Category Archives: Television

Television

Ash vs. Evil Dead: “Fire in the Hole” almost crashes and burns because of a nonsensical “romance”

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I both deeply enjoyed this episode and felt as if I needed to shower once it was over, which I think is going to be, ultimately, how I feel about this whole show. This week, once again, I find myself thankful for Ash vs. Evil Dead’s half hour running time. While it’s fun to watch the show’s copious gory action scenes, and there’s some occasionally great banter, I don’t think I could stand any more, timewise, than what we’re getting.

The biggest problem I have with Ash vs. Evil Dead in general is the show’s seeming inability to write anything substantially good (or even just sensible) for Amanda Fisher to do. In “Fire in the Hole”, that becomes a huge issue in an episode that is otherwise quite good.

After having Amanda spend over half the season chasing after Ash with the mistaken belief that he was the bad guy in charge of the Deadites, she was fairly easily disabused of that notion last week. I didn’t love the way that happened, but alright. The show was always moving towards having her join up with Ash’s little gang, and Ruby being evil (although this is somehow completely unnoticed by Amanda) had always been pretty strongly telegraphed. Last week we also saw Amanda being surprisingly (and disappointingly) susceptible to Ash’s dubious (and, frankly, disgusting) charms.

This week, Amanda and Ash get handcuffed together and this gross “romantic” dynamic gets dialed up to eleven. This might be slightly tolerable if it didn’t require the complete destruction of Amanda’s character for it to even remotely “work.” The thing is, Ash is stupid, sexist, and only marginally competent at the best of times. Amanda was introduced in the first episode as an intelligent and generally sensible police officer on a hunt for the truth about a supernatural experience. She quickly transformed into a nonsensically violent and irrational impediment to our heroes, and now she’s changed again into a doe-eyed, empty-headed object for Ash to seduce.

It’s depressing (read: blind-rage-inducing) to see a potentially interesting female character so systematically diminished over the course of a series in 2015. I have the feeling that this is preparation for some kind of grand gesture or heroic act on Amanda’s part in the final episode or so of the season, but it’s mostly just tiresome. The idea that a clever, professional woman with a proper career and literally any other options would fall for Ash is the most laughable part of this show, and I don’t think that’s the intention of the writers.

Similarly frustrating is Kelly’s lack of character arc, though she’s not been wronged in the narrative in nearly the way that Amanda has. The “friendzoning” storyline with Pablo sucks, and I hate that Kelly’s development is in general kept decidedly subordinate to Pablo’s and Ash’s, and I didn’t love seeing her get semi-damselled again this week, but at least Kelly gets to use a big-ass gun instead of just gazing with inexplicable desire at some dickhead for twenty-five minutes.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • The brief nude shots of Lucy Lawless were lovely.
  • I know it helps to make disposable characters seem like they “deserve” to die, but I don’t think it was at all necessary to have the survivalists straight up threaten to rape Kelly.
  • Lem is my favorite Deadite on the show to date.
  • Ray Santiago is a national treasure.
  • At this point, I am firmly on Team Severed Hand.
Television

iZombie: “Cape Town” is thick with narrative justice

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This season of iZombie has been an examination of how Liv’s zombie-ism affects her life and relationships, and this episode really digs deep into the ideas that it’s introduced over the last few weeks. “Cape Town” opens with the inevitable argument between Liv and Major after last week’s ending, moves on to the murder of a masked vigilante, has some fun with new villain Stacey Boss, and then hurtles towards a devastating nadir of a midseason finale.

The biggest surprise of the episode, for me, anyway, was the slight abatement of my hatred for Major. This was helped along by “Cape Town”’s B-plot, which explained Major’s situation a little better and worked to make a little more sense out of what’s going on with his zombie-freezing operation. It’s definitely a case of “telling” rather than “showing,” but it works here, with Major spending most of the episode having a heart to heart with a suicidal zombie prostitute. It’s surprising enough that the show handles this material sensitively and respectfully, but that Major comes out of it a somewhat more-polished turd than he was before is a real achievement.

My only serious complaint about Major’s scenes this week is that the woman he spends all this time talking to is never named. I appreciate that the show does such a good job of differentiating between the woman’s choice to engage in sex work and the sex slavery that’s made her suicidal, and her story is definitely a heart wrenching way to offer a sort of worst (or at least worse) case scenario of the zombie experience. It helps Major to understand Liv a little better, though it’s too little, too late for now, as we see at the end of the episode. Still, the Major stuff this week was effective. When Liv breaks things off, I actually felt bad for him on some level—even if it was on a level somewhere underneath my cheering for even the temporary ending of this relationship.

