Category Archives: Television

Television

Supergirl: In “For the Girl Who Has Everything” nothing much actually happens

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“For the Girl Who Has Everything” could have, and should have, been a much better episode than it is. Sadly, the episode starts off with somewhat of a disappointment. The thing that attacked Kara at the end of last week’s episode turns out to be a weird plant thing that just puts Kara into a sort of coma, and while unconscious she gets a taste of her ideal life. The rest of the episode mostly deals with Kara’s friends trying to figure out what has happened to her and how to rescue her. The thing is, most of this stuff is very, very boring, and even a major character death at the end of the episode doesn’t really do much to liven things up. This week, the show chooses to focus on basically every character except Kara, but mostly to the extent that it’s a way of returning to a comfortable status quo.

The last few weeks have looked at Winn and James’s relationships with Kara and seemed to be moving both of those relationships towards some kind of change, but this episode reconfirms that they are all just friends. Alex was keeping a secret from her sister at the beginning of the season, but since they’ve both been working at the DEO they’ve had very little conflict. This week, however, Alex gets a new secret, which also happens to be a new reason for Kara to distrust Hank Henshaw. Cat Grant doesn’t appear much in this episode, but Kara’s relationship with her boss is also back to a downright unpleasant square one as well. After weeks and weeks of Kara’s relationships progressing and developing, this episode undoes basically all of it in less than an hour.

The saga of Kara’s plant-induced coma shows us nothing new about the character, which is a huge missed opportunity. Kara’s speech at the end of the episode spells out to us why her ideal world is back on Krypton with her parents, but it doesn’t really ring true. Sure, things haven’t been great lately for Kara on Earth, but they haven’t really been so bad that she should want to regress to her childhood. Even if things have been that bad, the sort of regression portrayed here would be an unhealthy way of dealing with problems. Unfortunately, the episode never really delves into this, and instead sort of glosses everything over with pot stickers and ice cream. It works to establish a new normal, but it doesn’t actual deal in any meaningful way with any of the trauma or sadness Kara has suffered this week.

The thing that seemed most promising this week was Kara’s rage at Non, but it seemed to dissipate as quickly as it arose. Their fight seemed superfluous to Kara’s outburst of emotion, and it doesn’t seem to have actually had any reason for existing other than to add a little more excitement to a dull episode. Similarly pointless was Astra’s sort-of redemption, which would have been much more effective if we’d actually seen Astra more than a handful of times since the show started. It also doesn’t help that she’s really not redeemed here at all and her death has almost no impact on anyone.

It’s a disappointing episode that rolls back a lot of progress the show had made in earlier episodes, leaving us with essentially a blank slate for the rest of the season. With Maxwell Lord imprisoned at the DEO (which apparently has no consequences at all), that leaves Non (now likely motivated by a desire to avenge his wife’s death) as the major villain for the remaining episodes. Without the personal connection that existed between Astra and Kara, however, this leaves Non a fairly one-dimensional character, and with the show paying scarce attention to its overarching storyline I can’t see this improving without a real commitment to changing the format of the series.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • Kara can’t get drunk, apparently.
  • Hank-as-Kara dealing with Cat Grant should have been comedy gold, but it was a tragically squandered opportunity.
  • The thing that seemed most promising this week was Kara’s rage at Non, but it seemed to dissipate as quickly as it arose. Their fight seemed superfluous to Kara’s outburst of emotion, and it doesn’t seem to have actually had any reason for existing other than to add a little more excitement to a dull episode.
  • Similarly pointless was Astra’s sort-of redemption, which would have been much more effective if we’d actually seen Astra more than a handful of times since the show started. It also doesn’t help that she’s really not redeemed here at all and her death has almost no impact on anyone.
Television

The X-Files: “Home Again” kind of wastes a great premise

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I wish I could say that I loved “Home Again.” It’s got a great, creepy monster. It deals with an important and timely issue, addressing gentrification and the displacement of homeless people in cities. Thematically, it’s both rich and consistent, and the episode moves along at a brisk pace while still spending an appropriate amount of time on its more emotional scenes. Unfortunately, it only partly works, and the episode just leaves too many questions unanswered for it to feel very satisfying. This could be intentional, but it would have been better if something had been resolved by the end of the hour.

The episode opens with Alessandro Juliani (from Battlestar Galactica!) appearing as an evil public official overseeing the forced removal of what amounts to a small village of homeless people who are in the way of a new housing development that would gentrify the Philadelphia neighborhood they live in. The casually brutal inhumanity with which the homeless people are treated may be slightly exaggerated, but only slightly, and it’s a great way to set up the catharsis we’re supposed feel as a mysterious man starts ripping those responsible for the abuse of the homeless apart limb from limb. It promises to be a compelling story, but “Home Again” unfortunately doesn’t quite deliver on its interesting premise.

This is primarily because the episode gets bogged down in melodrama when Scully’s mother has a heart attack right in the middle of Mulder and Scully examining the first crime scene. While there are several more murders over the course of the episode, there’s very little actual investigation of the crimes, and the mystery remains unsolved at the end of the episode although there is a somewhat gratifying conclusion to the murder spree, as all of the bad guys who are being mean to homeless people end up dead. Instead of exploring a potentially fascinating X-File, Scully goes to be with her mom in the hospital and spends most of her screen time this week dealing with the news that her mother has changed her advanced directive without Dana’s knowledge. Like the monster of the week, this storyline has a lot of potential, but it too feels just half-baked.

