Monsters of Television

“The town gets together every Thursday night to watch reruns of Everwood.

Orgasmic pie and “damn fine” cider.

If you came here looking for more Twin Peaks fan service, detailing all the little references and inside jokes about the iconic series, you’ve sadly come to the wrong place. My experience with the show is severely limited to the kind of education best described as osmosis where I understand the jokes other media properties are making but have no real point of reference myself. So, instead, I’m just going to talk about Psych. Sorry.

But CNN has a good list of the references if you really want one.

It’s interesting, though, that, in its fifth season, Psych has a number of parody/homage episodes under its belt, a trend that is no more identifiable than it has been lately, what with this Twin Peaks version and the upcoming It’s a Wonderful Life take the network has been promoting for months. Careful, Psych: you’re already a show that rough-rides that line between inspired content and series-of-pop-culture-references-that-don’t-fit-together-cohesively-but-people-believe-it-does-because-it-has-a-good-message. That’s right. I’m warning you that you’re a modern pop culture reference and musical episode away from being Glee. And that is dangerous territory, my friend.

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“You are not getting bullets for a long, long time.”

Watch out for Sarah-gator.

Chuck is the ever-expanding sinkhole that constantly sucks his friends in, collapsing any sense of self-determined purpose within them.

Morgan is the most obvious example of this, especially in the beginning seasons (before they realized that Grimes could stand on his own). His character was forever the lackey no matter how horrible Chuck was to the little bearded man. No matter what Chuck did, Morgan was always there with an undying (and increasingly unjustified) bro-code. Letting Morgan in on the spy game was almost essential. Otherwise, his character would almost be too unbelievable. Who would stick around for that much punishment?

Casey’s heart has also melted a bit under the direct light of the Chuck Effect. His cold, harsh stance on Chuck’s incessant whining and lovesick decision-making turned a corner after years of the Intersect coming through for him. He’s come to appreciate the Sarah and Chuck relationship even if it does kind of make him gag.

But, by far and away, the one most bedraggled by Chuck throughout the series (understandably) is Sarah Walker. She went from being the exalted super-spy to the pretty accessory to Chuck’s antics. Her personality has been so diluted by her time in Burbank that it’s hard to define Sarah without using Chuck as a touchstone. She’s the spy Chuck fell in love with. Though it’s good for the show that her personality has evolved over the seasons (professional and intrigued to semi-professional but willing to surrender to hurt but healing to the current, more complex, lovefool), it’s unfortunate that her power has certainly switched from being mostly on her tough spy training to being the muse to Chuck’s formerly stagnant self.

Fool, I think, is the proper term since she sounds more and more like Chuck, particularly when he has his Brunette of the Season. A focused, emotional, protocol-breaking, on-the-edge persona emerges in this episode. And I love it.

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“I’m not strolling the streets of Atlanta with just my good intentions, okay?”

Diggin’ holes.

Do you ever get the feeling that men are just a problem in this show? Nevermind the fact that they’re all racists or adulterers or abusive but they’re also generally useless to the survival of the non-walkers. They serve as lookouts and muscle but only the women help keep the camp functioning with laundry and educating the children and the various other tasks that the men in which the men never seem to participate. I would say this is like some early patriarchal hunter/gatherer society, but, when Daryl’s gone to Atlanta to find Merle and get guns, the women do the hunting, too. Men are just the blight on this struggling society.

On the podcast yesterday, we talked a little bit about how this Lord of the Flies-esque societal regeneration is similar to that of Lost, especially with a hero (Rick) emerging, complete with antagonists both to his power (Merle) and his being (Shane), to help save them from the Others (walkers). Sure, the walkers don’t have a ringleader like Ben or an ancient spiritual leader like Richard but many of them don’t have faces either so we can’t expect too much. The more interesting difference is how the new society is formed with baser instincts: cliques, a bit of mistrust, paranoia, and an surprising lack of unity despite the superficial all-togetherness. There is far more poison in this bunch than on the island, with a few people feeling they have the right to rise to the throne. The inherent fear of their situation, of each other sometimes, and a lack of collaboration to get them out of harm’s way, can only prove to be detrimental to their cause of survival.

