Monsters of Television

“I didn’t know we had that.”

Good times. For a change.

Your regularly scheduled reviewer for Sym-Bionic Titan will be played by Nick today. I’ve never seen the show before but I’m kind of glad this is the one that I’ve come in on. You’ll have to excuse me if I’m ignorant to history but hopefully I make up for it in charm and wit. And handsomeness. Which you can’t see. Just go with me on the last one.

Why I’m glad “Disenfranchised” is my first episode is because it feels like (and please, correct me if I’m wrong) it has all the elements of the show without much in the way of story progression. It’s a filler episode. And hilarious even though there’s NO WAY some of the jokes are meant for children (some of its demographic wasn’t even born during Budweiser’s What’s Up days).

In this very special episode, however, Lance discovers New Wave, or the modern incarnation of it, Shoegaze Emo, and gets a very valuable lesson in indie cred. Also, there’s an alien they slice like a sausage.

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“Okay, if you were new in town and just ingested an eighth of sandwich, where would you go?”

Scooby-Doo references abound.

I know. You’re all pretty confused because this review totally has a picture. “Where’s Noel?” you cry. “Who is this Philistine? What else does he review? Chuck? What does he know about quality television? He’s not even a GRAD student.”

First of all, calm down. Second, quality television is a very problematic phrase (see, that totally made you feel more comfortable, didn’t it?). Third, we’ll take it slow-like. I’ll try not to let my verbosity interfere with Noel’s succinct style. Also, I could’ve been a pretty awesome grad student if Bazin and Barthes didn’t make me so sleepy.

This week on How I Met Your Mother, we go to the well over and over again.

“A Change of Heart” might have felt very familiar to you because we kind of already did this. Remember when Barney got sick and Robin had to take care of him? Or when Barney fell in love with Robin? Or how Lilly is his only confidante? Yeah, that’s all here again with Nora. It’s like the same thing except not as ill-advised as the first time.

We’re also starting to come out of the shadow of Mr Erikson’s death (though it sparks the whole heart theme) and we get a Barney-dominated episode where instead of cracking wise, NPH gets a chance to flex his deeply-flawed and -damaged character, even if we’ve already seen it before.

Though maybe we shouldn’t look at it like it’s tread territory and look at it like a do-over. Right?

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“Don’t lead with the beard. Let it be a pleasant surprise.”

She is so not happy to be on the Island.

Between the Devil from Reaper and Pierre Chang from Lost, this might be the most evil episode of Chuck we’ve ever seen.

That’s why I’m so glad it has been part of what has been an inspired run of of episodes. From the downfall of Alexei Volkoff to the reluctant rise of his daughter Vivian (played by Lauren Cohan — an electric presence on a show not lacking in that department), we’ve seen some imagination, some heart, and really sharp comedy. The kind we haven’t seen in such a long time.

I don’t know if someone cracked down on the writer’s room sometime after they crapped the bed on “vs The Balcony” but it’s refreshing to see characters behaving in the way you’ve been dying to see them behave, engaging in real problems, dealing with issues some characters have been having from the very beginning. Sarah’s detached mind finally has a chance to float in the opportunities afforded by her civilian friends (like getting excited about a wedding). Casey’s skills, handicapped by van surveillance and a string of debilitating injuries, finally gets noticed by higher ups so he’s given a mission. And Chuck — well, Chuck has his black hole of emotion that everyone gets sucked into (even the coldest hearts in the spy world seem to cave into their inside feelings more often lately) but he’s returned to being that affable, sometimes awkward character everyone probably misses. And how about someone realized there’s more to the Intersect than kung-fu. Lots of good stuff with all the characters.

But let’s get to the specifics of this episode, shall we?

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“Oh, feelings. I see why you came to me.”

Alexei, you might be my favorite.

Two weeks ago, we watched “vs The Balcony” and its structure completely crumble around one of the most important plot arcs in the series. Up there with the Chucknsarah relationship and Chuck balancing a normal life with being the Intersect (regretfully, the latter of which has been hastily abandoned), the correlation between Chuck/Sarah and Orion/Frost has been the ultimate reflection for the future of the core relationship and the ghost that haunts it, even if the arc has defied Chuck’s general stance on being completely obvious about all plotlines. Of course, I flew into reactionary rage about it, whining about the show’s inconsistency and how one of the most important turnarounds the show has accomplished in four seasons was sullied by a “vs the Honeymooners”-esque level of camp.

However, the last two episodes have made up for it.

