My Favorite Shows of 2020

I had a lot of time on my hands in 2020, for whatever reason. Maybe you did too! Perhaps you can explain it to me. In any case, I decided to close out the year by summarizing every TV show I watched. I've never been a fan of bingeing a show, I get bored of seeing the same thing over and over and feel it detracts from my enjoyment, so I got into the habit of putting a few things on while I make dinner, running through multiple shows at a time. At the very least it helps me get through some bad shows I want to watch for stupid reasons. I felt pretty confident when I started that this would be an interesting challenge, completely underestimating how much being stuck inside without being able to see my friends for nine months had messed up my mental state, until I fell into a full-on depressive episode over a children's cartoon.

Hey, it was a good show, sue me.

Anyway, transcribed below is that list, as originally sent around to friends and family. Each year I've done this since, I've always forgotten one show I watched; this time it was Castlevania. I may make jokes that are intended for friends to respond to, for which I do not apologize, I am very funny, you just don't get it.

50. Transformers: War for Cybertron

Peter Cullen told me not to watch this one. Granted, that was because they had cast a non-union actor to imitate him as Optimus Prime instead of just hiring him, but I still should have listened. While my typical stance is that American-made (North American—Beast Wars was produced by a company based in Canada after all) Transformers shows are superior to Japanese ones, this one breaks that trend. Super serious and dour, completely lacking in any of the character or fun or excitement of a good Transformers series, replacing it with relentless Grimdark posturing, a teenager’s idea of what adult media is like. Seriously, take a drink every time someone laments “this. war.”, you will die of alcohol poisoning. Heck, even the previous Machinima-made Transformers series, Power of the Primes, is better than this dreck. A complete waste of time for everyone involved.

49. Dancouga, Super Beast Machine God

After a promising premier episode with beautiful animation of Earth’s defenses just getting wrecked by aliens, this show slid into mediocrity almost immediately and luxuriated in it for the entire run. (When I posted this for friends, I had a bunch of pictures of series villain Shapiro Kets being extra, but I stole all those from the internet so I don't feel right posting them here, even though I could just go screencap the show myself)

48. Agents of SHIELD, final season:

I had a half-formed idea of how I would address the end of a show I went into with such high hopes after the success of the first Avengers movie and came out of without any sort of attachment to any character in it at all (some of the actors were good though), but then Penny Arcade made this comic, which I think sums up my relationship with this show rather succinctly: (likewise, I don't feel comfortable linking Penny Arcade since Tycho and Gabe don't know I exist; it's the 12/21/20 comic about Cyberpunk, if you want to know how I feel about Agents of SHIELD)

47. Digimon Xros Wars (Pronounced “Cross”)

When COVID first hit and all the anime went on hiatus, it delayed my plans to watch the new remake of the original Digimon show. So, I decided to watch the two Digimon shows I hadn’t seen while I waiting, starting with this one, the sixth Digimon show: Digimon Xros Wars. Well, I’m glad I did because some of the Digimon in this show are in the Digimon Adventure remake. And…that’s it, that’s the only reason I’m glad, this show is trash. I don’t remember seasons 4 and 5 enough to say which was the worst Digimon show, but I will say those at least did something original. This show is a soulless rehash of Digimon plots past, taking the best parts of Digimon Adventure 1 and 2, and Digimon Tamers, and draining them of all the soul and character that made those shows stand out over Pokémon back in the day. I have no illusions about it, Digimon was always about selling toys, but the best way to sell a toy to a kid is to make them care about that toy as a person, and the original Digimon was great at creating characters you could become attached to and care about their struggles. This show straight-up writes out main characters because the writers get tired of having them around. It’s got some nice, mecha-style designs for the Digimon (they were clearly selling toys that could combine like a robot show) and Tai, Davis, Takato, and Rika even show up for a cameo at the end, but it’s a slog full of plot points any Digimon fan has seen done better before. Pass.

46. Spider-Woman

Cartoons in the 1970’s were odd beasts. With no budget, little interest, and all sorts of censorship rules they had to follow, they’re mostly a forgettable lot; clearly inferior to the classic cartoons from the 1940’s and ‘50’s still in circulation, mostly Scooby-Doo ripoffs that were quickly overshadowed by the manic, exciting toy commercials that proliferated in the 1980’s due to Reagan’s loosening of regulations for advertising to children. It was during this time, however, that Marvel opened their first animation department. It was also during this time that Filmation considered making a TV show called Spiderwoman, so Stan Lee had the comics department create a character so they could secure the trademark. And so, Spider-Woman was born! And got a TV show! And boy what a mess this show is! Hypothetically, this should be a feminist TV show, as its star is a single woman, Jessica Drew, running her own successful business and saving her male co-stars. Except…the main co-star, Jeff, is a male chauvinist who is constantly talking down Jessica and attempting to show himself as a macho man. While Jeff often falls flat on his ass in his attempts to show off, Jessica often plays into the negative female stereotypes he projects onto her in order to protect her secret identity (of course), and tacitly condones his behavior and often demeaning language (oh and attempts at courtship) as she keeps him around and gives him all the good assignments instead of, you know, firing him and hiring someone who will act like a professional. Of course, it also doesn’t help that there are no other women in the cast—Bechdel test and all that. And on top of everything, the plots are complete nonsense, as in one episode where Spider-Woman battles an invasion of Pyramid aliens (with the help of Spider-Man; he guest starts a few times, with Paul Soles, better known as Hermey the Dentist Elf, reprising his role from the 1960’s cartoon) where they depower the pyramids by building a cube around them, a solution that is never foreshadowed or explained.

45. Challenge of the Gobots

Alright look. Gobots was a show I was always going to watch, that I had long needed to watch, but I was never going to really…like. And I don’t want the people who bought me these DVD sets to feel bad about that! I really appreciate it! I needed this! But look. Being the robot show that was worse than the original Transformers was never a good sign. And I love the original Transformers show! But they didn’t give a crap. At the very least, that show had talented writers and actors; the editors didn’t care and the animators were going so fast no one had time to fix mistakes (and I’m going easy on the Transformers writers because a lot of them still seemed interested in talking about their work later, and what they were trying to do with the themes of their episodes, except Don Glut, Don Glut didn’t give a shit and he’ll tell you so). And Gobots was the cheaper version. 1985 was the nadir of the once-proud Hannah Barbara studios; it would rebound in the 90’s before reconfiguring as the modern Cartoon Network studios, but back then it was just another studio churning out toy tie-ins, and not even the better ones. Most episodes of Gobots have bog-standard plots, hitting the same notes all their contemporaries did in about the same way.

The show does do some interesting things to set it apart from its contemporaries, though. In the original Transformers there was no sense that the Autobots were coordinating with humanity in any way; their relationship with local governments was friendly but tenuous, and they just kind of seemed to be able to go and do as they wanted if need be. The Guardian Gobots, on the other hand, work closely with a worldwide defense agency with a number of highly-trained human characters to help them, as opposed to the Transformer’s collection of oil rig workers and internet dweebs they picked up in various episodes. Gobots also had a much more focused cast than Transformers, which should have been helpful, but they forgot to give any of the Gobots a personality. Heck, Transformers could get more personality from one episode than Leader-1 got for the whole show. And then there’s that bizarre episode where the good guys decide that the solution to the Renegades trying to conquer a planet is to…blow the whole thing up and just immigrate the inhabitants elsewhere.

Yeah they get trapped on the planet and almost blow up their own damn selves. What a bizarre show.

But hey, René Auberjonois is in it.

(I have since read some Don Glut issues of Captain America and they were alright, he cared about those)

44. Eat-Man

The writing on this series is so incompetent it’s mesmerizing. Based on a manga series I’d heard good things about, my understanding is the TV show has almost nothing in common with the comics (there is a second series, Eat-Man ’98, that is apparently closer; I’ll watch that later). Told in a series of one-shot adventures with little to do with one another, it follows the adventures of a mercenary named Bolt Crank who can eat things and summon them later, and by “things” I mean “guns” because that’s all they ever bother to have him do. Most episodes end on some sort of semi-cliffhanger that isn’t followed up on ever. The characters (other than Bolt, no one shows up more than once) are all rather flat, and none of them act in a very believable manner, Bolt especially. At one point he impregnates a clone and it’s never mentioned again? There’s an episode where he dies and lives in a kind of VR limbo with other dead people, but someone brings him back to life? And he comes back to life to finally deal with the series-long mystery of the destroyed airship that never crashes, just hangs in the sky, and by “mystery” I mean we’re introduced to this thing in the first episode, it’s highlighted in the theme song, and it’s central to the plot of the final episode, but for the most part it’s just in the background of episodes with nothing to do with it and the characters don’t comment on it at all. But I just kept coming back to see what new batshittery it was going to throw at me this time. What a bizarre little show.

43. Beast Wars II (pronounced “Second”)

When I was a kid, on the early internet, getting back into Transformers and going on deep dives for new information, the Japanese-exclusive Transformers series seemed so cool and mysterious. You see, the realities of Japanese television meant they couldn’t just take a few months off to run reruns while the new season got ready; Takara would just make more while waiting on Hasbro (due to the weird nature of how Transformers came to be, the IP is owned by two different companies who have divided the world up into territories where they can basically do whatever they want in either, although they do usually work together on the toys). They made three shows after the original Transformers cartoon ended in America, then two more in-between the first and second season of Beast Wars, which were never dubbed into English for America (some were dubbed into English for the English-speaking Pacific…badly) and were considered very mysterious. We would hear about the battle where Blaster and Soundwave killed each other, or see Dai Atlas cut Predaking in half, or hear about this new Beast Wars with a lion leader and a new Starscream, and it all sounded very cool. Well a lot of those shows have been released in America, and I can tell you they aren’t cool. The original Transformers cartoon was no Shakespeare, but there were real attempts by the writers to give the toys at least one character moment, add some comedy to the proceedings, maybe say something about an issue that meant something to them. This was rarely the case with the Japanese series, which tended to have bland characters and repetitive situations. The Headmasters kill Galvatron by doing a cheerleader formation which makes a laser and buries him in the ice. In the ice! Galvatron! His gun can blow up planets and he’s trapped in a glacier.

Beast Wars II was never released on DVD, so I figured I’d finally watch it through…uh, other means. While the original Beast Wars remains a high quality mark in the history of Transformers, full of fully-realized characters, real emotional stakes, and interesting and engaging plot twists, this show made to fill time for Beast Wars to be finished in America (well, Canada) has…none of that. Characters are kind of a collection of speech quirks and jokes: the same jokes, all the time. There isn’t a plot, so much as a premise: the Predacons and Maximals are on planet Gaia to get Angolmois energy. What is that? It’s like, life energy or something. How are they getting it? Mining, I guess. Let’s have a few episodes introducing the characters. Oh some new toys came out? Let’s have the original characters meet them for about four episodes. Yeah they’re mostly nice but one of them is grumpy, and they know some of the bad guys but they’re not close or anything. Oh some new toys came out? Well them they’re…they’re Mexican. They like to party. This lobster says “muchas” a lot. Oh some new toys came out? Well those guys are pirates, actually. This one is a squid and we had another squid already, so she has a crush on him. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

And on and on like that. I’m only about halfway through, but I can guess how it goes. I know who still has to show up. And I didn’t even mention the two characters who live on the moon and comment on the action BUT CAN’T ACTUALLY INTERACT WITH THE MAIN CAST. What a bizarre little footnote in Transformers history. 42. Transformers Rescue Bots Academy

The original Transformers: Rescue Bots was a surprise. It was a Transformers show for babies, skewing even younger than the main Transformers cartoons, no conflict, no war, just…rescuing people. However, they managed to build their own little world, with fun quirky characters and some actual threats (ah, the ancient enmity between Levar Burton’s character and Tim Curry’s character). Rescue Bots Academy is a lower-budget sequel following up on that original, but with half the running time and…none of the character work. Oh sure, there’s some fun stuff here; their take on Whirl is pretty fun (and uh, nothing like the main Transformers series Whirl, who is an emotionally-damaged psychopath, this one is just a very excitable young woman) and Hot Shot is…very Hot Shot. But there just isn’t as much here. I watched every episode and I don’t know if I remember any. It’s just a show, and it’s almost over.

41. The Walking Dead

I’ve been watching this show for ten years and sometimes I forget it exists.

40. Detective Conan

This is comfort TV, a long-running anime procedural constructed so that the actual plot moves at a snail’s pace and most of it is one-or-two-episode mysteries solved in about the same manner: Conan drugs Mori Kogoro and pretends to make him solve the mystery, usually a murder (or Sonoko or the Professor, should Mori not be around). This show has been running since 1996 and Shinichi Kudo is still turned into a little kid, and no further movement was made on fixing that this year (last year there was, but no plot movement this year). There were some nice plots this year; a four-episode story about a man targeting traffic cops was pretty interesting for shifting to focus onto the supporting characters, but for the most part this year’s crop was more of the usual for this series: anyone in Japan, for any reason at all, could just flip out and kill someone at any time.

39. The Flash

The CW superhero shows all kind of blur into one-another. Honestly, I’ve stopped watching most of them, and stopped picking up new ones. Stuck with the Flash though! This season made interesting choices; after several seasons of main fights that just amount to “Flash vs. Evil Flash”, this season went with several villains all working simultaneously. The 2019 half of the season mostly dealt with the villain Bloodwork, but he only had a small part in the 2020 episodes, which mostly dealt with a unique take on the Mirror Master, here a woman trapped in the mirror dimension looking for revenge on her husband who trapped her there and stole her company. She captures several of the Flash’s friends and sends out doppelgangers to work against the Flash and kill her enemies, which leads to interesting scenes of the Flash being, basically, gaslit by a woman he thinks is his wife as the real Iris tries to escape her prison. While this is all going on, Elongated Man finally finds Sue, the heiress he’s been looking for who we assume would be his wife as in the comics, only she has now become a “gentleman thief” trying to get revenge on, coincidentally, the new Mirror Master’s husband. At the end, all this comes together to…nothing. The show had two episodes left to go when production shut down, and after that they fired the Elongated Man’s actor because he was a creep on the internet. Oh well! At least Barry wasn’t a huge asshole this season like usual!

