September used to mean that all my favorite TV shows were finally coming back after a long, depressing summer of repeats and probable heat stroke. Of course, that’s all changed now, what with Justified and Cougar Town starting in January, Game of Thrones starting at the end of March, and God only knows when Psych comes back, but still, I’ve watched a fair number of season (and sometimes series) premieres in the last couple of weeks. I figured, why not take some notes?

So, here they are, Best to Worst.

Last Resort

I don’t know how the actual show will turn out, but I think this is one of the strongest series premieres I’ve ever seen. (I’ve never actually made that list, but The West Wing, Lost, and Justified would be on it for sure. Battlestar Galactica, too, if “33″ counts as the pilot.)

The story told in this first episode could easily have been the plot of a whole movie, but it also works really well as the beginning of a series, and I’m really eager to see where they go with it. The concept of the show is awesome — who doesn’t like mutiny, betrayal, and revolution — and I’m liking the relationship between Andre Braugher and Scott Speedman a whole lot. Also, the tension in the pilot? Sky high. I really hope this does well.

Person of Interest

I am so glad I stuck through the first half of Season One. Person of Interest started out a little slow for me — a bit too procedural, and I like procedurals — but by the end of the first season, it had picked up a lot, and this was a very promising beginning to Season Two. The Machine is actually becoming its own character, and I think that’s fascinating. Also, I loved how determined John is to get Finch back, and I’m always okay with a little Ken Leung screen time, even if it’s just a one-time guest role.

Fringe

Normally, the time jump from fourth to fifth season would probably bother me — especially after the fourth season finale, which doesn’t lead up to it in any way — but as I understand it, we wouldn’t even get a fifth and final season of Fringe if the creators hadn’t done it this way, so . . . I can look past it. Besides, the war against the Observers is pretty interesting, even if I think the Nazi overtones are a little much sometimes. (At least they aren’t attempting to be sly about it, I suppose. Like, yep. We’re making the parallel in bold, red, 72-inch Comic Sans font. Let’s not even pretend here.)

John Noble is, as always, magnificent in this premiere. I really liked the scene where Peter and Olivia talk about how they dealt (or failed to deal) with their daughter going missing. And I’m just really excited to see how this last season turns out. Fringe has always been something of an uneven show with the occasional plot line that just drops out entirely, but they have done some of the most fascinatingly original material on television, and I really hope the series finale manages to bring everything together.

Revolution

I’m a bit wary about this show but interested regardless. I’m all for more post-apocalyptic programs on television, and the pilot was actually a lot of fun — particularly Giancarlo Esposito, who makes for a great antagonist, and Billy Burke, who is simply awesome — but the main girl, Charlie, needs to get better quick because she is annoying, and generally, you don’t want the protagonist to drive your audience to drink. There’s some amount of potential to her character, but naive, righteous heroines are incredibly hard to get right, and I am not at all certain that Tracy Spiridakos is up to the task.

Still, I’m going to see how first season goes. Cause Billy Burke and Giancarlo Esposito and Eric Krikpe and JJ Abrams all working on the same show. (Also, the blonde doctor lady and her poisoned whiskey? Kind of awesome. Why can’t she be the heroine?)

Grey’s Anatomy

Grey’s Anatomy is easily the most inconsistent TV show I’ve ever stuck with. Actually, I’ve dropped it any number of times — especially when George and Izzie started dating, ugh — but I’ve always come back to it. (Which is not an argument that other people should do the same. I will defend most of the acting and some of the writing –especially in the earlier seasons — but this show has also taken far too many missteps over the years for me to say, “Yeah, but if you ignore that, that, and that, it’s perfect.”)

Still, when Grey’s Anatomy is on, it’s on, and the season premiere was a fairly good one. At first, I was pretty skeptical of the small time jump (small compared to Fringe, anyway) after the plane crash in the finale, but much to my surprise, it actually worked fairly well. They kept a certain amount of mystery involved (what happened to Arizona; will Mark wake up before they extubate him), they gave a character a good send-off, and they dealt well with all the emotional fall-out of the crash. THIS, NCIS, is how you do emotional fall-out. (More bitching about NCIS later.)

I did have a few small problems with this ep (Cristina’s story line is boring; I miss Badass Bailey; of course April is wearing a trendy plaid shirt now that she’s working on the family farm), but overall I enjoyed it. It was sad, but in a good way.

Elementary

Okay, let’s just get this out of the way: I like Sherlock. It’s a great show, an ambitious show, and probably better than Elementary will ever be. But you know what? That doesn’t mean I can’t watch this too. This show has aired one episode so far, and I am already tired of reading people whining about America making a Sherlock Holmes story. Do you have any idea how many Sherlock Holmes adaptations there are? Lots. There are always going to be more Sherlock Holmes adaptations, just like there were always be Dracula stories or stories with a new version of Jesus. Get used to it.

Now. This is a pretty straight-forward procedural story, so if you don’t like procedurals, you probably won’t like Elementary. But if you do like good guys solving crime-of-the-week stuff, this isn’t a bad start. I’ve liked both Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu for years, and they seem to have a decent chemistry with one another. The show has been very adamant so far about their relationship not becoming romantic, which is awesome. And there seems to be a decent amount of give and take between Sherlock and Watson — it’s not just Watson blindly following Sherlock around, blinking rapidly and asking stupid questions. I think that’s necessary for this particular remake — if I have to watch one more show with a woman (usually a boss) who gives in, fails to control, or otherwise has absolutely no power at all over her Amazing-Brilliant-Amoral-Male-Genius Employee, I might just scream.

NCIS

Okay, so this is how not to deal with cliffhangers, giant explosions, and post-traumatic fall-out. When you blow up a building in a season finale and leave various characters missing or in danger, you should keep them missing or in danger for more than three minutes. You should not find out a character has a huge ass shard of glass sticking out of his side, cut to commercial break, and immediately come back with, “Oh yeah, he’s cool; just a couple of stitches.”

Likewise, you shouldn’t stick two people (who everyone wants to get together) in an elevator only to release them fifteen minutes into the show with nothing in their relationship having changed. Sure, giant explosions and people being stuck in elevators are all cliches — and people love them for the sugary guilty pleasures that they are. Don’t promise a chocolate cupcake and then offer a stale carrot instead.

And for Godssake.  Richard Schiff’s an awesome actor, but even awesome actors need better written story lines than this. If you’re going to try and sell the “we are not so very different, you and I” hero and villain dynamic? You need to write it a whole lot better than this. As is, this may have been one of the most anti-climactic season premieres I’ve ever seen on TV.

Criminal Minds

And yet as bad as NCIS was, my least favorite season premiere to date has been Criminal Minds. Oh, Criminal Minds. First you write Prentiss off in the dumbest way possible, and then you replace her with Jeanne Tripplehorn, who . . . not that good, not in this episode. I know I’m struggling to be fair to her because Prentiss was one of my favorite characters, and fans are always a little crazy mean about the people who get to replace their fave characters, but . . . Tripplehorn seemed flat as hell here. Also, the case stuff was poorly written and boring as hell, depending heavily on plot contrivance. If this is indicative of the following season, I may have to finally give Criminal Minds up. Boo.

That’s it for now. Maybe I’ll update again when The Walking Dead and Community start up later this month.

Okay, Trekkies. The very, very last of my Star Trek recasts . . . I (finally) give you the new USS: Voyager crew.

Bear in mind: while I’ll explain my reasoning below, you may want to take another quick glance at the 10 Ways to Remake and Fix Star Trek Voyager . . . otherwise you’re going to be very surprised when you see who I cast for Neelix.

Captain Kathryn Janeway

Connie Britton

“Mr. Kim . . . at ease, before you sprain something.”

I watched the first half of the first season of American Horror Story before I just kind of gave up on it. (Too bad considering how WTF that ending was . . . yeah, I got spoiled. Oh well.) One of the main things keeping me going, though — far longer than I normally would have — was Connie Britton’s performance as Vivien, the dry, irritable, no-nonsense mother who’s thrust into this massively horrific scenario. Britton has just absolutely wonderful reactions and makes Vivien extremely real. She’s the kind of strong female character I’d like to see more of — women who can be badass without skin-tight pants and a giant gun.

And I thought . . . this is exactly what I want Janeway to be. I mean, she can have the gun. I’m all about Janeway with a giant ass gun. But I also like her being a feminine, even maternal character. I love her moments of irritability and pissed off mama bear attitude. I want her to seem like a real woman with a very large responsibility on her shoulders, and I think Connie Britton would excel at that.

Commander Chakotay

Esai Morales

“I don’t care what kind of story it is, as long as I’m not the bad guy this time.”

I tried — I tried really fucking hard — to come up with a Native American actor in the right age group for Chakotay, but I just didn’t like anyone. So I’m casting Esai Morales instead, who I first saw in La Bamba (RICCCCHHHHIE!) but really liked for his role as Major Beck in Jericho. (And if you didn’t watch it — which you likely didn’t, based off of ratings – Jericho was ALL about being on your own and making hard choices to survive. So, it’s not such a leap to Voyager, actually.)

Chakotay is the second in command (not to mention the captain of his own Maquis ship), so it’d be nice if he, you know, seemed like a commander with actual authority. Morales can do authority, and I think he and Britton would be able to play off each other nicely. I suspect his Chakotay would be quiet but charismatic, which works for me.

And while I suppose we could switch the character’s ethnicity to fit the actor’s, I would actually prefer Chakotay to stay Native American. I want to see a Native American character who isn’t such a walking, talking stereotype, godammit.

Lt. Commander Tuvok

Giancarlo Esposito

“I have no desire for fun.”

I mostly enjoyed Tim Russ as Tuvok, but I kind of love Giancarlo Esposito — and I haven’t even watched Breaking Bad yet. (I’ve seen a few clips of him in it, though, and can I just say? Awesome.)

Esposito is one of those surprise powerhouse actors who seems to transform from role to role, and he can do a lot with a little — which is required, if you’re going to play a Vulcan. I expect his eyebrow twitches will come with seven different layers of nuance. And as good as he would be, all restrained and calm and logical, Esposito will really shine in those episodes where Tuvok’s emotional control snaps for whatever reason — watch that shit get crazy-awesome fast.

Lt. B’Elanna Torres

Tracie Thoms

“If you even think of joining in on this ‘embrace your heritage’ nonsense, I swear, I’ll rip out your tongue and wear it as a belt. “

B’Elanna is another role where I’m playing fast and loose with the character’s ethnicity, but I’m considerably less bothered by it here because I’m not sure it ever actually comes into play, not once in seven seasons. It was, at least, easier to come up with some possible Latina nominees, but I wasn’t crazy about any of them. Whereas I thought of Tracie Thoms and was like, “Yes. That’s B’Elanna.”

I have adored Tracie Thoms since I watched Death Proof for the first time. (I’m well aware that Death Proof is not everyone’s idea of a good time, but she’s hilarious in it and totally badass, which works for me here.) I have total confidence that she could portray B’Elanna’s continuous anger management issues without descending into petulance. Maybe B’Elanna could even sing something — um, probably against her will — considering that Trek loves to have people sing or play musical instruments, and Thoms has a great voice.

Lt. Tom Paris

Scott Speedman

“And, um . . . use grandiose language. He likes to be called ‘Sire’, and it helps to say things like: ‘The clever fiendishness of your evil plan is brilliant!’”

I didn’t think Tom Paris would be all that hard to cast, but man — it took forever to settle on him. There are probably 86 different ways to play Paris, but a lot of actors we came up with had the wrong sort of energy to them, and others just didn’t quite match up for us with Tracie Thoms. (You can’t really predict chemistry, of course, but you can at least try.)

We settled on Scott Speedman, who I am currently enjoying quite a bit on Last Resort. (And we’ll see how long I get to enjoy it, if ratings keep getting lower. Godammit.) Paris is a redemptive character, and I like the idea of watching Speedman going from selfish-angry-bitter-smirkiness to someone with responsibilities, someone who does things for other people, not just himself. (He can still retain a bit of the smirk, though. I like a good looking man with a smirk.)

Mekaela thinks Paris should have a pet lizard as an homage to the worst episode in Trek. I . . . think this is kind of awesome and am currently preoccupied with what we should name it.

Ensign Harry Kim

Steven Yeun

“Why does everyone say “relax” when they’re about to do something terrible?” 

I’ve had a love-hate relationship with The Walking Dead (although this season has been so much better so far), but I’ve always liked Steven Yeun as Glenn, and I think he’d be great at playing a young, fresh-faced ensign who’s life goes to hell on his very first assignment. Like Paris, I really want to see Harry Kim develop and change over the course of the show — particularly after the events of “Deadlock” — and I think Yeun would be up for the challenge. He’s a very expressive actor and seems like a natural fit in the part.

 The Doctor

Timothy Omundson

“For your information, I don’t appreciate being deactivated in the middle of a sentence. It brings back . . . unpleasant memories.”

Robert Picardo as the Doctor is one of the best things about the original Voyager, and it’s less because of the character — who I normally wouldn’t care that much about — and more because Picardo’s performance is awesome. Alas, he cannot be in my remake, so I am casting Timothy Omundson instead, who might seem like an odd choice for Psych fans, but he’s a character actor who can turn from goofy to serious on a dime and is also pretty well versed in playing characters who are both superior and irritable. It also helps that he doesn’t seem to jeer at genre, if his past career choices are any indication. (Seaquest DSV, Xena: Warrior Princess, Warehouse 13, Starship Troopers, various Star Wars video games, a short and very bleak Voltron fan film, etc.)

Also, while I’m not sure Omundson is well-versed in fucking opera, he does (like everyone in Psych) seem to enjoy singing. I’m not actually sure how good he is at it, given the givens, but that could be amusing too.

Kes

Mia Wasikowska

“I want complication in my life.”

Okay, so this is the “dream” part of “dream casting.” I do try and be realistic when I come up with these people, to an extent, but only to an extent. I know Mia Wasikowska would never show up in a Trek TV show, but I also know she can’t sell a movie on her name alone yet, which means I don’t feel so bad about casting her. I mean, it’s not quite like trying to cast Angelina Jolie as Janeway or something.

Anyway. Kes is supposed to be all naive and innocent and sweet, which makes for a pretty boring character. Wasikowska is a very talented young actress, however, and could easily infuse her with a bit more life. You know, she could be idealistic without being a wide-eyed, blinking doe of a woman. Kes has left behind her people and almost everything she’s ever known for a chance to explore the universe. I really want to see that adventurous side.

I also want to see her age and mature over the seasons, from young child to old woman. If acted well (and, preferably, with really good makeup), Kes could be an extremely interesting character to watch.

Neelix

Jason Dohring

“Whatever you need is what I have to offer. You need a guide — I’m your guide. You need supplies — I know where to procure them. I have friends among races you don’t even know exist. You need a cook? Oh, you haven’t lived until you’ve tasted my Angla’bosque!”

So, in MY remake — Neelix is not some silly, cartoonish, ridiculously perky alien. Neelix is a scavenger and a barterer and does basically whatever he needs to in order to survive. I don’t see him as a big fighter, but I do see him as a bit of a scrappy pirate — and also something of a romantic, as he manipulates the Voyager crew in order to get their help rescuing Kes.

Jason Dohring — best known as Logan Echolls on Veronica Mars — could be that scrappy pirate. He would be a darker character — because I don’t think Dohring knows how to not bring intensity — but he could also be quite charming. Hell, if he was done right, new Neelix could easily be one of the most liked characters in Trek instead of one of the most universally despised. How cool would that be?

Seven of Nine

Georgina Haig

“I was not traumatized. I was raised by the Borg.”

