He’s a world-class solder, a quick thinker with a quicker trigger and the ability to process minutiae really fast and spit it out as exposition to the audience. He’s fun to watch but difficult to relate to, and at the end gets lost in a massive library of action heroes who we remember by the name of the actor who portrayed them and not the character themselves.
Read MoreThe script is too thin to really grapple with the moral dilemma. We get a few sequences where the characters individually break down due to the stress, but the drama never builds to the wrenching height that the situation demands. Maybe you can chalk that up to the immense training and professionalism that these characters would exemplify, but it did leave me a bit cold.
Read MoreWhat Ruben desperately wants is a fix to his hearing loss - not unlike the other kind of fix he used to depend on. The grief he feels for the life he’s lost comes in waves. But in an echo of his past efforts to get clean, Ruben gradually adjusts to the strictures of the program and makes new friends. Unfortunately, he also offsets his progress…
Read MoreThe first half of the season spends a lot of time laying groundwork. Whereas the first season was more character-driven, often choosing several characters per episode to focus on, now the show takes on a more plot-driven, serialized structure. There’s a trickle of information about Stormfront, and the side hustle she may be running to import supervillains into the country. There’s also a comic-relief arc running between episodes with The Deep (Chace Crawford), who has accidentally joined a sort of Scientology-like cult in Ohio.
Read MoreNora fares a bit better. She’s the heart of the show, as someone who both loves and hates the idea of digital afterlife; she believes in the ideals that the tech is based on, but hates how corporate culture has infected it with predatory policies. Nora is someone who struggles to connect with people in the real world, and when she finally finds someone she truly cares about, he’s tragically both already dead and a professional client.
Read MoreA character glimpsed briefly in one episode will eventually get an installment of her own. The high-tech discoveries at the Loop figure into each one, but we’re never left with the sense that the show is trying to sound dire warnings about its viewers’ relationship with their phones or social media.
Read MoreIt’s a good-enough premise, but the moral question it posits is far more interesting. There’s a lot of torture, and a lot of it to good end. Important plot information is revealed usually when Nazis are tortured, and when the situation is flipped and the Nazis do the torturing, it’s usually to show the strength of Jews. I don’t think Hunters endorses torture, but simply by tolerating torture we may not be as progressive as we thought, especially given all the scientific advances made during the war years.
Read More
