy given their situation.

As the episode resolves, the lone surviving adult Krill acts as though the protagonists are the real aggressors. The scene is framed as though she has a point; she even gets the last lines of the episode. But this viewpoint is ridiculous. If you send a vessel to attack a colony, the destruction of that vessel is a reasonable response. If the creator of The Orville actually wanted a moral dilemma, all he had to do was give his characters an option for saving more Krill that was much riskier. Instead he gave his characters only one option and then pretended they did something wrong.

No Seth McFarlane didn't. I love that episode, because it makes a very good point. The Krill were wrong. The Krill were incredibly, incredibly wrong. And killing all of them was the only moral choice, and the crew going out of their way to save the Krill children was going above and beyond to do the right thing.

The point of the Krill getting the last word was twofold:

1) Doing the right thing shouldn't be done for reward. Too often in TNG the Enterprise would "do the right thing" and then the bad guys see the light and respect them. Here it's clear - they did the right thing, they did the right thing in saving the kids and their reward is... nothing. The Krill don't change, the war won't end. Is it still the right thing to do if you're not rewarded?

2) Everyone feels they're justified in a war. You just slaughtered a ship full of Krill soldiers and Krill families in the most horrible way possible. Do you think saving the kids will endear you to the Krill? Or do you think this is one more example of the atrocities of the "outside world" and the righteousness of the Krill?

And a third question: how often when you read about dead soldiers do you think of what those soldiers were busy doing when they were killed? War is a grey, grey business. Nature of the beast. Doesn't mean you shouldn't fight them, does mean you should remember that the only thing the war is getting you is dead people. Wars are a tragedy - not because the wrong side is winning, but because it's a fucking war.

I agree on the vampire shit, because way way way too often vampire media just depicts people who are hopeless murderous monsters and say "well they're hot!" as any sort of justification for their actions. One of the things I like about Buffy - all vampires are evil, it's their nature they're soulless demons. If the vampire gets their soul back, then they become moral agents (who are fucking repulsed at what their soulless body was up to). Without a soul, they're just murder machines no matter how hot they are.

Another story that provides justification for oppression is the movie Bright. In it, the Orcs are an oppressed group that are obvious stand-ins for Black people. However, the movie clarifies that, long ago, the Orcs used to work for the forces of evil, and that history is used as a reason to oppress them. In the real world, white supremacists do use narratives to justify oppression, but those narratives are absolutely false.

Oh so if the narratives were true then the white supremacists would actually be justified? The major problem we have with white supremacists is that they are historically inaccurate? Okay then. Imperial Japan. The fucking worst. So nauseatingly bad that the Nazi ambassador to Japan actually tried to lodge protests over their treatment of the Chinese people on the basis of "okay, hold on, what the actual fuck?" The Nazi ambassador thought Imperial Japan was going too far (yes, his worry might have been bad publicity and that they were being too public about this shit - but the shit they were doing was genocide and rape camps). So because I am historically correct about the actions of the Japanese in World War 2, am I justified in being racist against Japanese people today? No? Good. Glad that's settled.

I too remember being a teenager and in my early 20s and angry people couldn't see how what I supported was so evidently right, and how the people fighting it were so evidently wrong.As I've aged, I've learned a lot and one of them is that in any fight, no one stays morally clean from start to finish. Doesn't mean it's not worth fighting. Not that at all. Just hands will get dirty. If you think you're "morally perfect" you're immature. And if you're waiting for a morally perfect side to come along before they earn your support, you'll either be waiting a long time, or have to close your eyes quite a bit to think that you've found one.

[rickgriffin]

Hmmm...

Hey I THINK you might have misposted this here from the Questionable Morality thread in Science Fiction

[CrashGordon94]

My general suggestion is that since Chuck has such a large and varied catalogue, to single out whatever the friend is a fan of that he's reviewed. Then again that might backfire a bit potentially - anecdotally speaking, I mentioned SF Debris to a friend curious about who I was bingeing on and the review he "spotted" was Beast Wars, he ended up a little disappointed that there wasn't more there.
Essentially this method could lead them to some random requested one-off, which certainly aren't BAD but might not be as "juicy", and Chuck's away from his "home turf" as it were.

A more refined one would be if they're into any series he's covered extensively (every Star Trek, Doctor Who, Stargate, Avatar: The Last Airbender, etc.), to point them towards his reviews on that.

I do have perhaps some more specific suggestions but I'll admit bias in that I tend to like negative reviews a little more than positive in general (I will say that's less so with SF Debris, I'd honestly say one of Chuck's strengths is doing better/more entertaining positive reviews than many out there), you might see some of this seep in to the following suggestions.

If they know/care enough to want to watch reviews of it, then I'd suggest the classic: Voyager, starting from the beginning with Caretaker.

• It's the genesis of the style and also the source of many running gags.
• It has some of his best stuff, both in pure entertaining snark and analysis.
• He's covered it quite thoroughly, there should be plenty there.

And I think Caretaker is a solid enough starting point since (in a curious parallel to the episode itself), he pretty well sets up what he's going to do (including introducing his style and some running gags) and it's a solid review in its own right. While going in episode order will have in-jokes and references that cut in and out since the reviewers weren't made and released in that order, it's nothing too severe that a newbie wold be completely lost.

If Voyager isn't suitable but Enterprise is, that can work similarly for similar reasons.

Aside from that, solid standalone film reviews I'd suggest would be Battlefield Earth and Howard The Duck, fun and insightful snark at the expensive of something the new viewer isn't likely to be offended on behalf of.

Don't know what you guys might think about these suggestions?

[drewder]

I would go with enter Macbeth from gargoyles or the my little pony holiday specials.

[Aotrs Commander]

I was introduced by a friend of mine and started on the Voyager review of Threshold, since there's no place like starting at a hilarious good ol' look at the worst of the worst...!