38. Witcher

For a show called “The Witcher”, it sure seemed more concerned with how I felt about Yennifer of Vengerberg, who had most of the character development in the show. Not that I can’t sympathize with Geralt; that old standby of the moral man trying to make his way in a broken world is always a winner, and his well-meaning attempts to help people without having stupid shit happen to him make for great television. I am a little disturbed by the implications of the show’s “Destiny Plot”, that all the bad things in the show happen because Geralt didn’t want to steal the child of two living parents and I certainly hope the ultimate revelation is that destiny is bullshit (not the only show here I hope this about). It’s difficult to say much about this season, as it all seemed to be one big prelude to something else; the climax of the show is Geralt meeting a little girl, and tension is maintained Pulp Fiction-style, by playing the scenes out of order. It’s an intriguing start, I just hope it’s, you know, going somewhere.

37. Archer

Do we really need more Archer? I mean, the last three seasons were pretty weird experiments; doing the same old jokes and situations in different settings, with the meta plot being Archer was in a coma. So, Archer is out of a coma and…everything was better without him. Sure it’s nice to see him finally meet his daughter at the end, and there were some laughs…it certainly wasn’t the worst season…but what’s the point of a whole season about how your main character makes the whole world worse around him? The earlier seasons of Archer at least had some personal growth for the characters, and they did a great job of undoing whatever was left of that this season. I didn’t hate it…I’m just confused.

36. Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

A solid fourth-best Ninja Turtles TV show. Which doesn’t seem that good since that’s…out of five, but five would be next Mutation, which was just really bad so it’s cool. As is the trend lately, they went hard for comedy, to the point of mocking their own series; I guess a lot of action shows are trying to follow in Teen Titans Go!’s footsteps, but no one else seems able to pull off that level of success. Now, I never got into Teen Titans Go!, but I did watch all of this and Thundercats Roar. I think Rise of the TMNT’s problem was they didn’t settle for just making jokes about the Ninja Turtles, they kind of changed the dynamic. Teen Titans Go! Is a crazy world version of the 2003 Teen Titans cartoon, but they’re still recognizable as those characters. Here, Raphael is technically the “leader”, and Leonardo is just a big blowhard who kind of gets everyone in trouble all the time (Ben Schwartz, adding another blue cartoon character to the resumé) which leaves Michelangelo…kind of superfluous. Oh and Donatello is a narcissist now? The second season (this year’s season) did some good building on the first, and improved on some recurring jokes. I do like their friend, the skeleton who runs the pizza place, and his rivalry with his brother, a sack of flesh with no skeleton, that was a cute bit. They also did some good episodes about reforming first-season villain Baron Draxum into becoming a functioning member of society that were kind of cute. But this show is one of those that tries to differentiate itself from the others by saying, “Oh this character is this almost completely different character now” and I can’t help but feel it may have been better to take some time off from the Turtles for a while instead. After all, this started right after the end of the phenomenal CGI TMNT show, which turned out to be one of the best, with real heart and a great take on the turtle’s characters, and really weird ending where it went full Mad Max. It’s hard to compete with that, and I think that’s why the show just kind of abruptly ended this season. There’s supposed to be a Netflix movie, but I think the franchise would benefit from what they did after the original show and after the 4Kids show: take about five years off before trying again, and don’t reinvent the wheel.

35. Samurai Pizza Cats

Another one I’d technically watched when I was a kid but didn’t really remember, this one always stuck in my mind even though I didn’t watch it for long, and I was surprised some years after it went off the air to find it had a weird cult following, so I wanted to experience it again, with clear eyes, in full. And it starts off…rough. The story goes that this low-budget adaptation of a Japanese toy tie-in (that had no toys released in the US) was sent over to Saban for localization WITHOUT SCRIPTS. Left with only the videos to have a translator watch and what the crew who didn’t speak Japanese could figure out, they crafted some zany scripts, using that oh-so-nineties fascination, breaking the fourth wall. (Oh, and the guy who sang the theme song showed up drunk, that’s why he keeps laughing at the lyrics in the recording itself) It’s…a bit too much, at first. But they do hit their stride in the midpoint of the series, helped along by the fact that the original Japanese show appeared to get comfortable with itself around then. No longer needing to introduce new toys or show off their features, they settled into a standard rotation of jokes, and then began to mutate and undercut them. Princess Vi sends everyone she deems an enemy of the state to Prison Island, a horrible death-trap laden jungle torture chamber…on the side facing the city of Little Tokyo. The other side is quite a nice resort; no one ever comes back because they don’t want to leave. They keep finding new ways for Lucille to launch missiles out of her head in ways that it stays funny. And I don’t know who on the dub team thought 1992 was the year to make fun of the Pointer Sisters, but they did. Oh, and the episode where they have a manly-man contest and the Big Cheese shows up dressed like Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star? Hilarious!

But that’s about all it is, just some silly, corny jokes. I enjoyed it, but that sweet spot in the middle didn’t last for long. Just as the dubbers went too hard at the start, the original plots wore out near the end, and the running gags got stale. They even ran out of cute rhymes for Francine to say when she launched the cats out of the gun! It’s a cute show, and I’ll probably pull out my favorite episodes from time to time, but it’s a weird old relic of a strange time to be dubbing anime.

34. Digimon Universe: App Monsters

I remember when I started this show I walked over to Hank and said “Oh no it’s worse than Xros Wars.” Both of them were based around practically the same toy premise: there was a little digital game (as Digimon originally was, of course) where you collected Digimon and combined them. Very little in the early episodes changed my mind, especially as the main character befriended more, uh, let’s say Digidestined: one a young aspiring pop idol (I watched Perfect Blue this year, I do not look kindly on the Japanese pop idol industry, especially not as kindly as this show wants me to) and an annoying YouTuber. They kind of…traipsed around Tokyo, reenacting the plot of the last arc of Xros Wars, collecting Digimon who were supposed to combine into a big Digimon to save the day, yadda yadda.

Except…it got better? The main character was a shy boy who loved Harry Potter books (excuse me, Terry the Wizard) who sees himself as a secondary character in his own life, and learns to value himself and his own worth to other people (oh and also his grandfather was a big important AI researcher who knew Alan Turing personally and was able to live on after death as a Super Mario sprite so, you know, that’s some main character stuff right there). The YouTuber character, we learn, is torn between his love for weird stunt videos on YouTube and his desire to fulfill his family obligations as the heir to a Japanese tea ceremony clan, and his mixed heritage of his Japanese father and his Western (I want to say…British?) mother (who he calls by her first name, in an interesting storytelling choice). And we learn the reason why the pop idol character went into her chosen field, how she was raised by a hard-working single mom and wanted to help her mother out, and looked up to another idol and was inspired by her image, and wants to be someone other people look up to and can bring them out of depression.

Oh and the record company for the pop idol is run by an evil AI that broke off from an AI developed by the main character’s grandfather that’s trying to start the singularity and replace all human consciousness with itself. Yeah, things really ramp up at the end! I definitely wasn’t expecting a Digimon finale to start with fullscreen Turing quotes. I was expecting them to fight a giant World Serpent digital being made flesh in the middle of Tokyo for the fate of individuality, and that happened too. An unexpected surprise; still just another kids toy tie-in anime, but I had more fun with it than expected. A solid Digimon show.

33. Star Trek Discovery Season 2 (and Short Treks)

Like Marvel Comics, people overstate how well the original Star Trek shows meshed together. I can make some sense of the continuity, but really there are just some things that don’t make sense and you can’t get past that. However, actively changing things so past plots don’t make any sense just annoys me. It doesn’t make any sense for people to just…know about Section 31! They were introduced in Deep Space Nine as a clandestine organization, working against Federation Regulations as a black ops team, only known by the highest ranks of Starfleet and completely morally compromised; hated by the frontline Starfleet officers, Sisko and Bashir went to some lengths to defeat them and stand for Starfleets morals, even as they fought together against the Dominion. Even in the J.J. Abrams movies, Section 31 was a secret, only revealed to the public after they were (sigh) destroyed by Khan. To just have Philippa Georgiou show up and be like “Hey what up it’s the Federation Gestapo, you want in, half-Klingon dude?” is JARRING, to say the least. I can accept Spock just not telling anyone that he had an adopted human sister, he didn’t tell Kirk about his actual freaking brother until he was actively attempting to take over the Enterprise in Star Trek V, so sure, whatever. Oh, I don’t know if I can accept that Pike went back to Talos IV without repercussions in between the Cage and the Menagerie, but at this point it’s all par for the course. Whatever interesting things they do on this show, and there are some, is undercut by just mindless mining of the past, trading on people’s memories of good Star Trek episodes to make theirs seem more epic. You know, like J. J. Abrams does.

Which isn’t to say that there aren’t good things about this show. Sonequa Martin-Green was wonderful in the Walking Dead, where she started out as a background nothing character and grew into a very memorable member of the main cast, and then got eaten. Her Star Trek character Michael Burnham, as a principled person who made a poor choice and is trying to recover her reputation, is an interesting choice for a main Trek cast member. It’s just that they want her to be too interesting. Did what I just said sound cool? Well, what if she’s SPOCK’S SECRET ADOPTED SISTER? What if her parent’s MYTERIOUS MURDER was actually a TIME TRAVEL EXPERIMENT and her mom became a TIME TRAVEL MYSTERIOUS ANGEL WHO APPEARS AT OPPORTUNE TIMES in her life (and guess who else gets to wear that outfit and be a time travel angel, can you guess?)? What if her MIRROR UNIVERSE DOPPELGANGER was the ADOPTED DAUGHTER OF THE QUEEN OF THE EARTH EMPIRE? It’s just too much! Slow your roll, Michael Burnham! And hopefully we’ll get a bit of that in season 3 with it being further in the future, but from what I’ve heard, maybe not. (Yeah it’s out but I’m not paying for CBS All Access until they release more Picard, and I’ll do it all at once. Maybe I should get a VPN and convince Netflix I’m in England to watch it on that.)

My favorite part of the series is Doug Jones as Lt. Saru. He feels the most like a classic Star Trek character; an alien with his own ideology, living between his traditions and humanity and trying to reconcile both. He has an interesting plot this season, where he first fears he’s going to die, but then learns that he’s just going through a normal cycle of his people’s life, like puberty: his people, though sentient, are livestock on his planet, and they are culled before they can reach full maturity. Upon learning this, Saru returns to his planet for the first time since he escaped, asking asylum from the Federation, who couldn’t take any others since Saru was the first to make contact with a warp-capable species, and taking any more would be both a violation of the Prime Directive and an act of war. I’ll let you guess the secret of Saru’s people’s maturity—it’s an obvious twist—but his attempt to start a revolution, and the start of his people’s liberation, was a good, emotional, and very STAR TREK story that I’d like to see more of in this series. A high point.

I don’t have much to say about Short Treks except that they were mostly cute and having H. Jon Benjamin be the mad scientist behind the creation of Tribbles was stupid and I’m going to go back to pretending that didn’t happen. (I would like to go on the record to say I didn't get a VPN and watch Star Trek by telling Netflix I lived in the UK)

32. The Mandalorian

This show got more fun when I started watching it with the Star Wars fans in my house. It has a good Man With No Name/Lone Wolf and Cub vibe going, using the Star Wars setting to add gravitas and variety to essentially episodic storytelling. I agree with the general consensus going around that, although it’s cool to see guys like Luke Skywalker and Ahsoka Tano, having Mando meet more and more known Star Wars characters like them kind of constrains and limits his world, instead of expanding it. There’s also going to be a noticeable shift in the next season if Grogu isn’t around anymore; it’s weird that they tore off that bandage so soon, and I worry the show will lose something in the event of a radical reinvention. For now, though, it’s nice to just have a Star Wars thing be almost universally liked for once; well, that and to see Johnny Price argue with himself over whether or not the Krayt Dragon looked like previous portrayals of a Krayt Dragon. (I'm just...not that into Star Wars! I like dumber shows)

31. Mazinger Z (Pronounced “Zed”)

There were giant robot shows before Mazinger Z. Heck, one of them was American-made (Frankenstein, Jr.), and I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the effect Ultraman had on the development of the genre, even though Ultraman is technically just a large living being, not a robot. But this show started the 1970’s giant robot boom that made “Japanese Giant Robot Show” an instantly-understood concept, as well as being the first robot show to actually have a pilot inside the robot while it was working (previous shows had either autonomously-functioning robots, or remote-controlled robots). Created by Go Nagai at the height of his career, just off the success of Devilman, the series follows many of his favorite themes: a rowdy hero who could easily become the villain (cleaned up a bit for this original show, though, so they basically only pay lip service to that), biker gangs, twisted villains with bizarre designs (Dr. Hell, the main villain, is a standard mad scientist type who only really looks remarkable when standing next to a normal person, but Baron Ashura is split down the middle between male and female and played by a different actor depending on what side of their face the camera is facing, and Count Brocken is a decapitated Nazi who carries his head under his arm), and a sense of dread or mistrust by the populace of the heroes (although this is confined to just one episode and does not end in the death of the entire main cast like in Devilman). Thankfully, the series mostly avoids Nagai’s more perverted sense of humor, though a little of it creeps through in the interactions between series star Koji Kabuto and female lead Sayaka Yumi.

It’s easy to see why this appealed to kids at the time: Nagai’s designs are dynamic and interesting; Mazinger is immediately striking in appearance and more often than not the Mechanical Beasts (Kikaiju, a pun that doesn’t translate well) are terrifying monstrosities that are even a little unnerving to me today (though not always—there’s 92 episodes, they can’t all be winners). But it’s amazing how much this show seems dated, even compared to robot shows from five or six years later. Part of this can be chalked up to the proliferation of imitators; to succeed, later robot shows had to innovate to distinguish themselves from Mazinger, but as a result to the modern viewer Mazinger Z moves at a snail’s pace, plodding from place to place and slowly missing punches like Hulk Hogan in a boxing match. Additionally, the plot is built around an episodic formula, with very little forward movement: Dr. Hell gives Baron Ashura a robot, the robot attacks the photonic energy research facility to try to get some of the element Japanium that can only be found on Mt. Fuji and is essential to creating the super energy and alloy that powers Mazinger Z. Mazinger Z struggles to fight the robot, but eventually obliterates it. Repeat, endlessly. Things get spiced up for a little while when Count Brocken is introduced, cultivating a rivalry with Ashura and having his Iron Cross Army replace Ashura’s Iron Mask henchmen (Tekamen, another pun that doesn’t translate), but this eventually turns out to be just another example of Stan Lee’s old “Illusion of change”: a few episodes later and it’s back on the old formula, just with two henchmen instead of one. I’m about halfway through, and I plan to finish it and the sequel, Great Mazinger, as a historical curiosity, but there are better examples of the genre today.

(I put Mazinger Z above Mandalorian, though? In the interest of preserving my original intent, here it is, but I no longer stand by that listing.)