I didn’t actually think casting Seven would be all that hard — beautiful, blonde actresses are a dime a dozen in Hollywood — but I struggled with this for a long time until I thought of Georgina Haig, who you probably don’t know unless you’re Australian and/or watch Fringe.

Seven needs to be a logical, detached, ruthless badass who slowly relearns her humanity, and after watching Haig play Etta — a double agent in a dystopian future — I’m pretty sure she could do it. She’s got a decent look for it, too, and she’s about the right age for the mother/daughter dynamic that Seven and Janeway have together.

Seven will not end up with Esai Morales, however. Or, if she does, they will spend more than ten seconds building up to it. For Christ’s sake.

And finally . . .

Seska

Anne Dudek

“I did it for you. I did it for this crew.”

Because Anne Dudek, who has starred or guest starred in numerous TV shows (including the role of Amber — or Cutthroat Bitch — on House), knows a little something about how to play a nuanced villain, and I would like to see a more sympathetic version of the officer who betrays the captain in order to get herself — and possibly the rest of the crew — home. Seska is an “ends justify the means” kind of person. There’s a way to explore that in an interesting fashion without making her a secret Cardassian black hat who suddenly pops up pregnant and lies about her baby daddy.

. . . and . . . well, I guess that’s it. I have come to the the end of my Trek casting.

Crap. Now I have to come up with something new to remake.

Last year, I complained about a few of my gigantic problems with season two of The Walking Dead. I also said that if season three didn’t significantly improve, I probably wouldn’t be sticking around for season four.

Fortunately, prisons are inherently more interesting than farmhouses.

Well, after watching the mid-season finale, I can say with great joy that The Walking Dead has significantly improved.

DISCLAIMER:

Spoilers up till 3×08, “Made to Suffer.”

WAYS THE WALKING DEAD HAS IMPROVED:

1. I don’t want to kill all the characters.

Some of the most insufferable heroes. Ever.

Or maybe that’s not fair. I did enjoy a few of the characters. Daryl has consistently been pretty awesome. Glenn was pretty awesome — he was my favorite character in season one — but his romance with Maggie in season two was boring as hell. I felt Carol had potential — especially in her scenes with Daryl — but she spent most of her time crying about Sofia, which while understandable, does not make for particularly good television. And Shane was sort of fun when he was going batshit crazy, but I was also glad when he died because you can really only have batshit crazy go on for so long before it gets boring.

Everyone else? Tedious, dull, or simply aggravating as fuck.

However this — mostly — changed in season three. For example, let’s look at season two’s four most problematic characters and see what happened to them:

A. Lori and T-Dog are both dead.

T-Dog wasn’t so much of a bad character as he was a glorified extra. I didn’t necessarily want him to be killed off, but if he was going to stick around, he needed to gain a personality or a character background or something. Sadly, that never really happened, but at least his death scene was pretty good.

And speaking of death scenes . . . Lori’s death scene actually made me feel sorry for the character, which I didn’t actually know was possible at that point.

Of course, there are still some problems here. The Walking Dead has taken some heat for killing off T-Dog almost immediately after introducing Oscar, another black character, as if the producers were trying to maintain some kind of quota. I might think that this was merely an unfortunate coincidence if they hadn’t just done the exact same thing this last week with Oscar and Tyrese.

Also, while there were a lot of reasons I didn’t like Lori — namely that she had shitty priorities and bad decision making skills — the fanbase hated Lori so much that they attacked her for decisions that were actually understandable. For instance, people called Lori an awful wife for sleeping with Shane, and the season three writers (obviously pandering for the fans to like them again) had no problem at all with punishing her for that action. Problem is, Lori had absolutely no reason to believe Rick was still alive while she was screwing Shane, so all the hate that she gets for betraying Rick honestly comes off as a little skeevy and sexist to me.

Still, with these two problematic characters dead, I at least don’t have to deal with them and their annoying storylines (or total lack of storylines) anymore.

B. Carl is not a tiny, worthless asshole anymore.

He still doesn’t have a lot in the way of actual character, and he’s still wearing his dad’s hat — which is just hard to take seriously — but he’s no longer saying awful things to women who just lost their children or strolling by himself through zombie infested woods for no godamned reason at all. And in the very last episode, where Carl shows humanity by helping save Tyrese and his band of merry survivors — but also good judgement by locking them up and away from his own people — well, this was a wonderful moment for both the character and the show. Season two was all about Hero Rick — who couldn’t be good without also being an idiot — versus Villain Shane — who was a better survivalist but also a ruthless, crazy douchebag. And in this single moment, little Carl shows that there’s a way to be merciful, cautious, and not a total douchebag, all at the same time.

C. Andrea is . . . still a little annoying, but she’s nowhere near as bad as she was.

Andrea was my least favorite character in season two. Yes, I hated her more than Lori. I wanted to like her, considering that she was the only female who did anything other than talk, but I could never forgive her for one, allowing Beth the opportunity to kill herself, and two, nearly killing Daryl. Also, she was a total bitch.

However, in the interest of really giving third season a chance, I did my best to ignore all that I knew of Andrea from prior seasons and start fresh. And while I think her story line is easily the most boring thing on the show, I at least don’t despise her like I used to. Sure, I wanted her to give Michonne the benefit of the the doubt and ditch the creepy fucking governor. But Michonne didn’t really give Andrea a lot of evidence that something was wrong, either, and I’d bet I’d have a hard time leaving the comforts of Woodbury based on someone else’s gut feeling. Besides, Michonne? I like her and all, but she’s not the best at using her words.

And while I really, really wanted Andrea to find out what the Governor was up to in the mid-season finale, I can at least hope that seeing Daryl (as well as the giant wall of encased floating zombie heads) will give her the push she needs to do some investigating and get the fuck out of dodge.

So, yes. My biggest four problem characters from season two are either dead or on the road to likely salvation. And while there’s still some dead weight on the team –

Seriously, what does Beth even contribute — to the survivors OR the story?

– almost everyone else has vastly improved. Glenn, in particular, finally got the chance to be totally awesome again.

Glenn killing a zombie when he’s tied to a chair with his hands behind his back LIKE A BADASS.

You have no idea how happy this moment made me.

2. Also, things are actually happening on the show.

Maggie killing the hell out of this zombie..

I have always thought that a family drama or a procedural that just happened to be set in a post-apocalypse world would make for awesome television. I still believe that. But boy, oh boy, did season two of The Walking Dead totally fail in making a “life with zombies” storyline work. For every rare moment of awesome that happened, there were at least seventeen dull as hell scenes were nothing of any kind happened at all. I know I’m giving the show a hard time, and there certainly have been worse things on television — season two of Heroes, for instance — but if I had to come up with one adjective for the entire season, I’d probably go with “stagnant.”

This is just some of what’s happened in Season Three so far:

Rick’s group of survivors took the prison.
Hershel’s leg was amputated.
The prison was invaded.
T-Dog died saving Carol’s life.
Maggie was forced to brutally c-section Lori without anaesthetic to save the baby.
The Governor – The Walking Dead’s first real human villain — was introduced.
Also Woodbury.
Merle reappeared in all his racist, one-handed glory.
Glenn and Maggie were both captured and tortured (physically and psychologically).
Rick led a party to rescue Glenn and Maggie.
Michonne was introduced and later had an epic fight with the Governor where she stabbed him through the eye with a piece of glass.
Daryl found out his brother was alive, promptly got captured, and is now facing potential execution with him.

My god, there are . . . plot developments! PLOT DEVELOPMENTS!

You have no idea how much I yearn for this in television shows. Particularly this one.

CONCLUSIONS:

I won’t say there haven’t been a few missteps here and there — I hated Full Belly Zombie for continuity reasons alone, and Rick’s whole phone call hallucination nonsense left me utterly unmoved — but overall, this season has improved so much that The Walking Dead has become one of my favorite television shows right now, and I’m eagerly looking forward to its return in February.

TENTATIVE GRADE:

A

Didn’t you JUST talk about this show?

I found a link to these charts over on io9, and man. They might take a little while to load, but they are ridiculously detailed.

Some people over at The National Post went ahead and charted every single zombie kill that’s ever happened on this show. You can see which character has killed the most zombies, how many zombies each character has killed per season, the proportion of male to female zombie kills, etc.

It’s kind of awesome. Some people, clearly, are far more dedicated fans than I am.

. . . so prepare for the bitchfest.

You know what? I’ll let go of Justified today. I’ll let go of Community too — I mean, not seriously, not in my heart, but this show is never going to get an award, even if I keep desperately praying/sacrificing small animals for it. But seriously – Game of Thrones got shut out of every TV category? Seriously?

Dany says, “WTF, Golden Globes?”

Did you people watch the second season of Game of Thrones? Lena Headey deserves a nomination for “Blackwater” alone. Also: Peter Dinklage, Maisie Williams, and Charles Dance — all excellent. I know there’s a lot of competition on TV right now, but the fact that GoT was completely ignored is totally ridiculous.

(Also, I don’t watch Smash, so I can’t legitimately complain about its nomination, but everything I’ve ever heard about it says that it’s a terrible show, despite the presence of the ever-awesome Anjelica Houston. Has anyone else seen Smash? Do you think it deserves a nod, or did it just get nominated for Best Musical/Comedy because it’s one of the only musicals on TV?)

As far as movies go — well, I haven’t seen a single one of them yet, nor am I very interested in most of them. (I will see Django Unchained when it comes out in theaters this month, and I am at least somewhat interested in Argo, The Sessions, Moonrise Kingdom, and Silver Linings Playbook – but who knows when I’ll actually watch them. I still have very little to no interest in Lincoln, Life of Pi, Zero Dark Thirty, Flight, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, The Master, Les Miserables, etc. Anyway, no serious complaints about these nominations – not yet, anyway.)

The Golden Globes air on January 13th, 2013. I expect I am still one of the few people who enjoys watching award season, despite my mini-nervous breakdowns over all the various snubs.

Today, I mourn the passing of a television show.

Well. Mourn’s a little strong. I’ll miss watching Fringe, but I’m impressed that it managed to get five seasons at all (even if the last one was shortened), and I’m hopeful that all the people involved move on to do even more interesting projects. But I am sorry to see Fringe go because even when it came up with plots that I despised — the First People, for instance — there were a number of things I loved about it, and I was always interested to see where it was going next.

And so I present to you my quasi-retrospective. Complete with affection, snark, and SPOILERS for all five seasons.

1. Truth is, I actually didn’t like Fringe when I first started watching it. I tuned into the season premiere, and while I found bits of it interesting — the relationship between Walter and Peter, for instance, or the very end where Nina tells her subordinate to “question” the dead body — I wasn’t overly impressed with the show as a whole, and I found Olivia (Anna Torv) to be a particularly bland heroine.

Although no one was as annoying as Broyles (Lance Reddick). If that man had said, “Attache,” in that tone of voice one more time, I would have jumped in my television and beat him senseless. Thank God he was only that bitchy in the pilot.

2. Which isn’t to say that the show is perfect. It’s not. Fringe has an annoying way of dropping plotlines as if they never existed in the first place– like when Olivia says she’s seen the man who’s going to kill her, or that one time where Peter starts murdering shapeshifters for intel. They also came up with a lot of side plots and storylines that I never cared for — the whole idea that the fate of the two universes depended solely on which Olivia Peter fell in love with, for example, or the aforementioned First People.

(Seriously, I just hated this whole plot. The Big Reveal that all the technology from the supposed First People actually came from the future was kind of crap, but I was so relieved that I no longer had to deal with some prophetic, super-advanced, ancient civilization anymore that I didn’t even care.)

3. Still, despite some of these flaws, Fringe was always coming up with good storylines too, and the relationships between characters were fascinating. Peter and Walter’s relationship, for instance, only became more twisted and sweet and sad as the show went on. Walter’s complicated history with Olivia, as well, was interesting to see unfold. Astrid really never got the full backstory she deserved, but I loved watching her dynamic with Walter too, and watching Olivia’s and Nina’s relationship change from suspicious near-enemies in the first season to a more mother-daughter bond in the fourth was kind of awesome.

And while I was originally 100% against the idea of Peter and Olivia becoming a romantic couple — I love sibling dynamics, godammit — I admit, the show actually pretty quickly won me over in that regard.

(Also, I should point out that Olivia becomes a lot more interesting as time goes on, especially in the second and third seasons, when Anna Torv really gets to flex her acting muscles.)

As far as plot stuff goes . . . I loved all the Cortexiphan trial stuff. Olivia’s psychic powers were badass — I only wish the show managed a modicum of consistency with them. There were any number of monster-of-the-weeks that I found creepy and awesome. And the introduction of the parallel universe and Peter’s origins were nothing short of brilliant.

I loved almost everything about the parallel universes . . . our first real glimpse of it with Mr. Spock, Peter’s childhood abduction, the introduction of Walternate, Badass Redhead Olivia, alternate Fringe Division, the airships, etc. It was all really exciting and hugely intriguing stuff. If nothing else, Fringe was a wildly ambitious show and accomplished a lot of really neat things in the five years it was on TV.

4. I don’t think Joshua Jackson got enough credit for how good he was on this show — his performance as Observer-Peter was just awesome — but there’s no question that John Noble and Anna Torv were simply phenomenal, and the fact that neither of them received Emmy nods for their work is just frustrating as hell.

Seriously, can I petition for this man to get an Emmy?

I mean, technically, they still have one more shot, but who am I kidding? It’s nearly impossible for actors starring in genre work to get recognized for their talent. You basically have to be on HBO to even get the chance. And on a network channel like Fox? Please. That would pretty much require an act of God.

5. Sadly, I did have a lot of problems with the last season of Fringe, and the more I think about the series finale, the more I’m disappointed with it. There was definitely some worthwhile stuff in there, so I’m glad I saw it, but if ever there was a case of failed potential, it was this last season’s inability to fully explore and capitalize on the dystopian future that it had created.

Some examples:

The team using past Fringe events as terrorist attacks on the Observers is a really awesome idea . . . but it was never truly explored thematically, the way I wanted it to be, and they really only did it for two or three episodes anyway. So while it was a nice throwback to earlier seasons, it felt very hastily improvised.

Etta’s death was great because I wasn’t expecting it at all, and Peter turning himself into an Observer as a way to avenge her was fallout that I hadn’t originally anticipated . . . but this felt like it should have been endgame stuff, not a three episode mini-arc with no consequences of any kind. (Of course, this is pretty standard for this show . . . they have something of a track record of introducing Dark Peter, only to retreat quickly, much to my eternal annoyance.)

Bringing back the Child Observer was neat, but the twist that he was always the boy who must live . . . I hated that.

Plus, why the hell did he step off the train? They brought it up, and then never bothered to explain it . . . I call bullshit right there.

Also, I was extremely gratified to find out that other people besides me were confused as to why Walter would disappear from the timeline at 2015. Admittedly, working out time travel paradoxes has never really been one of my strong suits, but his winking out of existence right at this particular opportune moment doesn’t seem to make any sense to me. If the Observers had never existed, wouldn’t Walternate have been able to cure Peter as a child? And if he did that then, presumably, Walter would never have kidnapped him, and we’d have a very different situation on our hands . . . for instance, Peter wouldn’t be playing in a field with Etta and Olivia because he wouldn’t even be in this damn universe.

Finally, while the whole “time travel restart” is not my favorite way to fix problems and end a series in the first place, I especially am not a big fan of it when the show has already done it before.

At the end of Season Three, Peter goes into the future, sees a bunch of shitty things happen (re: his daddy kills his wife), sends a bunch of things back into the distant past to create his time travel machine in the first place, travels back to the present, fixes the damage between the two universes, and promptly disappears out of the timeline.

Any machine that looks like this . . . probably not worth testing out.

