2018 is at an end and that means it’s time for the return of one of my favorite episodes of The World’s Best Podcast: The Best & The Worst of 2018! We cover the very best and
the human diarrhea in story form, from TV, Movies Comics and I’ll kinds of other cool shit! This was by far one of my favorite podcasts that we recorded this year and I think you’re all going to love it!
I recorded this episode of The World’s Best Podcast with one my absolute favorite co-host, Ryan McDonald! Of course what look back at the best and worst of 2018 be without a very special appearance by Paul Sr! So sit back and enjoy as we deep dive into everything from Avengers: Infinity War, Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, and Mission: Impossible Fallout to Daredevil, The DC Superhero Crossovers Elseworlds, and more!
*Editors Note- We did have a very minor editing glitch for about 2 seconds towards the last quarter of the episode. You could easily miss it because of who quick and minor it is, but I wanted to give you all a heads up regardless. Even with the issue it still think this is a great episode and I’m very proud of it!
This is a DON’T MISS episode! Listen here or subscribe on iTunes and Stitcher:
Tonight the final season of Gotham premiered on Fox and honestly I was very excited to watch it. It’s hard to believe that this is the same show that just a few years ago had some of the absolute worst superhero writing on TV.When Gotham began, it was more or less a shittier Smallville, with proto-versions of Batman’s rogues gallery popping up each week for Ben McKenzie’s Jim Gordon to deal with. It was a shame because the show was very well cast and all the actors were perfect in their roles. Since the very first episode, Ben McKenzie has made a great Jim Gordon (he was also the voice of Batman in the animated film adaptation of Batman: Year One). Many of the great Batman stories are also great Jim Gordon stories, so it was very important for them to get this character right.
We even got to see a part of Bruce Wayne’s life that is very rarely explored, the years immediately following the murder of his parents. David Mazouz is easily one of the most compelling live action versions of Bruce Wayne we’ve seen. He conveys Bruce’s dark, brooding intelligence without ever sounding like a whiny brat. With excellent actors memorably playing classic Batman characters like Alfred, The Penguin, The Riddler, Selina Kyle and more, the series felt like a frustrating waste of great talent. Terrible writing hamstrung what could otherwise have been an excellent take on the Batman mythos.
About halfway through Season 3, specifically the mid-season finale, something fundamentally changed about the show for the better. I think there are two big reasons for this and one of them was how the series began to use Bruce Wayne. First of all, David Mazouz had grown up enough that he was just old enough to start becoming more crucial to the action going on in the story. Pretty much from the pilot on, Bruce has slowly been learning important skills that would become crucial on his journey to becoming Batman. Season 3’s mid-season finale saw Bruce being taken hostage at a circus by Jeremiah Valeska. If you’re not familiar with Gotham, Jeremiah (played by Cameron Monaghan) is basically their version of The Joker, and a damn good one too. The episode culminated with a show down in a hall of mirrors between Bruce and Jeremiah, where Bruce comes very close to killing Jeremiah. The whole episode was pretty great and I found myself watching the rest of the season once the show returned from it’s hiatus. You started to see Bruce take a more active role as a vigilante even though he wasn’t dressed like Batman.
The second reason the series changed for the better in my opinion, was because it stopped being a bad prequel series, building up to some day in the future where we get to see Bruce put on the Batman costume in the last 5 minutes of the final episode. In the same way that Smallville was entirely built around the show teasing Clark eventually putting on the Superman costume, that we only see him wear for about three seconds in the series finale. Instead, Gotham became more of an Elseworlds Batman story. I think it’s the smartest thing the show could’ve done because they took the mythology and made it their own. They were no longer slaves to the mythology of the Batman comic books. They allowed their story to be an alternate take on the mythos. This choice gave the show its own identity. It also made it more exciting for the audiences because things weren’t necessarily going to play out exactly as they had in the comic books. As a result the back half of Season 3 was a hell of a lot of fun and frankly I love Season 4. One of the reasons I love the show Krypton on Syfy is that the show isn’t a prequel, it’s more about the DC Universe’s past being changed by time travel. Changing Krypton‘s history, changes the history of the entire Superman story and by extension the entire DC Universe.
So coming into this final season, which was going to be drawing from classic Batman stories like No Man’ Land and Zero Year (In fact this episode’s title is “Year Zero”), I was pretty psyched to see what they were going to do. I’m happy to say I wasn’t disappointed.
