Agents of SHIELD Season 5 Episode 3 The world building is hot and heavy this week as Agents of SHIELD continues to expand the Marvel cosmos. Lots of stuff going on with our time and space tossed agents. Anywho, Kasius promises to train Abby as a warrior and sell her to a newly introduced white-skinned Kree aristocrat named Basha. Through Abby, we get to see the human/Kree/Inhuman dynamic at work in the future....
American Dad has gotten some decent mileage out of Steve’s group of friends, Snot especially. He’s never resonated that strongly with me, but I think he serves his purpose and have probably grown to like him more throughout the years, rather than the other way around. So I wasn’t overly excited when I saw this was a Steve and Snot affair, but all-in-all it’s a pleasant episode. A lot of time in this episode is spent in the dojo, Dojo Biden, which is a pretty stupid joke (and apparently a name that Sensei Tom was not given permission to use), but it’s repeated enough times, and doubled down on itself effectively that it actually starts to get funny....
Birth Oh yes, Viv and her twin babies are closer than ever, and everyone in the house is looking forward to the blessed event, from sweet, pining 30’s grief monger Nora to everyone’s favorite gay ghosts, Chad and Patrick. Even Hayden shows up to get in on the baby brawl, and she doesn’t even like Vivien; she just wants to own that little piece of Ben. Fortunately, the house has a couple of protectors, namely Constance (who will not let Chad and Patrick touch her grandchild), Billie Dean (Sarah Paulson) the psychic, and the Harmon’s oldest daughter, Violet....
1.2 Home Invasion Things are very tense in the Harmon household. Vivien is worried about her pregnancy, as she’s not gotten sick yet. Violet is worried about her parents, her mother’s pregnancy, and finding her next target to say hateful things to. And Ben… well, Ben has the most problems of all. Tate’s boasting about making out with his daughter, he’s got a nervous wife to contend with, he’s living in a house full of spirits with neighbors trying to drive him insane, and worst of all, his mistress back in Boston turns up pregnant....
Arrow Season 4, Episode 10 How far is too far when seeking truth, justice, and the American way? (Or, you know, the Arrow version of that — i.e. information, vengeance, and the vigilante way.) Arrowloves asking this question, which is probably why it brought it back for “Blood Debts,” its midseason premiere. Because there is nothing like a midseason premiere to hammer home the themes of your show — no matter how many times you’ve explored them before....
Arrow Season 4, Episode 22 In the season’s penultimate episode of Arrow,Oliver returns to where we first found him at the beginning of season 4: the suburbs. Unlike Felicity and Oliver’s “normal” life in a pleasant-enough surburban area filled with annoying, but ultimately well-meaning neighbors, Darhk’s dystopia dome is filled with people who are cool with the world ending as long as they get to hang out in a weird, safe neighborhood where it is always daytime and everyone has to wear terrible jumpsuits....
It’s the differences that are as important as the similarities with tonight’s installment of the Arrow and Flash crossover. Just like “Flash vs. Arrow” this is a remarkably self-contained adventure. Really, other than needing the boomerang excuse to put these shows together, both would have worked quite well as standalones. I hope that, if it means we’ll get more team-ups in the future, they don’t all have to be two night events....
On the DVD commentary for episode one, The Calm, Marc Guggenheim mentions that they plan out every Arrow season as if it were a movie. With that in mind, it’s easy to see how Arrow season 3 falls down the regular pitfalls of third-in-the-trilogy superhero movies. Arrow season 3 resurrects a superhero sequel issue that we’ve not really seen on the big screen since Batman & Robin as well – too many heroes....
Arrow Season 5 Episode 3 There was a time when one could say he or she was strictly an Arrow fan or a Flash fan. Then the CW added Legends of Tomorrow by scooping up the best secondary heroes before bending over backwards to get Supergirl and her mythos into the fold. Rather than walk back on the connectedness of this universe now that it’s got so many moving parts, the latest episode of the DC TV universe’s flagship series, titled “It’s a Matter of Trust,” doubled down....