At the end of Season Five, Walter goes into the future with Michael to show humanity not to go the Way of Observer (which always seemed like a monumentally stupid plan to me — like let’s put all of our eggs in one basket, and why not some toast too) and reboots the universe so that the shitty things that once happened (the Observer invasion, Etta’s death) never actually happen. Then Walter promptly disappears out of the timeline.

It’s not the exact same, but it’s close enough that I find it problematic. I really wish it had worked out, too, because that last shot of Peter with the white tulip is a good final shot for a series — but if this ending had made more sense, then this could have been an amazing end to the show.

CONCLUSIONS:

Clearly, I’m disappointed by the end of this series, but it’s still far from the worst series finale I’ve ever seen. Fringe wasn’t a perfect show, but I think it was an important one, and I’m glad I got the chance to watch it while it was on from beginning to end.

You were a psychotically imbalanced whirlwind of a show, Fringe. You will be missed.

With Community FINALLY coming back next week for its fourth (and likely — but hopefully not — last) season, I felt a list was in order.

Here they are: my favorite thirteen episodes of this excellent geektastic comedy.

DISCLAIMERS:

1. You may be wondering why I did not cap this list at ten episodes — well, you might not, but I’ll tell you regardless: I couldn’t. Every time I tried, my heart just broke a little. How could I exclude that episode? Or that one, or that one?

At thirteen, I am still excluding episodes I really enjoyed — hell, I’m excluding the entire first season — but at least I could sleep at night. This show, you guys. This show is so good.

2. There are some mild spoilers here — obviously, I give some basic plot descriptions, and I do reveal a couple of things that happen in certain episodes, although nothing particularly huge or shocking. If you’re interested in Community but haven’t seen any of it yet and don’t want to be spoiled for even that much, just scan the pictures or something. Probably don’t click on the links. I really don’t think anything here will ruin the show for you, though. And some of these clips I’ve linked to were what made me try out Community in the first place. So, you know. Maybe you should click on the links.

Basically, read the post or don’t read the post. Just whatever you do — TRY THE SHOW.

3. I reserve the right to completely change the order of this countdown whenever I feel like it for no other reason than a mere whim.

13 FAVORITE EPISODES OF COMMUNITY:

13. Paradigms of Human Memory

“The only sharks in that water are the emotional ghosts that I like to call fear, anchovies, fear, and the dangers of ingesting mercury!”

If you’re at all familiar with television, you’ll probably know what a clip show is . . . it’s that episode where characters start reminiscing about the good old times, which leads to you sitting on your couch, watching clips of episodes you’ve already seen.  These episodes usually pop up in the fourth or fifth season as a way to cut costs — although Star Trek: The Next Generation was particularly egregious about it and did theirs in the second season — and no one ever really likes them. Until now.

“Paradigms of Human Memory” is a fake clip show, and it’s pretty awesome — Jeff’s spliced-together speech, in particular, is kind of a triumph. Also, the gentle mocking of Jeff/Annie shippers is hilarious, and the continued, slightly less gentle mocking of Glee always makes me smile.

And who can forget . . .  SIX SEASONS AND A MOVIE!

12. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons

“You have . . . successfully rubbed your balls on the sword.”

I have never played Dungeons & Dragons before, but every time I watch this episode, I really want to try it. I’m pretty sure it’s exactly the kind of nerdiness I would get into. Especially if there’s a lot of Elf Maiden and Hector the Well-Endowed action going on.

One of the reasons I like this show so much is that it completely revels in its geekiness — usually, if you see something like D&D featured on prime time TV, it’s probably because some horrible crime has been committed, and the cops have to interview the Nerdiest Nerds of All Nerds Ever, and the audience is invited to laugh at how freakishly nerdy they all are. (My feelings on The Big Bang Theory, by the way, are . . . mixed. And the promos for King of the Nerds make me very, very sad.)

But Community doesn’t do that here — this episode doesn’t shit all over people who like role-playing games, even though the majority of characters in this episode have never played an RPG before. Plus, seriously, Abed and Annie’s pantomimed sex scene? So. Damn. Funny.

11. Cooperative Calligraphy

“What the hell did you people do in there?”
“Something you and your puppies could only dream of, you non-miraculous sonofabitch.”

Besides being a supremely geektastic show, Community is also a very meta show, and as “Paradigms of Human Memory” serves as their mock clip show, “Cooperative Calligraphy” is their brand of bottle episode. (And inserting a definition for the less TV savvy — a bottle episode is one in which everything is shot in the same location, like a room or possibly a building. It’s another way to cut costs.)

This episode doesn’t have the most riveting sounding premise — Annie won’t let anyone leave the study room until she finds out who is stealing her purple pens — but it somehow leads to madness and mayhem and, appropriately, everyone stripped down to their underwear. You know, sometimes this show makes me feel like I had a really inferior community college experience.

Although that’s probably just because we didn’t have puppy parades.

10. Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking

“If you’re lying to me, if my father isn’t coming, if a car pulls up and anyone other than my father steps out, say an actor or you in a wig, if you pull any Ferris Bueller, Parent Trap, Three’s Company, FX, FX2: the Deadly Art of Illusion bulls**t —  I will beat you. And there will be nothing madcap or wacky about it.”

There are a couple of reasons I really adore this episode. One of them is Jeff — I always like the little glimpses we occasionally get of Dark Jeff, and this episode is a little more serious than most in regards to his storyline.

The other reason, of course, is the TOTAL AWESOMENESS that is Levar Burton and Donald Glover. Oh. My. God. I watched a couple of short clips from this episode online before I really starting watching the show — this one and this one – and I just about died laughing. I love you and your tears so much, Donald Glover!

9. Pillow and Blankets

“This war won’t stop with First Blood Part II. It will escalate to Rambo II, which should really be Rambo II: First Blood Part III, but the Rambo titles never made sense. And neither does war.”

Another thing I like about Community — they parody all kinds of stuff, but you don’t have to know the original material explicitly to find the episode funny. For instance, I’ve never seen Ken Burns’s PBS documentary The Civil War before, but I’ve still seen enough PBS and History Channel specials in school to get a kick out of this parody about The Greendale Pillow War. And I really do love pretty much everything about it — the tweets, the poems, the battles, the magic friendship hats. Troy and Abed’s bromance is one of my absolute favorite things about the show, but sometimes I like watching it break down too — as long as the fight doesn’t last too long. Nothing is right if Troy and Abed aren’t TroyAndAbed (in the morning!).

Also, Keith David’s narration? (And this show’s continued The Cape references?) Perfection.

8. Basic Lupine Urology

“You have to right to do whatever you want. Nothing you say or do can be used against you by anyone, but we’d really like it if you came with us, please and thank you.”

Of course, when you do have familiarity with the source material, the parody can only be that much better. And I’ve seen enough Law & Order episodes to know that this parody is so spot-on. It’d be too hard to pick a favorite part — the yam autopsy, Michael “Smiley” Ironside’s cameo, Annie’s victory dance, the true reason for the grisly crime — but I will say that the scene where Starburns tries to escape his pursuers by asking Quendra with a ‘Q-U’ to kiss him made me giggle like a fiend.

(Also, The Yam Autopsy? That should totally be a band name. Or at least the name of an album.)

7. Digital Estate Planning

“Jeff, you just murdered Annie!”
“Well, better than doing nothing.”

You know what not enough television shows do? Take their characters and throw them into an 8-bit video game. Especially not scary, racist 8-bit video games where dirty hippies attack.

Pierce is easily my least favorite character, so any episodes centering around his daddy issues — instead of, say, Jeff’s daddy issues — doesn’t sound terribly appealing to me on paper. Until you factor in the ‘everyone is transported into a video game’ thing, of course. And Giancarlo Esposito’s guest spot. And Hilda, Abed’s soulmate. (Well, his other one. The one that’s not Troy.) And, oh yes, the multiple murders at the blacksmith’s shop.

By the way, if you want to play The Journey to the Center of Hawkthorne yourself? You can download it here.

6. Regional Holiday Music

“Look, at some point, you hit a number of diminishing returns on the sexiness.”

So, that not-so-gentle Glee mocking I mentioned before? This whole episode is devoted to it — it is a Glee parody, an Invasion of the Bodysnatchers tribute, and a Christmas special, all at the same time. Clearly, it is glorious.

It’s not easy picking a favorite song — there isn’t one that I actually dislike. Annie’s Betty Boop number (pictured above) is kind of intensely awesome, but I think if I could only watch one of these songs ever again (*sob*), I’d have to go with Troy and Abed’s completely spectacular Christmas rap.

I wish all the music would become available on iTunes. I’d buy them in a hot second. And the second TeeFury comes up with a shirt that says, “I Am Jehovah’s Most Secret Witness”? I’m THERE.

5. Remedial Chaos Theory

“You’ve got your own place; you’ve got a future; you’ve got a . . . bowl of olives next to the toilet.”
“It’s a fancy party, Britta.”

Season Three started off a little bit slow for me . . . until the third episode, this episode. This is the episode that shows you how many wildly different paths your life can take based on the smallest factors, like who goes to the door to get the pizza from the delivery guy. Something that small can cause people to get engaged. It can unearth dark secrets. It can influence a woman to change her hair color. Life and limb can, quite literally, be lost.

And, of course, this is the episode that introduces the darkest timeline.

My sister made me a felt goatee for Christmas because she is the best.

By the way, if you want to compare the effects that each timeline had on each character, go here. They have charts and everything. I love people who make charts, so I don’t have to.

4. For A Few Paintballs More

“I had a dream it would end this way.”

This is the second half of the second season finale — when the students come together in a quasi-rebel alliance to take down their common paintball enemies, Star Wars style. There are so many great parts to this episode – the charge on the ice cream truck, Troy’s last stand in the library, Abed and Annie’s unusual and quite brief romance — but the very best part is that thirty second snippet of an epilogue with Jerry the Janitor. The epilogues are usually pretty funny, but this one really made me giggle. I adore Jerry.

Also Busy Phillips and Dan Byrd’s blink-and-you-miss it cameos? Love. It makes me inordinately happy that my two favorite “always-in-danger” comedies totally support each other, even though they’re from different networks.

3. A Fistful of Paintballs

“I’m outta here. I got Coldplay tickets.”

And here’s the FIRST half of the paintball episode. I really should just have listed this one above, for clarity’s sake, but when push comes to shove, I think I actually like the western half just a little, itty bit more than the Star Wars half. That’s not all due to Josh Holloway, although admittedly, I love his guest spot here as the Black Rider. But I also love Annie, who’s a total badass in this episode. I love all the western tropes. And I love how the season-long story of the group versus Pierce finally comes to a head in a one-on-one paint gun duel. (Okay, well, sorta.)

This is actually the first episode of Community I ever saw all the way through. I didn’t know who anybody was or half of what the characters were talking about, but I knew that I had to keep watching. And I never stopped.

2. Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas

“Abed, how many fingers am I holding up and, more importantly, are they still made of clay?”

There are a few reasons I love this episode as much as I do. The less serious reasons — like Christmas wizards and Christmas pterodactyls — would be enough, honestly. So would John Oliver, who I really wish would come back to guest star again. (He pops up a lot in the first couple of seasons, but this is easily Duncan’s best episode.) And just the general premise of the Community cast on a stop-motion animated journey to find the meaning of Christmas is pretty cool.

But Abed’s story kind of hits close to him in some ways. And I really love the “That’s What Christmas is For” song at the end — as an agnostic who’s celebrated Christmas her whole life, I really like the idea that Christmas doesn’t have to mean the same thing to everybody. You might go to church and sing carols, and I might watch Die Hard and eat too much chocolate, but that doesn’t mean we can’t both find value in the holiday. I like the idea that Christmas can be an inclusive holiday, for Christians and non-Christians alike. So this episode pretty much encapsulates my whole view on the season.

1. Epidemiology

”  . . . okay, I don’t know why I thought this would work.”

If I have to pick a favorite episode of Community, it’s gotta be second season’s Halloween episode, also known as the zombie episode. Because I love zombies. I mean, who doesn’t love zombies? (Hush, you contrary zombie haters. Put your hands down.) But also because who doesn’t love a zombie-themed episode set to the best hits of ABBA? Do you know when I hear ABBA on the radio now, I think of zombies? Even if I can’t initially remember who sang the song — I’ll be thinking, Who sang this again? And why am I suddenly thinking of zombies? Oh, it must be ABBA.

Other reasons for loving this episode:

Troy’s Sexy Dracula Costume
The Flying Cat
“Um. UM?!”
Homages to The Return of the Living Dead
Punching zombies in the face
George Takei

and . . .

“I love you.”
“I know.”

Season Four airs next Thursday, February 7th, at 8:00 pm on NBC. Here’s to hoping that — even in the absence of Dan Harmon — there are many more equally awesome episodes to come.

Celebrating Easter has never been a particularly big deal with my family, so I spent the holiday working, sleeping, and watching television. In particular, I watched the season premiere of Game of Thrones and the season finale of The Walking Dead.

Cause shows about — or at least including — walking corpses should be watched on Easter, right? Right?

Spoilers for both TV shows — not the books — ahead.

“Valar Dohaeris”

1. Sam finds a dead body in the snow. The body is decapitated, and holding its own head. I’m not sure if we’re supposed to know who the dead guy is, but he looks an awful lot like Jesus, which can’t be accidental, right? Surely not when the premiere airs on Easter.

2. In the credits, Winterfell is smoldering. Heh. Excellent.

3. “They said you lost your nose, but it’s not as gruesome as all that.” Awesome. If you haven’t read the books — or haven’t had to put up with your friends, who have read the books and still won’t shut up about them – that reference is probably lost on you.

4. Loyalty is a fine quality in a person, but it unfortunately often leads to very bad decisions if you’ve wasted your fidelity on a moron, a psychopath, or a psychopathic moron. Case in point: Davos.

Davos — who I like considerably more in the TV show — has miraculously survived from last season’s battle, only to go back to Stannis, who’s burning people alive based on the recommendations of Melissandre. For said loyalty, Davos is almost immediately thrown in jail. You need better friends, Davos.

5. Charles Dance continues to be awesome, but Twyin Lannister is a dick.

6. “Because the truth is always terrible, or boring.” Agreed, Sansa. Agreed.

7. Margaery Tyrell vs Cersei Lannister.

YES.

8. Without going into book spoilers, the change in Barristan Selmy’s storyline seems like the smart play for the show and doesn’t bother me at all.

9. Not going into book spoilers is hard, though, at least when it comes to certain characters like, say, Shae, who comes off a little different in the books than she does in the series. Based on what I’ve seen so far, I think her storyline is going to deviate slightly from the source material, and if it happens the way I think it will . . . well, I haven’t decided how I feel about that yet.

10. Finally, Roz better have an actual storyline this season. I was finally given hope at the end of season two, and I need season three to deliver on that hope, because currently, she is the most useless, unnecessary character on the entire show, and the time spent on her could be better spent on Arya, Jamie, Brienne, Varys, or any of the other infinitely better characters that didn’t appear on tonight’s premiere.

Conclusions: Happy to have it back!
Episode Grade: A

“Welcome to the Tombs”

1. Going into the finale, this was my Survival Likelihood List:

Absolutely Won’t Die: Rick, Daryl
Almost Certainly Won’t Die: Michonne, Tyrese, Carl
Could Die: Herschel, Maggie, Glenn, Carol, Andrea, Beth, Tyrese’s Sister
Hopefully WON’T Die: Glenn, Carol
Hopefully WILL Die: Beth
Almost Certainly Will Die: Milton
Absolutely Will Die: The Governor, Martinez, Tyrese’s Annoying Friend

Well, I failed. But I prefer to think that the The Walking Dead failed because they DID. I can’t BELIEVE that The Governor is still alive, and I’m, personally, highly disappointed by this development.