After the events of last season, Gotham has been completely cut off from the outside world. The bridges are down in the city and it’s been 87 days since Gotham was officially declared a No Man’s Land by the US government. Unfortunately, not everyone who wanted to had the means to leave the city before it was cut off from the rest of the world. Children, families, innocent people have been trapped in a city that has become an almost post-apocalyptic dystopia. Gotham’s been carved up into territories, with different factions controlling different neighborhoods. Penguin Control City Hall and the surrounding area. He’s also the only person in the city manufacturing bullets for guns, which are more or less currency in the city. Scarecrow, Firefly, Mr. Freeze, Poison Ivy, and other villains have also carved up their own peace of the city.Somewhat ominously, Jerimiah Valeska hasn’t been seen since the beginning of No Man’s Land. I have a feeling he’s waiting to make his own suitably dramatic entrance.
The only part of Gotham City for the average citizen who’d been left behind is the area controlled by the GCPD. Gordon with Bullock and Lucius Fox by his side, are not only leading what’s left of the GCPD, they’re also protecting and feeding hundreds of refugees and supplies are running out. A lot of this is straight out of some iconic Batman storylines, so as a longtime Batman comic book fan this is cool to see.
Fortunately, Bruce Wayne and Alfred decided to stay behind as well and Bruce is doing everything he can to get supplies smuggled in. Not only to the people suffering in the city, but medicine for Selena Kyle as well. She was shot in the stomach at point-blank range by Jeremiah in the season finale last year and unless something drastic is done she could be paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of her life. Of course this heavily weighs on Bruce, who blames himself for her condition.
Part of the fun of this season is seeing how close Bruce is to becoming Batman, even though he isn’t ready yet. There’s an early scene where Bruce takes down a bunch of thugs trying to steal medical supplies. The power has gone out, so he uses night vision goggles courtesy of the Lucius Fox to take them out one by one, in very Batman fashion. However, just when it looks like he’s saved the day, the lights come back on, the night vision goggles blind him, and the thieves get away. This is an important scene because it shows us that while Bruce is well on his way to becoming The Batman that we know, who could’ve easily taken down a group of bad guys in a situation like this, but he’s not quite there yet. He’s still making crucial mistakes and he still has much to learn. It’s important the series didn’t just suddenly turn him into Batman over night. Bruce’s journey throughout the series has felt earned. Based on his training it makes perfect sense for him to be exactly at the level he’s at now.
The episode largely sets up the status quo for the season and puts the pieces in play for things to come. We know things are going to get a lot worse before they get better because the episode opens with a flash forward to No Mans Land Day 391 and shows Gordon, Bullock, The Penguin, The Riddler, and the rest of the GCPD fending off a full blown siege by… someone. For Penguin and The Riddler to be teaming up with Gordon, it must be a pretty serious common enemy.
All in all I really enjoyed this episode and considering that it was mostly set up, I have a feeling once the story really gets going this has the potential to be a fantastic final season for Gotham. I couldn’t help but love the scene when Gordon and Bruce were standing on the roof of the GCPD together. With Gordon shining a spotlight on the sky to give people hope, foreshadowing so many of their interactions in the years to come. As Bruce walks away at the end of the scene, Gordon ask him if he regrets staying behind in Gotham, Bruce replies “No. You?”. Jim Gordons smiles and says “Hell no”. Am I looking forward to the rest of Gotham’s Final Season? Hell, yes.
On this Episode, I bring in the old man, Paul Sr. to discuss the season finales of Arrow, The Flash, Supernatural, and Gotham. We discuss the big moments of each finale, the quality of the preceding seasons, and where the shows go from here. A few of these shows we really love and have suffered from a dip in quality lately. So we have a lot of hot takes in this one! Including some inside info on how the shows connect to some other interesting projects like the Green Arrow movie that almost was called Supermax, the upcoming annual CW superhero crossover event involving Gotham City and Batwoman, the classic Batman stories “No Man’s Land” “Zero Year”, and more! Also, take a look below the link at some cool new images put out to promote the upcoming seasons of the show’s we talk about in this episode. Enjoy! Listen here, on The Boston Podcast Network pod617.com , or subscribe on Stitcher and ITunes:
Before you get to hear Part 2 of our EPIC Quentin Tarantino discussion, here’s an new episode of “The World’s Best Podcast” where I discuss some cool news in the world of movies, comics, TV, and a BOOK REVIEW! In this episode I discuss Avengers Infinity War SMASHING box office records, this year’s Free Comic Book Day, the new season of Westworld on HBO, and much more.
