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Television

Supergirl: “Better Angels” predictably features all of the show’s strengths and weaknesses

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I’m not sure what I expected from Supergirl’s season finale, but I feel like what we got—an uneven episode that is equally full of frustration and heart—is probably what I should have expected. “Better Angels,” like many Supergirl episodes, has flashes of greatness, and the sheer earnestness of it is refreshing in a television landscape dominated by darker, grittier programs, but the episode nonetheless exemplifies most of the show’s ongoing storytelling flaws. There’s a lot that’s satisfying about this season finale, but there’s much to frustrate as well, especially in light of the fact that the show still hasn’t been confirmed for a second season.

Last week’s episode ended on a cliffhanger of sorts, with Alex under the control of Non through his Myriad program and set to have a fight with Supergirl. Like most similar cliffhangers in the show’s first season, however, this one is resolved within the first five minutes or so of the episode when J’onn J’onnz (I guess I should get used to calling him that now since everyone knows his identity) shows up with the elder Danvers, Eliza, who is able to break Myriad’s hold on Alex with the power of love, I guess, which is just the sort of borderline Pollyannaish thing I expect from this show, but still. It seems like something that Supergirl could have done herself, which would have been more economical storytelling, but I suppose this is the way the show decided to contrive to have Eliza in town so that she could be told about her husband still being alive and then hang around for family dinner at the end.

Eliza being able to get through to Alex does lead to the idea that ends up freeing the rest of National City (except, inexplicably, Superman, who languishes in a coma until the end of the episode when he wakes up to text Kara about how awesome she is) from Non’s control. Unfortunately, because Non is highly impressionable, Indigo is able to convince him that if they can’t control the humans they should just kill them all and move on to a planet that they can control. This is a totally ridiculous plot, and the show itself seems a little sheepish about it, to be honest. Instead of focusing on resolving this silliness, most of the episode is instead dedicated to character work and touching speeches. Sure, Indigo gets ripped literally in half by J’onn, and Supergirl flies the remains of Fort Rozz out into space to save the world, but that stuff seems relatively unimportant and takes up a comparatively small amount of screen time.

Unfortunately, this leaves the finale feeling decidedly anticlimactic. Non and Indigo never feel like a true threat, and their defeat doesn’t feel like that much of an accomplishment. Though earlier in the season the idea was heavily seeded that Astra and Non were misguided environmentalists, this theme is completely abandoned, and whatever “message” the show has been going for with the whole Astra/Non and Non/Indigo saga has been watered down to something vague and mealy-mouthed about kindness and love being the answer. The answer to what? Meh. Everything, I guess.

Still, Supergirl has redeeming qualities. Melissa Benoist is an absolute treasure, and her performance carries this episode just like it’s carried so many others before. I love the evolution of Kara’s relationship with Cat Grant, even if the promotion she receives in the finale makes no sense whatsoever. The show often goes overboard with its number of sappy speeches, but I adore every stupid one of them. The family-friendly comic book feel of the show is exactly what I want it to be, and the supporting cast is solid, even if Benoist does do a lot of the heavy lifting from week to week. All in all, it’s an enjoyable show that only lacks in the writing department. Hopefully a second season will have plots strong enough to actually support the cast’s excellent chemistry and fine character work.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • I guess Project Cadmus is going to be the season two big bad.
  • So, does Cat know that Kara is Supergirl or not?
  • Also, Cat finally called her Kara!
  • Is there anyone who doesn’t cry at the end of Working Girl?
  • I’m glad that it looks like they’ll be keeping Lucy Lane around. I really want her and Kara and Alex to be best friends and have lots of time hanging out together just the three of them.
  • Kara and James are legitimately precious together, and I’m looking forward to seeing their relationship develop in the future.
Television

iZombie: “Dead Beat” and “Salivation Army” were an amazing end to a great season

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Wow. Just. Wow. iZombie sure knows how to end a season. It would probably be impossible for a show as sprawling and juggling so many concurrent plots as iZombie to wrap everything up to everyone’s satisfaction, and I do have some issues with the finale, but mostly I’m just blown away by how overall excellent it turned out to be. Between “Dead Beat” and “Salivation Army” there was enough resolution to feel some closure at the end of the season, but there are still a few loose ends and a potentially great setup for next season’s big bad.

“Dead Beat” is all about the fallout from Major’s arrest at the end of last week’s episode, and it brings all of the Chaos Killer stuff to a satisfying, if heartwrenching, close. It’s legitimately great television, possibly the best episode of the season. Dale and Clive struggle to build their respective cases against Major while Ravi and Liv try to find a way to get Major the brains that he needs to stay human, and it’s so tense. The episode opens with the FBI showing up to search Ravi and Major’s house, which totally blindsides Liv and culminates in Ravi’s arrest as a possible accessory to murder.

Things get worse before they get better, though. The show is a little hand-wavy about exactly how Ravi avoids charges, but he’s soon out of police custody and able to work with Liv and Peyton to try and find solutions to Major’s problems. With Ravi and Liv both cut off from the morgue, they go to Blaine for brains, only to be denied by Don E, who is still taking advantage of Blaine’s amnesia in order to take over the business. Next, Ravi and Liv decide to unfreeze one of Major’s “victims” in order to weaken the case against him, only to find that someone else has already found Major’s storage space and removed the bodies.

This whole episode is an exercise in creating just the right amount of tension for the characters so that it’s believable and the stakes feel truly high, and it’s proof that iZombie isn’t afraid to go dark. Things get seriously harrowing as Major’s condition deteriorates, and the sense of urgency that pervades the episode is marvelously crafted and makes Liv’s eventual confession to Clive about all the zombie stuff—and Clive’s reaction—a great scene of high drama. This drama is further heightened by the amount of time “Dead Beat” dedicates to Clive and Dale’s police work. These two work really well together, and though their relationship hasn’t gotten a ton of screen time in the back half of this season they have an easy chemistry and a lived-in dynamic that feels real and makes the fallout from Clive’s decision to drop the case against Major hard to watch. I’m not entirely thrilled with Dale being gone—though I think we can still hope to see her next season—but at least she didn’t die tragically.

