Category Archives: Television

Doctor Who, Television

Doctor Who: “Heaven Sent” doesn’t quite hit its emotional targets, but it’s still good

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“Heaven Sent” is a near-perfect episode of Doctor Who and a reminder that Steven Moffat isn’t completely and irredeemably awful and a blight on the history of the show, but is in fact a very good writer capable of creating truly compelling television. It’s by far the best episode of Doctor Who in recent years, though perhaps that’s because the Doctor is the only character on the screen for the vast majority of it—something that I would suggest is Steven Moffat’s ideal for the show, judging by the show’s increasing disregard for and neglect of all characters who aren’t the Doctor.

That said, Steven Capaldi has been the show’s strongest asset for some time, and “Heaven Sent” finds him imprisoned in a mysterious castle and pursued by an actually quite frightening, if also mysterious, creature in a voluminous robe. This creature can only be outrun temporarily, though it moves slowly, and the only thing that will stop it (also only temporarily) is the Doctor offering it a truthful confession. Something, something, the Doctor has a mind-palace—I mean mind-TARDIS—where he’s working through his feelings about Clara’s death and figuring out how to “WIN,” and also he has to spend literally billions of years punching through a giant harder-than-diamond wall with his fist. It’s a much better episode than it sounds, though, and Capaldi is at the top of his game here as he explores the castle and talks at Clara inside his head.

The problem that I have with this episode is a problem that is ongoing and omnipresent in Moffat’s work as both a writer and showrunner. While “Heaven Sent” could be read as a great episode that gives the Doctor time to grieve his lost companion, it just never manages to feel really real, and this is entirely due to Steven Moffat’s unwillingness to do the actual work required to actually elicit the emotional responses that he wants the audience to have. Instead, Moffat tells us how he thinks we ought to feel, regardless of whether or not it’s supported by anything that we’ve been shown so far.

The overall effect of this is that, while it’s possible to sort of objectively understand what Moffat is trying to communicate, it’s difficult to actually really get it. It’s unfortunate, particularly in an episode as well-written as this one. If Clara had been utilized more intelligently and developed as a fully-realized character over the past couple of seasons, this episode (and “Enter the Raven,” for that matter) would have been absolutely devastating. As it is, it’s not even enough to bring a tear to the eye.

Steven Moffat is a capable writer and can come up with clever ideas from time to time, but he’s never quite managed to learn that he can’t script the audience’s reactions. The most emotional moments of a Moffat episode always rely on implications, narrative shorthand, and straight up telling the audience what feelings to have. This is as true now as it was all the way back in “Blink” and “Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead.” I don’t suppose I can reasonably expect this style to change after all this time, but it’s disappointing nonetheless.

“Heaven Sent” could have been perfect, but instead we have to settle for close-but-no-cigar.

Television

Supergirl: “How Does She Do It?” doesn’t do it for me

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“How Does She Do It?” would have been a better episode if it wasn’t aired out of order (transposed with last week’s “Livewire”), but as it is it feels redundant. This isn’t helped by its heavy focus on a couple of ideas that are just plain boring: the “friend zone” and the question of whether or not women ever can “have it all.” The good news, I suppose, is that Supergirl does manage to do a couple of somewhat fresh things with such utterly pedestrian material. The bad news, of course, is that it’s still utterly pedestrian material.

I like that the show uses the phrase “friend zone” almost ironically, but I hate the it uses the phrase at all. I also hate how determined the episode is to force Kara to be Super Adult about things, no matter how gratifying it is to see a woman on screen setting boundaries in an assertive fashion. If Kara is capable of dealing with both James and Lucy so firmly and kindly (like a grown up), why hasn’t she been able to communicate her feelings to James? James and Lucy’s getting back together this episode is also a little spoiled by having already seen last week’s episode, where James spends all his time (while on vacation with Lucy!) pining after Kara.

While Kara is mooning over James and turning her adorkableness up to eleven, she has admirers of her own. First is Winn, who is a little more tolerable this episode than he has been in the past, though still slightly creepy. Next is Cat Grant’s son, Carter, who has a very cute crush on Supergirl and who Kara is a very inept babysitter for. Finally, there’s Maxwell Lord, who is apparently so totally obsessed with Supergirl that he’s willing to blow up his own things in order to test her abilities.