The monster of the week plot ends up being a straightforward revenge story, but it seems to assume that the audience already has a high level of familiarity with issues surrounding gentrification and its effect on homeless populations. Further, it seems to take it as given that just knowing that homeless people exist and are being harmed will be enough to provoke a sense of outrage in the viewer. At no point, for example, do Scully and Mulder actually talk to any of the homeless people who are being displaced. They are always spoken about and for, but the episode would have been much improved by giving these people a voice of their own instead of simply having a story happen around them. Even at the end of the episode, the plight of the homeless is not revisited after the last grisly murder, so the audience is left wondering what happened to them and what good is done by having a secret monstrous avenger on your side if it doesn’t actual change anything. In short, it’s a worthy theme that just isn’t done justice in the episode.

Similarly, Scully’s mother’s death feels less impactful than it ought. There’s a certain sort of naturalism to this story that I normally like, but I’m not sure The X-Files is the place for naturalistic storytelling. Certainly, the death of a parent is never convenient, and it contributes to the sort of slice-of-life feeling this whole season of the show has had so far, but I have to admit that I mostly just found it terribly disappointing that Scully was once again sort of sidelined from the story—and in a weird way. The episode in many ways could be considered a very Scully-centric one, but the truth is that very little actually happened in “Home Again.” I would have much preferred to just have the whole episode dedicated to Mulder and Scully actually working on the case of the bandaid-nosed man, and have the sweet character moments between the pair left to fanfic writers if the show’s writers aren’t going to do it properly.

It’s hard to put my finger on exactly what didn’t work this week, but I’m pretty sure the problem is just that both plotlines needed several more minutes of material to round them out and ensure that they hit their emotional marks. “Home Again” isn’t a bad episode, but I just want more of all of it. It feels as though the show’s writers are working really hard to squeeze, well, everything into these six episodes. I can understand treating these episodes as a final farewell, but that’s no excuse to waste a great monster of the week idea like this.

Television

iZombie: “Fifty Shades of Grey Matter” could have been great, but wasn’t

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iZombie is an almost frustratingly consistent show, and this second season has been one long line of good-but-not-great episodes. With the magnificently titled “Fifty Shades of Grey Matter,” we can add another one to that pile.

This week’s murder victim is an actual sexy librarian, murdered practically on the eve of the publication of her first novel—a delightful piece of erotica about a sexually adventurous flight attendant titled Upright Position. As much as I love everything about this premise, I was terribly disappointed to find that the show had wasted Kristen Bell’s “cameo” on having her read the Upright Position audiobook. This is somewhat redeemed by having Kristen Bell read the phrase, “I’m going to show you why it’s called the cock pit,” but still. Considering how much the show was using this as a promotional tactic, it was kind of a letdown.

As with most of season two’s murder mysteries, this one takes a decided back seat to the show’s overarching storyline, and the murdered woman, whose name actually completely escapes me, she was so irrelevant, is much less interesting than literally everything else that happens this week. This isn’t helped in the end by the revelation that the husband did it. Because of course he did. Frankly, there’s so much else going on that I barely even noticed.

The biggest news of the week is that Peyton was back, still working on building her case against Stacey Boss, still depending on Blaine as her primary source of information. This gets complicated when she decides, for some reason, to sleep with him, and then it’s even more complicated as Clive and Dale make a move to arrest Blaine as a suspect in the recent spate of high profile murders in town. Peyton manages to get Blaine off the hook for that stuff only to find out via Liv that Blaine really is a pretty villainous character. This is surprisingly devastating stuff to watch, considering how little of Peyton we’ve seen this season. I never know how much to care about her, since she floats in and out of the narrative pretty randomly and never stays for long.

Elsewhere, Major has to dump Minor to avoid being caught because of the dog’s gps tracking implant—which isn’t an implant at all, so he gives the dog up for no reason. My only hope is that at some point Ravi is going to realize how increasingly bizarre Major’s behavior has gotten and figure things out.

Now that I’m actually breaking things down, I’m forced to admit that not a whole lot actually happened this week. The sexy librarian brain led to a couple of funny interactions, and it was nice to see Peyton back. Liv and Peyton both get laid, but then they’re both sad about it, and Liv doesn’t even know yet that her new boy toy is working for Stacey Boss. There’s no progress on the zombie cure front, and we don’t get to see Gilda/Rita or Vaughn du Clark.

Still, it’s a solidly entertaining hour that does a lot of what iZombie does best. Namely, coming up with truly clever puns and keeping all its characters mostly miserable. We’re now halfway through the season, though. It would be nice to see a little more forward movement in all of the show’s plots.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • Dale and Clive are very cute together. I’m glad they’re happy.
  • Whatever happened to Liv’s mother and brother? Are they just gone forever now?
  • Liv’s sex life, or lack thereof, has been a recurring theme this season, but it never does manage to be really fully examined. In that way, this episode felt like a huge missed opportunity with it’s very shallow messaging.
Television, The Expanse

The Expanse: “Critical Mass/Leviathan Wakes” deliver exactly the payoff we deserve

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Well, that was a wild ride. Which I’m sure I’ve said more than once already this season, but I really, really mean it this time. The Expanse has been a captivating show from day one, but “Critical Mass/Leviathan Wakes” was an exhilarating experience. While I have at times felt that the show spent too much time on set-up and world building, it definitely paid off this week with several big reveals and a major ratcheting up of the stakes in preparation for the show’s second season—in 2017, a long wait which was probably the most devastating revelation of the day. Considering all that happened in the finale, that’s saying a lot.