Dale’s confrontation with Clive is only topped in this episode by the penultimate scene in the morgue, when Liv is attacked by Vaughn’s hired gun, Janko, and Ravi comes to the rescue. It’s not often that we see Rahul Kohli do such physical work on the show, but he pulls it off. I loved that he was so quick on the uptake and didn’t even pause before rushing out to retrieve Liv from the assassin. Kohli also really sells Ravi’s trauma after killing the man, and his shell-shocked reaction felt natural to the character. My only quibble here is how quickly he seemed to recover at the end of the episode. I always enjoy the Liv-Major-Ravi-Peyton friend group hanging out together, and their final get together here is in some ways a nice way to end an overall extremely dark episode, but Ravi’s quick recovery after killing a man in self-defense and Major’s similarly speedy rebound from his time in jail both felt a little too sunny. That said, the moment passes quickly, interrupted by Liv’s vision of the rest of Major’s abducted zombies, who are still alive in Vaughn Du Clark’s basement laboratory.

“Salivation Army” (which is an amazing episode title) opens the morning after Liv’s vision. Peyton is upset because the mayor has called off her investigation of Mr. Boss’s crime ring, and the whole gang has to figure out what to do about the zombies locked up in the Max Rager basement. Fortunately, Major has a plan, albeit a shaky one, to infiltrate the upcoming party that Vaughn is throwing to celebrate the sale of the company to some obviously shady military contractors—Fillmore Graves Enterprises, which is an excellently silly name.

Meanwhile, Mr. Boss is making his move against Don E, sending a couple of his hired guys to take out the competition. Poor Chief takes a bullet between the eyes, but Don E manages to only take a couple to the chest, while also deflecting attention to Blaine. The ensuing B-plot is by far the weakest part of the finale, unfortunately. After apparently getting back together with Ravi early in the episode, Peyton finds herself kidnapped by Mr. Boss’s guys in order to draw out Blaine based upon Don E’s claim that Blaine was in love with the DA. This leaves Ravi and Blaine to work together in order to rescue Peyton—they play the damsel in distress trope pretty straight—and leads to a bizarre sequence in which Blaine (still supposedly suffering from amnesia) rushes in like John McClane to save Peyton, and then Ravi walks in on Blaine comforting Peyton and feels jealous. It’s a subplot that borders on nonsensical, utilizes stupid sexist tropes, and doesn’t actually resolve the Mr. Boss storyline, Blaine’s amnesia, or anything else at all. I’m fine with having Boss carry over into the next season since I like him as a villain, but I could have done without literally everything else that happened regarding him this episode.

On the bright side, the Max Rager plot works really well, and I loved getting to see Liv, Major, and Clive work together to deal with the zombie outbreak at the party—obviously this was a thing that was going to happen after all the teasing and threatening of the zombie apocalypse in the last couple of episodes—and, ultimately, deal with Vaughn Du Clark. The final sequence in the Max Rager basement is for the most part really well-done, if a bit rushed-feeling. It’s basically just an emotional rollercoaster as Liv and company find the imprisoned zombies, encounter Rita, are separated by Vaughn, figure out that Drake has been damaged by the “cure” that was tested on him, have to fight their way free of it all again, during which Liv has to kill Drake to save Clive, then Major abandons Vaughn to Rita… It’s a whole lot of climax to jam into just a few minutes in a single episode, but they manage to pull it off, leaving me with just a couple of quibbles.

First, I would have liked to see Liv get a little more time to mourn Drake and process her having to be the one who killed him. Sure, I get the feeling that really this whole thing is more about Liv’s friendship with Clive than anything else, but still. Drake played a relatively significant role in Liv’s life this season, and it seems like his death was about everything but him and his relationship with Liv—especially since getting Drake out of the way opens the door to Liv getting back together with Major again. I’m not a huge fan of love triangles, but this is the second time that Liv has had a love interest killed off in order to make room for Major. If they’re an endgame couple, fine, but simply killing off other guys when they become inconvenient is lazy writing, and it diminishes any emotional investment the audience can even have in Liv’s love life if we know that her boyfriends are disposable.

Second, I’m a little bummed out about Rita dying. Her time as a zombie, and especially her final interactions with her father, made her a somewhat more sympathetic character, and I would have loved to see what she would do while under the influence of Vaughn’s brain. She would have made a great sidekick to Vivian, even, if she could have ingratiated herself to the new boss. Alternatively, she could have been an interesting frenemy for Liv if the show would ever seriously consider dedicating some time to Liv’s relationships with other women. It just seems like a missed opportunity, is all. There’s a certain sense of justice to the way that Rita and Vaughn met their ends, but I just really liked Rita and could see other potential uses for the character even in the absence of her father.

Of the two episodes that make up the finale, “Dead Beat” is definitely the stronger one, focused as it is, really, on just barreling towards bringing Clive in on the zombie secret and doing a last little bit of final setup for “Salivation Army.” The final episode of the season is sadly weighed down by a frankly ridiculous secondary plot. It wasn’t awful, though, and Vaughn’s ending in particular was a pretty much perfect way to wrap up this chapter of the show. Passing the villain torch to Vivian and her zombie army creates a ton of new and potentially interesting storytelling opportunities, and I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • Brant Stone is exactly the sort of delightfully sleazy lawyer I would expect to be friends with Vaughn Du Clark.
  • “We now take Bitcoin!” Oh, Don E. Never change.
  • I can’t wait until Blaine gets his memories back, if he hasn’t already. Amnesia Blaine is just not that much fun to watch.
  •  “…as a friend.” Clive is generally so undemonstrative about his friendship with Liv, and his pleading with her to think about her decision to stand by Major is genuinely touching and represents a real evolution of the character.
  • Major and Liv are definitely the biggest Peyton and Ravi shippers of all. Major’s “Sup!” and the looks of delight on both their faces might have been the single funniest moment of the night.
  • “A prison theme. White people.”
  • “Who knew that this evil underground lair gig would have actual perks?”
  • “A massive zombie outbreak means never having to say you’re sorry.”
  • Vivian Stoll is already a fascinating character, and she basically steals every scene she’s in. The Matchbox 20 cover at the end while Vivian and her people snack on Rob Thomas’s brain helps to create an absolutely perfect final tableau to end the season with.
Television