Ultimately, “Cape Town” becomes an attempt to answer some of the existential questions raised by the predicament of Liv and the other zombies. We see how integral to Liv’s identity her job is and how important her zombie powers have become to her, but we also see how her being a zombie interferes with her ability to function. For all that Liv disparages the masked vigilantes that (apparently) Seattle is just infested with, she sees herself in much the same way. The difference is that Liv actually does have super powers, even if they do come with some significant drawbacks.

In this way, “Cape Town” is also a great example of the show doing some of its best work as an interrogation of genre more generally. The masked hero conceit may be a little on the nose, but it’s well done, and this episode utilizes a lot of smart humor to balance out its darker elements and keep it from just being crushingly depressing.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • Ravi’s face when Liv starts spouting super hero platitudes is amazing. No one could be more delighted by this turn of events than Ravi is.
  • Stacey Boss is quickly becoming my favorite villain in the history of this show. I have a deep appreciation for disgustingly banal evildoers, and this guy is a perfect example of the type.
  • “I’m a brain dealer, not a doctor!”
  • I’m a little surprised at how easily Liv decides to make another zombie. Worth it for Blaine’s “Welcome to Team Z” speech, though.
  • Peyton is missing again this week, as are Gilda/Rita and Dale. I thought Peyton would be back for sure, with both Boss and Blaine in the episode, but no such luck.
  • It’s also getting a little tiresome for women of color to only be included in this show as murderers, negative stereotypes, and otherwise disposable characters.
  • The breakup between Clive and Liv is about a million times more devastating than the one between Liv and Major.
  • Ravi’s face when he sees Hope, though, is the saddest thing in the whole episode. I feel like Ravi’s face is always the place to look when you want to know how to feel about this show.
Television

Supergirl: “Human For a Day” is the best episode of the season so far

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“Human for a Day” is the Supergirl’s best offering to date, though it’s not without some of the same problems that have plagued the show since day one. It’s definitely an improvement on last week, though, and the episode crams a good amount of story into its hour without being overstuffed. It also continues to prove that the greatest strength of the show is its consistently optimistic outlook that never quite becomes Pollyannaish. This week in particular, the show injects just the right amount of darkness to highlight its hopefulness and make its points really stick.

As much as I want to love this show for being unabashedly and openly feminist, it’s become very clear that Supergirl is at its best when it explores more universal themes. This week, we don’t get any ponderously delivered speeches about gender roles, and it’s a pleasant change. Instead, “Human for a Day” digs a little deeper into what it means to be a hero by giving Kara a taste of what it’s like to go through life without her powers and examining some of the everyday heroism of ordinary people. It’s not thematically groundbreaking, but it’s well executed and avoids some of the after school special tone of previous episodes. ­

Following her battle with Red Tornado, Kara is left basically human until her powers recharge from exposure to Earth’s sun. I actually kind of love how comically fragile she is. Last week, the first thing she did was cut herself on some glass, and after like two days of being human she’s gotten a cold after one bus ride. Then, she breaks her arm by falling over during a particularly ill-timed earthquake. Also, this functions as an excuse to have James Olsen take off his shirt to make a sling for her, which is the best thing that could happen in this episode. Mehcad Brooks should always wear tank tops.

The earthquake leads to a fresh round of Maxwell Lord complaining about how bad Supergirl and the government are, even comparing her to heroin and welfare, because he’s the absolute worst. Kara and James go to talk to Lord and I guess ask him to stop talking bad about Supergirl, but this is really just a way to get Kara back out of the office so she can be confronted with her inability to help people. In a pretty bold (for this show) move, someone actually dies because of Kara’s temporary ordinariness.

It’s absolutely heartbreaking (mostly thanks to Melissa Benoist’s fine work in the role) to see Kara pleading in anguish for her powers to come back so she can save a woman’s father, but this man’s death and a nicely done pep talk from James motivate Kara to go put on her suit and do what she can to help when they see a robbery in progress. Supergirl manages to talk an armed robber down from killing a shopkeeper, and James photographs her at the crucial moment. It’s a powerful scene—even occurring in tandem with another lengthy Cat Grant speech (albeit a much better written one than usual)—and a new iconic image of Supergirl using her words instead of brute force to solve problems.