I also give a review/recommendation for an excellent trilogy of books that are collectively called The Themis Files by author Sylvain Nuevel. The series consists of Sleeping Giants, Waking Gods, and the latest and final book in the trilogy Only Human. Below the podcast links I’ve posted links to each book on Amazon if you want to give them a try. But this is one of my favorite sci-fi series in recent memory, so I highly recommend these books. As always, I really appreciate you guys using the Amazon links, because going through those links helps support the website and get great content out to all of you. Listen to the podcast at the links below
I was really excited about Agents of SHIELD when it premiered. The Avengers had just opened that summer and a series about SHIELD felt like a no-brainer. It seemed like the show would be about the Agents of SHIELD running around the more obscure corners of the Marvel universe (because they’re not gonna give them access to any of the major movie characters) dealing with threats and characters from the comic books. Having Phil Coulson (the SHIELD agent Loki seemingly killed at the end of the first Avengers film)as the central character was great because I liked him quite a bit at the time. He was intended to be a small supporting role in the first Iron Man movie and ended up being a vital figure in building the MCU.
Unfortunately that’s not really what we got. First of all, SHIELD is supposed to be the most elite covert government agency on the planet, and yet the agents on Coulson’s team were pretty damn incompetent. SHIELD agents should make Seal Team Six look like mall cops, not this sorry assortment of bumbling secret agents who sucked at their job.
There were three cardinal sins that Agents of SHIELD committed: one, if a Marvel Cinematic Universe television series doesn’t feature major characters like Captain America or any of the other Avengers, you better make the characters you have really, really fucking interesting. They weren’t. Two, the show was just plain boring. I found myself checking out after a few episodes. Sure I checked in here and there and the show definitely picked up at certain points. For example, after Captain America: The Winter Soldier came out, the show incorporated the HYDRA storyline that was central to that film to great effect. There were some really good twists and turns along way in the final part of the first season. Having Bill Paxton (R.I.P.) come in as the central villain certainly helped peak my interest. SHIELD vs. HYDRA, this show was finally starting to feel a little like a Marvel SHIELD comic book should.
Third and lastly, the show didn’t take advantage of Marvel characters and stories nearly enough.
The show continued to struggle with these three major problems, uninteresting characters, the show being relatively boring, and not taking advantage of the Marvel Universe. I never expected them to have A-list of characters like Iron Man or the Hulk on the show, but there was no reason they couldn’t use more of the C-list heroes and villains of the Marvel universe. As Guardians of the Galaxy proved, you don’t need the most popular and well known Marvel characters to tell great stories. Marvel could make 100 movies and there would still be a lot of interesting characters and storylines that are minor enough for Agents of SHIELD to be allowed to use.
To my surprise, they finally started to do just that when the Inhumans became a central part of the show in the second season. Let me give you Inhumans 101: The Inhumans are race of beings who live secretly and separately from humanity in technologically advanced cities hidden in places like the Himalayas and the Moon. They’re humans who had their genetic make up tampered with thousands of years ago by an alien race called Kree. The central part of their culture was when every Inhuman came of age they would pass through a transformative gas called the Terrigen Mist. Once they pass through the mist they would enter a cocoon-like state and after a period of metamorphosis, emerge as something more than human and completely unique. Each Inhuman has their own unique power or ability. No two Inhumans are alike. Some look completely human, but have a superpower. Others couldn’t pass for human at all after the transformation, but still had some power or ability. The comics typically focus on their king Black Bolt and the rest of the royal family of Inhumans. As I finished writing all of that, I just realized how completely fucking ridiculous this all sounds, but believe me it’s kind of cool.
To the credit of the show, they really took this concept and ran with it. They retconned Skye, one of their main characters who knew very little about her past and family, into Daisy Johnson a.k.a. Quake, an Inhuman with powerful seismic abilities. They introduced some notable new villains like Daredevil nemesis, Mr. Hyde and major Hulk villain, the Absorbing Man. The show still wasn’t perfect, but things were looking up.
As it stands the X-Men characters, which are all mutants, are owned by Fox and even though they’re Marvel comic book characters they can’t appear in the MCU. The way Agents of SHIELD has handled the Inhumans is very similar to how mutants are handled in the X-Men films and comics. They are feared by the public and viewed as dangerous liabilities by the United States government. Of course, heroic people like Agent Coulson protected the good Inhumans and defended against the dangerous ones and the show improved because of it. However, it was with the most recent season that the show really came into its own in my opinion.
