Topic: The TV Show Thread

My bro & I finished off season 1 of Fuller House (Netflix original) last night!.

Not much more for me to say about it that I already haven't (if you liked the original, you'll like this). However, I will say that they should have gotten the actor who played Fez (on That 70's Show) to play Fernando, as that would have been hilarious (I don't know if he would have been old enough to play the part, though).

Finished up season 2 of Marvel's Daredevil (Netflix original) last night!

It wasn't as good as season 1, but still a good watch. I preferred the Punisher half of the story, but I warmed up to the Electra half by the end.

My only issue was just how dark (picture wise) it was. Now whenever I saw commercials for the season on TV, everything looked perfectly fine, but when I went to actually watch it, sometimes it was so dark I couldn't tell who's who during the fighting, and no amount of fiddling around with the TV's picture settings did anything to fix it.

So I watched the Supergirl/Flash crossover episode last night. It was decent to say, I wouldn't say it was as good as say Arrow/Flash crossovers but it was good nevertheless. It kinda felt like the Arrow/Constantine crossover episode of Arrow.

There wasn't much build up to it as to why Barry was in National City which kinda bummed me, he just sort of appeared. It wasn't like he was chasing Zoom, or some other villain or there was a major disaster that caught his attention, and the reason he gave to being in National City is like ok so out of all the cities in the world why did you choose that city instead of say Star City since you know Arrow is there at least.

Sad thing is the reason behind where Supergirl takes place and the rest of the Arrowverse takes place I don't see any crossovers with any other character but Flash. (Perhaps they can do something with DC Legends but that is another story). Still it was a fun little episode and it felt more like a one shot. Maybe they were gauging the ratings before doing a full blown crossover who knows. I am just glad that now it's included into the Arrowverse.

Yeah, I enjoyed the crossover, and thought they handled it really well from a continuity standpoint.

Though now I can't wait for Netflix to get season 2 of the Flash, lol (which I know won't happen until autumn).

@RR529: Hulu has season 2 of The Flash available up to last week's episode and add the newest episode the day after it airs on the TV.

@Tasuki, unfortunately we don't have a Hulu subscription. I'd like to get one eventually, though.

We don't have DC's Legend of Tomorrow, here. Apparently, there was an homage to Batman Beyond in the recent episode?

I have to say I am enjoying Flash a lot more than I am Arrow this season. Not sure I will watch Arrow after this current season finishes.

Finished watching Code 100 and I feel cheated that they dragged me into the show over the 12 episodes. The actual storyline was good but the lead character had a terrible New York accent why they could not have employed an american to play an american is beyond me. The ending was like a big middle finger to the viewers.

@dryrain: I know what you mean about Arrow. I think the reason this season is so blah is because originally this season was suppose to be about the Suicide Squad. However WB put a nix to that due to the Suicide Squad movie coming out. Thus they were forced to redo a whole season at the last minute.

Anyone here watch Peaky Blinders? Series 3 just started up on BBC and I can't believe I know about it before. Easily one of the best gang TV shows out there

@tasuki yeah Arrow this season does not grab like it used they spent last seaosn bulding up the story only for it to be taken away because of the movie. I stopped watching it after episode 16.

I enjoyed Blindspot for a while but can not get into it any more so also stopped watching that. Loving the new season of Bosch really high quality writing. Red Oaks is also a great series that no one seems to be talking about funny comedy/coming of age drama on Amazon Prime.

@dryrain: I still watch Arrow mainly cause I hope it will get better, plus I wanted to see who died this season. Other then that though, it's felt like a chore watching Arrow this season. I am enjoying Supergirl, Flash and Legends alot more. Speaking of Legends, I really hope we see a Jonah Hex spinoff now, but I doubt it.

@Bad-MuthaAdebisi: Yeah I know (but next time let's use spoiler tags).

Not watched Legends only because my TV box was too full of shows so something had to go. Will watch it when it comes out on Bluray. Flash has been enjoyable this season and I think the Supergirl series has got stronger as the series has gone on.

@Bad-MuthaAdebisi: Which is one of the reasons I like Legends so much.

@dryrain: If you have Hulu you can watch it there.

So Supergirl will be moving to the CW next season which only makes sense since the other Arrowverse shows are there. Hopefully this means more crossovers.

@tasuki I was going through the renewed cancelled list. Its that time of year where you get your hopes up for a show returning or dashed because its cancelled. A lot of shows I enjoy got renewed which is great news and some I never started watching like Agent Carter got cancelled. The biggest disappointment of any first season show I have watched that got cancelled was Almost Human. Really loved the show and had good mix of characters and humour. Was so surprised when it got canned and then not picked up by either prime or Netflix the show had good potential.

So question for everyone what show that only ran for one season would have like to get renewed?

Yeah I was sad to hear Agent Carter got cancelled as I enjoyed that one alot more then Agents of Shield. But this season they didn't do a good job of promoting it. By the time I found out about it it was already half way through the season and I just decided to wait till it comes to Netflix so I can see it from the beginning. Oh well I am hoping that maybe Nexfix will pick it up and just have it as a Netflix series like Daredevil or Jessica Jones.

@ShadowofSparta round of applause for your xfiles thread. Copy and paste it here bro.