30. Thundercats Roar

Who is this show for? As someone who had already watched every episode of Thundercats ever made, I had no inclination to stop just because they did a Teen Titans Go!-style reboot, but the question is why they even did that in the first place. Thundercats ran from 1985-1989; I saw it in reruns after I came home from Middle School and liked it enough to get the complete series on DVD. There was a serious attempt at an action show reboot a few years ago, but it suffered from the same problems as the original: the characters are pretty bland, once you get down to it. The show is fondly remembered as a highlight of eighties cartoons, which is damning with faint praise really. Still, I like crappy eighties cartoons, so I remember it fondly, even if I know it ran for way too long. But the success of Teen Titans Go! Was making a comedic take on characters kids already knew from the 2003 Teen Titans cartoon, which had rerun for several years and was still within memory for those who started watching Go! What kid knows Lion-O enough to laugh at a parody of his antics? I know that Tygra is lame, the creators of this show know Tygra is lame, but kids don’t know who Tygra IS! Not to mention several episodes of this show are straight-up parodies of episodes of the original show. Which is great! Those episodes are memorable, iconic, and complete disasters from a storytelling or plotting standpoint, full of half-thought-out technobabble illogic. They’re ripe for parody, and this show does a good job! And that’s just the thing: this is a wonderful parody of Thundercats! It hits all the right buttons! The characters are exaggerated in all the right ways! And the animation, honestly, is beautiful! This show got dragged by haters when the character designs dropped for “bad animation”, but every episode has at least one extremely well-animated fight or chase scene, with dynamic shots, extreme camera movement, and interesting staging just to put the lie to the complaints. The only question is: who thought a parody of a 35-year-old cartoon was a moneymaking endeavor? WHY WAS THIS MADE?

Also, they used all songs from the original cartoon for the soundtrack of this show, which means those tracks still exist out there. Why can’t I buy them? The 2012 cartoon soundtrack is for sale and no one remembers that, I JUST WANT A GOOD QUALITY VERSION OF PANTHRO’S THEME ON MP3 THAT SONG SLAPS SO HARD COME ON.

29. Transformers Cyberverse

The “main” Transformers cartoon for the past few years finished up this year, with a kind of half-hearted attempt to tie into the Bumblebee movie by subtitling the final season “Bumblebee Adventures” even though there was far less Bumblebee than there had been up to this point. This was a pretty fun series but kind of a step down from the previous Prime/RiD2 continuity in quality, I think largely due to the shorter run times. Had some good writers though; Kate Leth even did a few episodes. This season starts off with an interesting twist: Optimus Prime and the Autobots win the war, although Hot Rod is apparently lost in battle. Then, there’s a time skip—at some unexplained point, the Quintessons have taken over the planet and trapped all the Transformers in a virtual reality (I’d say “The Matrix” but that means something different in Transformers). Also, for some reason this show bucked 35 years of pronouncing that word quin-tess-ON to pronounce it quin-TESS-un, which bothered me a lot. Anyway, it’s an interesting twist that allowed the show to have the Autobots and Decepticons team up against a greater enemy, and was a pretty original story for an old franchise like this, but the 10-minute episodes didn’t give it much room to breathe or have depth, which was made worse by the fact that they didn’t even run that story the whole season! It ends (with a fairly good climax where Starscream elevates himself to near-godlike status as one of the Quintessons and takes matters into his own hands vis-à-vis the conquest of Cybertron) about halfway through the season, because they needed time to introduce some new characters who had toys out at the time, meaning that after working together to beat the Quintessons, the Autobots and Decepticons go back to war for a bit, dividing the planet in two so they can still have fights between the new toys, leading to an even more rushed ending where they unite again against an even more evil Megatron from another universe. So, you know, that’s cool and all; it’s a fun series, just nothing to really write home about.

(And then they did two movies, so it did not, in fact, finish up in 2020)

28. New Getter Robo

I’ve watched a few classic robot shows this year, but one I really wanted to watch was Getter Robo, developed by Go Nagai and then handed off to his friend Ken Ishikawa, which has the distinction of being the first show with a combining robot. Unfortunately, I don’t know of a way to do that right now; even if I wanted to pirate, finding old shows can be tricky. But, the Retro Crush streaming service had this instead, the most recent version of the series from way back in 2004. And it sure is from 2004! The animation is typical of that time period: digital programs were becoming common for anime production, and the transition was clunky; time-saving techniques like resizing and sliding cells digitally looked cheap then and cheaper now, and the digital coloring is difficult to scale up to the quality of modern TV’s. They tried to make up for this with stylish designs, with think, dynamic outlines apparently trying to ape the style of the original manga, but as a result they were very difficult to animate, and the style can get lost in the few sequences where the animation is very fluid.

But how’s the show itself? As befitting a Go Nagai-adjacent work, it’s weird, violent, and confusing! So, I enjoyed it. After a slow start where it’s explained that the Getter Robo gives off strange radiation that kills its pilots, the scientist who created it goes out to find the three biggest badasses in Japan, the only kind of person who could possibly withstand radiation poisoning. The logic checks out and he gets a gangster, a terrorist, and a bandit-turned-monk to pilot his hell machines against demons (well, Oni, but the difference is largely immaterial in this instance). It doesn’t really pick up until they travel back in time, and find that the Oni almost conquered the world back in feudal Japan, so they must recover the Getter Machines and help a feudal queen stop a demon lord. This is probably the best part of the series, just freeform nonsense with a giant robot wrecking stuff all over Japan. Once they get back to the present they return to Nagai’s favorite plot: hey maybe the heroes are too powerful and will be even worse than the villains. They take this further than the original Mazinger, and show a potential future where everyone is fused into their own Getter Robos, and are in eternal combat. Even a baby is in a murder robot! That’s messed up! But the short 13-episode run of the series doesn’t give them enough room to really explore this concept; the series kind of ends with the pilots in a sort of multiversal combat with their potential future selves, with the main pilot possibly ascending to godhood as a robot overlord, or maybe defeating his future demon self. It’s left unclear! Just a bizarre little show.

27. Duck Tales (1987)

Okay, so I watched some episodes of this when I was a kid, but I don’t remember any of those so this counts as a first watch. I do remember the Duck Tales videogame that came with my dad’s first home PC, but we could never get that to progress beyond the title screen; just me and Daniel staring at Scrooge McDuck fuming in impotent fury at Glomgold as we banged on the keyboard until we gave up and opened the word processor.

So, how does the old classic hold up? Well, not too shabby. It’s definitely very 1987, and a very Disney 1987, which is its own little motif. Right on the cusp of a major change in the American animation industry as the Disney Renaissance began in earnest, and the reinvigoration of TV animation spurred by the rampant capitalist expansion of action figure TV shows morphed into a more character-focused form; just before the nostalgia boom brought about by Roger Rabbit led to renewed interest in Looney Tunes-style company and the rebirth of original TV shows as hip young animators got out of school and found new networks eager for content, any content. Duck Tales was an early example of innovating by looking backwards, a faithful (or, faithful enough) adaptation of Carl Barks’s classic Donald Duck comic books to a 1980’s sensibility, with some of the best animation on TV and a huge cast of characters that facilitated different types of episodes, and several multi-part adventures. It’s clear why this show was a hit and stayed a hit in reruns.

However, like those classic Barks Duck comics, Duck Tales also suffers from being very of its time. It’s no exaggeration that other shows following in its footsteps blew it out of the water; Gargoyles did adventure better, Batman action, Tiny Toons and Animaniacs slapstick comedy. Duck Tales also suffers from outdated stereotypes in its characters: Webby Vanderquack is a stereotypical girly-girl who the boys avoid and dislike just because of her gender, who worried about her “dollies” and gets scared and damseled frequently (one exception is the episode “Back Out in the Outback” where Webby saves the day by befriending wild animals in Australia and siccing them on the bad guys, but badass moments like this were not the norm). Doofus Drake is a good friend of Huey, Dewey, and Louie, which doesn’t stop them from mocking his weight or intelligence constantly. And lord, lord, lord, what were they thinking with the horrible Arabian stereotype Dijon (or his brother—sigh—Poupon?)? I appreciate attempts to avoid the relentless moralizing that characterized other popular shows of this period like He-Man and the Smurfs, but use a little common sense in what you’re teaching kids, guys!

Still, it’s a classic, and there’s a lot to love here. I’m glad I revisited it, I just don’t think I’ll be doing it again anytime soon.

26. Midnight Gospel

Boy this show is weird. The audio from the show is actual podcast episodes from a real podcast talking to real people. The video is a surreal, trippy landscape of usually horrible chaos in Pendleton Ward’s style, without any of the stoppers Cartoon Network put on Adventure Time. Characters will announce they are, for instance, the president of the United States, and then talk about how they’re a doctor and discuss the ethics of using hallucinogenic drugs, while killing zombies. The images and story don’t clearly link up until the end of the episodes, where they…sing a song about it. There is a main plot, but it mostly shows up on the sidelines, and is about how the main character, Clancy, is kind of avoiding his responsibilities to run his podcast, which involves going into simulated universes (thus, the strange things happening in every episode), so most of the show is just listening to a podcast where every time someone refers to a character by name, the same actor is clearly recording another name at another time to fit the setting of the show. The podcast mostly deals with spiritual issues, which don’t really appeal to me, and many of the interviewees have completely different ways of seeing the world from me and that can be frustrating, but they always at least have some things to say that I can agree with or jibe with what I know. The focus of the episode “Hunters Without a Home” (if I’m remembering correctly) goes on and on about how he follows magic passed down from ancient Sumeria, which seems…unlikely to me, but he also argues in favor of continuity of information through the oral tradition, which is defensible. It’s…it’s own thing. It’s interesting. It’s art. It’s an experiment. I could watch more, I could never watch it again. But it’s memorable.

25. Tower of God

This was a pretty fun show with beautiful animation from Telecom, the TMS subsidiary that has also done the animation on the latest Lupin III series. The setting is kind of…purposely confusing. Our point-of-interest character, Bam (a note on the names: this is based on a Korean comic, and Bam’s name is some sort of pun; I watched it in Japanese and they’ve clearly translated the pun so Bam’s name is Yoru, but the subtitles keep the Korean name from the comic), is as completely unfamiliar with the setting as we are, so we get some explanations, but it appears this is set in a bizarre universe where an eternal emperor has conquered multiple different fantasy races and concocted an elaborate contest for some of his oppressed subjects to climb up and attain some sort of escape from their oppression, or die trying. Also he collects women and makes them be eternal virgins; they are compared to a closet full of designer shoes. Basically the setting is messed up, and several characters are low-key trying to overthrow the emperor, but the show only goes through the first arc of the comics and we’re nowhere near that happening.

Instead, the first arc deals with a simple plot, one you might see in, say, Black Mirror: what are you willing to compromise to get what you want? Bam turns out to be a character of integrity, and collects around him a group of similarly-minded beings who might not have been so forgiving if not for his influence. It’s a fun little series with a somewhat stereotypically Shonen, “my enemy is now my friend,” bent.

Until the betrayal.

This show was fun to watch, but it didn’t make too much of an impression on me. I’m interested to see where it goes; a lot of people in the comments talked up the comics but I don’t see a need to read those yet. Maybe next year, I’m running out of other things to read…

24. Blue Seed

‘90’s anime were weird. Finally recognized as a legitimate art form and proliferating like mad through all facets of Japanese culture, the world, and (finally, after many fits and starts) even the United States, they began to experiment in subject matter and form while also producing some of the most excellent animation yet made for television productions. At the same time, a kind of creeping sexuality that had infiltrated its way into the anime-watching consciousness dating back at least to the work of Go Nagai in the 1970’s had become normalized as a comedic shorthand that appears to have passed without comment or even been applauded by the target audience and as I recall was largely excused by the foreign fanbase at the time but sticks out as a modern fan both because of the reaction against the unnecessary objectification of female bodies in general and a kind of segregation in recent years where ecchi anime was sent over to its own little corner with only series like Konosuba sometimes poking out their heads to mainstream acceptance.

Which is to say: I liked this series but I wish they would stop showing me the main character’s underwear all the damn time! The central theme of the series is a kind of environmentalist nationalism; the main character, Momiji, is one of two twin heirs to a line of holy protectors of Japan. The Japanese government has interpreted this as simply: they are here to protect the government from monsters. However, the other heir of the holy order sees things differently: to her, the “real Japan” is a natural state, a kind of environmentalist kingdom ruled over by the Shinto deities and tree spirits, all based around Susano-o, an ancient Japanese god they attempt to revive as a kind of a tree-person. The heroes are split between their desire to save humanity as it exists, and their distaste for the actions of their government towards that end, made all the worse by the fact that, as they all interpret their instructions, the easiest way to solve the problem would just be to kill Momiji, as their “Prophecy” says she must die to save Japan (sacrificing the children to preserve the status quo-an interesting metaphor). But in the midst of all this, Momiji has a very forced romance with a half-monster man named Kusanagi, with whom she has no noticeable chemistry other than the fact that she is the female and he the male lead, and to top it all off, he keeps sexually harassing her and then insulting her afterwards. Why? WHY?

Killer theme song though. 23. Endless Orbit SSX (Just pronounced like the letters), and the film Captain Harlock: Arcadia of My Youth, which the show is a sequel to

I’ve been interested in the works of Leiji Matsumoto since way back in Middle School, when Toonami hosted episodes of Star Blazers and Harlock Saga on their website as a kind of tie-in to the Daft Punk videos he was in charge of. However, when I watched the original Captain Harlock series, I found it a little boring; it didn’t quite have enough plot for its runtime, and the “audience identification” character Tadashi Daiba was annoying. Still, Harlock himself is an impressive character, and I’d always been interested in him and his space piracy motif, so I purchased a copy of the famous Harlock film, Arcadia of My Youth, and THAT…is a weird movie. Not really an action movie, it’s kind of a treatise on everything Matsumoto found interesting, a collection of short vignettes in the life (and past lives) of this character, focusing on his great moral fortitude against impossible odds. The setting of Arcadia of My Youth and its TV sequel are completely different from the original TV show: whereas in that show, Harlock was a pirate because Earth’s government was totally corrupt, brainwashing the populace to stay in power and as a result completely complacent, decadent, and stupid (I had always assumed the Prime Minister of Earth in that series was a victim of brainwashing himself, elected after the original puppet masters who created the brainwashing signals had died or been voted out of office by their ignorant populace, but they never make that clear) and Harlock was the only one who knew about the invading Mazone aliens; in SSX Harlock was a solider for Earth in a losing war against the Illumidas Empire, and Harlock and his friends refuse to bow to the Quisling Earth government willing to work with their invaders. The film follows Harlock’s adventures, as his moral fortitude guides him right and earns him the respect of the enemy commander, who, after his defeat, buys Harlock time to escape and go find freedom.