With Lucy temporarily out of the picture, this week sees Kara and James growing closer together in multiple ways, with both of them opening up about some deeper feelings. Unfortunately, their undeniable chemistry is still not being acted upon, which is a problem. These two clearly care for each other, and obviously want to bang, to the point where even James’s relationship with Lucy is unbelievable. This week, James becomes even more important to Kara when his being in danger is the thing that provides her with the adrenaline rush she needs to jump start her Kryptonian powers. This is clumsily handled, and I’m not sure it’s necessary; I would have been just as happy if her powers had returned in a less dramatic fashion.

Even the B-plot more or less works this week, and we get a big reveal about Hank Henshaw much earlier than I expected. I really thought we’d get at least a few more episodes of build-up to this, with Alex and Kara doing a little more detective work or with a longer arc of Alex’s growing discomfort with Hank finally coming to a head. Instead, that arc is condensed into just half of this episode, which suggests that the reveal is just the beginning of the story here. It was nice to really get a chance to see Alex being pretty badass, but I don’t love how irrational and even stupid some of her actions were in light of the DEO headquarters being under attack from the inside by an alien with mind control powers. During a crisis just doesn’t seem like the best time to handcuff your boss in a room and accuse him of murdering your father, and I know the show tried to sell us on the idea that Alex just doesn’t trust Hank anymore, but her reasoning here is pretty specious.

In the end, though, this is a solid episode that showcases some of the series’ best performances, moves along several storylines, and delivers a compelling (and refreshingly coherent) message. My hope for the show now is that it can continue to do the same thing going forward. It’s mostly fun to watch and has an excellent cast, but Supergirl is held back by its villain of the week format and simplistic ideas. It would be nice to see the show move forward with a new focus on an overarching story and pay less attention to writing each episode with a platitudinous message at the end.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • I’m curious about how much thought was put into developing James’s story about his father. There were fewer than 500 US casualties in the Gulf War, and fewer than 150 of those were combat-related (according to the Department of Defense). While it wouldn’t be impossible that his father could be one of them, and the unlikeliness of it might make that even more tragic than if it had happened in Vietnam or WWII, I also wonder if perhaps this was just not thought through very much at all. It does bring up an interesting question, though. How does one update the parent-lost-in-a-war backstory in an age when it’s become a highly unlikely event? It’s a character background that is a major part of a particular type of American story, but the fact is that almost no Americans die in wars these days. Looking back at comic books in particular, war has always figured largely into the comics landscape, but how has that changed? And does it change the backstory when the war in question was not exactly a good or just war—just a senseless or even unjust one? How is this kind of backstory changed when the unfortunate dead parent is no longer an honorable or heroic figure by virtue of their war service? When military service may even be disreputable or unethical? Or when the death is simply tragic, such as accidental deaths and deaths of soldiers by suicide?
  • The Martian Manhunter reveal was a moment where I keenly felt my lack of indepth knowledge about the comics. Apparently, this is really exciting for a lot of folks, and I’m just kind of like, “Cool, but who is this guy?”
  • I’m starting to really hate Winn. Maybe Kara and James do need to sort themselves out, but Winn’s behavior in this episode was even more atrocious than normal. He’s literally the only character in the show that doesn’t work, to be honest, and it’s getting worse. Winn is getting less likable every week, and at this point, it’s not even a little bit understandable why Kara puts up with him. He’s not her friend, and he clearly resents her and wants to punish her for not wanting to fuck him. It’s ugly to watch, and it’s exacerbated by the show’s failure to handle the material critically or even sensibly.
  • The only character worse than Winn might be Maxwell Lord, but at least that guy is supposed to be a huge douchebag.
  • Astra is back! Thank goodness for that. Another week or two, and we might have forgotten about her entirely.
Game of Thrones, Television

Game of Thrones: This teaser is trash, and I am trash for watching it

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I was so exhausted and angry and just generally wiped out by dealing with this show by the end of last season (3-5k words per episode on it will do that to a person) that I wasn’t a hundred percent certain I would keep watching it. But who am I kidding? Of fucking course I’m going to be watching this garbage show in April, and I will be writing about it, and in the meantime I will be following the promotion of it, because that’s what I do.

Television

Ash vs. Evil Dead: “The Killer of Killers” is a great, bloody mess

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“The Killer of Killers” is a return to better, though not perfect, form for the show after several weeks of frustrating sidelining of its female characters and a couple of episodes that were disappointingly light on the stylishly (and hilariously) gory action scenes that are the most recognizable characteristic of this franchise. This episode brings back the action (with interest!) and, while it’s not a great episode for the show’s ladies, they’ve definitely got a little more to do than they had last week or the week before. Unfortunately, any gains the women made this week were offset by the unpleasantness of Ash’s misogynistic behavior being played for laughs.

