I said back in the first installment of Finally Watched that occasionally I would review a series that I’ve wanted to see for years. Well, tonight I have the opportunity, at least in part. Not having income means not having pay-to-watch streaming services like Netflix available to me. So naturally they keep getting a lot of cool geek shows. Peacock isn’t going to do that and Disney only covers Marvel and Star Wars. Hulu got The Orville but that’s the only one I can think of over there beyond their list of older shows. One of those shows was the relaunch of Mystery Science Theater 3000, with new victim Jonah joining Tom Servo, Crow T. Robot, GPC (the rename of Gypsy to avoid insulting people who may not even watch the show because of the word’s history), and Cambot. The new Mads, Kinga Forrester and Max, are continuing the family tradition of trying to find the worse movie ever that will somehow lead to world domination.
I caught a break however when a bit of insomnia led me to learn that IFC has been airing the early seasons weekly along with broadcasts of the original Comedy Central and Sci-Fi Channel episodes, and that some of the return’s shows were available on demand. However, it only goes as far back as “the gauntlet”.
My theory is that this is a riff on Netflix’s insistence on releasing a full season of a show at the same time rather than weekly or even daily. Mother’s Basement has a good video going over why basically creating the binge culture is bad for discourse and keeping a show a discussion topic, but you can watch that at your leisure. I’m not a fan of it either but I did watch the first three episodes of the Gauntlet to at least give a proper review by post time.