The Governor didn’t start off so bad, as a villain, but by the end of season three, I was highly disenchanted with him. I wanted him to be charismatic and menacing and scary. Instead, he was . . . I don’t know. Cartoonish? I can see the broad strokes of how the Governor’s arc was supposed to unfold, but it just didn’t pan out right, so I was happy to finally be getting rid of him . . . only to have him ride off into the sunset with Martinez and the Other Lackey Whose Name I Never Learned, making his return in later seasons almost an inevitability. Godammit.

2. Actually, my disappointment with the Governor is a big part of my problem with Andrea’s whole storyline too. If the Governor actually was charismatic and seductive and all the things he’s clearly supposed to be, I probably could have bought Andrea staying with him longer than she should have. But since those two have no chemistry whatsoever . . . yeah, it doesn’t work. And while I know Andrea’s supposed to be caught between a rock and a hard place, frantically working to broker a peace between the town and the prison and save all the innocent lives . . . yeah, that doesn’t end up working either, partly because the writing is inconsistent as all hell, and partly because Andrea has a tendency to flounce off and pout, which makes it very hard to take her seriously.

3. On the upside, I do like Andrea’s actual death.

Despite my intense dislike of Andrea, I did have a small amount of sympathy for her by the end, mostly because I tend to feel sorry for characters who fight like hell to survive and then die anyway. Getting stuck in a room with a zombie while you’re tied to a chair sucks; ask Glenn. Actually, for that reason alone, I’m glad Andrea died — it would be a little much to have two of our heroes survive being tied to chairs with zombies trying to feast on them, all in the same season.

Mostly, though, I just feel sorry for Michonne. I suspect that Michonne will become one of my favorite characters, now that she talks and has occasional facial expressions.

4. Carl is the Bringer of Death.

I’d be much more interested in Carl’s newfound, sociopathic tendencies if he didn’t stomp and pout quite so damn much. Good God, is Carl the new Andrea?

5. I still hate Carl less than Beth, though. Isn’t that sad? Her entire role in this show is to hold a baby and, occasionally, sing. GIVE HER A CHARACTER OR KILL HER ALREADY, PLEASE.

6. Here is my other problem with the finale: all season, this show has been building up the tension between the prison and the town. Months. We’ve been building this battle up for MONTHS. The plot lines of the last few episodes have been stretched especially thin, just so the big battle could happen in the season finale. And now we’re here; we’re finally, finally here, and . . .

. . . the battle lasts all of two minutes. The folks of Woodbury retreat, and in his rage, the Governor kills almost every single one of them. And that’s it. That’s the whole conflict.

Thing is, I don’t even mind that the Governor goes totally apeshit and kills all the people he’s supposed to be protecting. That actually works for me as a rock bottom of a (poorly written) character arc. But the battle, people. You still have to write a real battle! Violence has to ensue. Life has to be lost. Life should, at the very least, seem close to being lost. I cannot believe I waited the whole season for this bullshit.

7. At least, Ghost Lori is finally gone. Goodbye, Ghost Lori! I still feel that Sarah Wayne Callies got a lot more shit than she actually deserved, but that being said . . . please stay away, Ghost Lori. And take Beth with you. Living or dead, I don’t even care.

Conclusions: Still like it better than Season 2, but other than some really good moments, Season Three kind of fell flat on its face at the end there. Let’s hope that with our new NEW showrunner, Season Four will continue to improve.
Episode Grade: C

Here’s the thing: I like a good night soap. I’m not going to lie about that. I grew up watching typical nerd things like TNG and Batman: The Animated Series, yes, but I also watched stuff like Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place. It doesn’t weigh on my soul. Soaps are like anything else on television — there are good ones, there are shit ones, and there are ones that flip-flop wildly between the two. Grey’s Anatomy flip-flops like no one’s business. Desperate Housewives was good, but only for one season. The remake of Melrose Place – or at least the pilot — was the worst thing ever, bloodless and dull.

The best night soap I’ve seen in a while, the one that has better plotting than half the other shows on television?

Here are some reasons Scandal is worth your time.

Very Basic Plot Synopsis:

Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) leaves a career in the White House behind and starts her own business — she and her associates are fixers, and they make their clients’ scandals disappear. Of course, they each have their own scandals and secrets too.

Some Reasons To Watch:

1. Mostly likable yet hugely morally ambiguous characters.

This guy, for instance. Wow, this guy.

Words cannot express how big of a deal this is for me. I get very bored of characters who come this close to doing something bad, only to step back from it at the eleventh hour because of some Friend or Lover’s Moving Speech. That kind of thing is okay, now and again, but if you’re always pulling back, then we can’t ever think, “Oh shit, is she really going to go there?” Because of course she’s not. She’s the Good Guy.

On the other hand, I don’t really want to waste my time watching a bunch of assholes be assholes. I’ve said that before, and I’ll say it again. It’s the same reason I don’t bother watching most reality TV.

But Scandal is different — the greater majority of characters are witty, sharp, and a lot of fun to watch, but they do some naughty, naughty shit. I have never seen a show that so exemplifies the idea, “The ends justify the means,” before, at least, not on network television. And this includes our heroine, Olivia, by the way. Olivia does some very, very bad things.

2. Kerry Washington, and really the whole cast, is pretty great.

After all, it’s not just writing — you need a really good cast to keep these characters sympathetic, despite the shit they pull. The only actor I flip-flop on is Tony Goldwyn as the president. Some moments, he plays really well. Other ones . . . well, it’s difficult. He’s easily my least favorite character, though. (My other least favorite character is Quinn, the Useless Guppy of the Show, but she’s getting better in second season, now that she has things to do other than gape and stammer and blink like a deer.)

Everyone else, though, is pretty consistently awesome. Kerry Washington is a strong, compelling lead that keeps Olivia from veering too far into the whininess or bitchiness that seems to plague female heroines – and, not for nothing, she’s also the first black female lead on a network TV drama since 1974. That’s both awesome and depressing, all at the same time.

Also, there’s this guy:

Admittedly, I’ve been a fan of Joshua Malina since he was Will Bailey in The West Wing, but as his character is the most, er, morally responsible on the show? He definitely has the potential to be righteous and shrieky. I can easily imagine many other actors being really tiresome as David, and yet, Malina is totally snarky and charming. He and Huck (Guillermo Diaz) are definitely my favorite characters thus far.

3. This is a show rife with government conspiracies . . . and I don’t even mind!

Don’t be fooled. They’re not clapping. They’re rubbing their hands together with EVIL GLEE.

Big Conspiracy Stories are a hard sell for me. Because, oh, it will start out with something simple, like, who killed the president, and you’ll eventually find out that it was, say, Lester, a traitorous secret service agent. Okay, fine. But then it will turn out Lester was actually a Soviet spy from Russia. And then you’ll realize that Lester is actually Harry, Lester’s identical twin brother. And then you’ll find out that Lester/Harry was actually just working under the First Lady’s orders the whole time, and the First Lady? Oh, she’s actually a he. And a Freemason. And the protagonist’s dead father. And an alien.

Any big plot-driving mysteries, conspiracies or otherwise, are hard to do well. Show runners like to solve them and then backtrack when they’ve run out of new material. (Or they just don’t solve them at all and keep piling up new, shinier mysteries.)

But so far, Scandal is doing a pretty decent job of introducing a whole bunch of insane shit, then adding some more insane shit, and then wrapping it all up in ways that mostly make sense. They actually solve their mysteries, before adding new ones. Weird, right? I know! Also?

4. Scandal has crazy plot twists and cliffhangers like whoa.

It’s hard to show you a picture of a twist without spoiling the twist, so . . . just have a picture of Huck. Because I like Huck. Huck is adorable.

Every episode throws you some kind of curveball, and almost every episode ends on that curveball, leaving you desperate for the next installment. I spent this last weekend marathoning the first two seasons of Scandal (the first season is only seven episodes long) so I could be caught up by this Thursday — only to find out that they’re now on a three week hiatus.

I hate you, Scandal! I HATE YOU!

And, finally . . .

5. Shameless Eye Candy

Okay, I like Harrison as a character too, but so far, he hasn’t had as much to do as some of the other associates. I hear he’ll get more major storylines in season three, which is good. I hate underused potential.

In the meantime, eye candy. Cause, damn. Even wearing some ugly suspenders, this man is very good looking. Love you, Harrison! (Even though I’ll always remember you as Pooch.)

VERDICT:

The show isn’t perfect because no show is — I would give money to work as a script editor for Shonda Rhimes, because her signature monologues would be a lot stronger if she would just cut about twenty words from them. (Also, you only need so much repetition. White hat, gladiator in a suit . . . I GOT IT.)

But it’s a fast-paced, addicting drama with interesting characters and a likable cast, and these next few Scandal-free weeks aren’t going to go quickly enough.

GRADE SO FAR:

A-

Everyone has pet peeves. Maybe you don’t like stories about, I don’t know, talking animals. I have a friend who can’t stand centaurs. And just about everyone hates sparkly vampires.

Personally, I can’t stand Leonardo da Vinci. I mean, I’m sure the actual guy was totally fine. He did a lot of important shit, and I can respect that. But I hate it when he or his made up inventions pop up in movies. Mentor to Cinderella? Hate. Holographic Mentor to Borg? Hate. Super secret airships cleverly called War Machines? HATE.

And now, Starz presents . . .

. . . the untold story of young da Vinci as a young, tortured dreamer/lover/inventor/idealist, and hero who’s armed ONLY WITH HIS BRAINS.

Shoot me.

When it comes to television, I am Queen of the Gone-Too-Soon.

This is my mourning attire.

I have fallen in love with all kinds of television shows that have been cancelled well before their time. Some shows — like Farscape – I’ve made my peace with, because while Farscape may have been my favorite science-fiction show ever, it did at least get a full four seasons, plus a mini-series to make up for the horrifying cliffhanger they ended the series on. (Seriously, that is not how you end a show. That is just cruel and sick and twisted, three things I often approve of . . . just not in this case.)

There are shows, however, that I still mourn to this day, which brings us to my very first entry in this semi-regular feature: The Unusuals.

Nygma isn’t yawning, by the way. This is his “Why, God, WHY!” face.

The Unusuals was a quirky crime procedural back in 2009 that lasted a whole ten episodes before getting yanked off the air. It starred Jeremy Renner, Amber Tamblyn, Harold Perrineau, Adam Goldberg, Monique Gabriela Curnen, and Terry Kinney, and it was an awesome show that really balanced the kooky and the serious in the best of ways.

Considering how long it was on the air, well, there’s a good chance you missed it. The good news: if you’re interested in checking it out, the show is now on DVD, as evidenced in the above photo with my cat. The bad news: if you saw this DVD in the store, you’d have no idea what kind of show you were getting yourself into. They try to sell this series as a “dark and gritty” cop show. Which . . . look, it’s not that there aren’t serious moments. There are, some really good ones, even. Like, here:

(Admittedly, the sound being a little off takes away some of the seriousness. But I couldn’t find another clip.)

Still, most “dark and gritty” cop shows I can think of probably don’t have a lot of quotes like this:

Dispatch: “Be on the lookout for a ninja, or a ninja-like figure.”

Beaumont: “Here’s what you need to know about the Second: Alvarez talks about himself in the third person, Banks sleeps in a bulletproof vest, and yesterday Delahoy named his mustache.”

Walsh: “Did you know it was illegal to give a monkey a cigarette in New Jersey?”

Casey: “Is that Bobby Vandercamp? Oh, man. We used to call him Captain Date Rape in high school. I bet he’s got coke on him.”

Medical Examiner: “Do you know how hard it is to get clown makeup off a bone saw?”

Casey: “Uh, Davis is my . . . lover. We have sex.”

Delahoy: “Jumping off that roof today, I realized I was being selfish.”
Banks: “But you saved an old lady.”
Delahoy: “Oh, screw that old lady. I mean, I almost got you killed, man. We’re partners. I’d push an old lady off a roof for you.”
Banks: “Really?”
Delahoy: “Yeah.”
Banks: “Yeah, I’d push an old lady off a roof for you, too.”

Dispatch: “Second Squad, this is Dispatch. Be on the lookout for a man in a hotdog costume, last seen running west on Hauser Street. Suspect may, or may not, be wielding a samurai sword.”

This was a pretty great show, people. Very short but pretty great. And while it unfortunately ended with a number of things unresolved, I still think it’s worth checking out.

Better to have loved and lost and all that.

When it comes to griping about cancelled TV shows, everyone likes to bitch about FOX. The more I think about it, though, the more I realize that Syfy has prematurely axed almost every show I’ve ever watched on that network. For instance?

Alphas was by no means a perfect show, but it was entertaining and had a lot of potential, until it was unceremoniously cancelled after the second season finale. This was particularly annoying because the second season finale ended on a pretty huge cliffhanger, and we’ll never find out all kinds of things, like what happened to almost the entire main cast.

Bastards.

1. If you’ve never watched Alphas . . . well, it’s basically the X-Men, but with less flashy powers, more downsides to those powers, less capes or costumes, and considerably less Hugh Jackman. I can see how that might not sound like a winner, but the show actually does have a lot going for it, namely Dr. Lee Rosen (David Strathairn) . . .

. . . and Gary Bell (Ryan Cartwright).

Strathairn and Cartwright are easily the best in the entire cast and not only do they routinely elevate the material, they also have some of the trickiest roles to work with. Depending on the season, Rosen either plays the moral center/group therapist or the semi-manipulative bastard who’s using his relationship with the Alphas to get what he needs. Going between those two extremes can’t be the easiest balance to rock, but Strathairn manages it gracefully, without making his character seem inconsistent.

Cartwright, on the other hand, has the challenge of playing an autistic young man with superpowers, which I shouldn’t have to tell you could have gone so bad SO FAST. And with another performance, it might have, but he’s excellent in the role, funny without being, “Ha ha ha, let’s poke fun at autism!”

The whole cast is actually pretty good, especially in the second season, with the possible exception of Azita Ghanizada who plays Rachel. I say possible because I think Rachel is also a hard character to play . . . but I’m not sure Ghanizada’s whiny, one-note performance did the show any favors.

2. As I’ve mentioned, Alphas had issues. Rachel was one such issue. Stanton Parish, the main antagonist, was another. (Actually, John Pyper-Ferguson is probably more miscast than Ghanizada. He doesn’t have the charisma necessary for the role at all.) And it definitely got off to a slow start. I couldn’t blame viewers for not continuing with it after the first couple of episodes.

But it did get much, much better by even the end of the first season with surprising plot developments (the leader of Red Flag, Nina’s terribly dark backstory), good guest stars (Brent Spiner, Summer Glau, Sean Astin, Liane Balaban, Rebecca Mader, etc) and interesting dynamics between characters (Gary and Anna were the best! Also, Gary and Bill, and Bill and Kat.) It also accomplished something I wish more TV shows managed . . . it moved forward.

TV shows need to progress from season to season. It’s not just about chronology — it’s about big things happening so that the story advances in some significant way. I am tired of watching shows shuffle side to side like crabs, repeating the same shit over and over. Characters should evolve. Decisions should be acted up on. Consequences should arise. Worlds should change. And yes, there is some danger of a show moving too far too fast — like Heroes, for example, cause WOW. No show screwed up quite like Heroes did in that regard.

But I value plot advancement in a TV show, and on that, Alphas definitely delivered. The conclusion of the first season completely informed the overarching plot of the second season, and if the show hadn’t been cancelled, I’m sure the second season finale would have equally informed the arc of the third season.

3. I almost forgot: Kat (Erin Way) is one of the best second season additions to a cast in, well, ever.

She injected a lot of humor and spunkiness into the proceedings. I liked her a lot, and I hope to see the actress in more things.