Granted, I’m a little disappointed we’ve come so far in this arc in the last two episodes but I’m also not at all surprised. Chuck typically likes to come up with a good idea and then burn through it like filler episodes are the sweet, sweet relief to the overexcitement that comes with story. From a different series, I might have expected something a little more drawn out so that the confrontation that happens in “vs The Push Mix” might actually occur closer to the end of the season. That felt like the natural progression for something like this, especially we’re only a little more than halfway through the remaining episodes.

But, to be fair, it appears Chuck has something else in mind for the culmination of the season.

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“Remember tonight … for it is the beginning of always.”

Spoiler: the show does NOT end in hail of bullets after double-crossing a South American drug lord. However: Lux does kill Dumbledore.

A film degree at my alma mater requires a minor and, instead of doing the responsible thing and getting a Computer Science minor to tag onto my established expertise, I went in a more interesting route and took every Italian class my school had to offer. My interest in Italian stems from my hero worship of the man credited with codifying the language: Dante Alighieri. I’ve read just about his entire catalog, including some in the original Italian, and have been reading his work since I was fifteen.

The quote Eric Daniels writes on the board doesn’t ring a bell.

If you know where it comes from, I’m willing to learn but I couldn’t find “ricorda” (the command form of “to remember”) and “notte” or “sera” (“night” or “evening”) anywhere near each other in La Commedia, Vita Nova, or Rime. I even looked in the complete poetry of Guido Cavalcanti, Dante’s best friend.

Where I did find a reference (besides the numerous quote sites on the internet citing Dante as the source of the quote but not from where it was derived) is to One Tree Hill. Lucas apparently has a conversation with Brooke about a note in which Lucas included the passage, claiming it was from Dante, an author they read “last semester.” Using One Tree Hill as a kick-off point for the end of the series is fitting, even if the elder series lives on while this one makes its exit.

Life Unexpected was supposed to be the Everwood/Gilmore Girls series that everyone was missing, a show that could fill the void of family drama the WB used to program for so well. And its first season (particularly the end) showed some promise. But second season went off the rails a little bit and started to, frankly, look more like One Tree Hill. Pretty people who can’t seem to ever pull it together because of the soap opera melodrama happening all around them. It’s probably good that LUX wasn’t allowed to limp into another season. Between LUX Shovel and Creepy Eric Daniels, the show was well on its way to a weather machine plotline delayed because Baze’s megalomaniacal father watched his own heart transplant spill across the floor of a hospital. That clip never gets old.

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“Let him man-serve you.”

Ms. Walker. You’re trying to seduce me.

Why do the big moments in Chuck and Sarah’s life have to be nestled in their cheesiest episodes?

It wasn’t always like this. Harken back to Seasons 1 and 2 and you’ll find plenty of important moments that are properly escalated, better structured, and surrounded by story that doesn’t crumble around the emotional core. In fact, the only heartbreaking moment in the timeline of these two crazy kids nestled into a campy hour prior to Season 3 that I can remember off the top of my head comes during “vs The Truth,” where a former East European gymnast armed with truth-serum/poison provides all the characters with their very own writer’s crutches.

But it seems like the really well-plotted episodes of this series are increasingly scattered and episodes that should have a lot of emotional pay-off because of the events surrounding the beating heart of this show (no matter how many times I almost wish the focus would shift to Morgan and Casey) stumble in structure and execution. Yeah, “vs The Honeymooners.” I’m looking at you.

While not suffering from the same paralysis of subtlety that 0314 celebrated, “vs The Balcony” definitely has an unfinished quality to it. The A-plot (termed as the “sub-mission” for the episode) is never supported by any other elements of the episode, even when it’s necessary that it is in order for the A-plot to function. But, more importantly, the end of the episode lacks an emotional beat because of the campiness surrounding the rest of the story.

Let’s start off with something good about the episode, though.

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“Come find me, bitches.

Sometimes they are also Pretty Dirty Little Liars

You can’t be blamed if you haven’t watched this show. I wouldn’t even know about it if I wasn’t such a Gilmore Girls junkie and ABC Family wasn’t such a publicity whore during their commercial breaks. Seriously, the phrases “secret life” and “make it or break it” will be forever burned into my consciousness despite the fact I’ve only seen short clips of both that put together wouldn’t even amount to an episode. And then, even if you had seen a preview or two for it, you might’ve been like me and assumed some sort of “ghost in the machine” scenario, like some poor American reboot of Serial Experiements: Lain. The show wasn’t really made for me and I chose not to respond to it.