This last is the major plot of the episode in lieu of the normal bad guy of the week, which is a nice change. Essentially, Lord wants to put Supergirl through her paces to get a better feel for what her true skill set is, which also allows the viewers the same opportunity. What we get, then, is a show chock full of Supergirl doing all different kinds of things, and what we learn is that she’s still working on figuring out the best ways to help people. She has a pretty impressive range of abilities to work with, and in this episode we see her trot out all of them in order to deal with the challenges Lord has set for her. We see again that Supergirl is still learning her own limits, and she’s not entirely successful in the end; she saves a train full of people, but she has to watch as a man that has been manipulated by Lord kills himself practically in front of her.

This ties in neatly with the exploration of “having it all” through Kara’s overall experiences in the episode. She’s trying to be Supergirl and a DEO agent of sorts and Cat Grant’s assistant, and this episode also sees her taking on the additional responsibility of watching Carter. It’s obviously too much for any one person to do, even with super powers, which might have been a rather boring message of the episode, but the show doesn’t stop with just the demonstration of this fact. Instead, the writers have tried to wrap things up much more explicitly and heavy-handedly by giving Cat Grant a speech about it. Unfortunately, the words Cat has to say don’t make a lot of sense, especially coming out of the mouth of a character who is so obviously an extraordinary (and extraordinarily privileged) woman. It’s yet another example of this show being so self-consciously feminist that it circles back around to being, well, not sexist, but incoherent and unhelpful.

The most interesting part of this episode to me was the comparison between Kara/Supergirl and Maxwell Lord. He talks about wanting to help people, but he doesn’t trust any of the existing systems (government, etc.) that do help people. Kara, on the other hand, is also someone who professes to want to help people, but where Lord seems mostly dedicated to interrogating and criticizing the things and people he doesn’t trust—and putting people in danger in order to do so—Kara is actually out there doing the work of trying to help people.

Supergirl is an imperfect hero, but she’s constantly trying to do her best. She may not always be able to save everyone, and she doesn’t have the right answer to every problem, but she’s all in for doing the work and learning and growing and improving her methods. This might be the most progressive message the show has delivered so far, and it’s one that seems almost unintentional in an episode that is ostensibly (and obnoxiously) exploring other far less interesting ideas.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • Carter Grant is a decidedly odd child.
  • Seeing how James and Lucy get back together made me like Lucy a lot more and James a lot less—especially when I think of how shady he acts in the chronologically next episode that we saw last week.
  • There were more seeds of Hank Henshaw being evil this week.
  • Still no Astra, though she is at least mentioned.
  • I hate the scene with Alex and Lord. Seriously gross.
  • If the writers would quit putting nonsensical “feminist” tirades in Cat Grant’s mouth, I think she’d be my favorite character.
Television

Minority Report: “Memento Mori” is a solid set up for next week’s finale

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We’re up to what is likely the penultimate episode of Minority Report, and it feels like the show is just now starting to hit a new and more comfortable stride as it’s moved away from the case-of-the-week format that it stuck to earlier in the season. “Memento Mori” delves deeper into the conspiracy our protagonists brushed up against last week as well as the DIA’s plot to re-enslave the precogs. Even more than I did last week, I feel like this is the show that Minority Report should always have been.

The show has always been at its best when it explores its larger themes and elaborates on its overarching plot, and it’s been doing more and more of that as it nears its probable ending. It may be too little, too late to save the show (though it’s still not officially cancelled), and it’s still not entirely living up to the potential of its premise, but it’s been an enjoyable couple of weeks.

The best scene of this week was Dash, Vega, Blake, and Akeela all hanging out together at the beginning of the episode, and I’m terribly sad that this is almost certainly the only time we’ll get to see this happen. It’s nice to see Dash in a somewhat normal environment, and I like seeing the whole team spending time together doing something not murder-related. It’s a chance for us to see the chemistry between Vega and Blake, though it’s also one more reason to be bummed about the impending cancellation of the series. Personally, I’ve always rather liked the idea of Vega and Dash together, but Vega and Blake would have worked, too. I don’t always care for romantic drama in these kinds of shows, but a little more romance would have helped to soften the often unlikeable Vega, especially if the show never intended to do much with her family relationships or her friendship with Akeela.

Dash does have a vision this week, and there is a case, this is all stuff that ties into the bigger intrigues and ideas behind the show. A senator who is working to pass a bill allowing genetic tinkering with fetuses is the target of a politically motivated attack, and it’s tied back to the Memento Mori terrorist group that we were introduced to last week. The ideas introduced in this plot are only tangentially related to the bigger things going on in the show as well as getting a little garbled in their delivery, but it mostly works even if viruses don’t work at all the way the show’s writers seem to think they do.