CONCLUSIONS:

I didn’t grieve over Alphas the way I’ve wept about other shows in the past, but I was pretty bummed regardless because this show was interesting, continually improving, and — despite a few bumps in the road — deserved another season.

MVP:

Ryan Cartwright

TENTATIVE GRADE OF SERIES AS A WHOLE:

B

MORAL:

Cliffhangers suck.

Doing a report card for season finales is harder than it used to be, since — depending on the network — shows end basically whenever the hell they feel like it. Some of the programs I would normally want to grade (like Warehouse 13, for example, or Defiance) are still going on.

But here’s what I thought about at least some of them.

DISCLAIMER: There WILL be spoilers, some mild, some considerably less so. You have been warned.

Scandal

Finale Grade: A-
Season Grade: A

My newest obsession: Scandal is a damn whirlwind of a show, and a veritable shitload of stuff happened in this second season. Between assassination attempts, secret government moles, secret identities, murders of Supreme Court judges, torture addiction withdrawal, election rigging, and half a dozen other top secret government conspiracies, well, it should have way too much going on to be anything but ridiculous. But this is actually a pretty tightly plotted show and has far less dropped plot lines than you might imagine. New mysteries emerge as old mysteries are actually solved, and there are interesting, morally ambiguous characters. So, yeah. I’m pretty impressed.

The finale is much of the same, and the main reason it’s getting an A- instead of an A is because the President going back to Mellie is the exact opposite of plot advancement and I think less of both characters for it. I figured there would be some horrible thing that would keep the President and Olivia apart, but I really thought Mellie would finally get to have her own story line, and I was looking forward to seeing her be an aggressive political animal vying for the next presidency.

Thankfully, everything else in the finale — from David’s moment of WIN to yet another twist that I didn’t see coming at all — is all really good stuff.

Person of Interest

Finale Grade: A-
Season Grade: A-

This year, I started out watching a lot of procedurals — shush, it’s a guilty pleasure — but I eventually dropped every one of them except Person of Interest because, unlike most procedurals, this show keeps evolving every season like a show should. In the finale, we not only set up some super intriguing plot developments for season three, but we also finally found out how Ingram died and how Finch was hurt. (And by the way, Finch’s flashbacks? Infinitely more exciting than John’s flashbacks.)

The only thing keeping this finale from being a solid A is Carter’s storyline. Not that I don’t like it, but it’s not particularly well balanced with everything else’s that’s going on. Carter saving Elias and now stuck with a fugitive outside of prison? Not a B storyline. Somehow, I think this needed to be its own episode. And for Christ’s sake, where the hell is Fusco?

Still, if I may have one last bit of praise for the show as a whole? Person of Interest has some awesome sauce recurring female characters. Before she died, Kara was pretty badass, and her death — which was awesome, by the way, go Snow — did not leave us with only useless women hovering around. Carter is on the main cast, and Root, Zoe, and Shaw — all immensely kickass in their own ways— keep coming back.

I am very excited to see next season.

Game of Thrones

Finale Grade: B+
Season Grade: A

“Mhysa” is — like most — a pretty good episode of Game of Thrones, although how effective it is as a season finale, I’m still trying to judge. It wraps up most story lines, fairly well, I think, considering that there is still so much story left to tell. (Season three only covers about half of the material in A Storm of Swords.) Still, I feel like Tyrion’s story didn’t have much of a conclusion, possibly because he didn’t have much of an actual arc. And I might’ve liked to have seen a little more of Jaime and Brienne. On the other hand, who didn’t smile when Ygritte shot Jon Snow with three arrows? I love TV Ygritte, and I miss Book Jon Snow.

The only real problem I had with “Mhysa” is the bit with Summer’s head on Robb Stark’s body. It’s not a problem with bad taste, exactly — my issue is that it looks awfully fake, and for me, that takes away from the brutality of the moment. When I read about this in the book, I remember being horrified, and you don’t even actually see it: it happens off-screen. Here, I was just like . . . eh. It’s a small thing, I know, but it bothers me because it seemed so unnecessary to actually film it.

Still, this was a great season of Game of Thrones: the Red Wedding, Tyrion’s marriage to Sansa, Jaime and Brienne’s unlikely friendship, every single scene with Charles Dance, etc. I hate that I have to wait another YEAR for more.

To hell with you, True Blood. I want my show back already.

Cougar Town

Finale Grade: B+
Season Grade: B

Maybe it was the change to a new network, but this season got off to something of a slow start for me, a little awkward in its humor, like it was trying to be more risque without quite knowing how. But it definitely picked up and was just settling into a nice, easy rhythm when the season abruptly hit its season finale. (Apparently, there were actually fifteen episodes, but it felt a lot shorter than that. I was like, What? Didn’t this season just START?)

That being said, this was a pretty good season finale. Cougar Town is apparently never going to get any love from anyone other than me, but one of the things it often does really well is manage to balance Serious Stuff with the gang’s crazy, wine-fueled antics, especially in their season finales. On one hand, Travis managing to set his arm on fire trying to get a perfect first kiss with Laurie was pretty hilarious. On the other, Jules finding out about her father’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis was appropriately sad and very well-handled. I’m not sure I can think of another show right now that so seamlessly mixes kooky and sweet.

Justified

Finale Grade: B
Season Grade: A-

Justified’s fourth season didn’t initially feel quite as cohesive as the past three . . . which still leaves it being better than 98% of all other television out there. But by the end of the season, it mostly all wraps up really nicely, and I was pretty impressed by that because I wasn’t sure the finale would have enough time to tie everything together. In fact, the finale would have had a much higher grade if I wasn’t so annoyed by the conclusion of Ava’s and Boyd’s storyline. It felt obvious and weak . . . I still don’t understand how they didn’t realize they were walking into a trap. And the part where Ava’s all, no, I’ll go on my own? Bullshit. I hated this.

That being said, this season included Sheriff Bobby Singer, more time with badass Tim, some great moments of character ambiguity for Raylan, the hilariously sudden death of the snake charmer preacher man, and Art taking the time to acknowledge the awesomeness of Drew Thompson.

So, all in all? I still love this damn show.

Community

Finale Grade: B-
Season Grade: B-

Here’s the thing: I don’t think that this season of Community was as godawful as everybody else seems to. I get that the writers had a difficult damn job, and I appreciate that they tried to keep the spirit of the original show instead of rewriting it to be like any other sitcom. I know they failed, and they failed a lot, but I do appreciate the trying. There were also some bright moments in the season — notably, Jeff finally confronting his dad at Thanksgiving, and Abed and Rachel colluding on wacky sitcom shenanigans. And you know what? I kind of liked the puppets. There, I said it.

But it’s true that this season was seriously off-center. Troy and Britta were horrifically mishandled and many of the episodes, including the season finale, felt like weaker imitations of past shows. It’s not that they were all awful. It’s just that they could have been so much better.

Shockingly, MIRACULOUSLY, Community got renewed for a fifth season. Dan Harmon is also back on the job, and Chevy Chase is presumably gone for good, so it seems to be good news all around. But we’ll see.

The Walking Dead

Finale Grade: C
Season Grade: B

I’ve already discussed my disgust with the season finale of The Walking Dead at some length, so I’ll just sum it up briefly here: bullshit final battle, annoying villain still annoyingly at large, and Useless Beth (sadly) is still alive. On the upside, Andrea’s dead. Yay!

The first half of the third season was pretty awesome. The second half of the third season was, on the whole, poorly written and stretched far too thin with very little payoff. I’m still planning to tune in for the fourth season, but hopefully it will improve considerably because I was pretty disappointed with how this last one, ultimately, turned out.

Shows I Dropped Entirely:

Criminal Minds, NCIS, The Mentalist, Revolution, Elementary, Once Upon a Time (again), and Grey’s Anatomy (again)

Shows That Were Cancelled On Me:

Last Resort, Alphas, Fringe

First order of business: the Clarion West Write-a-Thon has started! As it only started yesterday, though, I don’t have much to report yet, especially since I’ve been working the past few nights. (I do a lot of my writing at night, when sane people in the same time zone are dreaming of sugar plums — or whatever else people dream of during the non-Christmas season.) Look for an update near the end of the week.

Now, let’s get to what really matters: reality television.

As a general rule, I’m not that big into reality TV. There are shows I like – Face Off, for one, or So You Think You Can Dance because bite me, I’m a girl, and I like dancing. (Cause, dude. Why can’t I dance like this? Or this. DAMN.) And when I’m looking for pratfalls and snark, Wipe-Out can be a fun way to spend an hour. But shit like The Bachelor, Real Housewives of Wherever, American Idol, anything with a Kardashian . . . it’s not my thing. Even the shows I do enjoy . . . I don’t really care if I miss an episode or two. I will not break down in tears if my DVR inexplicably stops recording Toddlers & Tiaras. (Note: I have never actually watched this show. I suspect it might induce an aneurysm.)

But as of last night, that might have all changed because I watched the premiere of this:

Here’s the basic premise of Whodunnit?, if you don’t feel like watching the promo: thirteen strangers stay in a mansion — called the Rue Manor cause obviously — and try to solve a murder. (A supposed murder, clearly. I refuse to do quote marks.) Not every contestant gets access to the same bits of evidence, though, so players have to be strategic about what information to share and what to keep to themselves. Each contestant then guesses how the victim was killed, and the person who does the worst job of it is the next to be axed. For added levels of intrigue, the murderer is actually one of the contestants, so neither the audience nor the players know exactly who to trust. (As an aside: if the host turns out to have been the killer all along, I will be significantly pissed. That’s no fun at all.)

Now that I’ve watched the premiere, let me tell you guys: Whodunnit? is camp to the max. It’s also perfectly aware that it’s camp to the max, which means that we have incredibly overelaborate murders, contestants in matching Estate pajamas, and a butler-host named Giles (Gildart Jackson) who — depending on the given moment — will either be dramatically announcing, “It has begun!” or offering up plushy socks. LOVE.

This show actually has a pretty clever hook, and some of the contestants are surprisingly funny. I mean, some of them are still pretty obnoxious, but I laughed out loud a couple times. Quote of the Day goes to Ulysses: “Right off the bat, red flags: the morgue is just downstairs. It’s not like we’re driving to the morgue. The morgue is in the house.”

If you’re looking for a serious mystery . . . look not here. Seriously, this is not the place. But if you, like me, have a love for self-aware cheesiness and MUUUUURDER, well, Whodunnit? looks pretty fun.

I’ve probably mentioned this before, but when it comes to movies and television, I get spoiled for everything. It’s partially my own fault: I read entertainment sites and top ten lists for fun, but even without that, I really do have a knack for stumbling over spoilers in the most ridiculous and unlikely of places. To give you an idea, here’s a list of some of the things I’ve been spoiled for — some of which were completely understandable, and some of which were TOTALLY NOT OKAY: Battlestar Galactica, Dollhouse, Citizen Kane, The Prestige, Skyfall, The Others, Vertigo, The Brothers Bloom, Don’t Look Now, Sleepaway Camp, Frailty, etc.

But recently I realized that somehow, despite this, I’d gone my entire life without being spoiled for Twin Peaks. At the tender age of 27, I still had no idea who had killed Laura Palmer, despite the fact that the show had aired over twenty years ago. So when I saw that the entire series was up on Netflix Instant, I was like, “Mek, we’ve gotta watch that shit, and we gotta watch it now.”

So we did. And as a result, not only do I now know who killed Laura Palmer, I am completely and utterly obsessed with Twin Peaks.

DISCLAIMER: The non-spoiler section of this . . . review or retrospective or whatever . . . will likely be very brief. In fact, all I’m really going to do is talk a little about my extremely limited experiences with David Lynch’s work and then write an intentionally vague list of the crazy-hilarious things this show has going for it. Everything else will be spoiler-heavy and appropriately marked as such. Also, while I watched Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me – the prequel released in theaters a year after the show’s demise – I found it mostly worthless and will probably spend little to no time discussing it in this particular post. Which is sad because Kiefer Sutherland AND David Bowie? I desperately wanted that movie to be awesome.

It was not.

So, David Lynch.

Prior to watching Twin Peaks, I’d only seen two Lynch films: Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive. I don’t actually remember Mulholland Drive well enough to tell you how I felt about it, and my impressions of Blue Velvet were . . . mixed. Probably tipping more to negative than positive, being honest, although I might give it a second chance at some point. I’m interested in seeing more of Lynch’s work, actually, but I suspect that the greater majority of it wouldn’t actually appeal to me, due to what seems like some fundamentally different ideas in how to approach storytelling.

Surprisingly, however, this doesn’t seem to include Twin Peaks. Which isn’t to say I don’t have problems with the show — cause, wow, do I — but despite the many things I think don’t work, all the stuff that does work, all the ridiculous, beautiful, what-the-fuckery? It’s amazing.

Which leads us to my super-vague list of crazy-hilarious, none of which will mean a damn thing to you if you haven’t watched the show, but could maybe interest you enough to give it a try:

1. One of my favorite protagonists ever — Special Agent Dale Cooper
2. Donuts
3. Tibet
4. The best character you never actually meet
5. How Nadine lost her eye
6. Albert
7. The Log Lady
8. A hilariously over-the-top chess metaphor
9. A funeral scene that made me laugh so hard I cried
10. A pre X-Files David Duchovny
11. Dreams and visions
12. Invitation to Love
13. Pie
14. A damn fine cup of coffee, and . . .
15. A sudden bout of temporary insanity leading a character to believe that he is a general in the Confederate Army

Oh, Twin Peaks. You were batshit crazy, and I kind of adored you for it. There’s so much about you to discuss.

Let’s get started, shall we?

SPOILERS

SPOILERS

SPOILERS

SPOILERS

SPOILERS

First, before anything else, I feel the need to tell you that I will almost certainly call Twin Peaks “Twin Pines” at least once in this review. I’m just going to apologize for that ahead of time, since I doubt I’ll catch every instance of it, even when I proofread this entry twelve freaking times.

Now. I have so much I want to say about this show that I’m actually having a little trouble organizing my thoughts. Where, oh where, to start?

Well, let’s try beginning with this guy:

I didn’t know very much about Twin Peaks when Mek and I started watching the show. I knew a high schooler named Laura Palmer died, and I knew Kyle MacLachlan played an FBI agent investigating her murder. And from watching Psych’s homage episode “Dual Spires” — and also a bit of common sense — I knew that Twin Peaks was a very, very strange little town. Since MacLachlan was playing the outsider, I automatically assumed he would be the straight man for some reason.

However, nothing could’ve been further from the truth, which I’m entirely grateful for, because without Agent Dale Cooper and his endearing oddness, there is no show. Honestly, if I didn’t like Cooper as much as I do, I’d never have stuck around long enough to figure out who killed Laura. He’s not like other FBI agents, you see. He’s absurdly meticulous and amiably enthusiastic about just almost everything, which should make him hugely annoying. Instead, his enthusiasm is weirdly adorable. To get a taste of this, here’s our introduction to Agent Cooper:

First, that music? That weird kind of . . . I don’t know, comical jazz? That’s pretty prevalent throughout the series, and it always makes me smile. The other music, unfortunately, is more like the horrible theme song — which I purchased on iTunes just so I could torment my sister. I love you, Mek.

Now, the woman he’s talking to, Diane? Next to Cooper, Diane is totally my favorite character, which is quite a feat considering she never shows up. We never see her, never even hear her voice. No one else ever mentions her at all. In fact, the only proof that she’s even real — because I definitely assumed she was dead for a good long while — is a pair of earplugs Cooper asks her for and receives the very next episode.

A brief aside: my sister and I have been talking about having an Obscure Characters costume party for years. At the moment, I want to dress up in some horrible, early 90′s women’s black skirt suit with a dictaphone in one hand and a name tag that says Diane. That would be awesome.