The show opens with Ruby and Amanda arriving, again, at a place that Ash and company have just left. The poke around separately in one of the few legitimately creepy sequences of the season so far, and then the Brujo’s charred corpse comes out of his funeral pyre, accuses Ruby of some kind of betrayal, and then drags her into the flames. Amanda, doing the smart thing for once, gets in the car and drives off after Ash, but not before we’re shown that Ash’s severed hand is, ominously, missing.

Meanwhile, Ash, Pablo, and Kelly have stopped for breakfast at a sort of greasy spoon kind of place. I’m not sure why they don’t just dine and dash, but instead we’re treated to a too-long bit of Ash disgustingly sexually harassing their waitress. It’s probably the most unfunny this series has been so far, and that the waitress is one of the unfortunate victims when all hell shortly breaks loose only adds insult to injury—made still worse again when Ash quickly moves on to harassing Amanda as soon as she arrives on the scene. The action the follows helps to gloss over some of this nonsense—mostly with enormous gouts of fake blood—but it’s kind of a mess nonetheless.

Still, “The Killer of Killers” turns out to be a solid episode if you don’t think too hard about it. It’s highly entertaining, and it benefits greatly from the show’s short running time. Ash might be abrasive and his antics might be stupid and/or offensive, but he consistently provides enough laughs that he doesn’t overstay his welcome. And while the show is still not doing the best job of utilizing its secondary characters, this week was an improvement over last week, and uniting Amanda with the rest of the group feels like an importance piece falling into place.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • I’m so glad the goat didn’t die.
  • I was honestly shocked that they killed a kid, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. It wasn’t too much enough for me to not watch the show any longer, but still.
  • It was great to see Kelly finally get in on the action without being possessed or needing to be rescued.
  • One of these days, Amanda will learn that you have to shoot deadites in the head, but it wasn’t today.
  • “When you were possessed, you tried to fuck me and kill me,” is my favorite line of dialogue in this show, ever. I hate the “friendzone” narrative that Pablo and Kelly seem to be getting forced into, but I love this frank conversation opener.
Doctor Who, Television

Doctor Who: “Hell Bent” is a hell of a finale after a rocky season

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“Hell Bent” is a hell of an episode of a show that I have largely lost faith in over the last few years. My expectations for Doctor Who under the leadership of Steven Moffat have pretty much completely evaporated, and Moffat’s handling of the Doctor’s history, especially as it concerns Gallifrey, has consistently been one of the least interesting-to-me hallmarks of the Moffat era. The previews for this episode showed that Gallifrey was exactly where the Doctor was going in this finale, so my expectations of enjoying it were correspondingly low. I’m happy to have been pleasantly surprised.

Of course, I say “pleasantly surprised,” but the truth is that “Hell Bent” blew all my expectations out of the water. While it doesn’t redeem multiple seasons’ worth of bad writing, poor characterization, whiz-bang endings, and a general trend towards “style” over substance, this episode—especially in conjunction with the previous two—stands out as a stellar accomplishment, the type of truly excellent storytelling that Steven Moffat is, sadly, only all-too-occasionally capable of.

The framing device for the episode is the Doctor in a 1950s style diner in Nevada, telling the story of Clara to…Clara herself. This is the first surprise of the episode, which I had thought would be another no-companion episode that would deal with some kind of epic storyline on Gallifrey. It turns out that is not at all the case. The Gallifrey stuff, honestly, ends up being almost incidental rather than integral to real story, which is an exploration of the Doctor’s unhinged grief over Clara’s death and a way to provide an even better ending for Clara than the quite serviceable one we got in “Enter the Raven.”

That said, it takes until about halfway through the episode before we actually learn what the Doctor is on Gallifrey for. Spending nearly thirty minutes with the Doctor dicking around in a barn, prevaricating about what he knows about the Hybrid, and banishing all his political enemies is a shameless waste of time. Though I suppose this is Moffat’s attempt to establish Gallifrey’s place in the show’s current mythology, it’s a tiresome and senselessly circuitous route to take to the crux of the story: The Doctor is really on Gallifrey to gain access to an extraction chamber that will allow him to remove Clara from time at the moment of her death in order to save her life.