Supergirl: “Myriad” is a very dull setup for next week’s season finale

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“Myriad” is almost entirely setup for next week’s season finale of Supergirl, but it’s sadly just not that compelling. The characters who aren’t mind-controlled mostly flail around ineffectually, and the moments of emotional resonance that usually make this show worth watching are few and far between this week. It’s capped off with what passes for a cliffhanger ending on this show, but the stakes still feel relatively low and the pattern of events for next week’s finale already feels predictable and, frankly, boring. To get there, though, we first have to make it through this episode, which is boring enough on its own for two episodes and turns into a downright slog in its second half.

The hour starts out well enough, picking up just after the end of “World’s Finest.” Nearly all of National City is under Non’s Myriad mind control, including everyone at the DEO, where all but one of the prisoners are to be released. Only one—Maxima, Queen of the planet Almerac—actually gets loose, however, before Supergirl arrives and stops the process. The short fight that ensues Supergirl and Maxima is the only real action in the episode, however, and Supergirl is primarily focused with disabling the DEO systems and taking out Lucy Lane and the other agents without seriously injuring them. This is all over with in the first four minutes of the episode, however, which leaves a lot of time to fill with stuff that’s not action.

After leaving the DEO, Supergirl flies straight to the Fortress of Solitude to find out more about Myriad in the hope of finding a way to stop it. Unfortunately, the little robot guy there is no help at all, and the hologram of Kara’s mother isn’t much more help, which sends a dejected Supergirl back to National City, where she spends some more time frantically wandering around and trying to come up with some kind of plan. Lucy Lane’s dad is surprisingly helpful, but the real surprise is when Supergirl is pacing around CatCo in distress and Cat Grant walks in like everything is totally normal. This is kind of hilarious until Maxwell Lord arrives hot on Cat’s heels with a smirk and several infuriatingly glib and too-convenient explanations.

While Max is teasing some kind of plan—it’s a bomb, obv—Non shows up. Probably the biggest problem this show has is that it fails, utterly, to deal in any sensible way with real moral ambiguity, and this is highlighted in this episode in a series of situations that all start with Non’s arrival at CatCo.

First, Non’s goal (and Astra’s before) is not an entirely bad one. He sees the self-destructive trajectory of the human race—much like the successfully suicidal policies of Krypton—and wants to fix it. Unfortunately, the show portrays Non as almost nonsensically villainous instead of recognizing or working with the greyness of his character. Some noise is made about Non’s desire to not have to kill his niece, but with the near-absence of any interactions between them previously, it’s hard to care very much about their relationship or believe that either of them has any sincere attachment to the other.

Before Non leaves CatCo, he has James, Winn, and another CatCo employee, Kelly, all walk outside and fall off the sides of the building, putting Kara in the impossible situation of not being able to save all of them. However, Kelly is a character who has never been named before, and is essentially a throwaway character who exists only to be sacrificed in this manner as a matter of narrative convenience. Any emotional resonance of this scene is further diminished by the fact that it all happens so quickly and things move along so soon after that there’s barely a moment to spare to reflect on the tragedy. Certainly Supergirl herself seems to get over Kelly’s death extremely quickly. It’s a moment seemingly meant to suggest a weakness in Supergirl, but it doesn’t quite connect.

Finally, the whole business with Maxwell Lord’s bomb is a little silly. I love a good Cat Grant speech as much as the next person, and on the surface this one is excellent. Taken out of context, I love this talk between Cat and Supergirl, but within the episode it’s almost silly, coming off as Pollyannaish and preachy. A very generous interpretation would be that this scene is an exploration of the moral dilemma Kara faces in choosing whether or not to go along with Max’s plan, but I would contend that it’s actually a rejection of the dilemma. Indeed, Cat’s central thesis reminded me a little too much of the Fear and Love scene from Donnie Darko. Only the sheer earnest goodness of this show saved it from being completely ridiculous.

Meanwhile, Alex and Hank are still on the run. I’m not sure how much time, chronologically, has passed since they actually left National City, but they appear to still be on a bus out of town when it’s stopped by some shady-looking law enforcement flashing their pictures around. This scene is nicely done, even if the red glow of Hank’s eyes is a bit much—yeah, we get it, the little boy is Hank in disguise—but things are almost all downhill for this pair after that. When they arrive at the Danvers home (because that place is definitely not going to be being watched for the fugitives or anything like that), Eliza tells them the news about National City, and they promptly decide to go back, even though Alex will obviously just get mind controlled along with the rest of the humans.

By the end of the episode, of course, Alex is mind controlled and Supergirl has to fight her, though Kara does say she won’t do it, and that’s where the episode ends. I’d like to say that I’m excited to find out what happens next, but my dominant feeling by the end of this episode was just “meh.” Hopefully next week’s finale can manage to make some sense out of all this.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • I did love Cat’s Harrison Ford joke.
  • Superman showing up and getting mind controlled and Max’s explanation for it is one of the dumbest things this show has ever subjected us to. And that’s saying a lot.
  • “We’re way past villains of the week and kittens stuck in trees” is a passably good line.
  • Also “So mind control is the answer to global warming. Why didn’t I think of that?”
  • I’m not really sure why Indigo is necessary. Sure, Non is dull on his own, but the addition of a Lady Macbeth doing a cheap Mystique cosplay doesn’t improve things.
Television

Lucifer: “St. Lucifer” is a mess of rape culture and mediocre-to-poor writing

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I can’t help but feel as if Lucifer shot its wad a little early this week. Last night’s episode was an overall okay hour of television, but “St. Lucifer” somehow managed to feel both as if it rushed through story and as if nothing much significant happened. With just two episodes left in the first season, this one ends on a curiously ambiguous and frustratingly dull note. First, though, let’s talk a bit about how this episode is actually a pretty vile piece of rape culture.