But back to our protagonist: Agent Cooper does not solve things by traditional means, or rather, not only by traditional means. He also has crazy dreams and visions and uses Tibetan-influenced intuition, as seen here:

This happens pretty early in the series — before we get into full on Black Lodge/White Lodge insanity — so I was unprepared for the murder investigation to lead into a lecture about Tibet. This, I believe, was my first uncontrollable giggling fit. My second? When Leland Palmer (Ray Wise) wails as he leaps onto his daughter’s coffin as its being lowered into the ground . . . and then it continues to go up and down, up and down, while he’s still lying on top of it.

Twin Peaks is an intentionally funny melodrama, which is . . . rare, to say the least. But unfortunately, the melodrama works for it as well as against it, especially in the second season.

See, David Lynch and his co-creator, Mark Frost, envisioned Twin Peaks as a night soap — the mystery of Laura Palmer’s murder was only a MacGuffin, to draw audiences in. The real show was about the townspeople and their multiple relationship problems and secret affairs. (As well as bouts of, oh, superstrength and whatnot. Don’t worry. I’m getting there.) It’s not a terrible notion, exactly, but there are some serious problems with it:

1. I’ve read that David Lynch never wanted to reveal who killed Laura Palmer, that the network pressured him into doing so and that he blamed the show’s cancellation, at least in part, on this decision. And first off — I have absolutely no sympathy for the Moonlighting defense, whether it’s about a romantic relationship or the identity of a murderer: plots and relationships need to evolve, and if your show can’t do that, then it’s not a strong enough show, period. Second: I know you’re probably never supposed to side with the networks because they’re money-grubbing, soul-sucking demons or whatever, but on this one, I think they’re 100% right. You can use a murder mystery to draw in viewers, sure, but you don’t just get to refuse to solve that mystery entirely.

When I was up at Clarion West, Connie Willis talked a lot about how writers and readers have a sort of contract, that — to a degree — you know what kind of story you’re getting into when you begin a book or movie, and that the author/director is bound to fulfill certain promises by the end of it. Obviously, this doesn’t mean that story creators should be boring and predictable and never do anything that could go against expectation, but it does mean if you’re luring people in with a certain premise, you’re obligated to make good on that premise or else you’re just lying to them. Like when a movie trailer deliberately misleads you into thinking you’re going to watch one type of movie when they’re actually giving you something else entirely (read: Adventureland), not to avoid spoilers or anything like that, but just to draw in more money. If Twin Peaks HAD ended without ever solving the mystery of Laura Palmer’s murder, I would definitely have considered that breaking that contract, and I would have been pissed.

2. If you do use a mystery to draw viewers in, your audience is probably going to care primarily about said mystery and less about all that soapy subplot stuff unless you can make the soapy subplot stuff AMAZING. And as much as I like Twin Peaks, their subplots regularly fall short of amazing. Now in Season One — which was only eight episodes — I was curious about all the characters because I was still getting a handle on their relationships to one another and how they related to the murder. By Season Two, though, I knew enough about the case to discount half the cast as suspects, and I didn’t particularly care about most of them as actual characters. Worse, Season Two was a full-length, 22 episode season, which meant that the show rammed in a dozen more mini-dramas that felt pointless at best and insufferable at worst.

Here is a list of Season Two subplots that I didn’t give a shit about, ordered from least to most objectionable:

A. The true identity of Donna’s father, which might have been more entertaining if one, I cared even a little bit about Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle), and two, if it didn’t come out of absolutely nowhere.

B. The ongoing love saga between Donna and James and Harold and Maddy, mostly because their characters are all somewhere between blah and hugely annoying, and the actors themselves are somewhere between just okay and pretty terrible. Thankfully, two of these characters die; unfortunately, they aren’t really the two I was hoping for.

C. Nadine (Wendie Robie) believes that she’s a teenager and not a middle-aged married women and goes back to high school and tries out for cheerleading and makes it on the wrestling team and has a crush on Mike the quarterback who doesn’t like her back but eventually starts dating her anyway because the sex is awesome because she has ridiculous super-strength that someone claims is just adrenaline which is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my fucking life. None of this, by the way, has anything at ALL to do with Cooper’s investigation into Laura’s murder and is only bearable because Wendie Robie throws herself entirely into the role.

D. John Justice Wheeler (Billy Zane) and his sudden, bland, and completely ill-conceived relationship with Audrey (Sherilyn Fenn).

Now, in fairness to the creators, there was a lot of backstage drama that created this whole storyline in the first place: Audrey was originally Cooper’s love interest, but Kyle MacLachlan refused to participate in the show if the writers continued to develop that relationship, either because Audrey was a high school student and it would Be Wrong, or because Lara Flynn Boyle, MacLachlan’s girlfriend at the time, didn’t like Sherilyn Fenn and demanded it. Honestly, I think MacLachlan was in the wrong no matter what his motivation was because multiple problems arose from this hasty rewrite, but maybe none so bad as stranding Audrey with absolutely nothing to do in the second season, other than occasionally helping out her total asshat of a father and loving some boring dude who comes out of nowhere and leaves just as abruptly.

E. Shelley and Bobby’s plans to steal Catatonic Leo’s insurance money. Mind you, I never actually feel sorry for Catatonic Leo because Not-Catatonic Leo was awful, but I can only spend so long watching him stare vacantly into space while his stupid wife and her even dumber boyfriend dance around before wanting to blow my brains out. This story finally ended after half a season, only to have No-Longer-Catatonic-But-Still-Clearly-Brain-Damaged Leo stumble into Windom Earle’s Cabin of Feverish and Devious Plotting, which was at least slightly more interesting, if also utterly unnecessary.

F. As a result of Maddie’s death, James leaves town and is eventually framed for murder in the most obvious setup ever. This whole plot arc has no significance of any kind to any character other than James — who, let’s face it, is kind of the weakest link in the whole show — and could easily be excised without doing any damage. In fact, this subplot is so insignificant that it doesn’t even really affect James: as soon as he’s found innocent, he continues doing exactly what he’d planned to do before, namely, taking off and never coming back.

G. The love triangle between Lucy, Andy, and Dick — and the baby daddy trauma that arises from it. These characters are much more insignificant to the plot than Donna, James, and Maddy, AND are also considerably dumber, which is kind of a feat in and of itself. Also, this love triangle leads to the worst of the worst:

H. Little Nicky, an orphaned boy that Andy and Dick wrongly believe is a demonic child who murdered his parents.

So, yes. There is a lot of stuff I don’t like, and if I were remaking this TV show, there’s a lot I would change. But there’s also so much that I do love, that feels like nothing else on television today and certainly not back in 1990-1991. I mean, some of the visuals are just spectacular. I love how things are framed — there is definitely art in this show, and art that I can appreciate, even.

Also: I absolutely adore the tone of Twin Peaks. I think it’s utterly hilarious, sometimes unintentionally, sure, but often very intentionally. Another “I-can’t-stop-laughing” moment? When Albert (Miguel Ferrer), a man with no people skills or any tolerance for stupidity, barely tries to cover up his laughter during Big Ed’s tragic monologue.

Also: I really like Cooper’s developing relationship with Audrey — before it abruptly ends, of course — because the writers pleasantly surprised me a few times with how they were handling it. It didn’t go the direction I was expecting at all. (Also, the actors had much better chemistry than Sherilyn Fenn and Billy Zane did, or Kyle MacLachlan and Heather Graham did.)

Also: while I’m normally kind of a hard sell on surrealism and what-the-fuckery, I was totally into all of the craziness in this show: I loved all of Cooper’s dreams and bizarre visions and metaphysical investigation techniques. I loved the Giant (Mr. Homn!) and the Man From Another Place (that guy from Carnivale!) and the dreams of the waiting room where people – including Laura — only speak backwards. I found the lore of the Black Lodge and the White Lodge intriguing, even when I didn’t understand half of what was happening. I was caught up in the mystery of BOB, the grungy, dance-happy, killer spirit, who possesses Leland Palmer and forces him to kill his only child. This show had a secret small-town league against evil called the Bookhouse Boys AND it hinted at aliens, and I loved it.

Also: despite the fact that the chess metaphor between good and evil is heavily overused in Hollywood, I still like how they did it in Twin Peaks, at least before they dropped it altogether. First, Windom Earle promises to kill somebody for every piece he captures, so Cooper — who’s surprisingly not great at chess — enlists help from Pete to play a stalemate game. I like that Cooper’s object isn’t to win, just to stalemate. Then when Earle punishes Cooper for cheating, he does it in the absolutely hammiest way possible: he kills Ted Raimi and shoves his body in a giant pawn piece sculpture. It’s absurd. It’s magically absurd.

Also: this show is basically coffee and pie porn.

Also: I like David Duchovny’s portrayal of Denise Bryson. Okay, mostly. The limp wrist thing drives me kind of crazy, and I think they go back and forth a little on cross-dresser versus transgender, but for 1990, it seems pretty damn good, and I like Duchovny’s sass and competence. Honestly, Duchovny makes a much better looking woman that I ever would have given him credit for. Certainly better, anyway, than Kurt Russell in Tango & Cash.

So, yeah. Despite my multiple problems with it, I’m sad this show ended after only two seasons because I definitely would have kept watching had it continued. I would have HAD to, really, to deal with all the multiple cliffhangers at the series finale: first, Josie (Joan Chen) mysteriously died a few episodes before, and her body is mysteriously light because her soul might have . . . ended up in a hotel drawer? I don’t know. Then we never figure out if Donna’s dad accidentally killed Donna’s birth dad. Audrey, too, might have been killed in a bank explosion, along with Pete and the previously-thought-deceased Andrew Packard.

Finally, the biggest cliffhanger of them all: Cooper goes into the Black Lodge to rescue Love Interest and Once-A-Nun Annie (Heather Graham) from his evil ex-partner, Windom Earle. Earle is killed or destroyed or something, and Cooper gets stuck in the Lodge, while Cooper’s evil doppleganger escapes with Annie. (Or BOB’s spirit in Cooper’s body. It’s . . . complicated.) Point being, this is last scene of the show.

This is why cancellation is a cruel, cruel thing.

QUOTES:

Cooper: “By way of explaining what we’re about to do, I am first going to tell you a little bit about the country called Tibet.”

Cooper: “Diane. I’m holding in my hand a box of small chocolate bunnies.”

Cooper: “Who’s the lady with the log?”
Truman: “We call her the Log Lady.”

Albert: “How do you feel?”
Cooper: “Me?”
Albert: “I believe it’s customary to ask after the health of someone who’s been plugged three times.”
Cooper: “Thanks for asking.”
Albert: “Don’t get sentimental.”
Cooper: “Who shot me, Albert?”
Albert: “My men are interrogating the hotel guests, the usual bumper crop of rural know-nothings and drunken fly-fisherman. Nothing so far, although the world’s most decrepit room service waiter remembers nothing out of the ordinary about the night in question. No surprise there: Señor Drool Cup has, shall we say, a mind that wanders.”

Cooper: “You know this is — excuse me — a damn fine cup of coffee.”

Cooper: “Bacon, super crispy. Almost burned. Cremated.”

Cooper: “Following a dream I had three years ago, I have become deeply motivated by the plight of the Tibetan people, and have been filled with a desire to help them. I also awoke from the same dream realizing I had subconsciously gained knowledge of a deductive technique, involving mind-body coordination operating hand-in-hand with the deepest level of intuition.”

Log Lady: “One day, my log will have something to say about this. My log saw something that night.”

Dr. Hayward: “Have you no compassion?”
Albert: “Oh, I’ve got compassion running out of my nose, pal! I’m the Sultan of Sentiment. Dr. Hayward, I have travelled thousands of miles and apparently several centuries to this forgotten sinkhole in order to perform a series of tests. Now, I do not ask that you understand these tests. I’m not a cruel man. I just ask you to get the hell out of my way, so that I can finish my work!”

Cooper: “He didn’t mean anything.”
Albert: “He hit me!”
Cooper: “Well, I’m sure he meant to do that.”

Hawk: “One woman can make you fly like an eagle. Another can give you the strength of a lion, but only one in the cycle of life can fill your heart with wonder and the wisdom that you have known a singular joy. I wrote that for my girlfriend.”

Cooper: “All things considered, being shot is not as bad as I always thought it might be, as long as you can keep the fear from your mind. But I guess you can say that about almost anything in life. It’s not so bad as long as you can keep the fear from your mind.”

Cooper: “Laura Palmer is dead. Jacques Renault is dead. Ronette Pulaski and Leo Johnson are in comas. Waldo the Bird is dead.”

Truman: “Jelly donuts?”
Cooper: “Harry, that goes without saying.”

Cooper: “You’re making a joke.”
Albert: “I like to think of myself as one of the happy generations.”

Albert: “You listen to me. While I will admit to a certain cynicism, the fact is that I am a naysayer and a hatchet-man in the fight against violence. I pride myself in taking a punch and will gladly take one another because I choose to live my life in the company of Gandhi and King. My concerns are global. I reject absolutely: revenge, aggression, retaliation. The foundation of such a method . . . is love. I love you, Sheriff Truman.”

Harold Smith: “There are things you can’t get anywhere, but we dream they can be found in other people.”

Audrey: “What happened? Did she die or something?”
Cooper: “As a matter of fact, she did. Wanna know how? She was a material witness to a federal crime. We were supposed to protect her, 24 hours a day, my partner and I. Windom Earle was his name. Taught me everything I know about being a special agent. And when the attempt on her life was finally made, I wasn’t ready . . . because I loved her. She died in my arms. I was badly injured, and my partner lost his mind. Need to hear any more?”

Albert: “Replacing the quiet elegance of the dark suit and tie with the casual indifference of these muted earth tones is a form of fashion suicide, but call me crazy — on you, it works.”

Bob/Cooper: “How’s Annie? How’s Annie? How’s Annie?”

CONCLUSIONS:

The very definition of “cult show”. And I am now, officially, a cultist.

MVP:

Kyle MacLachlan, no doubt. He carries the show. But I like Piper Laurie and Sherilyn Fenn a lot too.

TENTATIVE GRADE:

Um. B+? I can’t really comprehensively grade this. I wanted to change so, so many things, but at the same time, this show completely ate up my life for the few weeks I was marathoning it between work and writing and eating junk food. I give up.

MORALS:

If you see a dancing man, kill him, because he is probably possessed by BOB.
Psychiatrists who wear glasses with two different colored lenses are not to be trusted.
Hawk is the only competent person in the whole Twin Peaks police department.
Don’t tell anyone where you keep the evidence of fraud.
Small towns are beautiful but also fucking crazy.

. . . are about as predictable as you’d expect them to be. You’d think I’d get used to this after so many years, but hope breaks me every time.

I’m far too bored to list each and every nominee, but if you’re interested in that kind of thing, the complete breakdown is here. Otherwise, here are a few, mostly disappointed thoughts:

1. I love Peter Dinklage on Game of Thrones; really, I do. Tyrion is pretty much everybody’s favorite character, and Dinklage does a magnificent job with the role. That being said, he had considerably less to do this season, and I wish Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime) had been nominated instead. Come on, you guys! This scene!

This scene — probably NSFW due to Naked Male Butt — is so good.

2. On a similar note, Michelle Fairley also failed to get a nomination for her work as Catelyn Stark. Really, Emmy Decider People? Really? Did you see “The Rains of Castamere?”

3. Justified continues to be ignored by everyone everywhere. You’d think I’d get used to that, too, but I never do.

4. I haven’t watched Orphan Black yet, and even I’m surprised that Tatiana Maslany wasn’t nominated for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama. Well. I suppose only a little surprised – Orphan Black is science-fiction, after all, and I’m pretty sure there’s some bylaw that states Emmy nods can only go to speculative shows that are on HBO. See the casts and creative teams of Fringe, Battlestar Galactica, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Farscape, etc. for other various snubs.