Once the Doctor has safely rescued Clara, we get more of the same speech that she gave before she walked out to meet the raven in the first place, which is a nice bit of emotional continuity while the Doctor steals another Tardis so he can take Clara to the end of the universe. He’s convinced that this journey will give time a chance to heal and set Clara’s heart beating again, which is a weird piece of mysticism, but it gets us to where Ashildr/Me is waiting for the Doctor with some perfectly delivered philosophical advice. This is also where things get really interesting, as the Doctor spills his plans to Me while Clara listens in from inside the Tardis.

In a sometimes incoherent discussion, we learn that it’s possible that the “Hybrid” that is supposed to be so dangerous might actually be the combination of the Doctor and Clara, something the Doctor acknowledges as a possibility. This, you see, is why the Doctor’s big plan is to resurrect Clara only to then remove all her memories of him and then leave her forever, something like what happened to Donna Noble, only even more infuriating because the Doctor’s decision here isn’t motivated by a desire to minimize harm. He’s just being high-handed and, frankly, selfish, which Me reminds him of.

Even better, when the Doctor and Me enter the Tardis, Clara is prepared. She’s used the Doctor’s sonic sunglasses to reverse the effect of the memory erasing device so it will work on the Doctor instead of on her, and she’s adamantly opposed to giving up her past. It’s a scene that finally brings home the idea that Clara really is perhaps too much like the Doctor for anyone’s good, and it’s also the first time since Martha Jones’ departure that a companion has left the Doctor so entirely on her own terms, and it’s really wonderful.

Jenna Coleman really shows her range in this episode as she refuses to have her own life and experiences subordinated to the Doctor’s will, and it doesn’t hurt that the Capaldi’s performance is absolutely superb both in his final scene on the newly stolen Tardis and in the scenes in Clara’s diner that bookend the main storyline. The best moment of the night, though, is a tie between the bittersweet instant when the Doctor insists that he will know Clara if he ever sees her again and Clara realizes that he’s really forgotten her and the moment very shortly after that when we get to see Clara fly off together with Me in the extra absconded-with Tardis.

If the first half of “Hell Bent” is an exercise in self-important grandstanding (it really, really is, on the part of Moffat and the Doctor both), the second half is a well-conceived, beautifully acted, and deeply resonant conclusion to Clara Oswald’s tenure as companion. “Face the Raven” was the best ending it was reasonable to expect for Clara, but “Hell Bent” is the ending that she deserved.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • I love Donald Sumpter, but I miss Timothy Dalton as Rassilon.
  • I’m don’t understand why Moffat seems to like Ohila so much, and I’m not sure why the Sisterhood of Karn is on Gallifrey this week.
  • The old-style Tardis that they steal is apparently the original design, and it looks kind of surprisingly great in color.
  • Clara and Me turned loose on the universe, taking the long way back to Gallifrey in a Tardis of their own, is basically my favorite thing that’s happened on Doctor Who in ages. However, this is the second time (The first time was when he gave us Lady Vastra and Jenny.) that Moffat has created a premise for a spin-off series that I want to see more than I want to see more Doctor Who. I desperately want to see Clara and Me’s adventures in time and space—as long as Steven Moffat isn’t anywhere near them.
Television

iZombie: “The Hurt Stalker” is a showcase for some of this show’s biggest problems

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I feel like I’m decidedly in the minority with my ambivalence about “The Hurt Stalker” when all the other reviews of it I’ve seen have been glowing. It’s not a bad episode, and it tells us a lot more about Clive, who has been desperately in need of characterization for some time now, but a lot of the episode deals with Liv and Major drama, which is my least favorite thing about this season so far. Probably because Liv and Major drama is objectively boring, and this episode really highlighted to me just how unfair and hypocritical Major is being through all of this.

First, though, we get a big dose of Clive stuff right at the beginning of the episode, as he’s the initial suspect in the murder investigation of the week. It turns out the woman who was murdered was someone Clive dated a few months ago and who subsequently stalked him and menaced his new girlfriend. The evidence against Clive, of course—his gun was the murder weapon, and he had threatened the murdered woman just an hour before her death—is obviously too damning for him to actually be the killer, so the challenge for Liv and Ravi this week is to clear Clive’s name by finding the real murderer.

My biggest problem with the Clive stuff this week is that, while we do learn a lot more about him—He plays piano! He cooks! He love Game of Thrones!—all of this information is literally told to us in one conversation with Dale very early in the episode. There are a couple of scenes later in the episode where this information is revisited, but there’s nothing new introduced after of this initial reveal. As adorable as it is seeing Ravi poking gentle fun at Clive about Game of Thrones and watching Liv and Ravi together trying to get Clive to admit to cooking for them, it can’t reasonably be counted as characterization when Dale told us all about it in thirty seconds twenty minutes ago.

