Monsters of Television

“Anna’s a lizard? That sucks. She’s so hot.”

It’s been a long time since the sky turned red (well, only 4 days in story time), but V came out swinging. Questions were answered, things were shown, lines were drawn and other nouns were verbed. Earth continues to be a planet populated mostly by idiots as the V’s plans continue and most of us keep drinking the red Kool-Aid. I prefer Ice Blue Raspberry Lemonade myself.

We got to see the V baby! And she’s so cute! Ryan only got a short time with her before being banished from the mothership. Anna plans on fueling his hatred of her to lead him to the Fifth Column (of which he’s already a main member) and destroying them from the inside. Hobbs already has reservations about his rejoining the group. Understandable seeing the extreme anger issues Ryan seems to have developed. He beat the piss out of that tracker. By the way, was anyone else thinking about this during the chase scene? It’s all I was seeing.

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“No. I never thought our friends were criminals until we made friends with criminals.”

Ok. This must be discussed before diving into the meat of the episode. I feel cheated, No Ordinary Family. Daphne’s amnesia, a super exciting possible plot development, was just an outlet for introducing potential new viewers to the concept and to the character’s powers. It’s resolved in the first 2 minutes of the episode by touching her family members and relearning everything. All of the emotional weight from the brilliant ending to “No Ordinary Sidekick” was just wasted. Cheap, No Ordinary Family. Cheap.

Now that that’s off my chest let’s talk this week. “No Ordinary Friends” introduced us to the Cotton Family. The patriarch, Dave, was saved by Jim and so a friendship between the two families was born. Jim and Steph loved the possibility of having people they could talk and relate to. Apparently they forgot about George and Katie.

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“You are freaking out the invalid.”

Can you speak up so the bear can hear you?

Right out of the gate in 2011, ABC Family laid the calendar year’s premieres of Greek and Pretty Little Liars and, while some of our academic critic cohorts watch and review Greek, Matt and I are of different stock and shifted our attention to the lyin’ ladies of Rosewood instead. Previously on Pretty Little Liars, Aria continued her illicit relationship with a teacher, Emily conceded to be in lesbians with Maya, and Hanna got hit by a car after recognizing who she thought was “A.” Oh, and there was the tragedy of a side character dubbing her birthday party “Camp Mona,” complete with labeled SWAG and signage, but only kept reminding me of Who’s the Boss?

This week the show decompressed a little, going over the facts and processing the new information. Matt and I did the same upon the finishing the episode.

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“I’m not ready for this.”

When last we last this show, Ted was sorting everyone’s life out but his own and then went to watch It’s A Wonderful Life while the episode failed to really follow through with any reflections on Ted’s own inability to get his life in order. Needless to say, the show really only follows through with the Marshall and Lily baby plot.

But that’s not really what matters, is it? The episode is very unimpresisve, with very little of the inspired humor that could come from the premises (lasertag tournament, SANDY RIVERS!) but that button. Man, that button grabbed what’s left of my cold, bitter, cynical heart.

That is, if I still had one. Read more »

“So if we’re going to figure out what’s going on now, we have to figure out what happened back then.”

I’ve already seen the episodes that follow this one, up through, as of this writing, “Faith.” While I was watching, I was tweeting little bits about my enjoyment (and I really love this run of episodes as you’ll see), and regular commenter on this First Watch, Charlotte Howell, noted that this run of episodes is where she no longer needed convincing about staying with the show. I was pretty sold after “The Phantom Traveler,” but “Home,” “Asylum,” and “Scarecrow” have me fully committed to Supernatural. In that spirit, each one gets its own write-up, starting with “Home.”

Which starts off this: Damn. Just damn. Read more »

“Every legend has a source, a place where it all began.”

“Sometimes bad things just happen.”

This post was inspired by the episodes “Bloody Mary,” “Skin,” “Hook Man,” and “Bugs” found on disc 2 of the first season DVD set.

So instead of doing a blow-by-blow of each episode on the second disc of Supernatural season 1, I’m going to do a sum-up post since my notes on each episode tended to be roughly the same due to the trends present in each of the episodes. I’ll try not to make a huge habit of doing this kind of a post since I think there’s some value in addressing each episode individually, or, at the most, paired, but I make no promises. (It’s also Christmas, so I figure one long entry may be a nice break from dealing with whatever you happen to be dealing with today, be it family or boredom or both!)

In any event, at this point in the season, I think I can address one of its big central premises: myths happening in every day life and most of us simply aren’t aware of it. More importantly though is that these myths aren’t occurring in big cities. Despite the claims of Toledo and St. Louis, we’re clearly in the suburbs of those cities, so how is it that the urban myth is now a suburban one? Read more »

“We were the only real family you had, Nikita, and you betrayed us.”

Percy. Did you really think that this would hold Nikita? Really?

Karen and I have been watching Nikita all season, though neither of us on a super-regular basis. I know I had to marathon the series twice, missing  three or four episodes at a time, never exactly sure when it was on (and when I would try to watch it live, it would be a rerun!).

The most recent episode is perhaps the best way to check on the series, and make the case for tuning in, or going back if you stopped after a few episodes, like I nearly did. While “All the Way” provides for nice plot and character advancement and the episode also nicely raises the stakes of the series, eliminating some aspects of the show that would’ve eventually gotten worn out. Read more »

Figures the very next episode would go and poke a hole in my emphasis on “the local” argument. But I’m okay with that because “Phantom Traveler” is terrific episode that deals well with a sense of a place and applying the horror genre within it, especially in a setting that doesn’t often get horror applied to it: airplanes.

Airplanes, and airports in general, are anxiety-filled places. There’s people rushing to make a flight, people nervous about flying, people anxious about getting felt up by the TSA (or looking forward to it), and then there’s just the massive amounts of waiting that happens at airports that can be anxiety-inducing in other ways (“Can I take a nap? What if I sleep through my connection?” “Why is a single beer $12?”).

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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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