It’s like they don’t know that they need learn to live together or die alone.

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“I mean — he was moving, right?”

What is happening here?!

Troubled kid, meet actual trouble.

For most of tonight’s episode, I felt pretty much the same as I do every week of watching this show. “Ew. Don’t do tha– ew. Lux, you’re a jackass. Tash, please don’t let her — ew. Adults don’t leave them in a room alone togeth– ew.” And, despite because extra crispy gross tonight, Eric “Minnesota” Daniels wasn’t the weirdest part of the evening. No, that easily goes to what Lux did with a car, what Tash did with a shovel, and what the new guy Sam put together all by himself.

Seriously, this is an episode that makes me almost sad that the show is almost certainly doomed. I really want to see where this is going, especially now that they’ve dug deep down into the WB archives for characters this season. Especially since they decided to bring in some of the stuff they plastered over earlier this season (quick! Get Tash away from Valerie! Wait — you called her mom? And don’t mention it again) and weave it into the new stuff they have going on here.

I’ll warn you now, I have no real important thoughts on this episode. I offer no real insight. All I can tell you is what I saw, how I saw it, and hope you watch the episode just to enjoy the spectacle with me. It’s a glorifying hour of witness.

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“Whoa, whoa. That sounds like candor.”

If it weren’t for the Dragon*Con photos, I’m not sure I would believe that Summer Glau knows how to smile. Combo Breaker!

Why can’t we start off our seasons with episodes like this? Instead we have to wade through so much garbage before we start to get the story going, right about at the threshold when people stop caring about the show.

It wasn’t perfect but just about everything hit: the spy story, Chuck’s situation, the best Greta yet, even the Chuck and Sarah story had good reveal. There was a point when I even said, “Oh snap.” Out loud. Yeah, I brought that back that’s how good it was.

Okay, I’ll be honest. “Oh snap” never really left my vocabulary. But you can see how impressive that is for Chuck this season. I can’t even think of a moment beyond the past two episodes where an “oh snap” would be appropriate. Maybe they know something we don’t. Maybe they have reason not to worry about ratings and make a bunch of horrible episodes to scare away the riff-raff. And then at the quarter-season mark, they bring out the goods for the True Believers. Excelsior!

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“Why don’t you take that stupid hat and go back to On Golden Pond?

“Oh, don’t worry: he won’t wake up. I made time between running from zombies and scraping by to survive to bump uglies with your best friend while your son slept in the next bed and he never made a peep. Carl, not Shane. Shane’s a screamer. Did I mention that I made you a cuckold? I did. But we can laugh about it now. Ha ha ha. Ha?”

The complaint from several people (including myself) is that last week’s episode of The Walking Dead felt too much like the horror movies the pilot promised so much against. Dialogue was atrocious, themes were too obvious, it borrowed so heavily from its genre-mates (even parodies like Shaun of the Dead) that it felt unoriginal, and the slow-build-tension, character-focused, trope-examining, AMC-promise-of-story was violated by what was, essentially, a conventional horror plot.

Perhaps I felt that way because I brought expectations to this episode. After talking it over during the Monsters of Television podcast, they might have needed a hook after that first episode in order to grab as many people as possible. Sure, the story for the first episode set a tone but we’re dealing with television afterall and it’s not called “broadcast” for nothin’. Stupid farmers.

In any event, the third episode is kind of a marriage of the two in that we have some interesting character deepening events with some heavy-handed themes, even ones that are vocalized pretty blatantly (more so than even the “us against them” speech Rick gave Mearle on the rooftop). There’s some good stuff here, some cheesy stuff, and one big huge “WHY. WOULD YOU DO THAT?” For those of you that watched the episode, I’m pretty sure you know where I’m going.

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“I accidentally turned McNab and my dad into confidantes. It’s a weird day.”

“This is way easier than sawing my leg off and being scared of a puppet with a voice modifier.”

Previously. On Psych.

Declan is trying to escape using the most convenient aircraft to him. He tries to get Juliet to go with him but the Man in Puka Shells constantly thwarts him at every pass. You see, the Man in Puka Shells wants Declan to be on his side but then violates his trust and recruits Declan’s followers behind his back. Although, to be fair, Juliet’s heart has always belonged to the Man in Puka Shells. Declan never really stood a chance. So, confused about where his destiny lies, Declan tries to kill himself with dynamite found on a beached pirate ship. Wait, that last part might actually be from Lost.