“Critical Mass” opens with an extended flashback that tells Julie Mao’s story from Julie’s point of view. It’s a great way to elevate her from being essentially an object in a narrative that revolves around the stories of men—Holden and Miller in particular, but to a lesser extent Dawes and Johnson—to being a real character who we can empathize with and care about. By dedicating nearly a full half episode to showing us who Julie was, the show forces us to think of her as an active agent in her own right, driving her own narrative, which only intersects with Holden’s and Miller’s. What I most appreciated about the time we spend with Julie this week is how much of that is dedicated to showing us who she was as a person, not just what she did. At the same time, this material gives us a much better understanding of what Miller and Holden have gotten themselves into—even as it highlights that there is still a ton of stuff that they (and we) don’t know.

And can we all stop to appreciate that Julie Mao’s death isn’t sexualized? Her body isn’t posed in any kind of titillating fashion, and her illness is filmed in a way that invites the viewer to identify with her rather than simply observing her. It’s done in a way that is almost viscerally affecting, as we’re able to almost experience her increasing sickness, her rising desperation as her attempts to contact Anderson Dawes go unanswered, her panic as she realizes what is happening to her, and her final despair as she succumbs to whatever the blue space goo is. Still, she’s given a sort of sad dignity through all of it, and I was happy to see that her death is framed as tragic for her sake more than for Miller’s like it was in the book.

The second half of “Critical Mass” and all of “Leviathan Wakes” are dedicated to the present day, where things are getting very scary extremely quickly. Miller and the Rocinante crew manage to escape from the motel, only to find the whole station on lockdown due to a supposed emergency. As Eros residents are herded into radiation shelters, Miller, Holden, and the rest try to get their bearings. Eventually, they split up—Miller and Holden to find out what’s going on and Naomi leading the rest back to the Rocinante. What follows is a fast-moving series of tense, high stakes sequences as the two groups try to find their way off the doomed space station. It’s definitely the best work of this type that the show has delivered so far, and the danger they’re in, especially Holden and Miller, feels very real.

All of the events on Eros this week made me a little regretful that I read Leviathan Wakes before the show aired. The show is a pretty faithful adaptation of the book, and I think it would have been cool to see it with fresh eyes. Even knowing how things would turn out, I felt real worry for Holden and Miller, so I can only imagine how harrowing their scenes must have been for non-readers.

One thing that wasn’t in the books, though? Naomi’s journey back to the Rocinante, which I loved. It’s nice to see her get a chance to really be in a leadership position, even if she does decide before the end of the episode that she doesn’t really want that responsibility after all. I haven’t always been completely happy with the way the show dealt with the situation between Naomi and Holden as they jockeyed for primacy on the Roci, but I liked the way it ended here. Her struggle to lead felt real and human; her decision to defer to Holden felt honest; and the final tender moment they share together hints at a possible romance that feels genuine and earned. It’s a brief moment of sweetness in an overall extremely dark episode.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, Chrisjen is going to pay her respects to her old friend, Franklin DeGraaf. She finds his husband very angry with her, but he lets her in regardless. It’s impressive how much convincing feeling Shohreh Aghdashloo can produce in this role, and this is a standout episode for her character. She’s definitely grieving for her friend, but she’s also trying to piece together more pieces of a mystery—in this case, a proper conspiracy. When Fred Johnson makes an announcement regarding the destruction of the Donnager and broadcasts some of the same information that Chrisjen found in her dead friend’s desk, things start to become clearer. When she reconnects with Errinwright, Chrisjen immediately sees that he’s in on it, whatever it is, and she smiles and plays her part. Then she goes home and takes steps to keep her family safe from whatever storm is about to hit.

Avasarala’s story line this season has been perhaps the show’s most consistently weak link, but it finally starts to pay off in “Leviathan Wakes.” As an enormous Chrisjen fan, I can’t wait to see how this develops next season. Most of the season, her role seemed largely to function as a way to further understand the events in the Belt, but her uncovering of a conspiracy, combined with her introduction to Jules-Pierre Mao, finally gives her a proper story of her own. She’s still stuck on Earth, where most of the action isn’t, but now she’s in some real peril that she’ll have to face next year.

The Expanse is hands-down SyFy’s best production since Battlestar Galactica, and this finale only continues to prove the series’ strengths. It’s a perfect mix of personal stories and epic scale plots, and it ends with an iconic and ominous shot that promises that shit is going to get very real in season two.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • “Everyone’s a winner on Eros!” Indeed.
  • I feel like people would have been rioting in the streets if we’d had to wait a week between the end of “Critical Mass” and the beginning of “Leviathan Wakes.”
  • Those pencil-shaped data sticks are awesome.
  • “Half the system thinks you’re some kind of outlaw hero, but you’re really kind of clueless, aren’t you?”
  • I’m not entirely sure why Sematimba had to die. I suppose he’s just a loose end or perhaps this is going to lead to conflict between Miller and the Roci crew next season, but I didn’t love the way this went down. I’d have preferred it if he just disappeared in the chaos on Eros.
  • “You guys look like shit.”
  • One could almost feel bad for Kenzo. Only almost, though.

 

Television, The Shannara Chronicles

The Shannara Chronicles: “Pykon” is an unnecessary, derivative slog of a detour

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In “Pykon,” our heroes are diverted through some mountains in search of a kind of shortcut through an old Elven fortress. Meanwhile, Arion is entirely taken in by the Changeling, who is posing as the presumably dead Eventine, and Ander is gallivanting rather uselessly around the countryside with his ex-girlfriend and a gnome. One major issue with the episode is that these storylines barely seem to have anything to do with each other, and there’s a total lack of thematic cohesion between them. Unfortunately, that glaring issue of craft is basically the least of the hour’s problems.