The other order of the day is more exploration of what Liv and Major’s relationship looks like now that she’s a zombie. There’s some great stuff going on here, and a couple of really powerful moments, but I can’t help feeling frustrated at how Major seems to have already checked out of the relationship. At the same time Major’s tendency to hold Liv to an entirely unfair standard continues to be infuriating. By the end of “The Hurt Stalker,” I was heartbroken for Liv, but for entirely different reasons than I think the show intends for us to be. Major is just the worst, and Liv does not deserve what he’s going to end up putting her through.

I missed Blaine and Peyton this week, but Vaughn du Clark was back, which was nice. I loved the scene between him and Gilda/Rita, although that was pretty much the only part of the episode where she showed to advantage. The rest of her time on screen was spent being subtly hostile towards Liv—who is totally oblivious, apparently, to the fact that her roommate hates her—and being creepily jealous over Major, who she also despises. I’d be the last person to argue that there’s no place for the occasional one-dimensional character in fiction, but Gilda/Rita is just terrible. She seems to be motivated pretty much only by hatred and spite, with no softer feelings at all, and she verges on being a misogynistic caricature at times.

As much as I love this show, it continues to be plagued by serious problems in the way it chooses to represent women. Liv is a great character, and I like Peyton, but Peyton is rarely around and even more rarely in scenes with Liv, in spite of their purported best friendship. Dale could be promising, but we only ever see her with (or about) Clive, and Gilda/Rita could be a wonderful antagonist if the show was willing to dedicate more time to developing her, but they don’t. For a show that is so well-known and well-loved for its excellent female protagonist, it’s a shame that it can’t figure out how to better utilize its supporting cast of women.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • Liv in jail felt like a situation with legitimately high stakes, but I feel like the woman she shared a cell with who was screaming about Ferguson felt like a horrendously racist caricature of a black criminal “playing the race card.” There are seldom women of color on this show, and that this one was set up in such a way that the show seems to be implying that she almost deserves to have her brain eaten is pretty horrifying.
  • As much as I can’t stand Major and Liv together, the engagement ring in the safe was really well-done.
  • Best use of “Karma Chameleon” ever.
  • It’s never a good idea to go snooping in your significant other’s devices, and that clearly doesn’t work out for Liv here, but I hate that this whole episode worked to essentially minimize and delegitimize Liv’s feelings and deflect her valid concerns about her relationship with Major—who is in fact being dishonest with Liv about multiple, important, probably deal-breaking things that she deserves to know about.
Television

Supergirl: “Red Faced” is mostly an embarrassment

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“Red Faced” is a big old mess of an episode that highlights literally every problem Supergirl has and showing almost none of its strengths. It could have been worse, but not by much, and it’s definitely dampened my excitement at the news that CBS has just expanded their order for the show by seven episodes.

I’ve complained from the beginning about Supergirl’s overly self-conscious feminism, but I’ve been hesitant so far to be too critical of it because, frankly, it’s mostly refreshing to see a show like this wear its feminist sensibilities on its sleeve, even if it is imperfectly executed. It’s always been heavy-handed with its Feminism 101 messaging, and the messages are often garbled, as with Cat Grant’s speech about the term “girl” in the pilot and all of “How Does She Do It?” which at least made up for its confusing ideas by being somewhat entertaining.

“Red Faced,” however, is an episode that seems to be desperately trying to make some kind of point but gets so bogged down under the weight of its own themes that it collapses under the pressure. It’s further hindered by several lackluster villains and a script that is almost entirely devoid of the show’s usual humor.

The episode starts off on the wrong foot to begin with, as Supergirl rescues a group of school children from being run down by a couple of road-raging douchebags. When one of the men takes a swing at her, she’s angry enough at their recklessness that she grabs the guy’s fist and twists it around, hurting him. Perhaps predictably, the media in National City blows this entirely out of proportion, and Kara finds herself in trouble with Hank Henshaw for not controlling her anger. It’s completely ludicrous, since Supergirl didn’t actually injure the dude, who did actually try to punch her (and had just almost killed like a dozen children). By the time Maxwell Lord (who has an opinion on everything) suggests putting a body cam on Supergirl, I was ready to punch this episode in the face, and that’s less than five minutes in.

At CatCo, we’re introduced to Cat Grant’s mother, who is a complete monster. I get the feeling that we’re supposed to find this old harridan funny, but she’s just unrelentingly terrible in every single possible way. The most unbelievable thing about this little diversion, though, is that this woman could get an invitation to a small, intimate dinner with Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood. I can’t imagine either of them would tolerate this woman for more than thirty seconds. I suppose this gives us a little more context for Cat’s character, but the show’s writers think they’re being much cleverer than they actually are.

