The Quite Nerdy Blog

26 years ago, there was an anime called Neon Genesis Evangelion . It was a hugely successful show across the world, about giant robots fighting aliens and the psychological turmoil that said battles can inflict on their pilots. However, its bold ending proved controversial and led to a second attempt to end the show, this time as a feature film called The End of Evangelion . It too is an incredibly bold statement that, while more universally appreciated, still has its detractors. That response led creator and writer Hideaki Anno to try once again to tell his story through a "rebuild" series of films, which retell the story of Evangelion across four lusciously animated films, the final one of which was released worldwide last month. Most shows are happy to end once. Some shows get a second attempt. It is almost unheard of for a creator to get three attempts to end their story. But Evangelion isn't like most stories. If you're also a fan, you already know all this thoug...

Black Widow is the hotly awaited solo film of Black Widow, a character who has been dead for over two years now. I bring this up at the start because it helps foreground the weird place the MCU finds itself in currently. After the pandemic shuttered most cinemas and film sets for the majority of 2020, studios have been working with a mix of productions finished during COVID (more on them in a bit) and productions that have been sitting on a shelf gathering dust. Black Widow is the latter, originally supposed to be released in the spring of 2020, now here in the summer of 2021. It feels exactly like it's been on a shelf somewhere, and that colours so many of my thoughts towards it. This feels like the exact wrong time for a movie about Black Widow, a step back while the TV branch of the MCU is attempting (again, more on that later) to push this universe forward. Paramount among the reasons this feels like a film that was meant to come out years ago is that it's set in between Ca...

Last year, when we all went into lockdown, I did what most of us did: I reverted to a younger version of myself. Living in my childhood bedroom again, I became my thirteen year old self. All I did between daily walks and weekly video calls was play video games and watch Community . To this day, Community is still my favourite show, but I discovered it when I was thirteen and I hadn't rewatched the whole show in full since the season 6 finale. So yeah, I had very little to do with my days and I thought that a comfort watch of my favourite show was appropriate. Most of us did similar, avert thy judgement. The question you're probably asking is why this is relevant a year later. In fairness, a great question. In my rewatch, I failed to finish the show, leaving it hanging on the final three episodes. For an entire year, I have left those episodes untouched and as a sort of closure, I wanted to finally watch those episodes. In the UK, we're coming out of lockdown next week, endi...

After four months, I finally finished my rewatch of Twin Peaks in its entirity. It is an absolutely fascinating show and has slowed morphed into one of my favourites, but it's also intensely hard to recommend to anyone who isn't already a fan of David Lynch, the co-creator and director of much of Twin Peaks . So, that's kind of what today is, it's a three pronged Twin Peaks attack. I'm going to talk about the various forms Twin Peaks has taken over the years, what makes those forms so hard to recommend to people, but also why I love them so much. I know the title makes it sound like this show isn't going to be for you but hopefully, if you read on dear reader, you may realise that a trip to Twin Peaks is exactly what you need. Twin Peaks  (1990-1991) - The Trailblazer We begin, as the end credits song for Bojack Horseman do, back in the nineties. Beloved director of weird shit David Lynch and TV veteran and writer of Hill Street Blues Mark Frost team up to creat...

In a year defined by staying inside and binge watching Netflix, I feel like I didn't watch as much as everyone else. I wish I could have, a lot of it sounds great, but I spent most of the year so full of overwhelming anxiety that I couldn't focus on something non-interactive for more than a few hours and then the rest of the year I spent studying. Despite that, I made time for Normal People , a show that is so great it felt almost cruel to release it in the middle (or as we now call it, the start) of a pandemic. For those who are unaware, the show is the story of two young adults, Connell and Marianne. They meet at sixth form, where Connell's mum is a cleaner for Marianne's family. Coming from two different social worlds, they never expect to connect and yet, they do. They connect quite hard, actually. The show follows their relationship, falling in and out of love across their time at sixth form and then university, with plenty of heartbreak, touching and touching indu...

Hey everyone, welcome to Best of the Decade month! For the next five weeks, I am going to be discussing the very best things that have come out this decade, at least in my opinion. Each week will have at least one post on a subject and because they're such big topics, I may be bending the numbers a bit in terms of how many entries there are (though always aiming to stick to multiples of seven). Those topics are going to include films, books, music and video games but starting us off, we have TV shows. If you talk to anyone who's made an effort to follow TV this decade, they'll tell you it was an amazing decade for TV, a real moment of "Peak TV". As the decade reached its end, that became exhausting for some ( me included ) but it can't be denied that we have seen some of the best shows ever made in the last ten years. Speaking of, I want to be clear how I'm judging release windows. Being ongoing by their very nature, measuring what decade a show came out...