Endless Orbit SSX picks up where this plot left off, with Harlock and his crew (Including Toshiro, the engineer who designed the Spaceship Arcadia, who was dead in the original) travelling the galaxy, looking for their own paradise. They introduce a new audience-identification character, this time Tadashi Monono, who is very clearly just Tetsuro Hoshino from Galaxy Express 999 with a different actor (Tetsuro’s movie design, which was different from his TV design), as well as bringing back Kei Yuki, who was absent from the film. The early episodes have great pacing and good character moments, as Harlock matches wits with Mr. Zone, a highly-intelligent human working with the Illumidas because of a grudge against Harlock, and also Harlock has to battle against his own ship from his time as part of Earth’s military, now captained by the father of a girl Harlock has adopted. The pacing and plots were, from my memory, far better than the original series, and the animation is top notch. However, this show was not nearly as popular as its predecessors in Leiji Matsumoto’s catalogue; by 1983 his style was looking a little dated next to popular shows like Macross and Urusei Yatsura (and Gundam, which had originally bombed and became popular in reruns, just as Matsumoto’s breakout hit Space Battleship Yamato/Star Blazers had). Good pacing soon became quick pacing, and the interesting human plots were soon complicated by a weird, half-explained “golden goddess” who purposely set Harlock and Zone against each other in little “tests” designed just to get them in the same place for artificial conflict. Finally, both men reach the “goddess’s” planet, where she gives them some magic power and then they go back to Earth and retake the planet in like 10 minutes (also Zone dies). Then the goddess blows up planet Illumidas. I’m used to great comic series smashing three years of stories into an issue when they get cancelled; 20 episodes of TV into one isn’t any better. Still, up until that point, it’s a pretty fun show, and probably one of the best ways to introduce someone to this classic character.

22. Doctor Who: Jodie Whittaker Season 2

I’m not a big fan of Chris Chibnall. Torchwood was mostly pointless edgelord shit, at least until Davies came back for Children of Earth which was very pointed edgelord shit that made me feel actually sick (wonderful miniseries); and Broadchurch was a similar parade of misery that drew you in with a sharp mystery at first and then just got darker and more painful as it went along. I was a little worried about what he’d bring to Who, even though casting Jodie Whittaker from Broadchurch as the Doctor was, I thought, a great choice, as she was one of the only characters who was still likeable by the end of that show. So, their first season was a bit of a mess; I appreciated avoiding typical Who tropes, and the historical episodes touched on major events Who had, up until now, avoided in really interesting ways, but the teeth…guy they kept fighting was just kind of weird and not particularly memorable, and I’ll just say it, Kerblam! was the worst episode of Doctor Who ever made, just completely execrable. Fortunately, this season was much better. Unfortunately, they fell back into more Doctor Who tropes.

The season’s start was a great two-parter, throwing us right into the action with a complicated alien conspiracy plot, a fast-paced yarn with a bit of an X-Files feel but keeping the Doctor Who scope, which features the return of the Master as the main villain of the season. I’m always down for a new incarnation of the Master, but it just felt a little soon after they did so much work with the character in the Capaldi episodes. Most of the rest of the season was made up of fun historical episodes, with strange plots like the Doctor dragging Tesla and Edison along on an alien fight, and a fun horror mystery at Lord Byron’s mansion; but the real standout was the midway point of the season, “Fugitive of the Judoon”, which sees the return not only of the eponymous Galactic Police-Rhinos, but Torchwood’s own Captain Jack Harkness, a great character played by the always-delightful John Barrowman (we are promised more of him on January 1, looking forward to it). Despite this, I’m very divided on this episode; taken just by itself it’s a wonderful episode with great writing and an interesting mystery, but it opens up a meta-plot with an “everything you knew is wrong” twist, a remolding of the Doctor’s origin that (as detailed in additional revelations in the season finale) makes her a central part of the development of Galilfreyan society and the very birth of the Time Lords, an outsized influence on the course of history (well, the Doctor was already that, but now even more so, I guess). On the one hand, saying “The Doctor was a woman a bunch of times before so you can’t be mad anymore, nyeh” is beautiful anti-trolling, but it also seems a lot like Hasbro’s horrible idea that Optimus Prime is a reincarnated god, one of The Thirteen—taking this great everyman character, a simple person thrust into greatness through personal character, and making them some sort of predestined savior. I suppose there’s still room for them to add further revelations; the Doctor is said to have been found at a mysterious door to outside the universe, so there could be some sort of time loop thing going on here. I’ll just have to keep watching to find out.

Also, so glad Moffat brought the Time Lords back to life so we could just kill them offscreen again. Great job guys!

21. Galaxy Express 999 (Pronounced “Three-Nine”)

Like I said, I like Leiji Matsumoto, and have for a long time. So, I figured it would be a good time to try his longest, perhaps best-regarded series. Clocking in at 113 episodes and two movies, Galaxy Express 999 always seemed to me to be something kind of like the Love Boat or Fantasy Island, with the mysterious Maetel riding on the train across the galaxy and observing little morality plays and soap operas of the other passengers and helping them out (maybe?). That’s not what it is! It gets close, and our heroes definitely cross paths with many different passengers who have their own problems (when there are even other passengers at all—for a line portrayed within the fiction as being very popular and difficult to book, Maetel and Tetsuro spend a lot of time alone in their passenger car), but most of the story revolves around Maetel’s mysterious relation to a boy named Tetsuro Hoshino. In the far future, mankind has created highly-advanced cyborg bodies for themselves; but, this technology is very expensive, and has further divided society into the haves and have-nots. The rich, who can afford robot bodies, spend their money on them and live for thousands of years, hoarding money amongst the few and living in massive cities where they can do what they want. Baseline humans live in abject poverty, toiling in the hopes that one day they or their children will be able to afford cyborg bodies. They are so poorly regarded by the cyborgs that some wealthy cyborgs hunt people for sport, confident that they are protected from repercussions. But, amongst the people of Earth, there is a rumor: out in the Andromeda Galaxy, there is a planet where robot bodies are given away for free. Tetsuro Hoshino and his mother journeyed to the capital city of Megalopolis to earn money to go to Andromeda, but on the way Tetsuro’s mother is murdered by Count Mecha and her body taken as a hunting trophy to mount on his wall; as Tetsuro hides in the cold and waits to die of exposure, he is saved by Maetel, who promises him free passage on the 999 line to Andromeda. Tetsuro accepts, but not before he gets his revenge on Count Mecha. And so, fleeing from a warrant for his execution on Earth, Tetsuro and Maetel continue into space; with Maetel keeping communication with a mysterious person interested in Tetsuro…

The “main plot” is secondary, however, and just ends up being another example of the show’s main theme: There’s no such thing as a free, magic solution to your problems. As he journeys across the galaxy, Tetsuro meets several cyborgs who still have problems, who are looked down on for their cheap bodies or who have lost their dreams, and now live forever in emotional turmoil, unable to end their existence, looking for something, anything to hold on to and make life worth living. It’s uh, pretty morbid! This little kid puts more than one cyborg in the grave, and more than one of them thank him for it. One group of episodes stuck with me in particular: in episode 46, “The Song of El Alamein,” the Galaxy Express lands on planet El Alamein. Tetsuro and Maetel befriend a citizen of the planet, returning after many years away. They are targeted by automatic weapons left on the planet; the robot tanks were designed to seek out and eliminate all life, and they have killed everyone on the planet, and turn their guns now on our heroes. Their friend is killed by the tanks, and they barely escape, leaving this once-great planet in ruins. THE VERY NEXT EPISODE is also about war; it seemed pretty repetitive to me and I complained to a friend about it, but they switched it up. In the two-part episodes 47 and 48, “The Laboratory of Eternal Way”, Tetsuro and Maetel arrive on the planet Rifle Grenade, whose entire economy is based around tourism. But, they have no natural resources, no ancient ruins or tourist spots; instead, they capture and enslave citizens of neighboring, poorer planets and force them into battle as a spectator sport. The train station is a massive, reinforced hotel looking out over a battlefield as two forces kill each other for NO REASON. Tetsuro and Maetel are disgusted and try to start a revolution with some of the soldiers, but they fail: all their friends on the planet are killed, and Tetsuro and Maetel only escape because they are foreigners and can get on the train. When I explained the difference to the aforementioned friend, he laughed: “This show is SO DEPRESSING!”

The 1980 film adaptation changed things up. Directed by Rintaro, who I knew from his excellent film Metropolis, a kind of bizarre mashup of Fritz Lang’s film and Osamu Tezuka’s mostly-unrelated manga, the Galaxy Express 999 films streamline the story to make it fit within the two-hour runtime by merging similar characters and making the final villain an overlord of the whole universe as a unifying theme (also, Captain Harlock, who cameoed in one multi-part episode of the show, is a much more major player in the movie; it’s another good way to introduce a new fan to him). The films also age up Tetsuro Hoshino; one of the recurring themes of the show was that Tetsuro knew suffering, but he had an amazing advantage in being gifted a pass onto the 999, and he had to learn empathy for those who do not have his enormous luck. Film Tetsuro didn’t have this problem; he spent five years on the streets after Count Mecha killed his mother before Maetel found him. The films also fix one of the big problems of the show: the moral of the show seems to be that things are bad and there’s nothing you can do, no magic fix, no ending to suffering, you just have to do what you can and live your life. The films offer a solution: revolution, weeding out the corruption in society, and building anew. Perhaps that leads to the same problems, who can say. But I prefer a series with an impetus to try, instead of just wallowing in despair. Either way: very interesting, different show.

20. Aggretsuko Season 3

Sanrio’s weird little office comedy continues to be an absolute delight. This season switches things up; instead of giving Retsuko an out from the monotony of her day job through romance as in the last seasons (although at the start of the series, she is very into a dating video game), it provides an alternative career path for her to try to achieve. After she hits a car in a parking lot while driving without insurance, Retsuko ends up indebted to a mysterious Cheetah man. Is he a mobster? Some corporate bigwig? NO! He’s a weirdo who manages an underground pop idol group, and now she’s their accountant! Womp womp, the lead singer is a horrible prima donna and Retsuko has basically no free time as she has to untangle the horrible finances of this completely mismanaged side project. MEANWHILE, Haida, who has been crushing on Retsuko the whole show, now starts to fall for new office worker Inui, with whom he shares…actual interests. How’s this going to play out? As usual with Aggretsuko: not how you expect. Even with Retsuko’s accounting help, the band is in dire straits, and needs a way to differentiate it in a crowded field (after watching Perfect Blue, and really even before, I am very uncomfortable with the Japanese pop idol culture, but they handle that very well here and don’t shy away from how toxic it can be); the manager hits on a new idea when he accidentally sees Retsuko doing heavy metal karaoke, as she does. He pressures her to become the new frontman of the group, refocusing on heavy metal music, much to the chagrin of the former lead singer, Monaka. Retusko tries to bow out since she’s “too old,” only to discover that Monaka is older than she is. Now in deep with the band, Retsuko starts to like the adulation of fans, and begins to consider life after her current job. Likewise, things go well with Haida and Inui, and he starts to move on from Retsuko, but as she keeps disappearing suddenly, he (and Ms. Gori, another of Retsuko’s office friends) becomes worries and tails her to a show. Conflicted and confused, Haida struggles with his opposing feelings. Both of them must make a choice, and their choice is difficult. Retsuko learns that hard way that not everyone will be a fan when you’re in entertainment, and Haida struggles with properly expressing his feelings, and the difference between emotion and logic.

Personally, I think the end of the season was a bit of a cop-out, but it still gave the show forward motion, and everyone ended up in a happy place at the end. I’m not sure if this is the end of the show or if it will continue, but I’m consistently entertained, to the tune of 10 15-minute episodes a year. If you want some heartfelt office comedy that’s about a Japanese red panda woman, um, that’s oddly specific, what other show are you watching that has that? Weirdo. 19. Digimon Adventure:

Yes they just put a colon after Digimon Adventure to signify it was the remake, look I don’t know.

I think the original Digimon was a pretty important show to anyone between the ages of 8 and 13 in 2000. It took the Pokémon formula of “Hey kids hey, look monsters that turn into other ones, neat” and put an actual story and character development to it; it had real heart and a real plot in contrast with Ash Ketchum’s endless quest to be the “best” by some nebulous definition (which is STILL GOING ON to this day), while also being divided into easily-digestible mini storylines with their own beginning, middle, and end so the plot had real forward motion and noticeable changes for the characters, unlike whatever endless meandering Genki was up to looking for the Phoenix in Monster Rancher. They’d done a few movies in recent years about that same cast as slightly older kids, which were…interesting, but a little slow. When they announced a straight-up remake of the original, I was intrigued, and wondered how much they’d change it. By episode 3 Aagumon and Gabumon have already merged into Omegamon and stopped the nuclear annihilation of Tokyo after Digimon seize the American nuclear codes.