The hour opens with Chloe waking up naked and hungover in Lucifer’s bed, which I guess seems like an obvious follow-up to the events at the end of the previous episode, but it’s a situation played for laughs that I just don’t find at all funny. The more I’ve thought about the ending of “Pops,” the more I hate that we’re supposed to think at all highly of Lucifer’s “self-sacrifice” in refusing Chloe’s drunken advances. This opening scene only highlights how awful it would have been for Lucifer to have had sex with her in that condition, as Chloe was apparently so drunk that she barely even remembers what happened and needs his help with making sense out of what little she does remember. That this is framed as her having a fear of doing something she would regret rather than concern that she may have been taken advantage of is actually disgusting. Because, make no mistake about it, a sober person having sex with someone who is blackout, passing-out drunk—especially if the sober party knows that the drunk one would not ordinarily be down to bang—is rape.

It may have been easier to overlook this gross, victim-blaming, rape-enabling messaging if it didn’t form most of the basis for the thematic arc of the episode. Basically, Lucifer feels so good having done something nice that he wants to repeat the experience. It just doesn’t work the way it seems to be intended to. Or, rather, it doesn’t work if you recognize taking advantage of a drunk and incapacitated person as rape, since in that case Lucifer’s managing to, you know, not rape his friend isn’t a particularly good or heroic act as the show’s writers seem to want us to believe. Unfortunately for the foundational premise of this episode, not raping someone is not a good deed that one should feel self-congratulatory about—especially not to the degree that Lucifer is self-congratulatory. It’s just basic human decency. Not raping is literally the least you can do when your drunk and distraught friend shows up unexpectedly looking for comfort, and, frankly, not being quite human is really no excuse.

This is made even worse by the fact that, while Lucifer has been shown to enjoy a great deal of sex, often in party situations where drugs and alcohol are being consumed, there’s been no actual evidence put forward on the show that he’s a rapist. In fact, he seems to be generally considerate and nonjudgmental of his sex partners, and the show has always presented all the sex Lucifer is having as situations where a good time is had by all. To suggest that Lucifer taking advantage of a very drunk Chloe is on the same ethical level as a bunch of people having fun sexy times with substances shows a creepily bizarre lack of judgment and good taste on the part of the show’s writers. It feeds into rape culture myths that muddy the definition of rape and shame women into silence, and this undermines all of Lucifer’s supposed character growth this week.

The case of the week involves the murder of a wealthy philanthropist, and Lucifer identifies strongly with the dead man, who was someone who had reformed his life after a misspent youth. Lucifer sees himself on a similar journey, but instead of wanting to change for truly other-focused reasons, Lucifer is more concerned with rehabilitating his image and is only doing good if and because it gives him a bit of an emotional high. Through the investigation of the murder, Lucifer ought to learn that goodness comes from a sincere desire to be decent and helpful to others, but that lesson seems lost on the Devil, and it’s honestly not clear what Lucifer has learned from this experience by the end of the episode. This is half due to the writers’ seeming confusion over what rape and basic human decency are, but it’s compounded by the fact that any Lucifer character growth this week is totally upstaged by the episode’s other significant events and revelations.

First, Maze—still on the outs with Lucifer—seeks out Amenadiel, ostensibly looking to ruin his night since she blames him for her current woes. Their dinner at a fancy restaurant ends up being the standout scene of the episode, and their later getting it on in the back seat of a car is probably the most unexpected and pleasantly surprising event of the night. I said weeks ago that I shipped this pair, but I didn’t really think it would happen. Sure, Maze later tells Lucifer that she’s using Amenadiel (her revelation that she had sex with his brother should definitely have elicited a more comical spit take from Lucifer than it did), but there’s real chemistry here, and the angel and the demon steaming up the car was nicely done, sexy but understated and just the right amount of wryly funny.

The other big event of the week is that Malcolm makes his move to kill Lucifer. However, this whole plot seems to have simply fizzled. After all the buildup of making it a bit of a mystery at first why Amenadiel brought Malcolm back in the first place and then having Malcolm abduct Dan and plan to frame the other man for Lucifer’s murder, the whole thing was resolved very quickly and with remarkably little fuss. Malcolm comes at Lucifer with a gun, Lucifer sets Malcolm straight about Amenadiel’s false promises, and Malcolm is sent on his way with a get out of Hell free coin. Sure, it seems like this coin might be more important to Lucifer than he lets on, and I’m certain this is somehow going to come back and haunt him at some point, but it’s definitely a little anticlimactic after so much time in the last couple of episodes was dedicated to this stuff.

Even Dan manages to escape on his own, and arrives just in time to see Lucifer recovering from being shot by someone else entirely. Instead of focusing on Dan’s having just seen Lucifer return from the dead, or even taking a moment to pause and talk about why Dan looks so awful, Lucifer rushes off to catch the murderer, and his miraculous survival goes pretty much uncommented on, even though it ought to be pretty incontrovertible evidence that something weird is going on. This might be addressed next week, but Chloe doesn’t even bring it up in the last scene of the episode when Lucifer shows up at her house to test his new theory of what causes him to be physically vulnerable (it’s Chloe, obviously). On the one hand, it’s good to have this information confirmed (although it shouldn’t be a big surprise to viewers). On the other hand, Chloe didn’t mention Dan’s return or Lucifer’s bullet hole-riddled suit, which makes her seem a little stupid. At the very least, her wanting to talk about feelings makes it seem as if she’s inexplicably completely ignored some very important things that maybe she ought to be bringing up instead.