@themcnoisy: Haha thanks mc. Here goes

This is a somewhat random topic, I know, but as I've been re-watching the X-Files (why? I don't know, just decided to re-watch every season), I have become increasingly frustrated with Scully's skepticism to any of Mulder's claims. In season 7 now, and after a few episodes, it's really beginning to bug me. I love Scully as a person, she's kind, warm, funny, smart and guarded in a way that just makes her more likeable. So I kept trying to convince myself that she's just being a good, rational scientist. But is she really? Why are my intuitions telling me she isn't? As such, I set about trying to ground my intuitions to words.

The Good Scientist
Whilst there is some variation in textbooks, it may be generally accepted that there are several key principles to the scientific method:
1) Systematic empiricism: observations organised in a systematic manner
2) Theories must be testable and falsifiable
3) Reproducibility: can be verified independently by others in an objective manner
4) Parsimony: simplest, most natural explanations must be favoured
5) Lack of absolutes or certainty in science
I think my intuitions stem from (5). Scully generally adheres to Inference to the Best explanation (IBE- something a lot of scientists adhere to, not many pseudoscientists). This is best described by Charles Sanders Pierce:
"Facts cannot be explained by a hypothesis more extraordinary than the facts themselves, and among various hypothesis, the least extraordinary must be adopted"
On any single instance of an extraordinary phenomenon, it's perfectly reasonable to adopt a simple hypothesis. If a pig flies into the window of my room on the third floor, it's probably better to assume it was hurled there rather taking on the assumption that it developed the ability to fly after escaping from a secret government facility that was attempting to create a race of super pigs, led by a mad scientist secretly being mind-controlled by a mutant pig named Dave in a plot to overthrow pig farmers everywhere. The problem is, Scully doesn't just face a single instance. Over 7 seasons, she's at least been present to over 140 instances in which the simplest explanation wasn't adequate. Yet she never budges on her skeptical stance, citing it as scientific. But, like many forget, science is not absolute. No good scientist claims to have accessed a universal, necessary truth. Evolution is 99.9% certain, for there are no certainties. Scientists produce models of the world, models that are open to refinement and modification. To therefore be unwilling to accept an alternate possibility despite a large amount of evidence to the contrary is bad science. Good scientists have a healthy amount skepticism but a willingness to change depending on evidence. All scientists are aware of the pessimistic meta-induction from the history of science. Knowledge collapses as often as it accumulates (history provides as with numerous examples of false beliefs we held- e.g aether).As the literary critic Henry Levine so eloquently put it:
"The habit of equating one's age with the apogee of civilization, one's town with the hub of the universe, one's horizons with the limits of human awareness, is paradoxically widespread"

But is she just being rational?

The Rational Scientist
I think Scully's adherence to IBE is mostly an adherence to Induction. Induction is the general idea that, as Hume put it
"Instances of which we have had no experience must resemble those of which we have, and the course of nature continues always uniformly the same"
However, there are philosophical problems with induction. Unlike deduction, an example of good reasoning that guarantees a conclusion, induction offers no guarantee. Just because it may have rained on every Thursday that fell on the 21st of January throughout the history of the world, does not mean it will happen the next time. And, unlike deduction, induction cannot be justified without employing some degree of circularity (the future will resemble the past because the future has always resembled the past). Despite its drawbacks, induction is a form of reasoning employed everyday by some of the greatest minds on Earth, despite its vulnerability to being wrong. This is because induction is a good form of reasoning if and only if it is seen as an instance of IBE (Gilbert Harman, The Inference to The Best Explanation, 1965). Scully seems to faithfully stick to induction, rather than adopting IBE, which would allow someone to adopt a different hypothesis after 140 instances of contradiction. But maybe she is sticking to IBE and I'm misunderstanding. Does this make her Rational?

Miracles
Hume thought that "no testimony was sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony were of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact it endeavours to establish." No matter how reliable and trustworthy a person is, if they tell you of some miraculous and extraordinary event that contravenes the laws of nature, Hume would admonish you for believing it. He believed there was no reason to believe any testimony of miracles. So, whenever Mulder claims to have seen something extraordinary, Scully is within reason allowed to give his claims no ground. This actually plays out in probability theory too. If you take Scully to be a Bayesian (which she is as she cites statistics fequently), the probability of a miracle occurring is still very low even if you account for testimony from a source of incredible reliability. BUT Bayesianism allows you to adopt a new probability of a miracle occurring if YOU are provided with evidence of the miracle. Now, the show was very careful (to the point of destroying credibility) to make sure that whenever Mulder saw something amazing, Scully was conveniently doing something else so she wasn't exposed to direct evidence, only testimony. But there were enough occasions where Scully saw something extraordinary yet did not adjust her prior probability of the miracle/event occurring to suggest that she wasn't applying the Bayesian concept of probability accurately. She rejected the testimony but ignored evidence. She may seem to come round to the idea towards the end of an episode, only to conveniently forget it an episode later, discarding evidence she had been privy to. Thus, logic cannot be used as an excuse for her skepticism.

tl;dr: I don't think science or logic can be adequately used to defend Scully's skepticism
I'm probably wrong and thinking about this too much