This show…I keep wanting to say it trolls hard, but that’s just because, very early on, they specifically play on the viewer’s expectations that they know what’s supposed to happen. Izzy comes to talk to Tai before they go to camp—in the original show, a weird phenomenon at camp sent all the kids to the Digital World. But, things start going wrong early, and Tai and Izzy end up finding a way into a pocket Digital World (they create this “barrier space” between the worlds so they can have this fight in real time but keep the “time moves faster in the Digital World” conceit for later in the series) where they meet Aagumon and also Matt, who has already digivolved Gabumon into Garurumon, and then they just skip ahead to Omegamon. Then Tai and Izzy go to camp and the only main cast there are Sora and Joe, and nothing happens and everyone goes home once camp was over. It’s a complete fake-out! The animation in those early episodes is also top-notch, but they aren’t able to sustain it over the series; pretty soon we’re back to typical Digimon shortcuts like sliding cells over the background for movement, or resizing a cell digitally so it looks like it’s moving closer/further away. Well, so far so Toei Animation, right? But the show does its best to keep things interesting for old viewers and new alike, crafting an entirely original story that just happens to look kind of like one you’ve already seen. The writers know they have a certain amount of episodes, and they have the confidence not to push a lot of information on the audience right out of the gate. The 8 Digidestined are introduced one by one in good spotlight stories, and even once introduced the show isn’t afraid to split them up; they spend some time with only Tai and Matt in the Digital World, and they split up the group to surround their enemies. Also, there’s a slow burn on adding TK and Kari to the series; TK shows up once he’s kidnapped by the villains, and Kari mysteriously has the power to move between both worlds. Both of the little kid characters are treated with a kind of reverence by the plot, acknowledging that their place as the partners of the Angel Digimon makes them kind of holy, set apart from the other kids. The plots also do a much better job of creating real stakes for the adventures; in the original series, so much of the plot was about getting home, and Digimon only started affecting the real world once Myotismon led his invasion in the third plot (which was the REAL climax of the series; the Dark Masters plot felt like an anticlimax after a giant vampire man almost destroyed Tokyo). In the remake, each one of the evil Digimon’s plots has real world effects; first the nuclear strike, then a disruption to the power grid, then messing with a GPS system to cause cargo ship crashes; and the current plot is hinting that Digimon are going to disrupt space launches or satellites or something. This gives real stakes and a timer to the kids actions, so there are repercussions if they fail other than just…still being in the Digital World (which they can move to and from pretty easily). Plus there’s still some mystery behind just what the bad guys are up to; Devimon has been defeated, but DarkKnightMon still carries out his plans. Plus, they’re pretty good at presenting the Digital World as a vast, mysterious place; after defeating Devimon on Cloud Continent, Tai and Matt discover that they really were IN THE CLOUDS, and an even more vast world is beneath them. A world full of cannibals! The current plotline has Digimon eating each other to grow more powerful, a literalized version of survival of the fittest as they literally evolve from eating the weak! That’s a little messed up! In short, it’s a good heir to a classic children’s TV series that revives a lot of the appeal it had in the first place, and had lost in the endless translations and rehashes since. A fun series.

18. Tom Baker Who Season 3

There’s a reason Tom Baker’s Doctor Who is so respected: the best writing, the best production values (yes, this is what the best looked like in Classic Who, just accept it), the best cast, and by God the man himself is just a delight to watch the whole time he’s on screen. I watched season 3 this year for the simple reason that it was released on Blu-Ray, and I hadn’t seen it before. Well, that’s not entirely true; I must have seen The Hand of Fear at some point, if only because Elizabeth Sladen’s bizarre pronunciation of “Eldrad MUST live” really sticks in my mind, so I’ll skip describing that one. As usual for a Baker season, it’s full of solid episodes. The Masque of Mandragora is a little muddled, but it succeeds due to an interesting setting, in the early Renaissance, contrasting the beginning of the development of modern science with the small cult “witch religions” that sprung up around the same time; mostly folk healers unjustly persecuted by the church, although at the time the episode was made there was a popular conception that these were part of an ancient pagan religion that lived on hidden outside of the cities. Doctor Who transformed this into the cult of the alien Mandragora.

The Deadly Assassin is a classic, a Doctor adventure without a companion, in which he must solve the assassination of the President of Planet Gallifrey while simultaneously being the primary suspect—all an elaborate frame-up, of course. One of the first episodes to extensively take place on Gallifrey, it highlighted how different the Doctor was from his people, and how staid and stoic the planet he fled was. This is followed by the bizarre Face of Evil, that takes advantage of the time travel aspects of the show to illustrate the aftermath of an unseen Doctor adventure, where a well-meaning choice the Doctor made has unintended consequences, as a mad computer enslaves and kills in the Doctor’s image. Then it’s on to the Robots of Death, a neat little locked-room mystery where the Doctor tries to stop murders while also advocating for the rights of slave AI; a typical tightrope for our hero to walk, attempting to argue for the humanity of those trying to kill him.

But I think what prevents this season from being truly great is the 6-part finale that was one of the most popular stories of the time: The Talons of Weng-Chiang. A cool late-Victorian period piece taking place in the sewers under London, it suffers from, well, being clearly derivative of a Fu Manchu-style yellow peril story, complete with a white guy in makeup with fake squinty eyes. This “Chinese” villain is of course, a stage magician, of course, owns a ventriloquist doll that is actually a little person he uses to carry out murders, and of course, worships a “Chinese God” who is actually a time travelling despot trying to escape retribution in the future. Watching old TV means putting up with all sorts of well-intentioned bad decisions, and this is far from the worst I’ve seen, but not even an adorable rabid rat puppet could make this one watchable, and it kind of drags down the whole set, unfortunately.

“He blew it! Hey! Hey, you! He blew it.”

17. Great Pretender

Two people begged me to watch this show, so I did. And it was a good call! A kind of halfway point between Lupin III and Catch Me If You Can (which are pretty similar anyway) that uses a lot of the same trappings and late-sixties design motifs that those stories had seeped into their bones from conception, it follows a group of con artists out to make the world a better place by taking dirty money and…mostly just spending it on themselves. Now that, in and of itself, is fun; they get into wild adventures all over the world, taking on big bad crooks and doing crazy stunts (the air race plotline is a standout and the most Lupin III the show ever gets, but like a lot of Lupin stories doesn’t make any sense to exist in the real world—we’re talking about an airplane race whose course runs through several expensive art installations and an actual landmark building, I don’t care if it’s in Singapore, what city planner would approve this?), but all of that is just window dressing for the education of Makoto Edamura (“Edamame” to his…friends?). A young swindler with a tragic past—dead mother, scumbag father—Edamura tries desperately to succeed in the normal world like a functioning adult, but keeps getting pulled into swindles, either by accident or design. Or is it never an accident? Master swindler Laurent always seems to be one step ahead of him, convinced Edamura is his new wonderkind despite the protestations of his right-hand enforcer, Abbie (Cynthia, another one of the top swindlers, is more inclined to take Laurent’s word for it).

As the series progresses, though, we learn more about this ragtag group and how they all have tragedies driving them towards “crime”. Abbie lived in the Middle East, and was dragged into war that she’s never gotten over. Cynthia had her one great love ruined by an unscrupulous man doing much the same things she does on a daily basis. And Laurent…knows more than he lets on. The revelation of Laurent’s backstory ties the series together in a very unexpected way, bringing together the disparate themes of family, fortune, mistakes, the lies we tell ourselves, the lies we tell others, and telling the fucking mob to fuck off. It’s a clever and stylish show, and a fun ride to the end.

Post-credits scene is a cop out though.

16. Black Jack

Osamu Tezuka, the legendary “God Of Manga”, made a lot of comics in his life. He’s famous for his children’s works, like Astro Boy, Wonder Three, New Treasure Island, and the Lion KingI MEAN Kimba, the White Lion. I, on the other hand, prefer his weirder, adult-oriented later works; my collection of Tezuka comics is made up of Dororo, Alabaster, Letter to Adolph, and yes, some Black Jack, although they went out of print shortly after I started buying some so I only have like 1/3 of the comics. I had avoided adaptations of Black Jack for a while; there were a few TV shows made in the mid-2000’s but they never caught my interest. However, I was looking at some anime to watch on the services I had and noticed I had access to the 12-episode direct-to-video (we all know what an OVA is right? I’m going to just say that going forward) series by Osamu Dezaki and its movie tie-in, I jumped at the chance to see more of these classic characters I love. I knew Dezaki from his work on the made-for-TV Lupin III movies from the 1990’s, and those movies, uh…weren’t very good! At all! However, I knew he was respected for his work on series like Space Adventure Cobra, and had worked with Tezuka as a young man, so I gave it a chance. I’m glad I did! Dezaki perfectly captures Black Jack’s strange moral compass and morally-grey universe, where desperate people of all stripes and backgrounds, with all sorts of diseases untreatable by conventional medicine, all find themselves with the last option available: pick up the phone and call that weird guy who lives on the shack by a cliff in Japan, and leave a message with his tiny baby secretary.

Sure it suffers from some weird choices, some of which are Dezaki hallmarks (repeating action animation multiple times in quick succession for emphasis, or alternatively pausing the action and switching to a more detailed illustration with hatching for shading and a more complicated color painting to make a talking sequence look cool without having to animate it) and some of which are just hazards of watching a ‘90’s OVA (there must be tits, no matter how gross the scene they are shown in). But, the show perfectly captures the weird little morality plays that characterize the classic Black Jack comics of the ‘70’s; memorable episodes include Black Jack having to cure an old man who is cursed with a strange disease that causes uncontrollable perspiration and can kill from dehydration, Black Jack befriending a young college student whose friend is in a coma which leads to him uncovering a complicated drug ring that controls the local hospital, Black Jack helping a film star trying to escape pornography and get into serious film who is suffering from the effects of nerve gas she inhaled as a young girl, Black Jack getting in too deep with a difficult surgery while his sidekick Pinoko befriends the mobsters that hired him, Black Jack investigating the strange case of the boy turning into a tree, and the movie, where Black Jack investigates the sudden deaths of the gold medal winners from the 1996 Olympics and uncovers a terrible doping scheme that’s killing anyone who took the drugs—and the drugs were fed to Black Jack! The original series ran 10 episodes and the movie from 1993-2000, but after Dezaki’s death they found storyboards for two more episodes in his things and completed them (bringing back the theme song they used for the first 3 episodes, which was the best one). These episodes were a little hard to watch because the subtitles were done by a different person and didn’t synch perfectly, but they did contain one of my favorite stories: the origin of Pinoko. Anyone remember that scene in My Big, Fat Greek Wedding where the aunt tells the story of the lump on her neck, and how they did “the bibopsy” and found teeth inside, and it was her unformed twin? Thirty years earlier, Black Jack did that story, except there was a brain inside and it had psychic powers and stopped anyone from excising it, so Black Jack negotiated and built it a prosthetic body. Thus, Pinoko, the Pinocchio girl! The rest of the episode adapted a story I hadn’t read, where Pinoko and her sister had a symbiotic relationship, and by removing Pinoko Black Jack had accidentally killed the sister, and he had to figure out how to save her without killing Pinoko! This story was made a little nicer for the modern telling by making Black Jack not tell the sister that he had created Pinoko; in the original, the sister wanted nothing to do with her, and left her with Black Jack with full knowledge of what had happened. Still. Love that bizarre little story…

I dressed as Black Jack for Halloween this year and my friends haven’t posted the pictures they took of it, come on guys! (Here you go:)

Scar makeup started falling off the moment I put it on.

15. Giant Robo

I’ve wanted to watch this show for almost two decades now, dating back to hearing about it on IGN when that website was just starting out and would post short reviews of different anime every week. I mean, technically I had already seen the original Giant Robo a few years ago on Hulu (in its English version, Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot), but that’s not the same. Created by Mitsuteru Yokoyama at the request of Toei, it was basically a recreation of his earlier series Tetsujin 28-go (Iron Man #28, released in the US as Gigantor) with elements to make it more like Ultraman. In the early ninteties there was a brief trend of doing short OVA series based on older cartoons, and Sunrise got the rights to do Giant Robo, only to discover that they only had the rights to the main character (Daisaku Kusama), the robot, and the bad guys could still be called Big Fire but they couldn’t be, like, Emperor Guillotine or any of the original bad guy characters. At first, this might seem constraining, as they only had a few toys to play with; instead, the production team took it to mean they were freed to do whatever they wanted, and crafted a show with almost no connection to the original, improving on it in just about every way.

Set in a utopic future powered by free, endless cold fusion energy called the Shizuma Drive, the only threat to humanity known is the terrorist organization Big Fire. The world’s countries have banded together into the International Police Organization to combat Big Fire; more than that, they have assembled their own superhero team, the Experts of Justice, and Daisaku and Giant Robo are members for the Japanese organization. The plot kicks off when Big Fire starts attacking the inventors of the Shizuma Drive; Dr. Shizuma himself hints that there is some dark secret to the drive connected with a little-known accident during the creation of the drive, which took the life of uncreated contributor to the project, Dr. Franken Von Vogler, and almost doomed the project. As the plot unfolds, the heroes battle against the oppression of Big Fire but also uncover the dark secrets and lies behind the official story of the creation of cold fusion power, and the understanding that the energy-independence on which the utopian future they live in is built was made through moral compromise and shortsighted greed, and the propaganda they’ve accepted as fact is skewed to keep people complacent with the status quo and protect those who brought it about.

That all seems pretty heavy, but it really isn’t. Series director Yasuhiro Imagawa has a habit of going big thematically, but handling his conflicts through good old punching, yelling, and acts of heroic sacrifice; he took time off in the middle of the series to do G Gundam, another mecha series where the base-level humans often seem more powerful than the robots themselves, and stand up to the villains through their sheer overwhelming goodness. While the plot deals with corruption and conspiracy, the main characters are all thoroughly good and incorruptible, fighting and even dying to save humanity from attacks from within and without, and uncover the truth behind the Shizuma Drive while also protecting the energy-independent future they’ve achieved. The result is just some fun, weird superhero stuff; characters are introduced and suffer major damage before we find out they’re superhuman, so they will seem to die and come back. It’s all just an amazing good time, with beautiful visuals and a wonderful retro-future design scheme; instead of looking like modern manga characters, everyone, even though they are mostly new creations for the show, look like someone you would see in a manga from the ‘60’s (and at the end of the series they start to get cute and throw in characters from other comics by the same creator; they seemed to be hinting at a sequel revolving around Giant Robo vs. Babel II that never happened). The staging and storyboarding are also excellent, with shots evoking Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or utterly surreal depictions of characters superpowers gone wrong that are beautifully bizarre. I do have some complaints about how they treated breakout star (and female lead) GinRei, who is of course tragically (read: melodramatically) tied to the villains and tries to help them even as it destroys her, but honestly I’ve seen worse treatments of female leads in the past few years (not a good excuse). An excellent action anime that I highly recommend.

14. Voltes V (Pronounced “Five”)

It’s 1979. Japanese robot shows have been doing gangbusters business for about seven years now, and while they’re still relatively unknown in the United States, they’ve spread all over the Pacific and are shown on TV in most capitalist nations. One such nation was the Philippines, which at the time was ruled by the US-backed dictatorship of President Ferdinand Marcos. However, Marcos claimed to have received several complaints about the level of violence in such programs, and declared that all Japanese robot shows were to be banned from Filipino television effective immediately. There were four episodes of Voltes V left to air in the Phillipines.

7 years later, Marcos was peacefully removed from power. Voltes V returned to TV, and those last four episodes were released in movie theaters.