The most important things that are happening in this episode concern the DIA and Blomfield’s plan to recapture and use the precogs. Early in the episode, Arthur tries to get Blake to blackmail someone in the DIA in order to put an end to Blomfield’s machinations, but Blake refuses in no uncertain terms. When Arthur gets someone else to do his dirty work, Blomfield turns to the private sector to keep his plans moving forward. When Blomfield turns up at Wally’s place looking for the precogs, we finally get to see Blomfield becoming a truly terrifying villain. Wally manages to be momentarily successful at getting Blomfield and his thugs to leave him alone, but Blomfield is already pretty successful at finding the precogs without Wally’s assistance.

Before the end of the episode, Blomfield has managed to locate Agatha, who goes to Arthur after being flushed from her hiding place on Libertarian Island (or whatever). Agatha is still having the vision of Vega standing over them in the milk bath, and now her vision shows Vega ordering some unseen person to “put them in.” This ominous revelation caps off the episode, and we’re all set up for next week’s finale.

Television

Ash vs. Evil Dead: In “Brujo” the show’s women continue to be short-changed

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This week brings another shift in pace and tone for Ash vs. Evil Dead, and “Brujo” is an entertaining half hour of television. It’s nice to see the show mixing things up a bit and avoiding following a formula from episode to episode. While I haven’t loved every piece of the show so far, they’ve all been enjoyable in their own way and I could easily see this being a show that ends up being greater than the sum of its parts in the end.

The episode begins with Amanda Fisher, who is attacked by the not-quite-dead bookstore owner from last week after being left handcuffed to a ladder. Fortunately, Ruby arrives right in time to rescue her, and the two women are now teaming up and combining their quests to find Ash. This is a positive development, especially for Amanda, who the show hasn’t seemed to know what to do with since the first episode. It’s a little disheartening just how wrong both Amanda and Ruby are about what’s going on, and I’m concerned by how little screen time they’re getting when it feels like they’ve got so much to learn.

Obviously, the show is Ash vs. Evil Dead, not Amanda and Ruby Fight Evil, and with only a half hour per week it would be easy for the show to lose focus if it spent too much time with these secondary characters. Unfortunately, I feel like the show is doing Ruby and Amanda a disservice by moving their stories along so slowly. Ruby may benefit from a bit of mystery, but Amanda continues to suffer from lack of characterization and just not having a lot to do when she is on screen.

All that said, I’m not entirely convinced yet that Ruby isn’t evil herself. At this point, it’s early speculation on my part, and I could be wrong—goodness knows, it would be nice if the show wouldn’t do the expected thing and make her secretly evil all along—but carrying around a severed hand of sinister provenance seems more than a little suspicious.

There’s relatively little actual action in this episode, but there is a short sequence while Ash and company are on the road to Pedro’s uncle’s house where they find themselves being chased by a huge, roiling cloud of evil. Unfortunately, this bit feels a little overlong and doesn’t manage to be exciting, scary, or funny. Instead, it serves mostly to allow us to see that Kelly is having a decidedly weird headache that she can’t seem to shake. It gave me a bad feeling about how things were going to go for her in the rest of the episode, and I was correct to be apprehensive.

While Ash is getting high and exploring his trip to try and learn how to undo the evil he’s summoned, and Pedro is working on building a new prosthetic for Ash, we learn that Kelly has been possessed by last week’s demon. I hate this so, so much.

I wasn’t thrilled last week with Kelly being cut out of most of the action, but I suppose someone had to keep an eye on Amanda. The week before that, Kelly was effectively made into a damsel in distress, but I forgave it because it seemed to work as the beginning of her character arc. However, in “Brujo” Kelly starts off incapacitated by debilitating headaches and ends the night still possessed by a demon. With the lack of attention paid to the other women in the show, it’s beginning to feel like they’re all being actively sidelined in favor of exploring Ash as an anti-hero and developing Pedro as Ash’s loyal sidekick.

The worst part of all of this is that the show began its run with a lot of promise, and I had high hopes that it might utilize women in interesting roles that defy some of the more irritating genre tropes. In fact, that seemed to be part of what the show was explicitly offering with its promotional materials and trailers. There might be plenty of episodes left in which things might improve, but right now things just get worse and worse each week for the show’s women. It’s not a deal breaker for me, yet, but it’s definitely gotten grating already.