“Pykon” starts off with a train wreck, giving the viewer a creepily voyeuristic view of Amberle’s sex dream about Wil. It’s a lens flare monstrosity from which she is abruptly woken from by her attempted rapist, who is apparently just a regular member of the group now. No big deal. I’m not sure what the most infuriating thing about this is because it’s so much grossness crammed into such a short amount of time. In any case, the idea that actual rapist Cephalo is just roaming around free like a normal person who didn’t just try to rape Amberle last week had me spitting mad before the episode even properly started. I could see bringing him along as a potentially useful prisoner or as a way to keep him from following behind and causing trouble, but he shouldn’t get to have banter within two days of being shown to be an actual rapist who actually attempted to rape a main character who we’re supposed to identify with.

Not only is Cephalo a free man, but he’s practically the leader of the group this week. His opinions dictate pretty much every decision made by the party, starting with the decision to go to Pykon. It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, though. He kidnapped and tried to rape Amberle. He’s stolen Wil’s elfstones multiple times. And he owned Eretria, with the heavy implication that he was physically and likely sexually abusive towards her, and he has threatened her life on numerous occasions. Crispin the elf guard quite sensibly doesn’t trust him, at least, but literally no one gives a shit about what Crispin thinks about anything at all. In the end it gets Crispin killed and the rest of the party betrayed by Cephalo, who proves—to no one’s surprise—that he only cares about himself.

The thing is, I get the feeling that this is supposed to parallel the much better written stuff that happens this week with Ander, Commander Tilton, and Slanter, who are on their way to the Breakline to find out if there really is a demon army amassing there. En route, they come across a small group of gnomes who have been slaughtered by demons, underscoring the fact that the Dagda Mor and his forces aren’t just a problem for the elves; they threaten everyone. Slanter requests that he be allowed to say last rites for his people, and the soft-hearted Ander removes his chains only to have Slanter promptly turn on him and abscond with the horses, leaving the two elves alone so they can talk about their feelings. Unlike Cephalo, however, Slanter isn’t a complete monster of a person, so when he sees that there actually is a huge army, he comes running back and there’s something of an alliance forged between the elven prince and the gnome.

This whole sequence is surprisingly smart and well-executed, with some good character growth for Ander and a nice amount of backstory that helps to explain his relationship with Commander Tilton, but it’s not enough to redeem the rest of the episode. Mostly, though, it just doesn’t really work as a counterpoint to the Cephalo stuff because Cephalo is so irredeemable. Slanter isn’t exactly a great dude, but it could be argued (pretty successfully) that his killing of Aine Elessidel was a more or less fair act of war. Cephalo is just a really shady guy (and a rapist and slaver). The idea that two once-warring factions could bury the hatchet after many years makes a lot more sense than the idea that a young woman is going to follow her attempted rapist into low-budget Caradhras for a shortcut that may not even exist.

Which brings me to that little adventure. Listen, we all know that the Shannara stories have been, from the very beginning, a shameless rip-off of Lord of the Rings. The Sword of Shannara is practically a scene for scene rewrite of The Fellowship of the Ring, and all the subsequent books have been similarly, if not quite so absurdly, derivative. So far, the show had managed to avoid inviting too many direct comparisons between itself and LOTR, but in “Pykon” they seem to have just said, “Fuck it! Let’s go full Tolkien!” There’s the trip through the mountains in a blizzard, the seemingly abandoned edifice, the escape over a chasm, from a monster made of fire and smoke, who kills a party member, before falling down the crevasse, pulling people with it. The only new flourishes are the obvious queerbaiting and gratuitous torture scenes.

Let’s talk about Eretria and Amberle in the bath. First, I have to say that I am totally here for bisexual Eretria. I actually kind of love that idea, and it would be interesting to see the relationship between these two women develop in that direction if there was time to do it. However, that’s not what this is. This is just titillating filler that wastes time that could have been spent on, oh, something like an actual conversation between Amberle and Eretria to cement their newfound and rather fragile alliance. Worse, this scene isn’t even particularly sexy. It’s not that the two women don’t have any chemistry, but it’s a decidedly PG-13 show that isn’t actually interested in really exploring sexual tension between women; the scene is shot even more voyeuristically than the episode’s opening dream sequence, and it’s interrupted by a weird noise (perhaps from the creepy voyeur whose point of view we’re observing from) that is never actually explained. It really is just a “sexy” interlude thrown in for, well, who knows why this show does the things it does?

It turns out that, of course, the creepy guy that they find at Pykon is a torturer with a serious grudge against Amberle’s grandfather. Or something. It doesn’t really matter because he’s just a roadblock to give the characters something to do while the Reaper from last week recharges—because, goodness knows, we wouldn’t want to feel like there was too much forward movement. This tendency to reuse monsters and recycle situations is further confirmed by what happens to Amberle inside Pykon. When the whole group is drugged and imprisoned, Amberle tries to pull rank, using her status as a princess to try and convince Remo to release them, but it backfires. In a near-repeat of last week’s events, Amberle finds herself separated from the group, this time to be both sexually menaced and tortured—again needing to be rescued, this time by Wil, who is rewarded with a kiss. Because nothing gets Amberle’s motor running like the threat of being lobotomized and forcibly impregnated, I guess.