Why? Why this show? Was it worth it? Well…yeah, I can see it. I didn’t know any of this when I started watching Voltes V. All I knew was that it was a respected Japanese robot show, in the Robot Romance Trilogy, a less-successful follow-up to Combattler V (pronounced like the letter V) and a direct ancestor of later shows like Votron (known as GoLion in Japan, the similar names are just coincidence from the dub crew). The main characters, just like Voltron, follow the standard Japanese superhero team makeup that started with 1972’s Science Ninja Team Gatchaman: Clean-cut hero (Kenichi Go), slightly less clean-cut hero (Ippei Mine), fat hero (Daijiro Go), little boy hero (Hiyoshi Go), woman hero (Megumi Oka). The main characters are mostly bland, though there is an attempt at Stan Lee-level conflict; one memorable early episode has Ippei get irritable as the Go brothers mourn their mother, who sacrificed herself to save them from aliens the episode before. It is revealed that Ippei’s mother abandoned him and his father when he was young and he still harbors anger, anger that dissipates when he learns the secret truth that she died fighting off some wolves that were going to attack her family in the desert, and took the wolves with her with a suicide vest.

Just a warning: no hero gets out of this show with all their parents alive. It’s the go-to method for pathos in this show.

The Go brothers do have one thing that gets interesting though; the Voltes V robot was constructed by their father, a mysterious man who journeyed into space some years ago to negotiate with the government of planet Boazan, who he knew would invade Earth. How he knew this is a bit of a mystery in the show, so I won’t explain, but you can probably guess. Anyway, his attempts failed, and the Boazanians invade; but, in what I like to call the “early Larry Hama GI Joe syndrome”, the villains themselves are far more interesting, and do more to drive the plot. The primary villain is Prince Heinel, nephew to the king of Boazan, Sanbasil. He takes great pride in being put in charge of the mission to invade Earth, and his anger at being defeated by Earthlings grows with each episode, made worse because Boazan has kind of a Sneetches on Beaches thing going on where the nobility are born with horns on their heads, and the lower classes don’t have them, so he considers humans a lower species; in one episode, Heinel is surprised to find out humans have a concept of love. However, it is revealed fairly early on that Sanbasil is a bastard who was able to maneuver his way to his father’s throne through manipulating the royal court; Heinel, as a legitimate child of the former king’s brother, had a more legitimate claim to the throne, and has been sent to Earth with spies for Sanbasil in his party. The conquest of Earth is immaterial; the point is for Heinel to die so there will be no rival claimant to the throne. And meanwhile, the imprisoned Dr. Go has started a slave revolution on Boazan, promising them to recreate their world in a society of equals, like the idealized image of Earth he sells the Boazanian peasants on. This all finally culminates in Voltes V wrecking the castle of the king of Boazan, and the heroes confronting Heinel on the front steps. Then, out steps King Sanbasil, hands full of the stolen riches he’s accumulated by plundering his own people and enslaving his own citizens. Desperate to save his own life, Sanbasil lays the whole plot, the invasion of Earth, at the feet of Heinel, begging his enemies to kill his nephew and leave the king in peace with what riches remain. I can see where the people of the Phillipines would see their president in this character. I can see where they would sympathize with Heinel when he kills him.

It’s old, it’s clunky, it’s there to sell toys, and it’s melodramatic. But Voltes V is a classic. Good show.

13. Star Trek Picard (and that one Short Treks that’s a prequel to it, the one that’s just a music video for Peter Gabriel’s cover of Heroes by David Bowie)

I’m a Kirk guy. Oh sure, I like Picard fine; he’s a very moral man, who struggles to try to follow his morals in difficult situations, and does whatever he can to resolve crises peacefully before moving to violence. That’s all very noble! But Kirk’s steadfast decisiveness, his ability to push the rules and make difficult split-second decisions without much deliberation…well, it made for exciting television (my conception of Kirk is helped by some of the lessons he learns about being too carefree in Wrath of Khan, but review isn’t about him, so moving on). Either way, Patrick Stewart is a fantastic actor, and it’s clear he was very excited by his work in Logan, taking a classic character of his and portraying him at the breaking point, when he had lost everything and was unable to be the person he wanted to anymore. Being able to do that again with the one character even more associated with him must have been thrilling to him, and it comes through on the screen. As Picard suffers from a debilitating disease, he comes to recognize his one great mistake many years ago in not doing more to stand up for the rights of androids (and I guess, holographic people too—whatever happened to that revolution the Doctor’s autobiography was supposed to start in Voyager, anyway?) after a devastating attack by hijacked androids killed thousands on Mars, and also ruined his attempts at brokering peace with the homeless Romulans, after the destruction of their planet in the Abrams Star Trek movie (this is not in the Abrams continuity, it’s in the main continuity, but remember that the Abrams continuity was created when a Romulan ship from the main continuity traveled back in time after the destruction of Romulus, look, it’s not that hard I remembered don’t look at me like that). The old captain looks around at a scared, prejudiced Federation, one that no longer resembles the proud organization he once served, and realizes its being targeted by enemies without as well as cowardice within. As he comes to realize no one respects him anymore, Picard takes any chance he can to do the right thing, travelling across the galaxy, bringing in any allies he can, for one last desperate journey to set things right. Does he succeed? Well, I’ll let you find out; I had a lot of fun seeing them get where they’re going.

I understand people had problems with this series. I haven’t read a lot of the complaints because I don’t care. But, I have heard a lot of complaints about The Last Jedi. And while I had some complaints about that movie too, one that would seem to apply to Picard as well is the complaint that some fans don’t think the Luke Skywalker they knew would ever give up, and I think some people feel that about Picard as well. Now, I’m willing to forgive that just on the basis that it gave me this new story I like, and he’s working to fix his mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes! But I think there’s something to be said for a time skip as a literary shortcut to “the person you knew changed.” They make a big deal out of Picard being a bit of a narcissist, and I can easily surmise how he got there. He’s Locutus of Borg. He personally helped Gowron become Chancellor of the Klingon empire, and when that didn’t work out his friend helped Martok take over and that was better. He’s met Mark Twain. Picard held Captain Kirk as he died. He led the evacuation of Romulus, and that was after Romulus was conquered by their slaves on planet Remus, who were led by A CLONE OF PICARD. A godlike being took a personal interest in him and even messed with the time stream to see what life would be like if things went a little different for Picard. Picard IS a big deal in the Star Trek universe. It DOES revolve around him. I can see where even a man like Picard would get a big head about that. It doesn’t take a leap to see his famous modesty start to ring a little false; that this man with so much history and gravitas behind him thinks he could threaten to quit Starfleet and somehow that would change their minds, just from the effect of his powerful moral conviction. To have this blow to his ego, that Starfleet, Star Trek, will continue without him…and he just gives up. I can understand how he got there, and it was exciting to see him get back to the person he was. That Picard became Picard again at the same time he was helping the Federation become the Federation again…that’s good storytelling. And he needed help! He needed his friends. When he chides Soji and Troi tells him he’s being cruel, it’s a learning moment; she’s right and he didn’t want to hear it from anyone else. When his quest costs the lives of his friends, he realizes what his ego cost the universe, and, I would think, drives his decision to finally ask for help.

I don’t know where this series goes from here. It can’t just go back to being TNG again. It will definitely feature a bunch of old Star Trek actors stepping back into their parts (if we see Kira Nerys in Starfleet uniform at DS9 I will flip shit). But this story, right here? Good Star Trek. I haven’t been able to say that this unequivocally for a long time.

12. Doom Patrol

When Mr. Nobody (Alan Tudyk) looked me in the eyes and said he was talking to an audience made of “Grant Morrison fans, trolls with a DC Universe account, and the three new viewers who stuck around after the donkey fart,” I knew this was a show for me. I mean, I am a Grant Morrison fan, I guess; but I’m just glad we’re at the point where we can have superhero shows that are willing to get weird and experimental like some of the best superhero comics are. The first season of this show is a gem; four misfits (and also Cyborg for some reason) who have been effectively frozen in amber since traumatic accidents gave them superpowers join together to save their friend and mentor, Niles Caulder (Timothy Dalton), the only person who cared for them, from, well, Alan Tudyk, hamming it up as only he can. Along the way they get into the kind of surreal adventures one would expect from Morrison’s Doom Patrol, experiencing weird puppet shows, going into a dimension up a goat’s ass, seeing an evil cockroach make out with a rat, and oh yeah Danny the Street on freaking TV, how cool is that? Along the way, they come to terms with the fact that they’ve been coasting these years, never really getting the treatment they need, and the realization that the accidents that made them super-freaks were not the start of their trauma, it’s much deeper.

But…they never really get to resolution. Well, maybe I should say not yet; unlike the other shows further up the list that deal with overcoming childhood trauma, this one is technically still going. Part of this is because the first season is mostly plot-driven, focusing on the surreal adventure of the fight against Mr. Nobody, seeking out clues to his location and evil plan, leaving the psychosis of the characters on the backburner. The closest they get to some kind of improvement comes when Robotman (played by, I kid you not, Brendan Fraser) just starts screaming “THERAPY” over and over until people talk about their feelings. But it never seems to fix anything, you know?

Maybe that was the plan for season 2. That season toned down the weirdness a bit, keeping it mostly for Dorothy Spinner’s little imaginary friends. Instead, the plot split into multiple storylines about the characters’ relationships with either their parents, their children, or both, to show how they’re trying to break a cycle of trauma. Unfortunately, due to COVID of course, the season ends abruptly at a seemingly-tragic resolution of the Niles-Dorothy plot; although I think it’s rather obvious that Niles has misread the situation and it will all turn out alright for Dorothy (not the only show on this list with a plotline about the dangers of infantilizing your adult children being literalized through supernatural attacks, oddly enough). There was a secondary cliffhanger leading to what would have been the real season finale, a fight within Jane’s mind against her memory of her abusive father, which is all well and good and a central part of Jane’s character, except they’d already done that in miniature in season 1.

Look, the Doom Patrol has always been a band of misfits who have sniped and yelled at each other and thrown fits because they’re broken inside. I get that. But the cast doesn’t yet feel like a whole, they live together and they fight together but I don’t feel them coming together. Sure, they had that great moment where they blew up a rat and saved the drag bar, but then they spent a whole season on separate plotlines. It’s a nice show, but it could be better.

Also, more Flex Mentallo please. That character doesn’t show up enough in the comics, and Devan Chandler Long is just delightful as him every time he shows up.

11. Legends of Tomorrow

This show started out so bad, but has turned into the only one of the CW superhero shows I actually care about watching. It’s barely recognizable as a DC Comics property; it would be almost completely separated from its origins of not for the fact that John Constantine was running around sleeping with everybody. Just a wacky, zany show with your typical hodgepodge of misfits, but with real heart and interesting character stories. Main cast members come and go as they get tired of being on the show, or are no longer being used on other series, which keeps the dynamics fresh; or they’ll just rewrite time and introduce a new character played by the same actor, either way. Unfortunately they’re kind of repeating their tricks a bit now: last season Maisie Richardson-Sellers, who had been playing Vixen, was recast a Charlie, a shapeshifter who got stuck in Vixen’s form, and this season Tala Ashe’s character Zari had her history rewritten so she was basically a different person (and then her two time-selves have to team up, it’s neat); and a previous storyline had Martin Stein time travel and accidentally rewrite history so he and his wife had a daughter in the past, and in this season Heatwave goes back to high school and convinces his high school self that he should have sex with his crush when he hadn’t before, and now HE has a daughter. However, the Martin Stein storyline was something of a footnote to the series, Heatwave’s relationship with his sudden new daughter was a fairly touching story, as he bumbles his way through pissing her off and tries to come to terms with the fact that, since she didn’t exist until he time traveled, he had no option to be in her life before since she didn’t exist until he returned to the present. Also, it looks like Brandon Routh’s Ray Palmer has been written out of the series, with a nice story where he marries his girlfriend Nora, the daughter of Damien Darhk, who as of last season had become a fairy godmother and has to schedule their dates around the demands of the children she is assisting. Their small marriage ceremony is kind of thrown together at the last minute, after a sitcom plot where Nora tries to convince her father, fresh out of Hell, that she’s really getting married to John Constantine, because she thinks her wizard dad won’t approve of her marrying a scientist. Oh, and Sarah Lance, the undead assassin, and Ava Sharpe, the clone government bureaucrat, are still an adorable lead couple.

The main plot of the season revolved around Charlie the shapeshifter, now revealed as one of the three Fates of Greek myth, who broke the loom that controlled destiny and thus gave mankind free will. Her sisters have been hiding out in Hell, and manipulate the spirit of Astra, a girl who grew up trapped in Hell as John Constantine failed to save her, into releasing history’s worst murderers back into the world to cause havoc and distract the heroes from the villain’s true plan. There’s a MacGuffin quest for the remains of the Loom of the Fates as Constantine tries to use it to erase his mistakes and the Fates try to use it to regain power, with Astra torn between both sides. The anti-conformity theme of this plot works well with the cast of misfits and their previous rebellion against government agencies that have tried to employ them, and corresponds to similar plots in other shows on this list. Of course, the bad guys have to seem to win at first, and their bland world without human ingenuity is properly Orwellian, but never loses the show’s particular sense of humor (Gary and Mona, the comic relief characters, are left to save the heroes, who are trapped in an episode of Mister Rogers). The climax takes place at the “Museum of Bad Ideas”, a propaganda piece created by the Fates to show their brainwashed populace all the worst ideas and most horrible crimes created by people with free will. The Legends weaponize all the failed products and beautiful, wonderful, stupid mistakes that only a free mind can make that were on display at the museum in a knock-down, drag-out fight against wax figures of everyone they fought this season, all to the tune of the Thong Song! Tell me you don’t want to watch this show. You can’t! I won’t believe you. (I guess they had to outdo last season, where the ghost of Biff from Back to the Future sang James Taylor)

10. Young Justice Season 3: Outsiders

Young Justice was a standout of the DC Comics programming around the time of the New 52. Produced by the great Greg Weisman (Disney’s Gargoyles) right off the unfair cancellation of his Spectacular Spider-Man (and its replacement by the inferior Ultimate Spider-Man), it was a 1990’s-style animated series with mature writing (nothing inappropriate for children, just treating the subject with respect and its own sense of, let’s say, “realism”…a consistent universe might be a better phrase) and an enthralling plot. Of course, this came at exactly the wrong time to succeed, as this kind of television was…not even dying, it was dead. The excellent Green Lantern cartoon was the only other vestige and it was cancelled at the same time.

But, streaming opened up the gates to all sorts of different types of shows, and apparently Cartoon Network bigwig Sam Register saw Young Justice as the kind of show that would have done better on streaming (and, indeed, it already had on Netflix), so they brought it back. Back on DC Universe, a now-defunct streaming service that’s been completely cannibalized by HBO Max which is fine because who needs a streaming service for just DC Comics? And yes, they took advantage of the situation to have more adult situations in their cartoons, and maybe have some cursing and blood. But this is still the same show I watched 10-7 years ago, and it’s still excellent.