Doctor Who, Television

Doctor Who: I only wish that “Face the Raven” was the end of an era (namely, Moffat’s)

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“Face the Raven” was as good as it could be, but by no means as good as I would have liked it to be. This looks to be Jenna Coleman’s last episode in the role of Clara Oswald, which had been the rumor before the season started, and it’s frankly a relief to have it over with. The facts that it’s the second episode of the season written by a woman and that it’s actually pretty well written—both nice changes for Doctor Who—are really just a bonus.

Given the state of the show after over five years of Steven Moffat doing his best to destroy everything good about it, my expectations of it are pretty low, and “Face the Raven” exceeded them. That’s not saying much, and the episode did have some great moments, but it’s all tempered by my general dissatisfaction with the series and with Clara’s tenure as companion in general.

In “Face the Raven,” Clara and the Doctor receive a phone call from previous acquaintance Rigsy, who has a problem: he’s got a mysterious counting-down tattoo on the back of his neck. In a somewhat senselessly convoluted plot, it turns out that Rigsby has been framed for a murder at an alien refugee camp in London that is being run by the Doctor’s most recent frenemy, Ashildr/Me (Maisie Williams), who has contrived this scenario to draw the Doctor into a trap because she’s decided to trade the Doctor to some unknown “them” in exchange for protection for her little alien enclave.

It’s nice to see Maisie Williams returning so soon, and I suspect that we could see her sometime in the next couple of weeks as well, judging from the “…to be continued” at the end of this episode. Her performance here wasn’t as strong as it was in “The Woman Who Lived,” but she wasn’t given nearly so much to work with here. Still, I adore Maisie Williams, and Me/Ashildr is as good a recurring character as has been introduced during the Moffat era. Me’s plan in this episode may be a little silly to start with, but once it all goes sideways, Williams does an excellent job of portraying the character’s conflicted feelings, her regret, and her fear of the Doctor’s wrath.

Peter Capaldi turns in a much more understated performance this week than I expected. I rather thought we would see a fit of overly verbose histrionics over Clara’s death, but instead his reactions here stick to the realm of the believable, and it’s gratifying to see that Clara’s final moments weren’t entirely focused on the Doctor—at least not for his part.

Clara, of course, is (as always) a mixed bag this episode. She oversteps the bounds of her role as companion and does something that is, honestly, wildly stupid and results in her death. Even within the questionable logic of the episode it’s a decision that only makes marginal sense. However, Clara’s courage and kindness as she faces her death, talking the Doctor down from his desire for vengeance and doing what she can to protect Me and reassure Rigsy, is well-done. At the same time, though, it’s terribly frustrating that, in her final moments, Clara thinks almost entirely of the Doctor and his feelings. It’s frustrating that Clara’s death was so clearly a result of her own poor decision making, and it’s infuriating that years of piss-poor characterization diminish the emotional impact of it all. Worse, Moffat’s inability or unwillingness to truly kill characters off ensures that Clara’s death doesn’t have the feeling of finality that would make it really tragic.

Make no mistake. I’ve never disliked Clara herself. I’ve only been incredibly disappointed and dissatisfied by her treatment in the narrative of the show. Jenna Coleman is a talented actor, and she brought a great deal of charm to the role, but she’s never been enough of a superwoman to overcome as much awful writing as her character has been subjected to. No one could be, and it’s an unmitigated shame that my strongest feeling about Clara’s final episode is gladness that this chapter of Doctor Who is finally done with. I’d like to say that I’m hopeful that a new companion will provide just the sort of fresh start the series needs, but I don’t expect any real change as long as Moffat holds the reins.

Television

iZombie: “Abra Cadaver” breathes life into a pretty standard dead magician murder mystery

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It seems that it’s a requirement that every police procedural show must eventually do an episode involving stage magicians, and iZombie’s time to continue this tradition has come. In “Abra Cadaver,” Liv eats the brain of a death-obsessed magician with a penchant for explaining his colleagues’ best tricks on YouTube.

It’s nice to see an episode where the murder mystery of the week is more than just incidental to more important goings on, although this mystery turns out to be not as clever as the writers think it is. The best parts of this episode are all the parts that aren’t the investigation of Sid Wicked’s murder, and we finally get to see the show begin to address the enormous elephant that’s been in the room since the beginning—how Liv’s being under the influence of the brains she eats affects her relationships.