I never did expect The Shannara Chronicles to be particularly good, but I did think the show would be an entertaining and lighter alternative to heavier fantasy fare like Game of Thrones. However, week after week this show is squandering good will and frittering away its potential by doing its best to imitate the worst qualities of its grittier counterpart. At over halfway through the season, I figure I might as well watch the rest of it, but I have a feeling I won’t be happy about it. I guess I should just be happy that The Shannara Chronicles showed its true colors before I got five seasons invested into it. At this point, Shannara is going to have to do something really good to get me to subject myself to a season two.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • I can’t reiterate enough that Cephalo is an actual rapist, not a lovable rogue.
  • If Pykon was used within the last twenty years as an active military installation, why are the elves skeptical that it exists?
  • Why did Mag have to die? Sure, a child is inconvenient on a quest, but it wouldn’t be the worst idea this show ever had, and I rather liked her interactions with Wil.
  • Arion’s daddy issues and conflict with Allanon are potentially interesting, but get bogged down this week by having to share time with Catania and Bandon, who are the most superfluous of all superfluous characters.
Television

Supergirl: “Bizarro” has Kara at war with herself

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I’m not sure if “Bizarro” is objectively the best episode yet of Supergirl, but it definitely ranks among my personal favorites so far. This show has a strong tendency to rush through material and miss opportunities for emotional shading and depth, but it hit all the right notes this week as Supergirl faced off against her doppelganger while also trying to have a life as Kara Danvers. Supergirl had already delivered one incoherent mess of an episode while trying to communicate a very garbled something about Kara’s struggles to balance the different aspects of her identity, and that made it particularly pleasing to see the show get it right (or nearly so) this time around.

The main plot of the episode deals with the conflict between Kara and Bizarro, but it can really be better understood as a more internal conflict as Kara struggles to maintain her own identity in the face of her responsibilities and the weight of dealing with her specialness. She accepts Bizarro more and more fully over the course of the episode, until by the end she actually identifies with the other woman. It doesn’t show the viewer anything particularly new about Kara, but it does allow Kara to reaffirm her identity to herself. She’s been trying all season so far to separate Kara and Supergirl and compartmentalize her life in a way that allows her to “have it all,” but here she’s forced to integrate her dual identities and come to terms with the fact that she is different and she really might not be able to have a normal life.

The secondary plots this week are both intertwined with and perfectly complementary to the Kara/Bizarro stuff.

The first and more significant one is Kara’s attempt to date Cat Grant’s son, Adam. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t work out, though not for the reason I expected. Rather, the relationship ends before it even really begins because Kara just can’t see a way to fit him into her already very hectic—and dangerous—schedule. As sad as this is, especially considering how adorable this pair was together, the real gut punch comes when we learn how this affects Kara’s relationship with Cat. Cat’s remarks to Kara might not seem entirely fair to the viewer who knows the whole story, but from Cat’s point of view Kara has kind of betrayed her. Kara brought Adam to town and was an integral part of Cat’s reunion with her son, but now Kara has failed to deliver on the promise that implied—namely, that she would be Cat’s ally in reforging that mother-son relationship. Instead, Kara has somewhat quixotically started something that she isn’t capable of seeing all the way through, and she’s put her own sanity ahead of her desire to be all things to all people. It might not be fair of Cat to punish Kara by cutting her off emotionally, but it’s definitely understandable and sad for everyone involved.

Finally, there are the other men in Kara’s life, Winn and James, who managed to also be moderately interesting and less tiresome than usual this week. Winn seems to have mostly gotten over Kara’s rejection of him. I cringed when he used the term “friendzone,” but I can mostly forgive it as it’s said without rancor. What I can’t forgive is the gross way Winn suggests to James that James could “have” Kara any time he wants. Yuck. I’m also having an increasingly difficult time forgiving James for continuing his relationship with Lucy when he’s obviously got feelings for Kara. I don’t care if he never manages to ask Supergirl out—especially since that feels like a kind of weird transference of affections situation anyway—but I hate that he’s stringing Lucy along in the meantime. We haven’t gotten to see much of Lucy yet, but she seems like a nice woman who is genuinely in love with James and willing to relocate to pursue him. It’s kind of a dick move to let her do that when he’s obsessed with Supergirl.

The best parts of “Bizarro,” however, are the parts involving its titular character. There are several decently produced fight scenes, and Bizarro is infused with enough real pathos to make her the most compelling single-episode antagonist the show has given us so far. Overall, it’s a solid episode that manages to hit all its plot beats on time and effectively develop its themes without dipping into the after school special territory the show is sometimes prone to. Most gratifyingly, it manages to say something about a moderately complex feminist issue without putting it in Cat Grant’s mouth in the form of a clunky speech.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • Loved the Dr. Frankenstein vibe at the beginning. It’s a little heavy-handed, but it’s an appropriate allusion that works to make Maxwell Lord a more well-rounded villain. It’s very unsettling how deeply he seems to believe in what he’s doing.
  • It strains credibility a little that Kara is so quick to blame everything on Maxwell Lord. Sure, he’s a pain in the ass, but she just seems awful certain, awfully fast and in a way that feels more for narrative convenience than for any logical reason.
  • That brown sweater Kara wore to the office was wonderful.
  • I need Alex to get more and better character development.
  • Lucy was visiting her dad this week, apparently. I have a feeling that this is a hint that we’ll be seeing him again soon.
Television

Lucifer: Still with the good looks and charm, but this show desperately needs substance

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I really, really want to like this show. It’s got quite a few things going for it that I actually do like, if I look at them in isolation. Unfortunately, none of those things are working that well together yet.

Tom Ellis continues to shine in the titular role. He’s absurdly good-looking and quite funny, with an excellent sense of both comedic and dramatic timing. It’s an interesting balancing act he’s got to maintain, trying to create Lucifer as both the jaded, misanthropic ex-Lord of Hell and a compellingly human character that the audience can care about. This second episode finds him managing this with mixed success. There’s an excellent opening scene where Lucifer takes down an unscrupulous street preacher, and there’s a scene where he’s learning more about Chloe’s history that is nice. But then there’s also stuff like his interaction with Trixie Decker, which only retreads ground that was already covered in the pilot and which wasn’t very funny then, either.