We see a lot more of Lucy Lane this week, and we also get to meet her father, an army general who supposedly wants Supergirl to help test out a new “anthropomorphic pseudo-entity” that’s being developed for military use. First of all, “anthropomorphic pseudo-entity” sounds absurd, and not in a funny way. Second of all, it’s quickly obvious that Red Tornado is actually being designed to fight Kryptonians. Finally, Red Tornado is the most boring monster-of-the-week yet; the stakes just never feel high enough to make it at all interesting.

All of this stuff is really just a way for the show to talk about anger—especially women’s anger, and the ways in which we are taught to suppress it and shamed for expressing it. Unfortunately, they begin with a straw man—Supergirl’s supposed outburst at the road rage guy in the beginning of the episode—progress through a series of non-escalating events that lead Kara to getting a tipsy after-school special-style lecture on the topic from Cat Grant, and then end the episode without really resolving anything.

The B-plot—James Olsen’s conflict with his girlfriend’s racist dad—supports and complements the Kara stuff, and this is even explicitly called out in a scene where Kara and James are going to punch things together to take out their frustrations. However, while I thought that it was smart to relate the similar oppression of women and black men, this is also never fully explored and also fails to have any satisfying resolution by the end of the episode.

Neither Kara nor James are fully able to express themselves, and the rewards they receive this week feel like consolation prizes. This is especially frustrating with James since, aside from his own reminder to Kara about the struggles black men face, the conflict he has with General Lane is never specifically related to racism. General Lane just doesn’t think James is good enough for Lucy. For reasons. Definitely not related to his vaguely racist and nationalist rhetoric elsewhere in the text. Right.

Frankly, it’s just a huge disappointment that the show would squander such potentially rich material. The ways in which women are discouraged from having and showing emotions could be mined for great drama, but “Red Faced” tries far too hard while being far too shallow at the same time. It’s the least fun I’ve had watching this show to date, piling dourness on top of an incoherent attempt at some kind of feminist statement.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • Please, please stop trying to make Alex Danvers and Maxwell Lord happen. Every time I see this guy on screen, I feel like I need to go take a shower.
  • Cat Grant is a much sloppier drunk than I would have expected. Although maybe she shouldn’t be drinking at all with the meds she’s on.
  • Speaking of women not being allowed to behave badly… the natural climax of all of Kara’s anger should have been her finally declaring her feelings to James and damn the consequences. They clearly have chemistry, and I would love to see Kara not be quite so perfectly good and honorable for once.
  • I do love that Supergirl doesn’t have to be pretty all the time. Yes, I know that she burrowed underground like a mole and came out totally unmussed this week (and the burrowing thing was cool), but we also got to see her being completely, inhumanly fearsome with her heat rays, and I loved it.
  • I’m calling it now: Jeremiah Danvers is definitely not dead.
Television

Minority Report: “Everybody Runs” is as satisfying an ending as we could have hoped for

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The last few weeks have really been an improvement for Minority Report, and “Everybody Runs” is an episode that is good enough that I find myself very sad that it is likely the last episode of the series. If this is the end, though, it’s a good one. While it doesn’t wrap up everything perfectly, it works well enough to not be terribly frustrating, which is better than can be said for most other shows cancelled by Fox.

“Everybody Runs” continues to deal with Memento Mori and the terrorist plot to murder the US Senate. We also see Blomfeld’s hunt for the precogs come to a climax—and a resolution. It’s a tightly plotted episode that makes excellent use of its time to squeeze a good amount of story in and create a satisfying ending while still leaving room for another season if the show manages to get one (although that seems increasingly unlikely).

The episode opens with a flashback to Wally being interviewed and hired to work with the precogs seventeen years ago. With time at such a premium in this final episode, this might be a little redundant, as it doesn’t really expand our understanding of Wally or his relationship with the precogs. However, it pays off at the end when Wally gets a chance to finally protect them the way he wasn’t able to during pre-crime. It’s a moment that ought to be even more powerful than it is, and there are several other similar moments in the episode, all with their emotional impact unfortunately muted by the series overall failure to fully develop its characters.