Post-, well, not –coital, but post-probably-hand-stuff, I guess, Major talks a good game about how he’s cool with all incarnations of Liv, but it turns out that he’s much more bothered than he wants Liv to believe. By the end of the episode, Liv has gotten very weird from morbid magician brains, and Major has gotten very weirded out by it. I might be annoyed that Major’s brief flirtation with the most boring drug problem ever is so quickly forgotten, but this shift in direction for Major and Liv spawns one of my favorite interactions on the show so far when Major asks Ravi and Peyton about Liv’s personality changes.

My love for this scene might have something to do with the fact that it immediately follows Peyton shutting down Ravi’s awkward and totally unwelcome and inappropriate attempt to ask her for relationship advice. Left to his own devices, Ravi ends up dumping his girlfriend, Steph, later in the episode, which is actually the lowlight of the episode. Steph, weirdly and annoyingly, has decided to throw a Guy Fawkes Day celebration for Ravi—a couple of weeks late—and it’s every bit as cringeworthy as you could expect. It’s a really lazy way of dealing with a character who’s outlived her usefulness to the narrative the show is building.

Steph was introduced as Ravi’s new, relatively cool-seeming girlfriend a couple of weeks ago, and now she’s suddenly, well, this? I don’t buy it. And I didn’t like it. I ship Ravi and Peyton as much as the next person (which is to say a lot), but I hate to see this kind of character assassination in service to that. It could just as well have been handled by Ravi saying at some point that it just didn’t work out with Steph. There was no need to humiliate her on screen like this, and it didn’t make Ravi look good either.

By far my favorite parts of the episode, though, are the scenes of Liv and Blaine hanging out together trying to figure out who is killing zombies. By the end of their time together, I want nothing more than for them to get married already and make some beautiful zombie babies. In all honestly, though? Liv and Blaine have about ten times the chemistry that Liv and Major do, and we know that Blaine isn’t totally thrilled about being de-zombified. Liv and Blaine giving into their obviously sexual tension would be a great way for him to get re-zombified.

“Abra Cadaver” is a solid episode overall, and it hit most of the right notes, but it could have made better use of its premise. Personally, I could have used more magic puns, but it’s still a solid example of iZombie at its near-best and a nice entry into the annals of the dead magician murder mystery genre.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • How did Liv not even seem to notice that the dog in Dale’s file looked an awful lot like Major’s new canine friend?
  • Please stop trying to make Blaine and Peyton happen.
  • Who is the mysterious woman who drops off something at Babineaux’s place?
  • Speaking of Babineaux, I really like him and Dale together.
Television

Minority Report: “American Dream” offers a glimpse of a different, better show

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After a week without an episode, Minority Report is back with one that reminds me of a lot of the things that initially attracted me to the show in the first place. “American Dream” isn’t great, but it is good, and it’s definitely the most I’ve enjoyed this show in a while.

This episode does something that I think is one of the best things it could have done at this point: it lets Vega’s boss, Blake, in on the precog secret. Blake has been completely underutilized up to this point, which is a shame, but “American Dream” does its best to make up for lost time, with Blake joining Vega and Dash to investigate an impending murder in the poor, immigrant neighborhood where Blake himself grew up.

We learn that in 2025 the US government granted citizenship to some ten million undocumented immigrants, but that the “compromise” (in the true, Republican sense of the word) negotiated in exchange for that amnesty was the repeal of the 14th Amendment. Blake was one of the unfortunate children born in the US after that repeal, as was this week’s pre-murder suspect. The episode spends most of its time exploring what that status means to the people who are affected by it, focusing heavily on Blake’s experiences as a child of immigrants and a member of a marginalized community. This is definitely the best job the show has done to date with integrating world building with character development, though it does turn a little after school special in the end.

My biggest complaint about this episode is that it doesn’t manage to dig deep enough into any of its big ideas. It also sidelines its female star in favor of exploring a secondary character who they’ve actually made more interesting than either of the leads. Blake’s background is interesting enough that he could have carried a whole series himself, and indeed Wilmer Valderrama does most of the heavy lifting in this episode. Poor Vega exists at a similar-in-some-ways intersection of identities and experiences, but somehow the show just never has managed to really explore those and she’s relegated to background decoration in this episode.

