1.12 Dorkus & The Final Girl(s) Back in July, Ryan Murphy said, “… at the end of the first season there will only be four characters out of twenty-five left” and yet ten remain. The thirteen-episode run has always seemingly been building up to a bloodbath, with Murphy effectively promising lots of deaths in the finale. Over the course of Dorkus/The Final Girl(s) only one named character died, and a pizza guy to boot....
For those who may have missed it, Frank is now the face of the Gay rights movement. Not bad for a guy who began the episode making a slur against members of the LGBT seeking same sex marriages (he called them a bunch of “queers”). You see a week ago, Frank moved in with clingy, pseudo-creepy Christopher. Christopher, a chipper animal control gasser for the city, is the lonely sad sack sort who pretends to be a recovering alcoholic so as to pay a sponsor to stay with him....
I love a good courtroom drama. I mean a good courtroom drama. Stuff like 12 Angry Men or The Firm are deeply satisfying, largely because you feel like you’re a part of that courtroom and helping solve this murder (or whatever) too, and that’s an exciting feeling as most of us in our lifetime probably won’t be a member of the jury on a murder trial. So Space Dandy taking this construct as their plaything this week got me quite excited, and unsurprisingly it’s a great fit for the show....
Okay, so that last one doesn’t sound quite so cool, but still: being a secret agent. It must be exciting, even if you wouldn’t necessarily know it from looking at the gloomy expressions of the ones in Spooks: The Greater Good. Mind you, I’d probably look a bit down-in-the-mouth if a dangerous terrorist had somehow slipped out of my custody while being ferried through London. This is the MI5 agent’s epitome of a bad day at the office....
Before talking about this episode, I want to set the context of when it was made, and the issues that presented themselves to those living in America at this time. The Vietnam War had been going since 1959, and a year after this the conflict would peak in the Tet Offensive. Given that the decade prior to this has seen the Korean Conflict, and the one before that World War II, everyone was heartily sick of war even if they weren’t fought on US soil....
WARNING: This review contains EXPLICIT references to JAR JAR BINKS, interspecies relationships and at least one use of the word “Bombad”. Readers are advised to proceed with caution… It’s taken a while, but The Clone Wars has sadly delivered what can only be referred to as a ‘clunker’ or a ‘stinker’. Up ‘til now the episodes have ranged from pretty good to genuinely topping, but the latest installment, Bombad Jedi, has created this new category....
3.16 Altar Of Mortis Altar Of Mortis sees Anakin Skywalker, Ahsoka Tano and Obi-Wan Kenobi just leaving the planet Mortis after the eventful time there witnessed in the previous instalment, when the gang are pulled back to the planet by last week’s bad boy, the simply named “Son”, an amalgamation of Jedi and Sith (Jith? Sidi?), but far more powerful than either. He’s haunting the mind of Anakin and plants himself there posing as his double (in a knowing nod to the Dagobah cave scene in The Empire Strikes Back) in an eerie couple of minutes that betray the child-friendly facade of The Clone Wars....
2.7 Stealth Strike The last few episodes of Star Wars: Rebels have focused on individual characters, giving a little more backstory to Hera and Sabine. Zeb is still relatively unknown, but Stealth Strike brings us back to Kanan and Ezra in an episode that shows how repetitive the series has been lately. Kanan and Ezra have already starred in several good stories, although one of the best is still Rise Of The Old Masters, from early in season one....
Star Wars Rebels Season 4 Episodes 1 & 2 Star Wars Rebels is in flux. So far, the main characters have steered clear of the plotlines we’ve seen in the saga movies, except for General Syndulla’s wonderful blink-and-you’ll miss it mention in Rogue One. We know that the fourth season will be the final season of the series, so there’s only so far these characters can go. But it’s also a time of change....
We’ve had sci-fi, and we’ve had drama, and this week it’s time for a detective story. With this story, we get to see a lot of characters show a defensive side that we haven’t seen yet. We’ve been seeing a lot of emotional scenes, but not a lot of true conversational back and forth with this much ferocity. A lot of the writing in this episode is about that kind of conversation, coming to a head between various characters, and as a result some of the best moments of the season crop up....
Steven Universe Season 5 Episode 2 Steven Universe fans have wanted answers but they never stopped to wonder… Were they asking the right questions? It was just assumed that Rose Quartz shattered Pink Diamond and that was all there was to it but now that’s been completely thrown out the window. Did she shatter her? What if she didn’t? What if she was asked to? What if someone wanted it to happen?...
2.22 Nevertheless, She Persisted When Supergirl is asked to choose between saving her world and keeping a person she loves in her life, she chooses to save Earth. And did anyone ever have any doubt that this is the choice our heroine would make? Some shows would have milked this dilemma for contrived angst, but this show knows its protagonist. She will not fail another homeworld. No, Supergirl makes the smarter decision....
Supergirl Season 3 Episode 11 Supergirl headed out to a place poisonous to men while the show made some character adjustments. Livewire vacated the role of mean girl with a heart of gold so that Psi could take her place, while it seems Reign is moving away from current baddie so that Purity can take the mantle. It might take an episode or two for the dust to settle on those changes, but things have certainly shifted on Supergirl, even if all the same roles are still being filled....
As these “Road So Far” images flash by, we remember just how much Supernatural there’s been on TV. This is the beginning of the tenth season, a season in which we start out with brothers on the opposite side of the good and evil playing field. We hope our double-digit milestone will prove to be the season to beat all seasons. It’s a tough order to fill. The Mark of Cain needs to be sated, and that’s just what Crowley does when he sends a couple of Abaddon’s remaining supporters after Dean....
9.2 Devil May Care Watching a TV show is a bit like having faith: you have to believe that the writers will do right by the characters you love, and that after all these years, the show you fell in love with will live up to its potential. Personally, I’ve always taken after Dean Winchester in my inability to believe; the present season of Supernatural, however, continues to exceed my expectations, reminding me yet again that this is the show I fell in love with....
The Runaway Despite the variable quality of the past few weeks, I think we can safely call this the first episode of Terra Nova that was more good than bad. True, the leads remain almost impressively bland, but the focus on Taylor and new arrival Leah means that for a change, the characters at the forefront of the story are quite engaging. It’s impossible not to enjoy Leah’s presence in the cast....
Like most of The Affair, this episode is all about making choices, whether it’s to continue on with a dishonest relationship, to go into therapy, to sell a family’s legacy, to stay in Montauk, to deal drugs to survive. This is an episode particularly rife in the subject, but rather than it saying that we actually have a say in these choices, they’re seen as crushing forces that we can’t avoid....
How do you spice up an episode that features the same task you’ve seen and devoured year after year? You have one of the women rustling around after her knickers, for starters. You have some talking heads of people bigging themselves up. You throw in an unpaid advert for the Savoy Hotel. And you have Baron Alan Sugar, the mighty overlord of British commerce, trying to bash out a couple of new one liners....
I’m going to dispense with even the barest hint of plot recap for this one, because there’s just so much to love that I’m liable to eat up my entire word count just hitting the high points. Initially, Frank Whaley’s “good samaritan killer” (so named for a very good reason, which we’ll get to in just a moment) just seems like another Blacklist-by-the-numbers baddie of the week. He’s a kidnap/torture killer who drugs his victims, and then proceeds to, well…kidnap and torture them....