5. There was only one pleasant surprise on the entire list, and that was Kerry Washington’s nomination for Scandal. I’m glad for her — the show is a soap, but it’s an excellent soap, and she’s a great lead spearheading a fantastic cast. Still one pleasant surprise is not exactly what I’d call a win.

I will be watching The Emmys this year. I always do, but I suspect the fashion will be vastly more entertaining than the actual ceremony itself.

I have spent most of this summer doing what God intended people to do on sunny days: staying inside my air-conditioned apartment and catching up on television shows. The latest such show?

Orphan Black had a pretty spectacular first season. I have a couple of nitpicks, per always, and I’m a little concerned about where a few things are going, but overall, I’m pretty impressed. Here a few thoughts:

1. I have always been attracted to clone stories, yet I find so many of them frustrating or unfulfilling. Clones are often used as one-note villains or sacrificial redshirts — I longed to see an interesting story that deals with the individuality of each clone. Orphan Black is that show. Orphan Black does clones right.

2. And it wouldn’t be possible without Tatiana Maslany, who TOTALLY deserved an Emmy nod for her performance — for her multiple performances. Honest to God, I sometimes forget I’m watching the same actress.

3. Tatiana Maslany is not English. I suppose there are lots of people who knew that — especially people actually from England — but I was surprised to find out that the only UK actor in this BBC show is Maria Doyle Kennedy, who plays Mrs. S. (She was also Mrs. Bates on Downton Abbey. How we loathed you, Mrs. Bates!)

4. Felix is kind of the best. I hope Felix has more of his own storyline in second season.

5. I started out kind of loving Cosima and ended up being frustrated with her. I started out kind of hating Alison and ended up totally loving her. Glue gun FTW!

6. But nobody beats Helena. When I go to Dragon Con next year, Helena is at the top of my Ongoing Cosplay List.

Now for a few . . .

SPOILERS

SPOILERS

SPOILERS

SPOILERS

SPOILERS

7. Seriously, Cosima’s storyline sort of drove me nuts. I ended up being okay with it, by the end, but I had a hard time figuring out her motivations. It seemed like she was being uncharacteristically and unforgivably stupid.

8. Also, she’s coughing up blood now, which is always a bad sign. Does she have something similar to Katja’s barely-mentioned respiratory illness, or does she have the consumption? (Ooh, if she does have the respiratory illness — maybe she and Katja were twins too! Maybe all of the clones have twins, not just Sarah and Helena. Okay, maybe not, but it’s an idea.)

9. My other problem — both smaller and weirdly more serious — is the presumed death of Aynsley. I say presumed because, even though I’m pretty sure she’s dead, I desperately hope she isn’t. Cause . . . I love some of the crazy/silly stuff that happens with Alison, like seriously, the glue gun torture was AMAZING . . . but for Aynsley to actually die because her scarf or whatever got caught in the garbage disposal, choking her . . . that’s actually too cartoonish for me, far too convenient. I don’t mind that Alison allowed Ainsley to die while still believing she was the monitor, but I needed it to happen some other way, almost any other way, really.

10. It’s okay so far, but I have my concerns about Kira the Wonder Kid. I’m curious to see how that storyline progresses. Also about Kira: my hand actually went to my mouth when she got hit by the car. I was like, Shit! They just ran that kid DOWN.

11. I’m pretty excited by how quickly this series moved over the first season. I hesitated watching it when it first aired on BBC America because a clone/identical twin pretending to be another clone/identical twin for a whole show is not actually my idea of a good time. So, I was happy when Sarah just quit working for the police, and even happier when they figured out who she was (if not exactly what she was). Plot advancement! Yes!

12. Oh, Helena. It was time for you to go — I know — but how I will miss you and your craziness.

TENTATIVE GRADE:

A-

CONCLUSIONS:

Spring 2014 isn’t coming fast enough.

I watch a LOT of television. Sadly, most of it goes unnoticed by the Emmys — some of it justifiably (The Vampire Diaries, American Ninja Warrior), some of it less so (Justified, Orphan Black, Community — er, past seasons, anyway). Since most of my TV favorites went unrecognized AGAIN, I figured I’d be totally bored by the Emmy ceremony this year.

Good Lord, was I wrong.

1. Let’s talk upsets, shall we? We’ve got Merritt Weaver winning Best Supporting Actress – Comedy for Nurse Jackie. We’ve got Tony Hale winning Best Supporting Actor – Comedy for Veep. We’ve got Jeff Daniels taking Best Actor – Drama for The Newsroom. And then The Amazing Race and The Daily Show both LOST in their respective categories.

1A. I don’t know very much about Nurse Jackie. I don’t know anyone who actually watches it, and I tend to forget it exists at all until the Emmys roll around. That being said, Merritt Weaver easily had the best speech of the night: “Thank you so much! Um, thank you so much . . . I gotta go, bye.”

1B. Likewise, I’ve never actually seen Veep. (This is something of a running theme, as you’ll see.) But after years and years of Modern Family domination, I’m usually happy when anyone else wins. Which I feel slightly bad about because I actually like Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Ed O’Neil. Still. The comedy revolution begins tonight!

1C. I figured this was probably going to be Bryan Cranston’s year, but if he didn’t win, it would probably go to Damien Lewis. And I figured Jon Hamm actually had an outside chance, since we’d already seen a few surprises thus far. It did not even occur to me that Jeff Daniels might take this. Or anybody else, apparently. You weren’t kidding, NPH — I don’t think anyone won the workplace Emmy poll.

1D. In my 2012 Emmy Commentary, I mentioned that if The Amazing Race won one more year in a row, it would be MORTAL KOMBAT. Well, luckily, EarthRealm is now safe, all thanks to . . . The Voice? Seriously? I mean, I guess I should actually watch it before I knock it and all, but . . . really, The Voice?

1E. I watch The Daily Show on a regular basis, but even I was happy to see The Colbert Report take this one. Good for you, Stephen Colbert! (And the eighty thousand writers, whose names I do not know.)

2. Sadly, Modern Family wasn’t entirely shut out — they still won Best Comedy. Oh well, I guess our hearts couldn’t take that many upsets.

3. Due to some recording issues, I missed a little of the beginning and also a little of the ending. I didn’t much mind. I like Neil Patrick Harris, and I’ve definitely seen worse hosts, but the opening monologue I did see . . . well, it was okay, but I wouldn’t call it great, either. Kevin Spacey, though. Totally awesome. Maybe I should check out House of Cards.

4. I appear to be in the minority on this, but I actually liked the choreography section. Maybe because I didn’t watch So You Think You Can Dance this season and just missed it more than I realized . . . I thought the TV show interpretations were fun. I especially liked American Horror Story: Asylum (almost certainly done by Sonya Tayeh) which is funny because I don’t particularly like American Horror Story.

Of course, this is the rare category where I’m actually familiar with the work of, like, four different contestants . . . and naturally the guy from Dancing with the Stars wins. Le sigh.

5. The individual In Memoriam tributes were actually kind of nice . . . but I couldn’t help but feel a little bad for the people who weren’t considered worthy enough to have their own special tribute and were thus relegated to the Generic Dead Reel. How do you make those decisions, anyway? I don’t know if that’s a committee I’d especially want to sit on.

6. It seems like poor Jon Hamm is destined to never win an Emmy, despite the fact that everybody loves him. I wonder if he’s growing that grizzly beard out of grief. Angst Beard, people. It’s a real thing.

7. Finally, fashion. There were a few dresses I really liked and many, many more that I absolutely hated. I’d probably give best dressed to Sofia Vergara, despite that giant fucking ring on her finger. (Giant rings were apparently the red carpet trend this year. I hated each and every one of them.) Honorable mentions would go to Julianna Marguiles, Zooey Deschanel, Christina Hendricks, Carrie Preston, and Kaley Cuoco.

Worst dressed, though? Good God, to pick just one . . . I think I might have to go with Zosia Mamet’s atrocious dress. It has, like, a weird tie-dye/watercolor bottom with a netting bib on top and a black sleep mask across her boobs. It is HORRIBLE. (And, apparently, custom-made just for her. Yeesh.) Other dishonorable mentions: Aubrey Plaza, Lena Dunham, Lena Heady, Juliane Hough, Connie Britton, Mayim Bialik, Laura Dern, and Amanda Peet.

Well, that’s it for this year’s Emmys. Maybe next year they’ll actually nominate Tatiana Maslany?

Nah.

When I first heard about Arrow last year, I . . . wasn’t particularly optimistic. But since then, I’ve read some pretty good things about the show, so Mek and I spent last week marathoning the first season.

I definitely have my nitpicks — and more than nitpicks, really, like there are actual problems — but I also found the show a lot of fun and highly addictive, and I’m looking forward to watching the next season in a couple of weeks.

DISCLAIMER:

There are mild spoilers in here — mostly love interest stuff, plus one or two things about various DC characters who pop up. I’ll try to keep that to a minimum — it shouldn’t be too hard, considering the vast majority of what I know about Green Arrow comes from Justice League: Unlimited episodes and Wikipedia entries. I will detail a couple of disastrous dates, though, because I have serious things to vent about.

Also, this review — and disclaimer — turned out considerably longer than I anticipated. Whoops.

SUMMARY:

Oliver Queen, billionaire playboy, is shipwrecked on an island for five years. When he finally gets back home, he begins secretly working as a vigilante superhero to fix his father’s mistakes and save his city from the corrupt people who run it.

NOTES:

1. You can say this show is about superheroes or justice or class warfare or whatever you want. I know the truth. This show is about two and only two things: Stephen Amell’s abs and Stephen Amell’s chest.

I mean, damn. If you’ve got an exercise kink, good God, watch this show. (Or, alternatively, I suppose you could just watch all the workout and training scenes, although you’re going to get into spoilers the further you go.)

2. In all honesty, though, Stephen Amell is a really good lead. His Green Arrow is considerably more tortured and broody than I think the hero normally is, but it works on him, especially with the (ongoing) origin story the show has created for him. Also, we do actually get to see quite a bit of wisecracking — it’s just that most of Oliver’s snarky witticisms comes via flashbacks.

Of which there are, shall we say, more than a few.

3. After six seasons of LOST, I kind of had flashback fatigue. (Honestly, I had flashback fatigue after the very first season of LOST.) But much to my shock, I honestly enjoy watching a lot of the island flashbacks in this show, probably because they actually feel plot relevant most of the time. (Instead of just being, you know, thematic.)

I can’t talk much about the flashbacks without getting into Spoilers, but they do tell their own, ongoing story, and it’s mostly as much fun as the story that’s happening in present time. Although watching Amell in his Flashback Hair is really pretty painful. (And the fact that Amell basically says as much in the Gag Reel kind of makes me love him.)

4. Of course, it’s not all Stephen Amell and Stephen Amell’s upper body. Arrow has a pretty decent supporting cast. My favorites:

John Diggle

Diggle (David Ramsey) is one of the only original characters in the whole cast, and he’s got kind of a cool, laid back way about him that contrasts nicely with Oliver’s angsty intensity. Their interactions can, on occasion, get a bit repetitive — I’m doing this/You shouldn’t that/Well, I’m doing it — but for the most part I enjoy watching the two actors work off each other.

The only thing I don’t like about Diggle is his half-assed romantic storyline that hopefully gets cut entirely from second season . . . or at least seriously revamped. (We’ll be revisiting female characters in a later note, but for now, let me just say that it’s so incredibly rare for me to actually like any character named Carly. At least they always have the decency to spell their name in a clearly inferior manner, thus fitting their annoying personalities.)

Felicity Smoak

I kind of love Felicity. There are some issues with her character — for instance, her “I’m a Geek, so I Oh-So-Adorably Babble and Say Embarrassing Things” is often overplayed. And of course there’s no hiding the fact that she’s an extremely attractive woman, not that anyone on screen will seem to notice this until she puts on a dress and takes off her glasses because — as She’s All That taught us — women cannot be legitimately sexy until they put in a pair of contacts. (I guess I should consider myself lucky she didn’t have to chop off her hair or walk down a long staircase.)

Regardless, Emily Bett Rickards is pretty adorable and she brings a great sort of energy to the show. She is, thus far, the only main female character on Arrow that I haven’t wanted to slap across the face. She’s kind of awesome at various moments during the first season, and she and Stephen Amell have better chemistry than Amell and his actual love interest, Katie Cassidy, do. (I don’t always agree with people on sexual chemistry, so I was hugely happy to see that writers on Archive of Our Own — a fanfiction site — agree with me. Slash pairings dominate in almost every fandom I’ve ever read, so if the majority of fans actually ship a heterosexual pairing . . . my God, you know there’s gotta be something to it.)

Awesomely, Rickards is being promoted to a season regular this year. I highly approve of this turn of events.

Moira Queen

Moira Queen (Susanna Thompson) actually makes for a really interesting maternal character. Family, particularly her children, are hugely important to her — but she is willing do to some pretty dark stuff you don’t always get to see moms do. (Not that there aren’t awesome TV moms. It’s just that some of them are so immensely boring — like Claire on LOST. [I keep going back to LOST today. It must be the mystery islands.] When Claire was pregnant, she was fun. But the second she actually gave birth? Ugh. All she did was scream about her baaaay-beeeee eight bazillion times.)

Thompson was a great casting choice. She does this great mix of maternal warmth, cutthroat business executive, and regal elegance that works really well.

5. Still, for all that I generally love Moira Queen, there was one scene in particular where I wanted to beat her with my bare hands. I often felt the same way about Thea Queen, Oliver’s sister, and Laurel Lance, Oliver’s ex-girlfriend, because — unfortunately — these women are often written as hormonal bitches with no sense of perspective. Oh, and that’s just the main cast. For additional rage, we can also look at recurring characters like Helena Bertinelli and the aforementioned Carly Diggle.

I should be fair here: I think (most of) these characters and their total irrationality improve a lot over the second half of the season. But man, in those first few episodes? I was kind of ready to kill, partially because their righteous indignation often seemed inconsistent with what their characters were like the episode or even the scene before. I’m not saying people don’t get moody. Hell, I get moody. My . . . emotional instability, shall we call it? Well, it’s not one of my better traits. But even I don’t flip-flop like these women — and over the most unreasonable shit too,

Take Moira, for instance — who I actually like — and the way she reacts to Oliver’s reluctance to start running his father’s company one week after he’s back from being shipwrecked. When he first turns a leadership position down, she feels the need to remind him that he’s Robert Queen’s son. (He says he doesn’t need to be reminded. She says, “Obviously, you do.” Wow.)

Then she continues to say that his irresponsibility was “somewhat charming” five years ago, but now it’s time to grow up. Seriously? SERIOUSLY? I know Oliver Queen was quite a tool before he left, but the fact that he doesn’t want to run his dad’s company a week after being rescued from a supposedly deserted island where he was clearly tortured and otherwise traumatized for FIVE YEARS? Yeah, irresponsible is not the word that springs to mind.

And then there’s Thea (Willa Holland).

(It’s crazy how much she looks like Alison Brie, right? Everyone on the show looks like someone else to me. Stephen Amell has a little young Chris O’Donnell going on. Emily Bett Rickards reminds me of Alona Tal. Susanna Thompson looks a little like an older version of Ally Walker from The Profiler. It’s weird.)

Thea’s got cause for emotional damage; I’m not saying she doesn’t. But the way she freaks out at her brother because he won’t immediately open up about all the time he spent away is insane. And I don’t want to hear that, oh, she’s a teenager, or oh, she just wants her brother back the way he was — there are ways to write those things without turning Thea into a she-demon from Hell.