The worst part about all of this is that it indicates, to me, large structural flaws in the whole premise of the show. Vega has suffered all along from poor writing and inconsistent (and unlikable) characterization, and Dash is just bland. These leads have always struggled to distinguish themselves in comparison to more interesting secondary characters, and this episode offers a glimpse of what the show might have been like if they’d centered the narrative around someone else altogether. Blake’s well-drawn background, his naked ambition, and his interesting connection to pre-crime make him far more qualified to be a lead protagonist than Vega has proven to be.

I’ve felt from the very beginning that Minority Report was a show that has a lot of potential, and I’ve spent the last several episodes bemoaning the ways in which the show has failed to live up to its early promise. It’s nice to see the show exploring some of its more interesting ideas, even if it is almost certainly too little too late. It feels obvious to me after this episode that the show’s writers just have never known what to do with Vega and should probably have chosen a character they could have written well from the start.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • The more I think about all this, the more it makes me angry for Megan Good, who I think has done the best she can with the material she’s been handed.
  • Wilmer Valderrama is ridiculously handsome and charismatic.
  • I about lost it when that guy got a drone in the face. That was the funniest thing that has ever happened on this show, if for no other reason than it was a pretty random thing to have happen.
  • I also about lost it when that guy tore a page out of a first edition of The Origin of Species. I know it’s a prop, but still.
Television

Supergirl: “Livewire” gives us a cool new villain and examines troubled mother-daughter relationships

So, this episode actually aired out of order, with CBS deciding to hold off on showing an episode that dealt with events they thought might be uncomfortably similar to events in the real world this past week. It looks like last week’s episode really did wrap up the who comparing Supergirl to Superman thing, which is encouraging, but this week’s focus on every character except Supergirl left our heroine a little sidelined in her own show.

I was a little concerned that the show’s tendency to race through story might cause “Livewire” to feel extremely out of place, but the only thing that really felt off was the revelation that James and Lucy are apparently very much back together now. This had already been telegraphed by Lucy showing up in National City to begin with, so it’s not surprising that she’s continuing to be a roadblock to any romance between James and Kara. Sadly, this is such a boring and totally expected development that my eyes about rolled out of my head when I saw it, and this isn’t helped by the fact that Lucy is little more than a pretty face so far. I can only hope that when we finally get to see the episode that “Livewire” replaced it gives Lucy more of a personality so we can understand what James sees in her.

Ultimately, though, this early interlude serves just to get James out of town for Thanksgiving, minimizing Kara’s boy troubles and making room for Eliza Danvers to come into town to spend the holiday with her daughters and for Kara to have a ton of bonding time with Cat Grant, who basically steals the whole episode. What few scenes Cat doesn’t steal are stolen by villain of the week Livewire (Brit Morgan), who is great to watch in spite of a pretty nonsensical origin story.

Livewire starts the episode as a contentious radio shock-jock, Leslie Willis, who has been mentored by Cat Grant but who oversteps when she decides to denigrate Supergirl on the air in an opening sequence that is one of the more naturalistic pieces of writing that we’ve seen on the show so far. Leslie’s dislike of Supergirl feels real and her insulting tirade against our superheroine is also sharply funny. I can see why Cat hired Leslie in the first place. Unfortunately for Leslie, Cat has very specific plans for Supergirl’s “brand,” and she won’t stand for being undermined by Leslie’s grudge.

When Leslie refuses to let Cat dictate her content, Cat simply busts Leslie down to covering traffic until her contract with CatCo runs out. It’s on her first day in the traffic ‘copter that Leslie gets struck by lightning-via-Supergirl, falls into a coma, and then wakes up with superpowers and an even bigger ax to grind against Supergirl and Cat Grant both. Mostly, though, this plotline functions as an exploration of Cat Grant’s character through examining her relationships with Livewire and Supergirl, and it works perfectly to make Cat much more well-rounded and relatable character. As a fan of Cat since episode one, I am thrilled to see her given so much new depth this week.

Meanwhile, Kara’s foster mother, Eliza Danvers has come to National City for Thanksgiving. Kara is excited to share the newest developments in her life with the woman who raised her through her teen years, but big sister Alex is certain that Eliza is not happy about the situation. Alex is right, of course, and Eliza can’t even make it through dinner before lighting into Alex for failing to sufficiently protect Kara. These sequences also give us our first flashbacks to Kara’s life when she first came to Earth, which is a nice change, but the Alex/Eliza stuff is really just completely overshadowed by the much more interesting interactions between Kara, Cat, and Leslie.