Meet Jason, the latest BBC adventurer to spend Saturday teatimes running from monsters, jumping off things, and unravelling the mysteries of his fate. Unlike timeslot predecessors Robin Hood and Merlin, Jason does his running, jumping and fate-unravelling against an appealing Mediterranean backdrop. He’s the hero of Atlantis (less a lost city than a handy compendium of Greek myth in this incarnation), a fish out of water with a secret destiny and a six-pack....
This review contains spoilers. 1.4 Kate is Enough This week’s Awake further explores the question of which world of Michael’s is real, and which one he’d actually prefer to live in. That might sound harsh, considering either his wife or his son are on each side, but this episode set the groundwork for future hard questions he might have to ask himself. Compared to last week, we barely see the family, with the action centring on the two cases Michael finds himself working on....
Ballmastrz: 9009 Episode 6 “You gotta’ give the people what they want! People want balls!” Curiously, Ace’s love for collectible Ballmaster holocards fulfills both of these things and he gets to experience both sides of this love as he’s both a Ballmaster player and a fan. This episode is very much about that joy and the immortality of sports collectibles, but it also highlights the dangerous side of it all. Like most topics in Ballmastrz,it presents this as a double-edged sword and then grabs on tight to both edges and prepares to get bloody....
4.3 Job From his first appearance Job has served a very particular role in the series. Not only is it great to see a transvestite presented without comment as probably the toughest character in a show full of tough characters, but Job has always been a brilliant source of comic relief, and Hoon Lee’s performance is in no small part what has made him such an immediately iconic fan favourite....
5.2 Sticks and Rope There’s a sense that, after last week’s difficult opener, Being Human’s second outing of the year could just sit back a relax a bit. For the current incarnation of the show, that means lots of workplace comedy from Hal and Tom, some scary ghost stuff back at the house, and more devilish antics from Captain Hatch. We also get a flashback and some soul-searching, but this time it’s thankfully from someone other than our resident vampire....
Beowulf takes a Western turn this week, as our heroes find themselves under siege while transporting goods across wild land because they have disturbed a local tribe’s burial ground – the twist in this case being that the tribe are not human, but ‘mud-born,’ thoroughly wrapped up like chilly mummies, exposing only mouths that appear to drip black oil. The other problem is that the solution is rather anti-climactic – Beowulf just sets fire to the burial ground (which would surely make the situation worse) and they ride away, apparently without being chased....
To come up with the new story and direction for the sequel, they called upon director Adam Wingard and his long-time collaborator, writer Simon Barrett, the team behind 2011’s excellent home invasion thriller You’re Next. Wingard and Barrett had already established themselves among the horror cognoscenti at that point with their lower-budget films like A Horrible Way to Die and Autoerotic, and they went on to do segments in the V/H/S horror anthology and make the thriller The Guest....
Last week, I praised Boardwalk Empire for taking a little bit of time out to let us get to know the characters, as opposed to heaps of action and spectacle provided by the Scorsese-directed pilot. I clearly am a difficult person to please, however, because after Broadway Limited I was hankering for a bit more incident and excitement to accompany the storylines, which are otherwise chugging along nicely. This isn’t an affront to Steve Buscemi’s performance as Nucky Thompson, far from it....
Anyway, we’re not here to talk Doctor Who, nor praise Pushing Daisies (which was great, but derivative) so let’s instead turn our attention to the very welcome return of the ratings behemoth that brightened the evening some time after the Doctor popped off from Pompeii, and just before Anna Friel got killed again. Anyway, aside from the constant blubbing, the other things that I noticed about Popstars: The Rivals were a) how cheap it looked (you can clearly see that a number of the auditions take place at the bottom of a flight of stairs in some dingy hotel room); and b) how lacking in wit the whole production was....
This review contains spoilers. Welcome back to Broadchurch, or, to call it by its Chinese translation, Terrible Things Happen in Beautiful Rural Locations. This week, a gorgeous cornfield joined the bucolic, rolling grounds of Axehampton House as a site of human misery. Following new testimony and a fresh lead thanks to Beth’s mentor, it’s looking as though the man who attacked Trish is a serial rapist. Episode five opened on a distressing interview with Laura Benson, the woman who came forward at the end of last week’s hour....