Picking up, like season 2 did, a few years after the cliffhanger in the previous season, they finally, FINALLY, get to the Darkseid plot they’d been teasing the whole show. But the difference between this show and most superhero media has always been that the characters are allowed to age and change, so “the Team” is not where we left them. Superboy and Miss Martian are living together, Artemis and the Roy clone have a weird will they/won’t they thing going on where they don’t talk about Wally West, and Nightwing is trying to train a new generation of heroes while the Justice League are on their intergalactic goodwill tour to make up for the crimes they committed while brainwashed last season. In the midst of all this, the plans of the supervillain cabal the Light and the forces of Apokalips move into gear, a conspiracy-theory Illuminati plot where they have infiltrated every level of government and business all over the world. There are two main plots: Beast Boy finds out that he’s been working for Granny Goodness on a Star Trek-type show, and she is now using technology to brainwash people into being murderers, and another around an attempt to overthrow the monarchy of Markovia that leads to Geo-Force being forced out of his own kingdom. Both these events combine to lead to the formation of the Outsiders, a supposedly independent superhero team of younger superheroes. I say “supposedly” because the whole situation was organized by the Team, who are also secretly working with Batman and Wonder Woman: they are using their enemies tactics against them and working their own conspiracy, running their own false-flag operations, as a way of countering the influence of Lex Luthor, president of the UN (how an American was elected president of the UN, a position usually kept away from the big superpowers, is never answered, but it is used to make Lex Luthor say a bunch of Trump things, though it is made clear that Lex is playing a part when he says it). This season is a wonderful combination of big-stakes maneuvering behind the scenes and small-scale personal discussions about the morality of the actions the superheroes are taking and the effect it has on their lives in their secret identities, all spiced up with good superhero fights and weird sci-fi shit. Didn’t even talk about the undead computer, she’s great, sad how she’s manipulated. At one point Superboy chases Metron around space, runs into Superman who he hasn’t seen in years, invites Supes to his wedding, leaves in a boom tube. I’m ready for season 4.

9. Luther Season 5

“How many bullets, Alice?” “Enough, John!”

When I first started watching Luther, I described the main character as “Someone who is not a cop on the edge, but everyone treats him like he is, and he pushes himself to try to prove them wrong.” I stand by that assessment, even as subsequent seasons had him push the rules, go hard after criminals, I always understood his motivations, hoped he would overcome the hurdles put in his way by the police department, and liked to see him earn the respect of those who had prejudged him to be a “bad egg”. But through it all, there was always that one foible—his strange friendship with murderer Alice Morgan, a suspect he could never prove killed her victim but who helped Luther out when a murderer was after him. She always pushed him a little too far into the darkness, just enough to keep things interesting, and so it was so disappointing when they just killed her offscreen in season 4. Yeah nobody believed that, did they?

John Luther is pulled between his love for Alice and his need to be that by-the-book cop, and he gets in way too deep. As Alice pulls him into a gangland revenge plot (a plot she escalates the hell out of, just because she’s a psycho who can’t let things go), Luther is supposed to be helping a new officer on a series of violently sexual murders that he eventually discovers are being committed by a wealthy doctor and covered up by his wife, a psychiatrist, both of whom have been doing thrill killings for years around the world, but the husband has finally lost all sense of self-preservation and is just dragging his wife down with him. The two plots run in obvious parallel; the murderous doctor killing more and more as his wife struggles to clean up after him, and Alice doing the same as Luther negotiates with the mob to try to reach a peaceful solution that just doesn’t exist. The final showdown is inevitable, as Luther begins to lie to cover up just how badly he’s fucked up, not just this season but, as we come to think about it, throughout the whole show. I said Luther wasn’t a cop on the edge, that he just pushed things in a way we, the viewer, saw as justified. But look at the world right now. Being “justified” in the eyes of a TV audience isn’t enough. The police have to be better, they have to be open, they have to tell the truth. It’s a disappointing ending for the character, but a fascinating ending for the series. Well done.

8. Final Original Doctor Who Season

When I was first getting into Doctor Who, the final seasons had kind of a mixed reputation; the general consensus is that the writers valiantly tried to save the show, but the episodes themselves weren’t all that great and nothing could be done and the ending was disappointing. Well guys, I don’t agree with all that. I thought this season was great! I’d already seen the Curse of Fenric, which is a kind of predecessor to the type of stories Davies told in his early episodes, especially the Eccleston ones: a dark, moody story set during World War II, that ends up being a kind of origin for the Doctor’s companion Ace, as the events of this episode set into motion her entire life. I also enjoyed the much-maligned final serial, Survival, which is a rushed but interesting exploration of feminine power and primal freedom, as Ace befriends a leopard woman from another dimension and comes to respect herself as connected to nature. While this is going on, there are twin threats to the leopard dimension, both from a drill instructor who has mobilized the town against Ace’s friends, attempting to apply military discipline to the civilian populace and as a result removing all its character and individuality (this drill instructor, of course, finds himself completely useless against leopard people, and slowly slides into panic as his rigid worldview is unable to adjust to the weirdness of the Doctor’s world); and from the Master, who came there with a plot to enlist the leopard people as minions, but finds himself being drawn into their primal energy as well. And then there’s Ghost Light, which explains a traumatic experience from Ace’s childhood where she was scared by a haunted house.

Ghost Light sucks.

But what I really wanted to talk about was the four-part first serial of the season, Battlefield, the last appearance in Doctor Who of Nicholas Courtney’s great character, the Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (although he did show up on the Sarah Jane Adventures and the East Enders crossover Dimensions in Time they did for charity, so it wasn’t the last appearance of the character on TV). The Brig comes out of retirement to help the Doctor on one last adventure, and it’s a doozy: after finding an ancient, highly-advanced base hidden beneath a lake in England, and within it, the body of King Arthur. Several other Knights of the Round table and minions of Arthur then appear and begin to do battle, all astonished to see that Merlin has returned: for, at some point in the future, the Doctor will travel back to 5th-Century England with some other-dimensional knights, and the Doctor will be Merlin. This sets off a bizarre, action-packed series where the Doctor tries to unravel the reasoning behind actions he might not take for centuries, UNIT forces must team up with the Knights of the Round Table, and the Brigadier risks his life to kill a demon so the Doctor won’t be forced to break his prohibition against firearms. By the end of it the Brigadier appears to have adopted one of the Knights. Oh, to have been able to see an episode with that as the status quo, wouldn’t that have been fun?

7. Duck Tales (2017)

Ah, now THIS is more like it! I had considered picking up this show when it launched, but was overburdened with TV options at the time and gave it a pass. I immediately regretted my mistake, as I saw clip after clip online of nothing but incredibly sharp writing, witty characters, and hilarious situations. I was all set to watch it, but then Patrick and Steph told me they’d started and loved it so I immediately became uninterested.

Look my brain is weird.

However, time, and a gift of a free year of Disney Plus, heals all wounds, and I watched this show alongside the original. Anyone with Disney Plus who isn’t watching this show is missing out. Although I always read Barks’s Scrooge McDuck in the voice of the late Alan Young, replacing him with the always-excellent David Tennant was a great choice, and bringing along fellow Doctor Who alums Catherine Tate as arch-villain Magica DeSpell and Michelle Gomez as Scrooge’s sister Matilda was a fun treat too. In fact, this show is loaded with great actors from popular shows: Danny Pudi, Ben Schwartz, Kate Micucci, Bobby Moynihan, Paget Brewster, Marc Evan Jackson, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and any number of recurring characters or guest spots; and of course, Tony Anselmo returning as Donald Duck, at least, when Donald isn’t voiced by Don Cheadle. But voice actors don’t make a show, the writing does. Fortunately, the writing is sharp and witty. Plus, for fans, they’re not afraid to take deep dives into Duck lore when warranted, or to turn it all on its head when they need to. As the show progressed, they turned it into a love letter to all the old Disney afternoon cartoons that sprung up in the wake of the original, a sprawling universe of classic cartoon characters, reimagined as more alive, more real than they ever were, but in a crazier world than they had before. They even did an episode as an homage to the Duck Tales NES game! There’s real good superhero stuff here, classic world-adventuring, fun mysteries, and great villains, all focused around that old kids show standby of finding your family.

Plus, they finally answer the question of what kind of crazy woman would believe Donald Duck would be able to effectively raise her children, and why she’d even choose to have him do it in the first place. Can’t wait for the finale next year!

(Putting DuckTales at less than #1 almost ruined a friendship)

6. The Good Place (final episodes)

What can I say about the Good Place that hasn’t already been said? Not much, so I won’t try. Another one that would be higher if I was counting the whole show, this counts only for the final four episodes, but man, what episodes they were. Our heroes overcame their personal problems, reached out to their enemies and convinced them of their mistakes, and reformed heaven itself into a better organization, primed towards human goodness and built to help further human achievement and growth. The concept of an afterlife is always a little undercooked, at least from a secular worldview (which this show definitely embodies); eternity is a long time after all, and the show takes the fairly reasonable stance that even heaven would be hell after too long. All that’s left is for the characters to…advance. Each one, in turn, works on themselves, does all the things that life, circumstance, and yes, even their own egos were keeping them from doing. They find true love, they grow into the best people they could be, and find that elusive thing, true happiness. And then…they go. Peacefully, willingly, and serenely, their consciousnesses are dispersed through the universe, spreading their goodness and wisdom through the universe. A beautiful end to a beautiful show.

5. Better Call Saul

I once read someone’s Twitter post about how she doesn’t watch Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul because it just seems like entitled white dudes complaining about how they don’t get their way and taking advantage of everyone around them. I took a step back, thought about it, and said, “Yeah actually that’s right.” And I don’t mind, because they do it in such interesting ways! This season continued down Jimmy McGill’s path to destruction like happened to ol’ Walter White, but through a different path. Whereas Walter separated himself from his customers and set himself apart from the “everyman” his products hurt, devoting himself only to the “Art” of making drugs, the newly-christened “Saul Goodman” makes a point of going out on the streets, creating a cult of personality for himself amongst the ne’er-do-wells of New Mexico, even as his previous actions (and the manipulations of Gus Fring, but more of that later) bring him back into the control of the cartels, who he thought he’d avoided. As much as he likes to think of himself as a big time mover and manipulator, our Saul, like Walter before him, is completely at the mercy of Gus’s big revenge plot, a grudge the characters on the street can barely understand. Poor Nacho Varga is also pulled even further into moral compromise by his split alliances to both sides of the Cartels, allowing himself to become an accomplice to horrible murders and other crimes to cover up further crimes, all to protect his father once it’s too late to ignore his warnings.

But the real story of this season is what happens to Kim Wexler. A driven, successful, well-liked lawyer, her friendship with Jimmy and willingness to be pulled into his schemes has always been her weakness, but she always had a strong moral compass that kept her on the right side of him. In fact, that moral compass has often worked against her, as she has compromised her professional integrity to help those she felt were in need; in Kim’s case, we, the audience, agree that she is helping people in need, unlike Jimmy’s clients, who are clearly reprobates who Jimmy portrays as the oppressed underdog to assuage his own guilt and protect his massive ego. However, as Jimmy gets in deeper with the mob and things get desperate, Kim starts to double-down on bad decisions, without a kind of inherent understanding of her limits or where the danger is. Whether it’s too must trust in her own abilities, undo confidence based on succeeding in scams before, or what Adam West’s Batman termed “The lure of easy money,” Kim pushers herself further and further into crime, to places even Saul isn’t willing to go. This is an interesting twist on the Breaking Bad formula to me. Walter White was such a distasteful person that he never really had success pulling people into crime; Jesse Pinkman was already there, and just didn’t realize how deep he would get. Skyler was in the dark for so long, once she found out she was just trying to protect herself, and struck out at Walter in righteous indignation on several occasions for caring so little about her and Junior that he would become a drug lord and put them in the crosshairs. Kim Wexler…I’m worried about her. Of course, every season starts off with a scene set in the present. In this season’s, Saul is recognized in his new identity, and takes it upon himself to protect his new life, although we don’t yet know how. I’ve been waiting every season for someone we know to show up in these segments. Before El Camino, I thought it might be Jesse. Now I wonder, how deep will Kim get with the mob and, just maybe, is she still in deep to this day? She was never in Breaking Bad, so clearly something split her and Jimmy up; I’d been assuming he’d ruin her life in some way, possibly end it (and I hope not, too many cool women characters have died at the end of shows I’ve watched lately). I have started wondering if perhaps, instead, she will simply surpass him. I’m excited to find out.

4. She-Ra and the Princesses of Power final season

I wish this show had run forever. Like, let’s not understate the accomplishment of Nate Stevenson and their crew here: this is a legitimately good show, about He-Man characters. Now, there have been good He-Man shows before: namely, the 2002 He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. And…I’d say that’s it. Oh sure, 1983 He-Man is good for a laugh, and it did have tons of talented people working for it who went on to greater things, guys like Paul Dini, J. Michael Straczynski, Bruce Timm, Bob Forward, Larry DiTillio, but it was hampered by the Filmation production style, which remained largely unchanged since 1966, and their insistence on following the requirements of a child psychiatrist they had on staff to neuter any real sense of conflict in the program. I find it good for a laugh but it gets real old real fast.

But this show? This show’s great.