At the time of the season premiere, Doctor Strange was opening in just a few months. So to capitalize on the recognition that would come from the premiere of Doctor Strange, the show introduced what had been largely absent from the MCU at that point: the supernatural and magic. Using these new concepts as a jumping off poin, Agents of SHIELD introduced the most major Marvel character it’s ever used: Ghost Rider.
Ghost Rider is a very cool character, especially visually. There’s been a number of Ghost Riders over the years, but the version they chose to use is a man named Robbie Reyes. The basic concept of the Ghost Rider is, an individual sells their soul to the devil in exchange for something noble, like saving a life of a loved one. In this case saving the life of Robbie’s younger brother after a violent car wreck that Robbie feels responsible for. In return, their body becomes host to a demon that transforms it’s human host into a monster with a flaming skull for a head and demonic vehicle (usually a motorcycle or a muscle car) that catches on fire and displays other supernatural abilities. All with the purpose of hunting down supernatural bad guys. Robbie hunting down bad guys with a flaming skull and driving a demonic muscle car naturally gets SHIELD’s attention. I wouldn’t say I’m completely sold on the show, but a lot of what I saw of it I really liked. Especially the Ghost Rider stuff. It was really well executedand the special effects were phenomenal. I don’t think I’d goes far to actually recommend the show, but you could do a lot worse on a Tuesday night.
Now we come to Gotham, which of the two shows probably improved the most. Agents of SHIELD at its worst was never terrible, but Gotham reached some truly abysmal lows. The cast is excellent, but the writing was god awful. The series opens with the murder of the Waynes which introduced us to several of the main characters. The story kicks off with Det. Jim Gordon promising a traumatized Bruce Wayne that he’ll find the man who killed his parents and bring him to justice. Other central characters include Alfred, Harvey Bullock (who had never been shown in live action before for this show), The Penguin, The Riddler, and Catwoman or at least versions of these characters before they become their more iconic incarnations. As I’m sure you can imagine there are a lot of lame jokes allusions to who these characters could would be eventually become. For example The Riddler’s real name is Edward Nygma and as the show opens he is the medical examiner for the Gotham city Police Department. Every time we see him he only speaks in riddles. You can imagine how quickly that gets old. I would say I gave up on Gotham about halfway through the first season. I checked in again during the final stretch of season two when I heard of that introduced Hugo Strange and one of my favorite new additions to the Batman mythology, The Court of Owls. I ended up regretting it. It was a poorly written set of episodes and when The Court of Owls was finally introduced, it was pretty underwhelming. The writing on this show was so bad, I’m not exaggerating when I say in one episode a character will be arrested for murder, but somehow they become mayor in the next episode. Sure, why not?
For some reason I found myself watching the midseason finale of the current season, which is season three. The episode centered on Bruce Wayne, who is now a teenager and just beginning the path to becoming Batman. He doesn’t have a clear idea of what he wants to be, but he knows there’s a demon inside him that needs to be fed. It was also worth noting that at this point Bruce has had enough hand to hand combat training to be formidable in a fight. A character who calls himself “Jerome”, who may or may not be the man who becomes Joker, attempts to kidnap Bruce and involve him in a sick circus funhouse game without multiple lives on the line.
This is the first time we really see a Bruce Wayne that looks like the character we know from the comics. Something really clicked on the show seeing a pre-Batman Bruce Wayne fighting a Proto-Joker. It really worked and it was a surprisingly well written episode. So I found myself watching the first new episode when the show came back from its midseason break and I stuck with it through the rest of the season. While it’s certainly still silly and not always well written, the latter half of season three was the best show’s ever been.
The season finale introduced Ra’s Al Ghul and the final scene saw a masked Bruce stopping a mugging, much like the one that ended in tragedy for him… and somehow it really worked. The final shot of the episode was Bruce standing on a desolate Gotham rooftop overlooking the city after he had saved that family and it was hard not to think how cool that was. Here’s the final scene:
I’m a long way away from saying that Gotham is a good show, but I’ll definitely be tuning into the season four premiere in the fall.
Agents of SHIELD and Gotham: These were two shows I’d completely written off and both hugely improved over the past year. Neither one of them have achieved the heights of Daredevil or The Flash, but they definitely caught my attention and I thought it was worth pointing out. Once again, I am NOT saying these are good shows, but considering the level of improvement and progress they’ve made I think it’s worth keeping an eye on them. Anyway, as always, thanks for reading.
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