Golgotha

A priest who witnessed the resurrection of a dolphin greets the alien cephalopods who believe it to be a messiah.

This is a live-action episode with CGI, most obviously the alien. It's a pretty short episode, and there isn't a whole lot going on here. It seems like it probably belongs in a more traditional anthology collection than LD&R.

I can't really say that I've seen much in the way of alien messiahs in my science fiction. So, it's got that going for it. However, it doesn't really go anywhere particularly exciting or interesting with that hook. It's basically just a setup for a simple message.

It's not bad. The acting is fine, and the humor is fine. It seems like the sort of thing you might find on YouTube, though. I half expected the priest to turn to the camera at the end and say, "Don't forget to like and subscribe!"

I was so excited about the next season of LD&R, but this season has been such a bust. It might have been better if season 3 had been the last one, and we ended on a high note.

Episodes like this make me appreciate The Drowned Giant. I'm still not even sure how much I liked that episode. But The Drowned Giant left me wondering exactly what it was about and what it meant, if anything. This wasn't bad, but it feels like a throwaway episode whose only reason for existing is to blow some stuff up via CGI.

Just imagine if we were visited by an alien species, and if it took the side of what we considered inferior species, and saw the level of destruction that the only animal species considered intelligent, the human, has.

A very good episode, if you look at it from that perspective. If aliens arrived and communicated with insects, what would they say? Or with cattle, or with birds? Are we really the most intelligent? Looking from the outside looking in on the way we're doing on this planet, I don't think so.

If we take all humans out of the equation, I think the planet has a better chance of survival.

"Golgotha" isn't terrible by any means, but during and after my viewing of the episode, I was left with one crucial question: What was the point of the episode?

It isn't funny. It isn't entertaining. It isn't even interesting. The CGI is perhaps the only thing that was even remotely impressive, but even that was lackluster compared to most other episodes this season.

The premise was fine, and it did bring up an interesting question of whether animals would call humans out if given the opportunity. However, there were so many ways they could've explored the idea better that I was upset at the wasted potential.

Perhaps most strange of all is that there wasn't anything 'bad' about the episode. The story was tolerable, the CGI was tolerable, the acting was tolerable, the ending was tolerable, but the problem was that it all felt pointless. "Golgotha" is an episode of nothingness.

An alien emissary requests that a priest (Rhys Darby) who witnessed the apparent resurrection of a dead dolphin take it to the site of the miracle. The premise of aliens arriving on Earth only to reveal that perhaps we, as a species, are not as important as we'd like to think we are has been done before ('Star Trek: The Voyage Home' is another cetacean example) and can be a fun comment on our hominid hubris, but this short tale could have been a lot better. The special effects are pretty good, although the 'walking octopus' isn't very convincing from 'the neck down' and Darby doesn't make for a very plausible conflicted pastor (he is not helped by his script). The story would have been greatly improved if a bit more thought given to the design of the alien, such that the final scene made a bit more sense (as well as dispensing with the line "...their home is a gas giant").

For the first live-action episode in the series since Ice Age, I was hoping for something that would impress, and this episode fell very short of doing so. Almost no character was given to anyone, and the entire plot would have played out the same if the main character were absent. I struggle to see what this episode was trying to say or accomplish besides a very shallow "humans harm the earth".

With very little to bring to the table in terms of story, characters, and messages, it can't even give interesting visuals for me to at least turn my brain off and enjoy watching. Most of all, the sin this episode is most guilty of is being boring.