It doesn’t help that things between Alex and Eliza are mostly resolved by the end of the episode. I expect for a super hero show to have unbelievable things going on, but I expect that to be confined to the actual super hero portions of the show. The idea that ten years of mother-daughter strife can be fixed with a couple minutes of hugging it out on Thanksgiving just doesn’t feel true, which is too bad. It’s very important in a show like this that the more “out there” comic book elements are balanced by a naturalistic approach to its human drama. Rushing through these issues minimizes their emotional impact and makes them too unrealistic to counterbalance the absurdity of aliens and cyborgs and magical lightning powers. This has been a problem in the show since the pilot, and it’s worrisome that this is starting to feel like one of Supergirl’s defining characteristics. I’d hate to see it become the show’s downfall.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • Is the radio shock-jock character even a recognizable archetype in the modern age? While Leslie Willis isn’t alone in recent television history, I would seriously question whether or not a lot of young people would recognize the inside of a radio station anymore.
  • Winn’s dad is in prison, apparently. Since I’ve never read any of the comic books that this series is based on, I have no idea who any of these characters are, but I guess Winn’s dad probably is (or is going to be) some kind of supervillain. Frankly, I’ve felt for a while now that Winn himself gives off some faint future-supervillain vibes, so this isn’t terribly surprising.
  • Who on earth made the decision to use a cover of “Take Me to Church” for a mother-daughter bonding scene? This show is usually pretty obvious with its use of modern pop music, but this was bonkers. I haven’t seen a musical decision this baffling and bizarre since that time on Glee when Idina Menzel and Lea Michelle did a mother-daughter duet of “Poker Face.”
  • They really are moving right along with the “Hank Henshaw is a villain” storyline.
  • I still feel at times that including the DEO headquarters as a setting makes the whole show feel a little disjointed. Even when an episode is, like “Livewire” is, objectively not overstuffed with story, having those extra setting shifts can make it feel busier than it is.
  • Livewire herself felt a bit half-baked in this episode, but she’s definitely the most interesting villain-of-the-week we’ve seen so far. With her only being captured, not killed, I’m very hopeful that we’ll see her again in the future.
  • Speaking of villains, where is Astra? Even if they’re saving another showdown between her and Supergirl for a finale episode, it seems like we ought to get an update on her occasionally.
  • “You’ve always been my super girl” was the one like out of all the Eliza/Alex stuff that really worked for me. There might have been a tear or two.
Doctor Who, Television

Doctor Who: “Sleep No More” is a disaster in every possible way

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“Sleep No More” definitely numbers among Doctor Who’s worst episodes. Although it may not be the absolute worst in history, I can’t think of one that I’ve disliked more. That said, it’s not an episode to inspire a great deal of, well, anything. My singular thought as the episode ended was just “What the fuck did I just watch?”

The episode begins by skipping the opening credits in favor of jumping straight into a confusing and frustrating forty-five minutes of found footage nonsense. The story—a pretty standard base under siege plot—is introduced by creepy scientist Rasmussen, who is too-obviously some kind of villain, and we’re then introduced one by one to the unfortunately forgettable members of a doomed rescue party.

The only character this week who got anything like a development arc was Chopra, but even he was sadly one note. The show cast its first transgender actor, Bethany Black, as genetically engineered “grunt” 474, but her talents are largely wasted in the role, and the secondary plot where 474’s self-sacrifice helps Chopra to see the grunt’s humanity is underdone, unconvincing, and ultimately irrelevant as both characters involved die within moments of each other. Deep-Ando is separated from the rest of the group early on and dies alone as well. Rescue party leader Nagata was barely present and contributed little, but she did at least get to escape with the Doctor and Clara in the Tardis at the end.

Speaking of Clara, she fades into the background here almost as much as any of the secondary cast members this week. With Jenna Coleman’s definitely impending departure from the show and Clara’s possibly impending death (hey, it is rumored) coming as soon as next week, it’s incredibly saddening to see her once again marginalized in the story with almost nothing to do. It’s no comfort, either, that the Doctor is just as ineffectual this week. It only makes me wonder what the point of this episode is at all.