This, ultimately, is one of two things that account for this show’s downfall. Network shenanigans don’t help, and I would have liked to see Fox give this show a better chance at success than they did, but it’s always been a deeply flawed project. Though the last three episodes have definitely stepped up their game and finally seemed to more fully embrace the show’s high concept, it’s almost certainly too little too late to save the series, and the larger problem of the show has always been that it struggles to get the audience to really connect with its characters. In the end, this translates directly into those characters not being able to really sell us on major emotional moments, in spite of some fine acting on the part of, well, pretty much everybody this week.

I can’t believe I’m typing this, but one thing that might have helped this show would be some romance. Aside from Dash’s fling with that woman early in the season who turned out to be a murderer and Vega’s implied romantic history with Blake, the show basically avoided romance like it was the plague. I can definitely appreciate the desire to avoid focusing too much on romantic drama, but the utter lack of romantic entanglements actually makes the characters feel unrealistic. I’m sure someone has written the fanfic of it, but I would have loved to see Akeela have an ill-advised one-night stand with one of the twins (and, get real, probably it would be Arthur) or see Dash and Vega go on adorable dates together (I have a feeling that Vega is a secret romantic).

Still, I kind of loved this show, and I’m sad to see it go. The good news is that as endings go, this is a great one. If there’s never another episode, I can be happy that the show is going out with some dignity and on a high note.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • Wally and Agatha are obviously in love with each other, right?  What a sad, doomed, and slightly creepy romance to toss in at the last minute.
  • I never knew how much Andromeda meant to Arthur. I think the show always intended for Arthur to secretly be the soft-hearted precog sibling, and that would make his reaction to her death make more sense, but it’s one of the many things the writers either neglected or never got a chance to really develop.
  • I wish Dash wasn’t so boring. Agatha may say he’s the strong one, and he definitely is the one who is most committed to making use of his abilities, but he never did come alive as a real person.
  • Whoever designed Megan Good’s costumes throughout this whole series deserves an award. Or at least a pat on the back, because she always looked amazing.
  • Excellent use of Akeela and Blake this week. I still very much think that the show should have gotten Blake more involved with the precogs much earlier.
  • Vega standing over the milk bath as Agatha foresaw was perfectly executed, and Wally’s final decision to kill Blomfeld was legitimately surprising and interesting.
Television

Ash vs. Evil Dead: “The Host” has finally forced me to call a spade a spade

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I have such mixed feelings about this show. On the one hand, Ash vs. Evil Dead is a nice bit of nostalgia programming that, on an uncritical level, I find deeply enjoyable. On another level, I recognize it as technically well-written and –produced, with genuine humor and often lovely cinematography. At the same time, though, as a woman I find that the longer the show goes on, the less I feel included—and, therefore, the less I feel like tuning in week after week.

In “The Host” our heroes have to deal with Kelly’s demon-possession, which effectively prevents any character growth for Kelly, though it’s a great episode for both Ash and Pablo. We also see even less of Ruby and Amanda than we did last week—just one brief scene where they are using Ash’s severed hand to locate him. Unfortunately, even though Ash and company don’t move on to a new location this week, the two women don’t catch up to them. All in all, there’s very little going on in this episode, which is more than a little disappointing when they’ve only got to fill a half hour.

The thing that most strongly occurred to me in this episode, however, is the degree to which the early promotion of the show oversold its female characters. At halfway through the season, the early promise of the first couple of episodes has entirely dissipated, and all of the women have been relegated to decidedly secondary and tertiary roles that don’t put them in the way of either much interesting to do or any considerable character development. Instead, the men continue to take center stage, monopolizing screen time as well as demanding the greater part of the viewers’ emotional attention.

By far the worst sin of the episode is the utilization of the “possessed woman wants to do sex stuff she wouldn’t normally do” trope. At least the show had the good grace to write Pablo as such a mix of clueless and decent that he isn’t willing to take advantage of Kelly, but it’s still such a tired old device that I thought my eyes might roll out of my head. That Kelly’s violation is used entirely to provide an opportunity for showcasing Pablo’s goodness and puts her in need of rescue yet again isn’t terribly surprising, but it is disappointing.

It looks as if next week will finally see Ruby and Amanda catching up to Ash, Pablo, and Kelly, but my expectations are pretty low for the rest of the season. After five episodes where the treatment of the show’s female characters has only gone from bad to worse, I feel rather forced to admit to myself that Ash vs. Evil Dead is not really a show that is for me. I expect that I’ll keep watching it, and likely keep writing about it, but I feel now that I’ve got to accept it for what it is: a cash-grabbing exploitation of Gen-X and Millennial nostalgia that shamelessly goes through the motions of building a diverse cast but doesn’t care at all about being actually inclusive.