That said, it really could be the case that all this stuff is going to be dealt with next week, or even the week after, but it feels jumbled, and the confused ordering of events, revelations, and emotional moments only serves to weaken the overall impact of the episode. It could have been worse, and this show has certainly been worse in the past, but “St. Lucifer” was not good.

Television

iZombie: “Reflections on How Liv Used to Be” sets things up for a great season finale

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After last week’s slightly frenetic episode and with a two-part finale scheduled for next week, I rather expected “Reflections on How Liv Used to Be” to have a lot more going on than it turned out to. Instead of another frantically-paced hour of setup for the season finale, however, this episode actually slows things down considerably and takes its time dealing with the fallout from last week before ramping back up and ending on a significant cliffhanger.

Probably the biggest event of last week’s episode was Ravi’s confrontation with Major at the end of the episode, which was further complicated with Major’s return to zombie form, and these two get a good amount of screen time this week as they work through their situation. When Major wakes up, Ravi is waiting for an explanation about the Chaos Killer stuff, and that part of things is sorted relatively quickly, though both men agree that they won’t tell Liv, at least for now. This makes their most pressing issue Major’s rezombification and possibly impending death. Major’s immediate need for brains is filled with the last of the happiness brain from a few episodes ago, which is great on several levels, and it’s interesting to see how Major, the guy who at one point would rather have died than be a zombie, is handling it now—better, obviously, than when he’d just had the whole zombie thing sprung on him, but also, importantly, better in a way that seems to indicate real character growth on his part.

The bad news, of course, is that the zombie cure that Ravi has currently developed has some very negative side effects. Blaine still hasn’t gotten his memories back, and is struggling to just make it through his days. On the one hand, this generates one of the best scenes of the episode, when Ravi tells Blaine all the evil shit he’s done and then Major walks in and introduces himself absurdly cheerfully. On the other hand, it’s starting to be actually difficult to watch as Blaine goes through the motions of his life and is shamelessly taken advantage of by Don E and Chief. I mean, there’s no way that this is going to end well for either of those two, because surely Blaine’s memories are going to come back sooner or later, but it’s tough to watch in the meantime.

The case of the week is somewhat forgettable, functioning primarily as a way to give us a look at something like Liv’s pre-zombie normal. Unfortunately, that character work is overshadowed by the ways in which all the show’s various storylines are being systematically tied together. I’m not sure what’s going to happen with Drake, but his colleague in Vice plays a major role in this episode and provides several important pieces of information. He even mentions the z-word in connection with the Utopium trade, though he scoffs at the idea. Clive is so close—and yet so far away—to putting it all together, but this weeks’ award for good detective work has to go to Dale, who finally gets a break in her hunt for the Chaos Killer.

The bait and switch ending of this episode is a masterful piece of high tension television. Major is planning to purposefully infect Vaughn with zombieism, but Vaughn is being tipped off about Major’s failure to actually kill any of the people he’s been supposed to murder. Just as that situation is about to erupt, Dale makes her move, and the episode ends with Major facedown on the floor being arrested. There are several things going on at once here, and all of them are exciting. The last couple episodes have been steadily chipping away at various characters’ secrecy and connecting all of the show’s numerous plots to each other. Next week, we get to see just how much everyone figures out. It seems as if the only way out of some of these situations is going to be total transparency and honesty, but that literally never happens on television. I can’t wait to see what happens instead.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • “Can we play hooky and follow him around all day?”
  • Don E and Chief playing bluegrass was delightful.
  • Peyton is back to hassle Blaine about flaking on helping her nail Mr. Boss for doing so much crime.
  • Vaughn has Rita locked up in the basement, and she looks like she could cheerfully murder him, which I consider a likely event by the end of next week’s finale.
  • Robert Buckley has teased a character death next week. My money would be on Dale or Drake, but this could also be a good time to off Major, who has had a great arc this season and is probably at his most likeable since the beginning of the show, making his death the most potentially impactful. Major’s death could also have been foreshadowed this week with his blithe attitude about the cure and his seemingly sanguine feelings about being a zombie.
Television

Wynonna Earp: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of “Purgatory”

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Friday saw the premier of another new show on SyFy, but Wynonna Earp arrived to little fanfare. The thing is, it’s not a bad little show, as far as I can tell. Sure, it’s got some kinks that need to be worked out, but there’s nothing wrong with it that justifies the nearly complete lack of promotion I’ve seen for the show. It doesn’t even seem to be getting reviewed by any of the regular places that I go to for television reviews, and that doesn’t bode well for the show going forward. We’ll see. In the meantime, let’s pick it apart a little.

Good: Showrunner Emily Andras also ran Lost Girl, another show that I liked quite a bit.

Bad: Andras describes Wynonna Earp as “Frozen meets Buffy” which is just unfortunate-sounding. I know that what she means is that it’s a show that centers on the sometimes complicated relationship between sisters while they fight demons, but there have got to be better examples of sister-driven media than Frozen, and the last episode of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer aired almost fifteen years ago. It’s starting to just be sad that Buffy is still the go-to reference for girl-powered urban fantasy shows.

I mean, SERIOUSLY?

Ugly: While I haven’t read the comics, the source material looks like garbage. The cover art alone makes me want to go take about fourteen showers.

Good: That said, the show doesn’t reproduce the grossly objectifying imagery of the comics, and Wynonna is dressed perfectly sensibly so far.

Bad: The aesthetic of the show is, still, nothing particularly special, however. Wynonna is in the mold of other urban fantasy anti-heroines like Bo or Faith or, more recently, Jessica Jones, to whom I’m sure she’ll be compared ad nauseum. The rest of the characters likewise fall neatly into the looks of well-established genre tropes.

