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.

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.

Weekend Links

Weekend Links: November 28, 2015

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I can’t tell if my favorite cool thing I’ve seen this week is these gorgeous tilt-shift astronomy photos or this story about jetpacks being used to fight fires in Dubai.

My favorite funny thing of the week, though? Mightygodking’s 2016 election Magic: The Gathering cards.

The World Fantasy Award is looking for a new statuette design to replace the bust of H.P. Lovecraft.

Meanwhile, S.T. Joshi continues to have a public meltdown about it. The Arkham Digest reports, and there’s a good piece at Salon on the mixed legacy of H.P. Lovecraft.

Robert Jackson Bennett has some thoughts on worldbuilding.

At Black Gate, Sarah Avery looks at why we love enormous fantasy book series.

Ian Sales has some ideas on reasons to be cheerful in space opera.

Lit Reactor lists 5 Ray Bradbury stories that tell us everything we need to know about writing.

The Mary Sue talks about Supergirl vs. Jessica Jones. Turns out the world is wide enough for both. And more.

io9 looks at how Doctor Who managed to waste Clara Oswald.

Games Radar collects 25 of the most kick-ass TV heroines.

Tor.com has a roundup of the covers for their winter publishing schedule, and they look so good.

Tycho Journal wants to reinvent the sci-fi magazine.

Read “On Pandering” over at Tin House.

If you’re looking for something to read, Largehearted Boy is collecting all the “Year’s Best” lists you could ever hope for.

 

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.

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