But Matt kept insisting I check it out. Since I’d already given Veronica Mars a whirl (which I liked a lot) and I gave my mother Lost Season 1 for Christmas, I decided to hit the Matt Owens Trifecta. He sold it to me as a departure from normal ABC Family fare, something more closely resembling the WB shows of the early 2000s (when Dawson’s Creek, Everwood, and One Tree Hill were at their schmaltziest). The production value is improved over shows like Secret Life of the American Teenager and Make It Or Break It and the writing was a lot tighter, he defended. So, since Hulu had the entire season up to this point available to watch, I decided I could try it out. I mean, I watched Life Unexpected; it’s not like I have a masculine reputation to upkeep. I have a Fashionista badge on Miso, for crissakes.

The show surprised me, however. I was taken by the opening sequence, a desaturated series of shots showing a body being prepared for a viewing and scored by an almost saccharine song about keeping secrets (although Aria shushing at the end almost made me turn the show off). And not only did I see the things Matt noted but I also found it interesting in other areas. I’m not saying you have to watch it but it’s something to keep your eye on. If you want to keep up without sitting through the first ten episodes (new episodes start Monday, January 3rd), let me take you through the highlights.

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“I am preventing a nightmare.”

Super Sniffer at work.

There are several ways television likes to elicit the inner-workings of a character without having to demonstrate it in a natural way. One is to get them hammered. Another is to bring in a documentarian.

Scrubs did it early on in their series (“My Bed Banter and Beyond”) with unseen psych students. Dawson’s Creek used its eponymous filmmaker to draw out character development. There’s even an entire genre of sit-com based on the practice (see The Office, Parks & Recreation, Modern Family). So when I saw Lassiter’s distractingly attractive little sister armed with a camera and that the show was going to oscillate between conventional footage and what she shoots, I groaned a little bit.

Happily, though, we didn’t get the deep internal struggles of these characters that they just needed a medium through which to vent. Instead we got what these characters would actually act like on character. That I can appreciate. If anything, what this episode demonstrated wasn’t a crutch to develop our characters but a study into how Psych as a procedural clashes with other, more conventional, procedurals and even touches on the nature of the procedural in general. Yeah, I know. Deep for Psych.

And we got to see April Bowlby without having to watch Two and a Half Men. I say that’s a win all around.

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“Are you dating Dwayne Wade? That doesn’t even make sense. He’s with Gabrielle Union.”

Love or hate this episode, you have to be happy that this happened.

USA has been celebrating this epsiode for months, even making sure to name-check it in the early press releases for this season. The It’s a Wonderful Life episode. Surprising with so many theme episodes in Psych‘s oevre (Halloween horror movies, Jaws, Hitchcock, Twin Peaks) that it hasn’t hit on this before for a holiday episode. Maybe it’s just that we’re at a point in the series that it feels it can do surrealism and the audience will follow.

What’s interesting is the way they decided to do this. This wasn’t the same as A Christmas Carol or the movie that keep on giving to Frank Capra’s estate. Except for a heavy-handedness Psych affords itself when discussing anything serious for its characters, Shawn’s journey of self-discovery shared very little with the visions of the lesson-learning protagonists of the time-honored holiday fare. You might call it too hokey or too goofy, too parodic of It’s a Wonderful Life for it to make sense. But I’m actually going to defend the perspective.

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“If I could’ve traded places with him, I would have. I would trade places with him right now.”

“So — what do you want to do for 21 seconds?”

In the podcast earlier, I was curious as to what the cliffhanger for the end of this season could possibly be. Surly, we’d get some answers to some long-standing questions and maybe some tense moments with the cast being locked down in the basement of a suburban performing arts center technologically-advanced government building but where are they going? Karen pointed out that they need a plan. So when I sat down for “TS-19” tonight, that’s what I hoped to see. Instead, I got something else entirely. And even that was hampered by some of the same problems that’ve haunted this still-so-young series.

Chief among those problems: I don’t care about 80-90% of the cast.

Thus begins my series of Lost contrasts. The Walking Dead is completely different from Lost and not just because of the spelling. Though they both feature groups of survivors trying to fight for continuance against all odds and a mysterious force (smoke monsters and Others vs the where-did-they-come-from ghouls), The Walking Dead has a pretty serious problem of never endearing many of the characters to us. Lost had a giant ensemble cast to which they were able to give a lot of service, making it so that audience not only knew of each character but could identify them in a line-up. Before Jim started going bananas on the hills, diggin’ holes, did you remember who he was? Congratulations if you did (from the radiator hose thing). Many people didn’t.

And when you have a bunch of characters no one knows anything about and aren’t very developed beyond the surface, that’s horror code for “it’s time to thin out the herd.”

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