Ugly: The special effects in the first episode are mostly terrible. Wynonna’s first encounter with a demon, in particular, is hideous to look at, with everything obscured by a sort of blurry gloom that doesn’t manage to convey much of anything other than that the production of the episode was fairly cheap and lazy. I would say that this forest scene owes something to Ash vs. Evil Dead, but Wynonna Earp doesn’t have even a fraction of that show’s panache.

Good: Melanie Scrofano seems well-cast as the eponymous lead character, playing her as a decent amalgam of Jessica Jones and Lost Girl’s Bo, and she’s nicely supported so far by Dominique Provost-Chalkley as younger sister Waverly.

Good: We don’t get to see much of him, but Tim Rozon looks great as Doc Holliday. I can see the fanfic already.

Bad: Shamier Anderson is a little wooden and somewhat superfluous as Agent Dolls. The only bright side is that I think this is a bad writing problem, not a bad acting problem, which means that it would be easy for things to improve for Dolls as the show goes on.

Ugly: With the exception of Anderson, the cast is entirely white. In 2016, there’s really no excuse for this sort of tokenism.

Good: The first episode works nicely as a neatly self-contained origin story for Wynonna, with no mystery about or obfuscation of her history. The whole premise of the show is very straightforward, there’s a coherent mythology so far, and Wynonna Earp seems to be very aware of what it is. Some might consider it unambitious, and its admittedly someone derivative, but I find it refreshingly unpretentious.

Bad: The flip side of the above point is that there’s not a lot going on under the surface, at least not yet. Wynonna and Waverly are engaging enough, but they aren’t exactly compelling in this first episode.

Ugly: While the revenants that Wynonna is tasked with killing are supposedly part of a curse against her family, what they apparently really want to do is murder girls in general. Yuck. The brutal murder of Wynonna’s fell bus rider, Kiersten, in the first minutes of the episode was later confirmed to be at least the third such murder in recent months.

Good: The big fight scene at the end of the episode mostly worked, and there was even a glimmer of style (and none of the very silly special effects of the earlier scene) on display as Wynonna finally accepts her destiny and takes up the Peacemaker to step into her Chosen One role. It’s a bit of same old story at work, but it feels earned here, the end result is satisfying, and the episode ends exactly where it ought.

My final verdict?

Wynonna Earp is fun so far, and with twelve more episodes in the first season there’s plenty of room for it to get better. I’m not always a huge fan of urban fantasy serials like this, but the Western setting is just fresh enough to be a nice change of pace, and Wynonna is a type of heroine that I generally like. It’s not a show without flaws, but I can deal with some cheesy production values if the characters and story are good, and so far those aspects of the show are, overall, promising.

Wynonna Earp airs Fridays on SyFy at 10/9c.

Television

iZombie: “Pour Some Sugar, Zombie” strips away almost everyone’s secrets

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iZombie just gets better and better as it works its way towards the end of its second season. Like pretty much every episode these days, “Pour Some Sugar, Zombie” is jam-packed with important events, and that’s even without Drake, Mr. Boss, or Vaughn around to distract from the main characters. Smartly, this episode focuses primarily on Liv, Ravi, and Major, a nice change from last week which was very close to being entirely overstuffed.

The first and most exciting big news of the week is that Peyton is moving back in with Liv. I love that this wasn’t rushed, and the scene with Major and Ravi having drinks with the girls after helping Peyton carry boxes is just the beginning of a whole series of scenes this week that serve double purposes. In this case, it’s good to see the gang together and being friends—which is, incidentally, a great way to work in a somewhat dated reference to Friends—and the scene also introduces this week’s murder victim and sets up the case that Liv will be working on for most of the rest of the episode.

The case seems to be a pretty straightforward one to start with, and Liv isn’t even planning on eating Cassidy’s brain until Peyton shows up at the morgue to put in a special request. Unfortunately, the idea of Peyton hanging out with stripper brain Liv is much better than the execution of it here. There are elements of this sequence that I like, but it relies more than a little too heavily on stereotypes about dancers, made especially uncomfortable to watch by the fact that all of the dancers that appear in the episode are women of color, which adds a weirdly racialized tone to the stereotyping. Liv giving Peyton a lap dance could have been really funny, but instead it was just awkward, and not in a particularly fun way to watch.

The most compelling part of the episode actually ends up being Ravi’s journey to figuring out that Major is the Chaos Killer. This storyline is paced perfectly over the course of the episode so that the logical end of it, when Ravi finally confronts Major with his discoveries, feels organic and earned, a perfect dramatic payoff after a season’s worth of letting this hidden tension fester in the background. I like that Ravi doesn’t immediately go to Clive or Dale (or even Liv) when he figures it out, but instead confronts Major about it directly, and that it triggers Major’s reversion to zombie form makes it a great visual moment as well as a great emotional one.

In other news, after taking Ravi’s newest zombie cure last week, Blaine is no longer a zombie. However, he’s also no longer quite himself, either. There’s a lot of potential here for new directions in Blaine’s character growth, but I’m also somewhat concerned that this could be a prelude to writing him out of the series somehow, especially with Don E and Chief likely picking up the reins of Blaine’s business. That said, it seems much more likely that Don E and Chief’s move against Mr. Boss is going to fail spectacularly one way or another. My guess is that they are going to screw up big time in a way that helps to bring the conflicts between the show’s various factions to a head, and Blaine—either with his memory restored or not—will save the day somehow.

Also this week, after spending most of the episode bemoaning how she misjudged Drake, Liv finally finds out that he’s not a crook at all, but an undercover police officer. This is nicely seeded early in the hour when one of Drake’s handlers from vice shows up to ask Liv about him, but she ultimately finds out when she goes to visit Drake’s distraught mother. What remains to be seen is whether or not Liv actually does anything about this, especially in light of Major now being a zombie. As much as I, for the most part, dislike Liv and Major together, it’s a foundational fact of the show that the only reason they aren’t happily making little Livs and Majors now is because Liv is a zombie. Surely, this Chaos Killer business will get sorted out somehow, and then I expect Major and Liv to be interested in each other again, which makes Drake’s place on the show a little tenuous. I only hope he doesn’t go the way of poor Lowell.