Lauren German does the best she can with the shoddy-to-fair material she’s granted as Detective Chloe Decker. If her interest in Lucifer was prurient, that might make more sense than what’s going on here. I could understand why a beautiful, hot-blooded woman would want to bang this guy, but Chloe’s desire to explain the inexplicable things she’s seen would be much more believable if Lucifer wasn’t literally telling her exactly what’s going on all the time. Frankly, it makes her seem a little slow, especially when combined with her apparent complete lack of professionalism or adherence to police procedures. Her best scene this episode actually comes at the end and has nothing to do with Lucifer or the case of the week. Instead, it’s when she decides that she’s going to tell her daughter about her teen movie past—only to find out that Trixie already knows. It’s a sweet moment, and a cute reminder that kids are often smarter and better than people give them credit for.

The dynamic I was most interested to see this week was also the biggest letdown. I love the idea of Lucifer having a therapist, but the episode didn’t spend much time on his sessions. Both of the scenes with Dr. Martin felt rushed and inconsequential, and neither of them added much to the story or Lucifer’s character arc (such as it is). Similarly dull are Lucifer’s relationships with Amenadiel, who is little more than a laconic wet blanket so far, and Mazikeen, who is still sadly under-baked while also being kind of weirdly invested in Lucifer’s being evil. It could be that the show is simply ramping up its more supernatural plots instead of just throwing us into them, but so far none of this stuff has really grabbed me.

The biggest problem I have with the show so far is that it’s wildly entertaining, but not much else. It’s got slick production values, decent actors, a devilishly handsome lead, and good pacing, but there’s not a whole lot going on under the surface so far. It’s a concept that could lend itself well for exploring all kinds of interesting themes and ideas, but instead it wastes time joking about how big Lucifer’s dick is and leering about Chloe’s nude scene in a movie from fifteen years before the show even starts. The ending of this episode does hint at some deeper things going on, and it could be that we’re going to really get more substance going forward, but something needs to happen quick. As I said about the pilot, good looks and charm will only take this show so far. At some point it needs to have something to actually say.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • “King of Pain” is a little on the nose.
  • Lucifer, to an apple: “Hello, old friend.”
  • Lucifer, when he sees Chloe’s home: “Do you take bribes?”
  • Chloe’s ex, Dan, was surprisingly decent this week. I like when exes are friendly with each other like this. It’s much more interesting to me than when they just hate each other.
  • Trixie, about the dvd: “This isn’t even in HD.”
Television

The X-Files: “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster” is a near-perfect deconstruction of the show

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“Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster” is by far the best episode of season ten so far, but it also ranks among the show’s best episodes ever. Certainly it’s one of the funniest episodes of The X-Files, but it’s also surprisingly affecting as an exploration of how Mulder and Scully have changed with age and wonderfully effective as an examination of some of the show’s bigger ideas. I love a good genre deconstruction, and this episode is a near-perfectly executed one.

It’s interesting to see the show tackling head-on some of the issues presented by the just the existence of these new episodes. Namely, what are we even doing here? Why bother after all these years? It’s definitely true that even just these last few years have made many of the original series’ mysteries much less mystifying, and government conspiracies have become somewhat less entertaining in the post-9/11 world. And the truth is, the more we know about the world the more it’s confirmed that there is no magic and that the seemingly inexplicable seldom actually is. This was always the case with The X-Files, as well, although it often tried to have it both ways, leaving many of its “mysteries” ultimately unresolved—which has always made the show something short of truly fulfilling. This week, we take a good, hard look at what that means for Mulder and Scully.

Much as in the last couple of episodes, the show continues to be primarily concerned with Mulder and his journey. We find him having a sort of midlife existential crisis as he’s digging back into the X-Files. He’s questioning not just whether his time in the department was worth anything, but whether or not this is what he wants to be doing at his age. After all, Mulder reasons, they never did find any real evidence of anything supernatural, and many of his theories have actually been made ridiculous in light of new science. It’s a fascinatingly meta argument and a bold way of addressing the show’s critics and engaging longtime fans by referencing particular past episodes.

Scully, on the other hand, seems revitalized by their return to the X-Files (it’s her “I want to believe” poster that Mulder is destroying), and she’s excited about a new case—one with a monster. Mulder’s newfound maturity has made him insecure and questioning, while Scully has grown into her skepticism and her faith so that she’s returning to work with a new confidence and fresh enthusiasm. I kind of love this sort of role reversal, and Gillian Anderson sparkles with wit throughout the hour. While the episode is largely dominated by Mulder’s problems, his crisis, and his emotional growth, Scully gets some of the best lines and she definitely gets to make the best wryly amused and affectionately indulgent faces of the night.