Laurel, too, is often incredibly frustrating.

I actually like Katie Cassidy a lot, and I think she has more talent than this role, so far, is allowing her to show. But Laurel . . . well, sometimes, she has moments of awesome, and most times, she is Rachel Dawes from Batman Beyond. She really is — she’s a bitchy hardworking lawyer representing THE PEOPLE, not afraid of big time mobsters or corrupt businessmen. You know, she’s the voice of justice, of conscience — which, often, Diggle is too, actually. But men can just talk about justice, while women, apparently, have to whine about it and then stomp offstage to pout somewhere.

And speaking of pouting . . .

I debated writing about Helena for spoiler-reasons, but they introduce her as a vigilante almost immediately so . . . to hell with it. Helena is The Huntress — not that anyone calls her that, just like no one calls Green Arrow “Green Arrow”. (It’s mostly “the vigilante” or sometimes “the hood.”) She’s also not terribly convincing as a bloodthirsty badass. This is partially, if not mostly, due to acting . . . but there is a HUGE writing thing that comes up when she goes on a double date with Oliver. Basically, she ends up sitting at a table with Laurel, which is, of course, hugely awkward and probably why Oliver didn’t want to do it in the first place. Who’s the one who pushed for it? Helena.

When it shockingly doesn’t go well, Helena blames Oliver for forcing them all together and then decides that Oliver’s supposed lack of sensitivity in these matters means one, he doesn’t really care about her, and two, she has to go back to killing bad guys outright. Because that’s how logic works. If I can’t date you, then I’m going to start murdering people again! That’ll show you!

And finally, let’s not forget Carly. Oh, Carly. See, she used to be married to Diggle’s now-dead brother, and sure, maybe accidentally bringing him up on their date wasn’t his smoothest move, but come ON. I think any reasonable person might realize why the subject would come up. And for Godsake, it’s not like he spends the whole time talking about Dead Andy. Diggle mentions his brother’s name one time and almost immediately realizes that it’s a little awkward. To which Carly’s basically all, “Look, if you’re not SERIOUS about me, let’s not do this because my heart’s been broken too much already, okay?”

I didn’t throw things at my television screen, but only because my mama raised me to be financially responsible — and while feminist outrage combined with props is fun, a broken television screen is decidedly not.

6. Again, I do feel like the female characters on this show have improved over time, and I have hope they will continue to improve. Unfortunately, writing is not really one of this show’s core strengths, mostly because it’s often just so damn obvious.

For example — look, it’s hard to tell a serialized superhero story without at least once getting into the revenge vs justice argument. And that’s fine — honestly, it is — but you have to understand that this argument has been had many a time by many other characters. As such, the argument in your show needs to be more complex than this:

“This is revenge! Revenge, I say!”
“No, this is justice!”
“Revenge!”
“Justice!”
“REVENGE!”
“JUSTICE!”

And so on and so forth.

I generally like the ideas and the stories that Arrow presents — I just find a lot of the actual dialogue clunky as hell. (This is a problem I’ve had with other shows, most notably The Walking Dead.) But who knows — maybe this, too, will improve. You want to know the best improvement this show has made over the course of the first season? Getting rid of that terrible voiceover.

As we all know, VO’s are hard to do convincingly — especially when the script isn’t a core strength — and Stephen Amell just wasn’t pulling it at all. Although nothing beats how terrible the Vampire Diaries VO’s were. (Is that like a CW thing? We’ll start a show with a VO and only realize five episodes in that it was a horrible idea?)

7. To the show’s credit, I was surprised by a number of things that happened in this show — not that I can talk about any of them without creating a Spoiler Section, which I don’t really feel like doing. But certain things happened much faster than I was anticipating, and the show didn’t end up doing something I was predicting from the first episode. (Seriously, I can’t even describe how glad I am that this thing didn’t happen because Jesus. I was bored by that potential plot twist during the pilot.)

Somewhat related to that: the season finale was really pretty good. Things happened! There were emotional moments! I’m pretty excited to see all the fallout in the second season premiere.

8. I mentioned this in the disclaimer, but this show has a ton of minor DC characters and villains, not to mention nods to other heroes and even cities in the DC universe. (For instance, Coast City and Bludhaven come up a couple of times. I didn’t know Coast City offhand — turns out, it’s Green Lantern’s hometown — but Bludhaven, I knew. Thank you, Nightwing fanfiction.)

It looks like they’l be expanding the DC universe even more in season two — with a possible spin-off series for the Flash, assuming the episode does well. I know it won’t ever happen in a million years, but I can’t help but kind of hope Nightwing would pop up. (And then be awesome because if I got a really annoying live-action Nightwing, I might have to break that television after all. Also, I’m . . . curious to see how they’ll portray the Flash because, thus far, the show hasn’t had any actual powers. I don’t know if you can really just make Flash a track star, you know?)

Here’s a curious adaptation change: in the comics, Green Arrow’s hometown is Star City. In the show, it’s Starling City. I . . . can’t really come up with a good explanation for that, at present.

9. Of course, you don’t have to watch this show for nods to the graphic novels. (Or even for the 20% of Oliver’s body covered in scars . . . which basically his chest, stomach, and back.) You can also watch it for the bizarre hilarity that comes whenever a character asks the IT department for something the IT department has nothing to do with.

Like, when I am forced to call IT at work — and trust me, I desperately try not to, despite the fact that I’m pretty much lost if I can’t just make the computer work by rebooting it — I don’t get to ask someone to help me do any kind of spectral analysis on mysterious substances. So far as I know, no one at IT can help me analyze drug compounds — and I’m pretty sure they’d call the cops if I asked them to, no matter what terrible cover story I tried to spin.

At the very least, the Compliance Hotline would totally be getting a call.

10. Finally — and I know you have to take superhero’s outfits with a grain of salt — doesn’t that hood of Green Arrow’s seriously get in the way of his peripheral vision?

I have to push my hood back when I cross a street in the rain, much less when twenty hired goons are trying to kill me. And as much as I like the makeup mask . . . you know . . . it just doesn’t appear to be very effective.

I know Green Arrow’s disguise is a bazillion times better than Superman’s, but I’m just throwing this out there: he could probably do a little better.

QUOTES:

(I Kept Major Spoilers Out, But Be Warned: There Are Some Minor Revelations, Mostly Concerning Who Finds Out Arrow’s Secret Identity.)

Tommy: “Can I talk to you about something?”
Oliver: “Tommy, every time you want to talk to me about something and that something is Laurel, you look like you’re about to tell me you have a terminal disease.”

Oliver: “Roy, we haven’t met. I’m Thea’s disapproving older brother.”

Oliver: “You want me to kill her?”
Diggle: “I think you would have a long time ago if she looked like me, not the T-Mobile Girl.”

Oliver (about a broken laptop): “I was at my coffee shop surfing the web, and I spilled a latte on it.”
Felicity: “Really?”
Oliver: “Yeah.”
Felicity: “Cause these look like bullet holes.”

Felicity: “Look, I don’t want to get in the middle of some Shakespearian family drama thing.”
Oliver: “What?”
Felicity: “Mr. Steele marrying your mom . . . Claudius, Gertrude . . . Hamlet . . .”
Oliver: “I didn’t study Shakespeare at any of the four schools I dropped out of.”

Oliver: “What sort of business has a Lost & Found that’s just filled with women’s underwear?”
Tommy: “Best business ever.”

Diggle: “Please don’t tell me you’re going where I think you’re going.”
Oliver: “Diggle, why do you even ask?”

Oliver: “Where’s Diggle?”
Felicity: “I asked him to leave me alone . . . in my loud voice.”

Somebody: “Thousands of innocent people will be dead, and you’ll feel nothing.”
Somebody Else: “That’s not true. I’ll feel a sense of accomplishment.”

Diggle: “The person of color has successfully purchased your drugs.”

(Oliver’s trying to light a fire by rubbing two sticks together.)
Somebody: “Obviously, you were never a Boy Scout.”
Oliver: “Yeah? What tipped you off?”
Somebody: “You’d better hurry. The wolves come out at night.”
Oliver: “There are wolves here? Right, of course there are, because what would the worst place on Earth be without wolves?”
Somebody: “The only thing that’ll keep them out is fire.”
Oliver: “Well, you know, you’re welcome to help.”
(Somebody pulls out a lighter and starts a fire.)
Oliver: “Seriously? I’ve been working on this for two hours!”
Somebody: “I know. I was watching you. Thanks for the entertainment.”

Oliver: “That’s not how I typically get my information.”
Felicity: “How do you typically get it?”
Oliver: “I find the person, and then I put the fear of God in them until they talk. But we can try it your way.”

Oliver: “I’m trapped on an island, and my only friend is named Wilson.”

Felicity: “It’s just — you went over there to get all, ‘Grrr. Stop being bad, or I’ll arrow you.’ And now you want to rescue him?”
Oliver: “I don’t like the idea that somebody dangerous is out there . . . somebody else. Because, typically, they don’t show my level of restraint.”

Felicity: “My only encounter with drugs was with a pot brownie my freshman year. By mistake! Which could have been fun, except I’m allergic to nuts.”

Felicity: “I really don’t see myself fitting in at Guantanamo Bay.”
Oliver: “Don’t worry, Felicity. They don’t send blondes there.”
Felicity: “I dye it, actually.”
(long pause)
Felicity: “I keep your secrets.”

Oliver: “Felicity, you’re remarkable.”
Felicity: “Thank you for remarking on it.”

CONCLUSIONS:

Enjoyable and decently plotted — particularly considering the sheer number of flashbacks — but weak writing, especially in regards to female characters, is keeping this show from being great. And Colin Salmon has the best voice ever — cause, sure, that counts as a conclusion.

MVP:

Stephen Amell’s abs. Okay, fine. The rest of Stephen Amell, too.

TENTATIVE GRADE:

B

MORALS:

Killing is wrong, except when it’s not.

Revenge is wrong, except when it’s not.

Women are too emotional to be rational, especially when it comes to love.

The IT department can do anything.

Once upon a time, it seemed like every TV show began in the same calendar week. Well, no longer. As such, I’ve decided to break up my pilots/premieres coverage month by month. Shows like The Walking Dead (October) and Almost Human (fucking NOVEMBER) will just have to wait.

Sleepy Hollow

I watched a trailer for Sleepy Hollow earlier this year and laughed my ass off. The whole premise was so stupidly ridiculous. I figured, I’d have to watch the pilot and mock the holy hell out of it. But then a strange thing happened – I started reading a ton of positive early reviews. Everyone seemed to really love the show, so I said to Mekaela, “Mekaela? This one might actually be good.” And what do you know – it is.

I’m sorry, FOX, for doubting you. Just this once, mind.

So, the plot is utterly ridiculous — like the Headless Horsemen is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ridiculous — but it’s really entertaining. This is almost entirely due to the show’s fantastic leads: Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison) and Lt. Abbie Mills (Nicole Beharie). Tom Mison is attractive and English and Englishly attractive, but more than that, he’s funny. This Ichabod is considerably sharper and crankier than past iterations I’ve seen, and I love it. Beharie is also funny — she’s got great comedic timing — and she and Mison have good chemistry together. More importantly, she seems totally competent so far, and yet her character has, like, feelings and expressions. She shrieks at a moment where it’s totally justifiable to shriek, yet she doesn’t just stand around, flailing her arms and crying all the time. I’m . . . confused. A realistic female character? Surely not.

There are definitely things to mock in this pilot — glowy-eyed horses, miracle sunrises, Ichabod getting arrested for . . . being dirty? But I definitely had a good time watching this. I am grading it down for saying Book of Revelations, though. Come on, people. Don’t we all know better than this by now? It’s Revelation. No plural, please.

FAVORITE QUOTE:

“It can’t be mere coincidence that he and I arrive in the same place at exactly the same time.”
“That isn’t possible.”
“Oh, really? Oh, well, that’s wonderful news. Thank you for the clarification. Here I thought I’d actually awoken in the future and my wife had been dead for 250 years. I’m glad everything I’m seeing and hearing and touching is impossible, because that means it isn’t actually happening.”
“I have orders to take you to a mental institution.”
“Excellent. This day continues to bear gifts.”

GRADE:

B+

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

I don’t know if Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was the most amazing pilot I’ve ever seen — it’s no “Serenity,” is what I’m saying —  but it’s solid and entertaining, and I enjoyed watching it. I love Coulson (Clark Gregg), obviously, and I’m naturally intrigued by the mystery of his resurrection, especially since Coulson himself seems to be in the dark about it. Although I must say, I’ve been reading a lot of fan speculation that Coulson is, in fact, a robot or a Life Model Decoy or something of that nature, and if that’s actually the case, Whedon’s going to have to do a lot of work to sell me on it. (Because I’m sure Joss Whedon — and Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen too — are highly concerned with what I think about this program. Stop laughing. Of course they are.)

I like some of the tie-ins to previous Marvel movies (like Extremis from Iron Man 3), and I’m relieved that Skye doesn’t seem nearly as annoying as she came off in the promos. Mostly, I’m just waiting around for the actual character development. Weirdly, I’m most concerned about Fitz and Simmons — they’re cute and, you know, accents! But I wish I could have seen anything to them besides cute and accents. I mean, it’s a pilot. A lot of pilots are too busy setting up the universe to get into any real character building, and that’s cool. It’s just . . . this is Joss Whedon, and I’ve come to sort of expect better from him. But hey, I’m still excited. COULSON LIVES!

FAVORITE QUOTE:

“It’s a diaster.”
“No, it’s an origin story.

GRADE:

B+

Person of Interest

The actual case in Person of Interest was just sort of blah, and I was a tiny bit disappointed by the lack of awesome Finch (Michael Emerson) moments, just because I love Finch. But the women in this episode . . . the women owned.

Sarah Shahi is immensely badass as Shaw. I loved every moment she was on screen — I would totally watch an action movie starring her. And Root (Amy Acker), always awesome, is currently stuck in an insane asylum arguing with the Machine on the pros and cons of murdering her skeezy psychologist? Yes, please. And then somewhere between getting demoted, hiding out Elias (Enrico Colantoni) and keeping a Secret Crazy Vengeance Wall in her closet — Carter (Taraji P. Henson) got a lot more interesting. Also, Reese is right. She does look pretty badass in that uniform.

My only thing — the part where Reese abandons Fusco alone to deactive the bomb, and the false tension that arrives when he might not have defused it in time? Eh. I know it’s supposed to be funny, but it just made such little sense for John (Jim Caviezel) to actually do this that I couldn’t get into the humor. It felt way too contrived for me.

QUOTE:

“The truth is God is eleven years old.”

GRADE: 

B

Elementary

I drifted away from this show last year but after hearing positive reviews and a few surprising developments, I decided to check out the second season premiere because, hey, I like Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu quite a bit, so why not? And kind of like Person of Interest — I wasn’t exactly wowed by the case, but I enjoyed the episode well enough. It’s fun. I really like that I can already see how Sherlock has grown as a character from the last time I watched this show — one of my big problems with actual Sherlock adaptations or shows with Sherlock-esque characters (i.e., House) is that their super-observational powers coupled with their near-to-total lack of people skills starts feeling stagnant after a while, and I tend to turn against the character. You know, I don’t want them to become bright, shiny, happy people all the time, but if characters refuse to have any kind of actual growth . . . you know, I get bored.

I also enjoyed seeing Sean Pertwee as Lestrade, mostly because I like his gravelly voice, and Rhys Ifans as Mycroft. The scene on the bench? Awesome. I will gladly come back to watch this show if there continue to be more scenes like that.

FAVORITE QUOTE:

“Our relationship is entirely genetic.”

GRADE:

B