With three episodes left in the season, there’s still a good amount of very tangled story left to unravel, but this episode has made some real headway in getting things set up for a wild ride of a season finale.

Miscellaneous Thoughts:

  • It’s good to get an update on zombie Rita, though I was hoping for something a little bigger from that development.
  • I know I complained about the stereotyping of the dancers, but “Helvetica” was a legitimately surprising and funny stripper name.
  • “Does he remember that he’s a dick?”

 

Television

Supergirl: “World’s Finest” brings the Flash to town for reasons

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“World’s Finest” was, well, fine, but not great. I kind of think that as someone who hasn’t watched even a single episode of The Flash (though I am peripherally aware of it, what with not living under a rock), it was just hard for me to get very excited about the crossover between the two shows. That said, Barry Allen was a nice addition to the team for a single episode, but I don’t think I could deal with him more often. As Cat Grant pointed out: “He was so unfailingly charming and nice he either had to be a superhero or a Mormon.”

The story of the episode is set up early, with the revelation of Siobhan’s powers and her hatching of a plan to band together with Livewire to take down Supergirl and Cat Grant. Unfortunately, this pair never quite manage to be a credible threat to Supergirl or, frankly, anyone else. When they are finally defeated, it’s practically the definition of anticlimax. Although I did get a little misty-eyed when the people of National City finally seemed to rally around Supergirl, I felt like that development really wasn’t earned. I would have preferred to see the show hold off on Supergirl winning back the city’s love until the penultimate or even the final episode of the season, especially after the way this episode ends.

While Barry Allen’s presence is pleasant and an interesting way of shaking things up—particularly as a way of moving things along with Kara and James’s relationship—it’s really not enough to carry the hour. Far too much time is spent simply explaining why and how he’s there, including an absurd whiteboard drawing of several circles being used to explain the multiverse theory, which comes off more as condescending to the audience than anything else. It’s just not that complicated a concept, and the show uses rather silly comic book “science” to explain it anyway (apparently Barry is just that fast), so the whole sequence just ends up being kind of unintentionally funny.

I did rather like the instantly friendly dynamic between Barry and Kara, but it wasn’t any material that couldn’t have been better off given to Cat or Alex (who is sadly absent this week), and the one lasting impact Barry has on this version of National City could easily be missed by an unobservant viewer: his giving the local police a way to hold and take care of metahumans on their own so that human bad guys don’t have to be sent to the DEO. On the one hand, I appreciate that this is a way of revisiting and resolving a theme from earlier in the season, but it’s done in such an offhand way that it doesn’t seem very important. At the same time, with a likely-final confrontation with Non on the horizon, Lucy Lane in charge of the DEO, and Alex and Hank on the run, this could mean that the show is working towards removing the DEO from the picture altogether. This may not be a bad idea, as the show has always struggled to balance its vastly different settings and CatCo is the more compelling of them, but it also feels like a cheap way to shuffle Lucy out of the picture now that she’s no longer necessary to maintain a love triangle.

In many ways, “World’s Finest” feels a little like the show spinning its wheels. Before the final few minutes of the episode, very little of consequence actually happens, and then it’s as if everything is happening at once, leaving us with a cliffhanger setup for the last two episodes of the season.

Miscellaneous Thoughts:

  • Siobhan’s Silver Banshee makeup looked like garbage.
  • Winn was cute this week, which I never say, but it’s true this one time.
  • KARA AND JAMES IS HAPPENING… OH SHIT.
  • I feel like there is definitely going to be at least one major character death in the next two weeks, but I don’t even want to guess which one. Before this week I might have hoped for Winn, but he’s starting to grow on me now that he’s not being a gross Nice Guy™ towards Kara.
Television

Lucifer: “Pops” is all about Lucifer’s daddy issues, but it has other virtues

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In “Pops,” Lucifer and Chloe investigate the murder of a well-known chef, and when the prime suspect turns out to be the man’s estranged son, it brings all of Lucifer’s festering issues with his own father even more to the surface than they usually are. I’ve been saying for weeks now that Lucifer is at its best when it deals more with its broader mythological ideas, and “Pops” is not an episode of Lucifer at its best. However, it’s surprisingly good nonetheless and proves that the show is capable of tackling family drama as well.

The murder mystery this week is slightly better than usual, and it actually has a couple of interesting twists and some nicely done misdirection before circling back around to its conclusion. As always, the case of the week is primarily a device with which to explore Lucifer’s copious existential crises, but this one works well as a self-contained plot in its own right and doesn’t distract too much from the family drama that is actually the main event in this episode as Chloe’s mother, Penelope Decker (guest Rebecca De Mornay), turns up for a surprise visit. When Penelope invites Lucifer to a family dinner, and Chloe invites Dan, and Lucifer invites their murder suspect, things go about as well as you might think. My favorite things about this episode, however, were all subplots, minor happenings, and set-up for the next couple of weeks and the season finale.

Hands down the best thing that happened this week was Maze finally getting some much-needed character development. Up to this point, we’ve almost exclusively seen her in scenes either with Lucifer or about Lucifer, and there’s been very little sense of who Mazikeen is as a person on her own. Now that she’s very much out of Lucifer’s good graces—and still very much stuck on Earth as long as he is—Maze finds herself at loose ends. She’s already said that she likes Lucifer’s therapist, Dr. Martin, and this week finds Maze seeking out the good doctor for some therapy of her own. When Dr. Martin suggests that perhaps Maze needs to try making some friends, Maze storms out in frustration, but she manages to make a friend after all: Chloe’s daughter, Trixie, who is goddamn adorable. Fresh from this success, a somewhat softened Maze returns to Dr. Martin and asks the other woman out for a drink, so maybe Maze has made an adult friend now as well. I’ve been overall very unhappy with the treatment of Maze on the show, so I can’t even say how excited I was to see her getting to just exist and have a little bit of story that is only about herself rather than revolving around Lucifer and his drama.