The actual story this week is profoundly silly, but in a good way. It injects the new season with a much-needed dose of fun and lightens up some otherwise overly serious and self-indulgent character work. Mulder has never been my favorite half of The X-Files, and it would have been far too easy for an episode focused almost entirely on examining some of his most irritating character traits to be a masturbatory disaster. Instead, this one turns out to be a charming delight that proves that the writers and actors have a good sense of humor about what they’re doing here.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • What a waste of Kumail Nanjiani. He’s so funny, but he’s tragically underused here.
  • Mulder and Scully aren’t that old. Jokes about how confused they are by smartphones are lazy.
  • The creepy motel and its weirdo owner would have been enough to carry their own episode.
  • The lizardman feels urges to get a job, worry about retirement, and lie about his sex life. I love it.
  • Awww. Queequeg.
  • Scully straight up stole a dog. That is probably the best thing that could possibly happen in this show.
Television, The Expanse

The Expanse: “Salvage” finally (and gloriously) unites the show’s two biggest plots

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The Expanse up to this point has been highly entertaining, turning out consistently high quality, if not superb, episodes week after week. However, a common complaint and the show’s single biggest problem has been its tendency to get mired in exposition and distracted by filler material that prevents forward movement on the main plot lines. This has been largely due to the show’s trying to keep Miller’s and the Cant survivors’ storylines where they needed to be while still giving time to more tangentially related plots and characters. The end result, though, has been some unevenness from week to week and a couple of episodes that even felt slightly stagnant. At times, it felt as if the various plots the show has been juggling were never going to come together. This week, though, in “Salvage,” all of the patient waiting pays off in a big way.

On Earth, Chrisjen is informed by Errinwright that he’s activated a black ops team to investigate whatever Fred Johnson is up to on Tycho Station. She’s not thrilled, and she’s concerned about making a martyr of James Holden, but there’s nothing she can do to stop it. We also learn this week that Chrisjen’s old friend, Franklin DeGraaf, has killed himself. In a beautifully subtle moment, we get to see Chrisjen react to this sad news and then continue working through her grief. It’s a legitimately great character building moment, smack dab in the middle of a scene that shows that the U.N. on Earth has no idea what they’re dealing with in the Belt and might in fact be only compounding problems that they don’t understand. Avasarala’s scenes have felt somewhat disconnected all season from the events in the Belt, and it would be easy to write this scene off as unimportant or unnecessary, but there’s actually quite a lot going on here.

Miller’s flight to Eros is mostly uneventful, but there’s a great scene on the transport where he meets a Mormon man who is preparing to board the Nauvoo generation ship. It’s a nice, quiet interlude that deftly weaves together Miller’s character development with some exposition about the Mormons and their ship that seems like it will be important sometime down the road. When Miller arrives at Eros, he wastes no time in trying to locate Julie Mao, who has been traveling under the name Lionel Polanski, but his efforts only end up with him arrested and needing to be bailed out by his friend Sematimba, who wants to know what Miller has gotten himself involved with. Without being completely forthright, Miller convinces Sematimba to tell him the last place “Lionel Polanski” was known to be—a flophouse called the Blue Falcon.

The largest amount of time this week is spent with the crew of the Rocinante. When they reach the asteroid where the Anubis is supposed to be, they at first think they’ve been misdirected before they finally discover a stealth ship hidden in a crevasse on one side of the giant rock. Though the ship appears to be dead, Naomi points out that the intact hull suggests that there could still be air (and possibly survivors) inside. As everyone but Alex slowly explores the Anubis, they realize that the ship is not damaged at all, but has been deliberately turned off and vented—and a short range shuttle is missing. The most significant discoveries on the Anubis, however, are that it was at Phoebe Station and that there’s some kind of mysterious blue, glowing space goo that seems to be alive and gunking up the ship’s reactor. Fully freaked out, everyone hightails it back to the Rocinante so they can continue on towards Eros in search of the missing shuttle and Lionel Polanski, but not before destroying the stealth ship.

As a great lover of the mysterious space goo trope in science fiction, I have a deep appreciation for this segment, but I would have loved to see it portrayed more as it was in the books, with recognizable human parts embedded in the goo. In hindsight, however, I’m forced to admit that showing it that way on screen would have definitely spoiled the next big revelation of the episode. When the Rocinante arrives at Eros, Holden and company are able to relatively quickly make their way to the Blue Falcon, where Lionel Polanski is booked into room 22. Avasarala’s spy has set them up to be murdered, presumably on Errinwright’s instructions, but they are saved from that fate by the timely arrival of Miller.

The now-ex-cop recognizes Holden right away, but he’s more concerned with finding Julie as soon as possible. Unfortunately, when they all finally make it to Julie’s room, it’s clear right away that things are not right. All of the devices and lights in the room have been turned off, and it smells of “sweat, sick, and ozone” (a wonderfully evocative phrase that helps to convey the horror that the characters are experiencing). When they finally find Julie, she’s in the shower, covered all over with—you guessed it—space goo, which seems to have been fatal.

It’s a great way to end the episode, and perhaps the best possible lead-in to next week’s two-hour finale. “Salvage” manages to squeeze a lot of story into its running time, but it’s still an episode that is capable of pausing for interesting moments and continuing world building. It’s a wildly fast-paced episode that only builds momentum as it goes on, but it never feels rushed. Now it just remains to be seen how much story is going to be crammed into the finale, since this episode managed to somehow push all the way to the moment where I thought the show was going to be at the end of episode ten. I didn’t think it was going to be possible, but it now seems rather likely that this first season is going to make it to the end the source material in Leviathan Wakes, or very nearly so.

I can’t wait.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • The broad shot of the Nauvoo, with the trumpeting angel in gold, is incredible. Like, yes, of course that’s what a bunch of religious whackos are going to drive out into space. It’s gorgeous.
  • Fred Johnson is surprised by something in the data from the Donnager, but we don’t learn yet what it is.
  • “I kinda wanna blast it.” Good instincts, Amos.
  • The music at the Blue Falcon is amazing.
  • “Shit just follows you around, don’t it, kid?” Pretty much.
Television, The Shannara Chronicles

The Shannara Chronicles: “Reaper” is a morass of upsetting writing choices

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**Trigger Warning: Discussion of Rape**

Right, so I kind of love this silly show in a way that makes me inclined to forgive quite a lot of its faults, but this episode is a mess of bad storytelling, poor decision-making, absurd dialogue, rape threats for shock value, and just general time-wasting. All of these (except the rape threat stuff—that’s new) are problems that existed in the first four episodes of the show, but never enough to completely bog the whole thing down the way we see in “Reaper.”