Really, Psych? A previously on? Just who do you think you are?

Welcome to the post-hiatus or, as the kids like to call it, season 5.5. A lot of promise from the first half of the season is meant to carry over to this half, especially with stunt episodes (It’s a Wonderful LIfe coming up shortly) and the on-again, off-again storyline that has popped up more frequently in season 5, especially with the Declan arc.

Shabbat’s come early because it’s time for Shules.

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“Is he grunting? I think I hear grunting.”

You may notice this is my first post on House all season. There are several factors. (1) It comes on the same night as Chuck and, with all the time I need to lament that show (both in writing and post-episode independent face-palming), I usually don’t have time to watch House on the night it airs. (2) House episodes tend to lean more toward the episodic and, after six years, discussing the banal Psych 101 the characters wield against each other in order to extract plot points is not only tiresome to read but boring to write. (3) I’ve been hoping against all hope that this season is a fake and that House is going to wake up and realize Huddy was just a figment of his drug-addled imagination.

That is, until tonight.

Though the addition of Amber Tamblyn (known to most as Joan of Arcadia or the daintier female cop in The Unusuals; sadly known to me as Emily Quartermaine on General Hospital) was intriguing, unlike Noel, I’ve suffered this season week by week. I know: other people have found it to be good, even the better of the past three seasons. I don’t. I’ve felt like Huddy, though set up for years, was a contrived ending to last season. I felt like House’s change in demeanor since being with Cuddy has been unnatural at best, antithetical at worst, to his character. I’ve felt like the rest of the diagnostic team has been weak sauce this season (not to fault the actors). But, finally, tonight, I saw something (however poorly executed) that might actually turn everything around for me.

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“You’re surrounded by walkers. That’s the bad news.”
“There’s good news?”
“No.”

Even the walkers get stereotyped.

Well, it was about time for Atlanta’s representative racist hick to come out and play small-time antagonist. I suppose we could do worse that Michael “The Rook” Rooker to portray him but I would’ve preferred him to not be there at all what with all the over-pronounced drawls everywhere else. But there he was, dropping the “N” word just so we could all be educated about how old divisions blurred when they had a new enemy to hate. Instead of pouring your generations-descended loathing onto classes and race, funnel your hatred into killing ghouls instead.

Last week, I described how a horror series could do things a horror movie could not, specifically build deeper emotional connections and construct stronger characters. Unfortunately, this is not an episode that does very much of that at all. In fact, it sounded and functioned more like the end of the first act of a B zombie flick. Where the pilot felt more like an AMC show (subtle as a show of this bent could be while never talking down to the viewer), the follow-up is very specific and very obvious. I’d say it’s forgivable, however, as long as this was just a way to get the new group out of the city and into some deeper plot. Otherwise, we’re looking at some serious disappointment.

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“Even his stubble looks smug and self-righteous.”

I feel you, buddy.

Eww.

Barring a miracle, we’re looking at a lame duck series. Just about every other series on the CW not rounding out a decade on the network and choosing its own destiny got a full season pick up while Life Unexpected still waits to hear is almost certainly cancelled. TV by the Numbers has marked it dead in the water for weeks, even positing that this show has less of a chance than the Melrose Place reboot (or at least that it’ll go out sooner than it did). To look at the tweets of LUX showrunner Liz Tigelaar, you might be led to believe that the constant wining and dining of her writers, taking them out on the town, is like a farewell tour. “Thanks for everything, guys. Stay tuned for the next thing.” Or maybe that’s just my assumption based on all my information.

Now, there’s no way those behind the show could know what position they would be in come the middle of their order. They had no idea that they would be an intra-network loser to a show that once featured a hospital worker prat-falling, dumping a human heart from a cooler, and helplessly watching a dog in the hospital eat the organ in front of the transplant patient. Yeah, that happened on One Tree Hill. But if this episode is any indication, they are not going to go quietly into the night. They are going out with a bang. A giant, disgusting, bang of wrong.

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