The final season brings together all the previous season’s themes of conforming oneself to how others expect you to act into the ultimate battle of individuality vs. conformity. Adora and Catra had their lives planned out for them by Shadow Weaver under Hordak’s command, using Adora as a tool to access technology for their own ends, and even once Adora escaped that, her interactions with Light Hope were all tailored towards using her to fulfill the wishes of the First Ones. Previous seasons were based on the assumption that the First Ones were good and Horde Prime evil, but the end of season 4 and this final season show they were both just agents of conformity; just as Horde Prime keeps hundreds of clones of himself as slaves without personality, the first ones overwrote Light Hope’s individuality with their own directives to use the avatar of the She-Ra, first Mara then Adora, as a weapon for their own gain. Last season’s traumatic destruction of the Power Sword is more than a convenient way to introduce some tension into Adora and Bow’s quest to save Glimmer and Catra from Horde Prime, it has important thematic implications in removing Adora’s attachment to the First Ones. Now, instead of relying on their instrument of war, Adora finds the power of She-Ra was within her all along, activated by her love and compassion (there’s something to be said about the destruction of a phallic symbol being the impetus to attain power from within the female, but I don’t have much to add beyond pointing that out). However, Adora still feels drawn to her obligations to her friends—understandably, as Horde Prime is actively overwriting the personalities of several other beloved main characters (the little plot where Netossa is desperately trying to free her wife, Spinnerella, from brainwashing was a good touch, and the first real character work either of them got for the whole show) but also adds some further tension in her relationship with Catra. Well, that relationship was always fraught since their only parental figure, Shadow Weaver, clearly favored Adora over Catra, but also because of the different ways they internalized their lessons as children. Adora was always encouraged to see the Horde as good, and by extension to tie her worth to how well she could help others, which she interpreted as being a good soldier to defeat the princesses. The moment she learned the Horde was evil and Princesses good, she bounced. However, since Catra was never encouraged by Shadow Weaver, only talked down to, she valued power and liked being able to look down on the Princesses, thus, why she stayed with the Horde, manipulating and conniving her way into greater and greater positions of power, not for her own ends, but because she desired the validation of someone above her—remember when she and Scorpia were in the desert and basically became pirate queens, and Scorpia suggested they just stay there, but Catra had to go back to Hordak? It was important to her that someone she thought was more powerful acknowledge her.

By the end of this season, Catra no longer needs the acknowledgement of someone she sees as more powerful. She learns how bad someone like Horde Prime can be firsthand. But she overreacts, and defaults to selfishness; she encourages Adora to leave the rebellion, which she would never do because Adora has still internalized Shadow Weaver’s teaching that she her worth is defined by what she can do for others: she can’t let herself be selfish, that’s why she rejected the fantasy world Catra created in season 3, and that’s why Horde Prime tempts her with a fantasy of living happily with Catra, Bow, and Glimmer when he gets into Adora’s mind this season. (Speaking of Glimmer, she also definitely took advantage of Adora’s selflessness to further her own goals, and of course also took advantage of Shadow Weaver’s selfishness, something she has to reckon with as well)

I do think it’s a bit of a cop out that Shadow Weaver got a moment of redemption, even if that spurred Catra to consider selflessness and gave Adora the power of love to save the day. Heck, everyone but Horde Prime got some redemption; Hordak finally realized his feelings for Entrapta were real love, his desperate dreams of dictatorial conquest for Horde Prime just a broken man reaching out for the closest thing to real affection he’d ever seen. Maybe I’d have liked to have seen more exploration of the villain’s redemption, but maybe that doesn’t matter. The individual triumphed over the mind pirate. Love won, and the universe was freed. And I haven’t even talked about my boy Wrong Hordak, the other Horde Prime clone Entrapta saved by mistake who learned all on his own that everything he’d been taught was wrong, and led a slave rebellion all by his own damn self. Wrong Hordak is an icon. Maybe if I’d watched the whole show this year this would have been number one. I definitely lost some attachment to it after Catra created the “perfect” reality and I don’t know why. It took me a while to get back into the mindset I had when I watched this show to write this. But I guess none of that really matters, this show was a succinct, witty, well-written thesis on the triumph of individualism, the power of love, and damn it the lesbians got out of it in one piece and emotionally healthy. Great television.

3. Primal

Genndy Tartakovsky is one of the greatest auteurs in film today and the only reason he doesn’t get more respect is because his chosen medium is animation. Or maybe he does get respect! I certainly see people cite him as an influence on, say, video game websites or articles about cartoons. And why not! He’s been at it for 25 years with no sign of stopping. But the fact that his name doesn’t have the same pull as, say, Steven Spielberg or Christopher Nolan is a shame. From a sheer artistic standpoint, Tartakovsky has been pushing towards his own aesthetic, his own style, and not compromising it since the 90’s. Dexter’s Laboratory was an outstanding example of what a TV cartoon could be, even amongst a crop of outstanding cartoons, and its success allowed Tartakovsky to experiment in ways Cartoon Network never really allowed before or since on Samurai Jack. Think of the commitment to aesthetic of that show: long silences, mood set only by sound effects, stories told only through images. But, think of Samurai Jack’s problems—looped animation, effortless battles against faceless robots, tedium of repetition.

Primal doesn’t have those problems. Produced in five-episode half-seasons, the second half of season 1 aired this year and continued to blow me away. Tartakovsky’s return to TV after the success of his Hotel Transylvania movies (which I never did get around to seeing) and the failure of his last show, Sym-Bionic Titan (an utter shame, one of the best robot shows I’ve ever seen, and one of the best high school shows I’ve ever seen), Primal is built entirely upon the trust of the crews at Adult Swim in this artist to deliver something unlike anything else on TV. The story of a caveman (“Spear”) and a dinosaur (“Fang”), united by the shared tragedy of the murder of their children, travelling across a wild primordial landscape, like Conan the Barbarian through the lens of Devil Dinosaur. Everything is told through images; there is no dialogue. Only one voice actor in the whole show, just to do Spear’s grunts (well, usually just one). That’s fine. Doesn’t need dialogue. Beautifully fluid animation (okay, you can see where computers filled in some frames sometimes, but if I can forgive that so can you) and tight storyboarding, along with the smaller episode orders and a schedule that gives animators time to get the work done, fixes the problems of looping animation that plagued Samurai Jack. Running on Adult Swim opens up the doors on violence that they couldn’t show on Cartoon Network proper; enemies explode into beautiful fountains of viscera, jarringly garish tableaus of destruction are contrasted with moments of true peace and natural beauty that our heroes never experience for too long. And the plots! This year’s half-season picks up where the last left off, with Spear protecting an injured Fang and they are stalked by a band of hyenas, and must slowly learn to cope with a group that quickly outnumbers them. The next episode? Rampage of a zombie Argentinosaurus, ending in a mad dash across a field of lava. The third episode of the season was probably the standout, where Spear and Fang accidentally happen upon a witches’ coven, horned women who sacrifice men to a Thing upon a Mountain, who magically gifts them with children—one witch takes pity on them, and we see her tragic story, how her child died playing in a field, and how her grief now gives her pity for others. Then there’s the Night Feeder, where our heroes see signs of horrible slaughter, an unseen enemy that even we the viewer never see, just the carnage as it carves through hordes of dinosaurs—and slowly gets closer to our heroes. And then in the season finale, the whole show is turned on its head, as, unexpectedly, some form of civilization intrudes into their lives—and it’s not quite welcome.

A wonderful show. If I was being objective, probably the best show I’ve watched for two years. You won’t see anything else like it.

2. Gravity Falls

I KNOW, I KNOW, I’m late to the party. I heard nothing but good things about this show when it launched, but I just kept seeing a Gif of Mabel and Waddles in a Ferris Wheel (“I love this pig!”) and didn’t think that looked like my kind of sense of humor. If I’d known that was a time travel paradox episode I might have changed my mind. Over the years I saw a wide array of clips, fanart, designs, and just enough plot information to know I’d made a mistake in missing out on this one, but I didn’t get around to fixing that until this year.

I don’t know if there’s anyone out there who still needs me to tell them that Gravity Falls is a triumph of storytelling. It’s the kind of show that’s just the perfect length, but leaves you still wanting to see more. There wouldn’t even be a show; I just want to hear about these characters lives: Stan’s further adventures, if Wendy and Dipper ever hung out again, how Mabel explained their new pig to her parents, and well I think we can all figure out how things went for Soos. But I’m getting ahead of myself!

Described variously as “Twin Peaks for kids” or “X-Files for kids”, Gravity Falls is about the Pines twins, Dipper and Mabel, spending a summer at their Great-Uncle Stan’s, uh, roadside attraction, and the various fantastical misadventures they get into out in the woods of the Pacific Northwest. As you do! The writers do a fantastic job of dropping little hints everywhere of the broader, meta-mystery; both in obvious “Hey look at this” moments and little background information you probably weren’t even paying attention to. This definitely would be a series enhanced by watching with an active fandom, which I did not. You need someone else to catalogue this stuff! Or at least to watch the shorts before watching season 2 so you even notice Grunkle Stan has a weird tattoo! Stuff like that!

Yeah, good sci-fi/fantasy trappings are always nice—they’re basically the #1 way to get me to watch a TV show—but character work is always the key to a truly great show. Creator Alex Hirsch has talked about how he based this show on trying to recreate his memories of childhood summers, playing out his mistakes and moments to grow on screen, and that really comes through. This show really takes the time to explain and explore how the characters grow from their experiences, how they come out the other side as better people. Even the adults are changed by their experience, and “grow up” in a way they’d long assumed they were too old to do. Even the background characters have little arcs, and better themselves. Villains find that one little shred of decency to do the right thing! (Except Bill, Bill’s a motherfucker) It’s a sharply-written, witty, heartfelt exploration of growing up and growing better, with beautiful friendships and wonderful characters that kept playing around in my head for weeks after I finished watching it.

And it was a shoo-in for my best show, until something I had never considered for top spot snuck up on me and wormed its way into my heart even deeper…

1. Tangled: The Series, aka Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure, and its premier TV movie, Tangled: Before Ever After, and heck, the movie Tangled

It’s an internet cliché for when people are surprised by the intensity of something: “they didn’t have to go so hard.” I’ve seen it used seriously, like when complimenting the music of Phil Collins; I’ve seen it used comically, like commenting on a video of a parrot dancing. I feel like the phrase has lost meaning, become a parody of itself.

But folks, I don’t know how else to say it.

There was NO REASON for this show BASED ON A DISNEY PRINCESS MOVIE to go THIS HARD.

Let’s start at the beginning: why did I even watch this in the first place? This show doesn’t have the big internet and critical following of other big Disney TV cartoons I’ve mentioned on this list; and yeah, if Disney Plus had added Owl House a month earlier, I definitely would have watched that instead. But I was stuck with six months left of the free Disney Plus subscription Jacob Kurzer bought me, and very few shows I had any interest in watching. I’d seen a couple of Gif sets on someone’s Tumblr like three years ago of Rapunzel fighting a mad alchemist alongside a Joan of Arc-looking warrior woman and I filed it away in my brain as, “Huh, that’s not what I’d expect from seeing the trailers for the movie this show is based on.” So, when I finished all the shows I’d been watching, I figured, what the heck, and watched a 10-year-old Disney musical, followed by its TV show, figuring I could drop it if it was too childish for me.

And yeah, it started out about how you’d expect, with self-contained episodes with nice morals for the kids. Rapunzel grows her hair back, and struggles to hide it from her parents, but it all works out because she uses her hair to stop some criminals and her parents love her. Rapunzel gets self-conscious because someone doesn’t like her, and she makes things worse by overcompensating to seem nice to the guy, but it all works out because she’s genuinely nice and learns a lesson about not being able to please everyone all the time. Rapunzel embarrasses her friend Cassandra by joining a contest of strength and Cassandra has trouble expressing why she doesn’t want Rapunzel to join, but it all works out because Rapunzel and Cass work together and stay friends at the end. Cassandra overbooks herself on the day of a contest and lets her friend down, but they’re able to work together to stop an experiment gone wrong and strengthen their bond for the future. Eugene realizes that he stole something from Rapunzel’s mother when he was acting as Flynn Rider and struggles to reclaim the item before she realizes the connection, but it all works out because he comes clean and Rapunzel’s mom realizes that Eugene is trying to better himself. Rapunzel takes a still life painting class but chafes under the teacher who emphasizes the fundamentals and representationalism and suppresses Rapunzel’s unique style, but it all works out because she’s not really an art teacher she’s an evil witch who’s trying to brainwash Rapunzel and the other art students into casting an incantation to free her Ancient Wizard Dark Lord from 1,000 years of imprisonment in a Limbo dimension, and Eugene and Cassandra figure this out just in time to stop it.

Wait, where did THAT come from?!?

But that’s exactly what I wanted from this series, and it doesn’t stop. By the end of the season, Rapunzel has had to choose between saving her friend and saving her kingdom while her parents go missing in a blizzard and Eugene goes to save them—and by saving her kingdom I mean she, Cassandra, and Pascal the chameleon are the only ones who can activate the ancient weather control device. Rapunzel and friends are trapped in the tower where she was held captive, surrounded on all sides by enemy soldiers, until she brings the whole building down on them. Rapunzel and friends investigate the mystery of the adamantium shards spontaneously sprouting around their kingdom, and their connection to Rapunzel’s magic hair. AND THAT’S JUST SEASON ONE. In season two they load up their horse-drawn Barbie’s Magic Dream House and GO TO (basically) MORDOR (okay so there’s no volcano but still), and I don’t even want to tell you about season three, just massive spoilers there, don’t look at Wikipedia I did that once and saw half a spoiler and fled in terror.

All of that would get this show a good rating, solid kids cartoon. Why so high? Well, it snuck up on me, but this show has some fantastic character work. Rapunzel is always friendly and nice to everyone, but she still suffered from 18 years of emotional abuse and neglect, and that manifests in a need to BE loved, and she has trouble dealing with rejection and negative emotions in a way that impacts her relationships with the ones she loves, and that she struggles to improve on as the series proceeds. I touched on this a bit before, but Eugene’s show of bravado hides a fragile ego and regret for his actions as the thief Flynn Rider, compounded by his honest belief that he doesn’t deserve his lot in life. And Cassandra, the Joan of Arc warrior woman I mentioned and hands-down my favorite character, struggles with her desire to succeed in a male-dominated career field, held back by her overprotective father who pushes her towards more traditionally feminine work, and so feels she has to be better than everyone at everything, and suppresses her emotions to project the appearance of the person she thinks she’s expected to be. All of these characters and more struggle, push against each other, fight, and grow towards becoming emotionally intelligent adults as the series goes on, and, in fits and starts, they begin to succeed. You know. Normal stuff for kids TV!

I’m not going to say I loved every decision made. Sometimes the plot got in the way of the emotional core of an episode or story beat, sometimes the dialogue didn’t immediately feel true to the characters motivations in other episodes, but usually it did. Also, being a show for kids obviously isn’t a problem for me, but they do make clear concessions to their target audience when it comes to the truly dramatic scenes; sequences that might be scary are resolved rather quickly, and emotionally-heavy or dour episodes tend to be followed by silly ones so the kids don’t get too depressed. But more often than not, the characters ring true, and kept me coming back for more. I never expected to like this show so much, but halfway through season two I realized these were some of my favorite fictional characters now, and there was no going back.

If you’re looking at your Disney Plus subscription and wondering what to do with it when you’re not watching Mando or Marvel, give this one a try. It might grow on you. It sure grew on me.