The disaster starts right out of the gate with an extended pre-credits flashback that does nothing to further the story. It does finally give us a look at the gnomes (cool-looking, in a vaguely steampunk-y way) and offers us some new insight into Amberle by showing us a glimpse of her relationship with her father, but it’s altogether just too long a break in the action. We’ve been waiting for weeks to see this quest actually get started. Last week’s episode, “Changeling,” was actually a step backward, with the whole party returning to Arborlon, but the final scene saw our heroes finally going somewhere. It was extremely frustrating to have to sit through a lengthy flashback before we even get to see what Amberle, Wil and Eretria are up to. It does introduce the gnome, Slanter, who looks to be playing a significant role going forward, but this could have been done in some other way that would be a less irritating diversion from the main plot.

Speaking of diversions from the main plot, perhaps the worst example of time-wasting this week was all of the stuff with Bandon. I wasn’t entirely sold on this character before, but now I kind of hate him. His trying to learn how to control his powers might be interesting if it was the focus of a whole show of its own, but here it’s simply a distraction, and a fundamentally boring one. This is compounded by pairing him with Catania, another character created for the show and who has no discernable reason for existing at all. I suppose mentoring Bandon might give Allanon something to do, but he could be advising Eventine, mending fences with Arion, or just not be taking up screen time that could be better spent elsewhere.

When “Reaper” finally does focus on the quest plot that should be driving the show, it’s still a wreck of, well, notably less than epic proportions. Less than a day out of Arborlon, our heroes find themselves under attack by Rovers, although calling what ensues a battle would be highly dishonest. Before the elves can do anything whatsoever, Cephalo has swords to their necks, and he and his band quickly tie up Wil and the elven guards but make off with Amberle. This is where things go very wrong, on multiple levels.

Honestly, this is just shoddy on a storytelling level. Unless something has changed since the last time Wil and Amberle were captured by Rovers, there’s no reason to feel like they’re in any real danger this time around. Logically, you’d think that they’d be even better positioned to defeat Cephalo once and for all with at least a half dozen fighters with them, but they’re neutralized so early they don’t come into play at all. Instead, the show’s writers decide to introduce an entirely new element of peril by having Amberle separated from the rest of her group, ostensibly to be sold into slavery. This may indeed be Cephalo’s ultimate aim, but first he’s going to try and rape her, which is a thing he’s done plenty of before, if we’re supposed to judge him by the way he talks about how he’s raped other women. This is a huge problem.

First of all, it’s just plain tiresome to see yet another young woman in yet another fantasy show being subjected to an ultimately senseless (in every sense of the word) attempted rape as a way of (supposedly) raising the stakes. It’s not even successful at that in this case, since it’s basically a foregone conclusion that Eretria is going to come back and save the day—which she of course does. This is just the beginning of this cornucopia of awfulness, though.

The worst part about this all is the differences in the way the show treats the characters and the narratives that are created around them. Amberle has been presented for almost two full episodes now as unreasonably paranoid, irrational, and haughty, and it would be easy to see her abuse and degradation at the hands of Cephalo as Amberle being “put in her place.” This is further supported by the fact that she has to beg Eretria for help, and the other girl lets Amberle believe that she’s been abandoned before swooping in at—literally—the last possible moment to effect a rescue. At the same time, while the episode seems to try and frame Eretria as a hero for rescuing Amberle, it’s explicitly stated more than once that the reason Eretria came back was for the promise of riches from the elf girl’s grandfather.

Cephalo is the character who is treated the best in all of this, but it’s completely undeserved. Up to this point, he’s been presented as a ruthless but charming rogue, and while he’s threatened Eretria’s life and freedom several times, his threats have been shown to be toothless time and again. This week he goes far beyond threats with Amberle. He actually sexually assaults her, brutally, and is stopped only moments before completing his intended—explicitly so—rape. He also has plenty of dialogue that tells us that this isn’t his first rape; this is habitual behavior for Cephalo, clearly. I might have been able to tolerate this if this attack was finally the thing that gets Cephalo killed, or even if he was left tied up for monsters to get the way he left Wil and the rest of the elven party. That would have been something like narrative justice for a character who has, since the beginning, been pretty irredeemably bad. Cephalo had already been shown to be abusive, misogynistic and a slaver, which is pretty far outside of what can really be classified as “lovable scoundrel” behavior, so knowing that he’s also an actual rapist should seal the deal. Instead, and in lieu of any resolution to this mess that would make sense, Cephalo gets a sort of mini redemption arc before the end of the hour when he’s given the opportunity to save the group when they face the Reaper that gives the episode its title.

So, to recap: Amberle has to be humbled because she’s been so bitchy about this whole quest thing, Eretria is totally willing to abandon another woman to be raped unless she can gain personally from a rescue, and Cephalo is…misunderstood? I guess?

There’s some other stuff that happens this week, but I don’t care much about it since I’m still seething over the Cephalo crap, which basically ruined the whole episode for me. I know that this show has been billed as Game of Thrones for teens, or whatever, but that’s no reason for The Shannara Chronicles to emulate some of GoT’s worst qualities. Part of what I’ve enjoyed about this series so far is that it is so very different from the other, more grimdark shows that are so popular these days. The lighter tone and more straightforward heroic quest adventure story of Shannara has its own sort of appeal, but “Reaper” unravels some of that appeal by making things darker and more convoluted than they need to be.