Idiot Boxing: Castlevania, season 1 (2017); Game of Thrones, season 7 (2017)

Classic series protagonist, Trevor Belmont. We initially meet
Trevor while he's drunk in a bar, getting into a scuffle with
local morons over his family's misunderstood history as
monster-slayers.

Castlevania, season 1 (2017)

So this was the Netflix equivalent of an impulse buy of a package of Reese's Peanut Butter cups while waiting in line at the drugstore. I'm not a massive devotee of either anime or the Castlevania video game series, but both offered me more than a little entertainment in my younger days. So when I saw that Netflix had a tidy little four-episode series, I decided to give it a shot. To my surprise, it was good.

I wouldn't have been so surprised had I realized that the show was written by Warren Ellis, the wonderfully creative author of varieties of mature comic books since the early 1990s. In Castlevania, he imbues his dark wit into the deep mythology of the video game series to give us an incredibly violent and often pretty funny story pitting the forces of good against those of the arch-nemesis of the entire series, Vlad Tepec "The Impaler," also known as Dracula. The tale kicks off in a different fashion, as a young aspiring scholar approaches Dracula's castle seeking scientific knowledge that will allow her to become a healer to her village. Not only does the Count agree, being impressed by this woman's courage, but he eventually marries her and lives with her in as human a way as possible. A few years later, however, while Vlad is away on a journey, his wife is labeled a witch by the local clergy and burned at the stake. When Vlad finds out, he is none too pleased and promises to unleash his hordes of dark creatures upon the land. When this inevitably happens, the drunken former vampire-hunter Trevor Belmont is forced to shake himself out of an inebriated haze and get to work rediscovering his purpose as one of humankind's last defenses against the forces of evil.

One of the attacking demons confronts The Bishop - a zealot
whose black-and-white approach to good and evil makes
things worse. These initial episodes are a bit heavy on the
religious commentary, but I didn't mind it much at all.

This short little series serves mostly as an introduction to what promises to be a longer series of tales. In that sense, the resolution can be somewhat unsatisfying, as it merely sets up the larger confrontations promised in these initial episodes. There is also an odd arrhythmia to the pacing, which will shift from some rousing fight scenes to some overly long and wordy exchanges or even extended action sequences that are animated well but add little to the story. This latter aspect is rather strange for a season that has only four twenty-five minute episodes to it.

Still, the good outweighs the bad. The story, characters, and dialogue are quite strong. Ellis clearly wrote this for mature viewers, as he treats the Catholic church as an anti-science, anti-progressive force, and has certain characters allude to the deeper war of philosophies surrounding good and evil. The show is also quite literally violent as hell. There is more than a little imagery that is quite graphic, making this a show that I do not recommend letting your 10-year old nephew or niece watch - I don't care how much they like playing the video games. Fortunately, there is also some legitimately funny humor, thanks in no small part to a lack of language restriction. Ellis doesn't go crazy with blue language, but he uses it effectively when it punctuates a funny line here and there.

It's nice to come across a fun little show like this, which offers some fantasy/horror fun while not insulting an older viewers' intelligence. It created a the feeling like I was watching a savvy, respectful update of the classic 1985 anime Vampire Hunter D. I'm on board for upcoming seasons, especially if Ellis is penning them.

One of these "Stark" kids ain't a Stark - just one of several
long-running questions that is finally answered during this
season. 

Game of Thrones, season 7 (2017) [Spoiler-Free]

These show runners are quite simply not messing around. With this abbreviated, penultimate season of one of the most popular shows in recent TV history, we get plenty of the fireworks that have been teased and implied for the last several seasons.

The previous season ended with more than a few literal and figurative bangs. Jon is in the north, forming and leading alliances to help fend off the encroaching, undead White Walkers. Cersei has blown up all rivals in King's Landing and is ready to go on a revenge tour to end all revenge tours. Daenerys is finally on her way across the Narrow Sea with her army of Dothraki horsemen, Unsullied, and her three fully-grown dragons. It looked like we were finally heading towards the convergence of all of the most powerful figures who have emerged victorious through all of the bloody battles and secretive back-stabbings. And converge, things have.

This season had already been announced as the penultimate season of this insanely popular series. And it is abundantly clear that the show runners are steering all of the show's many moving parts towards the inevitable final clashes and ultimate conclusion in its final season. No longer are we seeing long, slow journeys across the plains of Westeros or Essos. And seemingly long gone are the more relaxed heart-to-heart conversations between various characters, both great and small. No, with this season, it is very much about trimming away any fat and getting to the business of putting Daenerys's army and dragons in position to square off against the Night King and his massive force of White Walkers. Many long-awaited reunions take place; many long-standing grudges are settled with extreme prejudice; and more than a few tertiary and secondary players in "The Game" are taken off the board, permanently.

One could raise the complaint that the storytelling rhythm picks up to an overly brisk pace, but I was never much bothered by the pace, per se. Yes, the questions about "fast travel" are legitimate, with characters appearing in far-off locales in the blink of a quick cut, but this was hardly any kind of deal-breaker for me. The only thing that irked me is that several potentially intriguing characters and plotlines have been completely jettisoned (usually in the form of a good slaying) in the name of streamlining the greater tale. Honestly, though, a show that had teased audiences for six seasons about the great showdowns needed to finally get to it. Fans of television shows have seen far too many great premises devolve into unfocused, bloated messes with too many characters, too many dangling plotlines, and a frustrating lack of focus on a primary story. Game of Thrones seems to trying to avoid all of that and get back to the relative simplicity of the very first season - Starks, Lannisters, Targaryens, and those zombies north of The Wall. At the end of this seventh season, all lesser characters and concerns have fallen in line with one of those four primary players, or they've been put six feet under ground.

Lena Headey wears the proverbial black hat of a villain as
well as any actor ever has. In this season, she starts picking
many of the bones that have accumulated around her.

I suppose it is worthwhile to address the celebrity cameos that so many people have griped about. I have to say that, on principal, I don't like the idea of using non-actor celebrities on shows, especially escapist fantasies like Game of Thrones. There's just too great a chance of it breaking the spell of suspending disbelief when I see a famous person whom I know and start thinking, "Oh hey! That's so-and-so!" The show did actually have quite a number of them this season, but I must say that most of them were extremely stealthy. The most controversial was only so because it was also the most in-your-face - the instantly-infamous Ed Sheeran appearance. Honestly, I didn't know what the singer/songwriter looked like, so it didn't bother me one whit when I watched the episode. Once I heard about it, though, I was bothered by how obvious it was. That aside, one would be hard-pressed to locate and identify the several other celebs who appear for a few brief moments here and there during the season. Hopefully the show runners learned a bit of a lesson here, and season eight doesn't give us LeBron James throwing a boulder down through a hoop and onto an enemy's head.

It now appears that we fans have quite a wait on our hands, with early reports suggesting that the eighth and final season may not appear until early 2019. For some, this may seem like an eternity. For those of us who have been longtime fans of the source novels, though, waiting a little under two years is child's play. We waited from 2001 to 2005 for the fourth book to be published, and and then until 2011 for the fifth book. It's now been over six years and still no solid word on when the next installment might arrive. Waiting is, for us, a part of the long-term "GoT" experience. But from the way that the seventh season of the show went, the relatively short two-year wait will have a solid payoff.