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SJEinTexas
Reviews
Elizabeth Stanton's Great Big World (2011)
The Berlin wall was built to "separate people"??? Please, do not use this for school History lessons
I am determined to not be mean in my reviews because I know that anyone who has created a video has put in some effort and I appreciate that.
Also, I have only seen a few of these episodes while scanning channels, so this isn't a review of the entire series.
However, there is one episode which I saw yesterday that I had to comment about. It was titled "German Adventures" (Season 8, Episode 1).
This episode was mainly about touristy things to do in Berlin and one of the main segments was about the Berlin Wall. It was a typical segment until, on multiple occasions, Elizabeth remarked that the Berlin Wall had been built to "Separate People" from East and West Berlin.
All I can say is, Elizabeth, please take some more history classes about the Cold War and please, if you ever go back to Berlin, report that the wall was built by the East German Communist Government in the early 1960's to keep an increasing number of people from East Berlin (and East Germany) from defecting to West Berlin.
These East Germans were not just trying to go to West Berlin because they were "separated" from their family and friends. They risked death and major injury from East Berlin solders brutally shooting at them with machine guns as they tried to make it across the wall to West Berlin because they didn't want to live in the "communist paradise" that had been established in East Germany with the help of the USSR (please look that country up, now relegated to the "Dustbin of History", if you haven't heard about it).
If this is series being shown on any PBS station, there should be a disclaimer about not using this in any way, shape, or form as a part of a school's history classes.
His Dark Materials: The Clouded Mountain (2022)
It's all rip roaring, crazy, non-nonsensical fun, so best not to overthink it.
I agree with an earlier reviewer that new plot devices just seem to pop out of nowhere in this episode. Although, since that seems to happen with regularity in most of the episodes, one almost comes to expect it by this episode.
BTW, season 2 episode 6 establishes that Mrs. Coulter can somehow control Specters. However, how she now has gained the ability to eviscerate them as well is one of the many new non-nonsensical plot devices.
And, what the heck, why wouldn't the seemingly god-like, all powerful, all controlling, ultimate evil antagonist, Metatron, also known as the Authority (who can also manipulate the flow of dust), lure Mrs. Coulter and her ex-lover Astriel into his sky fortress, where he takes human form (which was his original form?) and is wrestled into the dust rift and destroyed?
And, yes, why not use Steampunk weaponry and tactics from a physical realm to fight off all manner of creatures from a spiritual realm? It's been established in all the previous episodes that it makes perfectly good sense, so why not double down on it in this episode?
It makes one wonder about what kinds of chemicals were being ingested by the authors when this series was written.
Anyway, why am I giving this episode seven stars?
Well, in the end, it was all rip roaring, crazy fun after all, wasn't it, so it's best not to overthink it. :-)
Petticoat Junction: Modern Merchandising (1965)
What happened to the ending of this episode?
This episode, along with the usual disaster enhancing escapades of Uncle Joe, has a pretty good running joke about losing your wits when under too much stress ("What's your name again, lady?" "Kate!"). First it's Sam Drucker losing it as his customers defect to the new modern supermarket in Pixley; then it's Kate losing it after taking over Sam's store while he goes on vacation.
This was an okay episode overall. However, the strangest thing about it is that there's no resolution to the various problems that reach a crazy crescendo in the end. When I saw this last night, I thought for sure that the end of the episode must have been cut off during the transfer to DVD or there must be a part 2. But after checking the next episode and finding this one online, I can see that neither was the case.
So, in addition to Sam and Kate losing their minds, the writers of this episode must have as well when they tried to figure out an ending that would tie up all the loose ends.