Before the episode ends, we also get an update on what’s going on with Dan and Malcolm. I don’t quite get why Dan would be so concerned with finding some reason to advocate for Lucifer’s life—I really just didn’t buy that whole situation at all—but I was interested to see the Malcolm and Dan stuff escalating so quickly. It’s safe to say, I’m sure, that Dan is still in the land of the living going into next week’s episode, but Malcolm has managed to, perhaps permanently, damage Dan’s relationship with Chloe and has driven her right into Lucifer’s arms. I don’t love the way that Lucifer’s unwillingness to take advantage of Chloe’s inebriated state is framed as character growth—because it suggests that maybe at some point he would have raped a drunk and vulnerable woman—but there’s still a good deal of sweetness in the way Chloe snuggles up next to her friend and passes out.

Overall, “Pops” is another solid hour of a show that I’ve really grown to love. It’s not perfect, but it continues to improve in multiple areas as it marches on towards the season finale.

Miscellaneous Thoughts:

  • I have no idea at this point if we’re supposed to like and root for Dan or if we’re supposed to be hoping that he dies tragically in the season finale.
  • I would watch a whole show based around Mazikeen’s friendships with Trixie and Dr. Martin.
  • No Amenadiel this week, and I find that I didn’t miss him. Or, I did, but I think trying to squeeze him into this episode would have pushed it over the edge from jam-packed with story to straight-up overstuffed.
  • Lucifer’s narcissism was especially over the top as he tried to get someone, anyone, to admit to having daddy issues as big as his own.
  • Chloe’s relationship with Penelope was well-done considering how little screen time was actually dedicated to it. I thought their reconciliation over wine near the end was a little too neat, but not terribly so.
  • I wonder how much Uber is paying for all their product placement in shows these days?
Television

iZombie: “He Blinded Me… With Science” is full of almost-revelations

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I’m pretty sure I had a permanent look of delight on my face throughout this entire episode, which managed to squeeze an enormous amount of story into its 43 minutes—including a ton of set up for the final four episodes of the season, which I can already tell are going to be a wild ride. “He Blinded Me… With Science” might be my favorite episode of this show to date, to be honest; it’s certainly the best episode of this season, and it included some of everything I love about iZombie except for Peyton. There was even a somewhat minimal amount of Major this week and signs that all of Major’s chickens will be coming home to roost very soon. Of course, it looks like everyone’s chickens are coming home to roost, so it’s not exactly like Major is exceptional in this. There’s just a bonkers amount of plot this week, with an equally bonkers amount of character work, all leavened with liberal amounts of wry humor.

This episode is dominated by its villains, however. Both Blaine and Vaughn get significant amounts of screen time and some big developments in their respective plots. After an excellent cold open that introduces Liv’s case of the week and contains more than one great Ravi line, Liv leaves with Clive just in time for Blaine to show up covered in dirt and wrapped in a blanket. Blaine needs brains, clothes, and an Uber, all of which Ravi helps with, but not before delivering some more bad news about the progress—or lack thereof—on the zombie cure front. The rest of the episode sees Blaine dealing with this information and essentially making his final arrangements, from giving his henchmen the keys to the business to picking out a casket. Ravi does come up with another untested version of a possible cure that he gives to Blaine, and our final shot of Blaine this week is him injecting himself with it.

Vaughn, on the other hand, is becoming increasingly erratic and crazed under the influence of copious amounts of his own energy drinks. This episode sees him try to attack Major after giving a positively manic speech in which Major learns that Rita is Vaughn’s daughter. Vaughn manages to mostly keep it together when he’s interviewed by Clive and Liv about their dead woman, and he’s even more or less normal when he catches a disguised Liv snooping around Max Rager’s labs later on. However, things get weird when Vaughn and Gilda are down in the not-technically-secret basement after hours. Vaughn harasses one of their zombie test subjects until she breaks free, kills a scientist, and then comes for Vaughn and Rita. Vaughn manages to escape, but only by abandoning Rita to her fate. When his daughter manages to fight her way free of the zombie, Vaughn has locked himself in his office and refuses to let her in. He’s clearly shaken by this experience, but it’s pretty much impossible to feel bad for him. Rita, of course, is slightly more sympathetic here, but I’m much more excited to hurry on to next week or whenever we find out what zombie Rita is going to be like.

Liv actually has a lot going on herself this week, but she almost fades into the background in the face of all the Blaine and Vaughn stuff which is much more interesting than the case of the week. Still, the case—with a twin twist!—isn’t bad, and it leads Liv much closer to figuring a whole lot of things out. I don’t love her slightly creepy stalking of Drake, though. Liv’s love life has been a common thing for the show to explore this season, and the show always seems to tie her bad relationship behavior to the brains she eats, but at some point I feel like we have to start to accept that Liv just isn’t great with relationships. The thing is, I would be fine with that just as a part of Liv being a complex and flawed character, but the show seems to want to play this stuff for laughs and consistently shifts all responsibility away from Liv instead of really examining how kind of messed up Liv’s trust issues are and how they are negatively impacting her life, which could be really compelling if the writers would spend some time on it.

Overall, though, “He Blinded Me… With Science” is a top notch hour of television that leaves things nicely set up for the rest of the season. The show is juggling an awful lot of stories right now, but it’s managing, and we’re seeing all of iZombie’s scattered threads starting to converge. Next week, Peyton is back and I expect that we’ll see even more connections made and possibly even a couple of things made clear after this week’s string of near-revelations. I can’t wait.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • Loved Blaine and Liv on the same brains.
  • “In case you haven’t noticed, our popular culture is quite inundated with zombies.”
  • I wish we could have seen Rita fight off that zombie using just her high heel.
  • Could have used more of Stacey Boss, but what little we got was very good.
  • NEXT WEEK PEYTON IS MOVING BACK IN WITH LIV.