I have seen some posts praising the found footage format and the horror elements of the episode, but I didn’t find it compelling or frightening in the least. The shaky camera work was occasionally nauseating, but never managed to convey the sense of panic that I think was intended. The monster of the week was more silly than anything else, and if the sleep dust monsters weren’t absurd enough to look at, with their rather disgusting-looking heads like huge gaping (and vaguely scatological) orifices, the Doctor’s various theories and explanations made the monsters just plain ridiculous.

It’s not a great sign when even the Doctor ends the episode with an exasperated exclamation that none of it makes sense, and that’s exactly what happened here. The whole way through the episode, I kept waiting for it all to finally congeal into something resembling a coherent story, but it just never happened.

Television

Ash vs. Evil Dead: “Books from Beyond” is some yappening and not a lot of happening

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I had very high hopes for “Books from Beyond,” so I was a little disappointed when this episode felt like a bit of a step back after the first two really excellent half hours of the show. It’s not a terrible half hour of television, but it’s not particularly scary, not as funny as the last couple episodes, and it doesn’t do as much as it ought to move the story along.

After a week without Lucy Lawless, it was nice to see her back in the opening minutes of this episode, although I think her scene might leave us with rather more questions than answers about her character. I had kind of expected her to play a bigger part in the action this week, as the preview for the episode seemed to imply she would, but she only has perhaps five minutes of screen time. It’s not quite a deal breaker, but it is irritating to feel misled by promotional material in this way.

What’s more unfortunate this week is that Lawless’s Ruby isn’t the only female character to find herself somewhat sidelined once Ash and company arrive at the bookstore. While Ash and Pablo deal with ancient book expert and obvious weirdo Lionel (Kelson Henderson), Kelly is left to keep an eye on a handcuffed Amanda Fisher, who’s got no idea what’s going on but is convinced that Ash is responsible for it. Kelly has almost nothing to do this week, and Amanda doesn’t have anything useful to do. Both women end up only hindering Ash’s efforts to find a way to stop the evil he’s unleashed, but the largest portion of their time is spent doing nothing at all. This would be annoying enough if all the interesting stuff was happening where the women aren’t, but that’s sadly not the case here.

You wouldn’t expect a demon-summoning to be boring, but this one somehow manages it. There are some funny moments, but there are even more missed opportunities. Aside from this episode’s failure to include Kelly and Amanda in most of the action, the summoned demon and the ensuing fight just doesn’t end up being particularly well-done on any level. The demon itself is dull-looking, the show has toned down it’s characteristic gore, and the huge number of creepy specimen jars that are shown over and over again throughout the episode are never used to their full possible effect. Considering how much the camera lingered on all those jars of pickled fetus-looking things, I kept expecting them to at some point end up out of the jars and attacking Ash’s face. Not having that happen is a major missed opportunity.

Overall, “Books from Beyond” is simply a much slower-paced episode than the last two. It wasn’t bad, but it didn’t deliver on the promise of the episode preview. On the one hand, I’m not certain it’s reasonable to expect that the show could have kept up the level of energy and humor that characterized the first couple of episodes. On the other hand, I’m not sure the show works if it doesn’t somehow manage that. When you add in the fact that the show seems to have lost interest in its female characters, at least temporarily, “Books from Beyond” is layer upon layer of letdown.

Miscellaneous thoughts on the episode:

  • I did love Lionel’s costume, although I think his jacket really needed to have elbow patches.
  • They are seriously having Pablo get “friend-zoned”? I hate that trope so much. It’s the worst sort of low key misogynist bullshit.
  • I hate to harp on the fetus jars thing, but that really was an enormous disappointment. I know they already did Ash fighting a comically small opponent in episode one, but this would have been a whole bunch of exceptionally gross-looking comically small opponents, which is clearly an entirely different thing.
  •  Best line of the night: “Well, you two learned a very valuable lesson today: Cops don’t help.”
  • That said, I’m starting to get the feeling that the show either has a total disdain for Amanda Fisher or just doesn’t have any idea what to do with her. She’s clearly a tough, capable person, but this week in particularly she functioned as nothing but an obstacle to our heroes while also ending the episode worse off than she started it. I thought the show was moving towards having her join up with Ash and company, but that seems to not be the case. I suppose this may mean that Amanda is going to end up working together with Ruby (who is downright sinister at this point), but I’m not exactly holding my breath on that, either, after this week’s mishandling of her character. It is still early in the series, but Amanda deserves better than what she’s been given so far.