Monsters of Television

“I am not a fan. I am not a groupie. I am an academic.“

I haven’t been writing much about Community lately, largely due to time constraints on my end. It’s been a little bit frustrating, but it is what it is. So I return, hopefully, for the rest of the season to keep writing about a show that I really really enjoy, even if it doesn’t always really work. Like tonight.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with “Competitive Wine Tasting” but the episode is kind of a mishmash of ideas and plots, each of which really needed room to breathe beyond their few scenes each. As a result, you can see potential for each plot kind of peek out, but since they’re just piled on top of each other, the potential is never realized, and we’re left with that, really, would’ve felt more at home in the early going of season 1 (before “Introduction to Statistics” or “Comparative Religion”).

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“Leela.”

Way to take away all the hope, show.

I mean, yeah, we knew it was coming eventually (it had to!), so it’s not that much of a surprise but I have to tell I was pretty devastated at the end of the episode. I wasn’t crying or anything, but given how the season has been building on Alicia’s accomplishments at work, how she’s been able to make decisions for herself, slowly rebuild her marriage,  and on and on and then to have it taken away (Undermined? Tainted?) by the man with the talking lion phone (notice the lack of comedy Andrew had this week?), I was pretty depressed with the end of the episode.

And will continue to be depressed until May 3. Which is one the next new episode is.

Is it May 3 yet? Read more »

“I’ll kill you when the time comes. We can do it now if you like. I think I got a baseball bat in the back.”

“Kneeing Damon Lindeloff in the pants felt really good.”

If the remaining episodes continue the way they have been since “Bombshells,” this might end up being my favorite season of House yet.

I know, I know. I’ve been bellyaching about this season all year, lamenting the impossible union that was Huddy, sniping about Thirteen’s replacement, predicting nothing but doom and destruction for our narrative sensibilities on an essentially bulletproof series. Well, unless they can’t strike a deal.

Now that Huddy is split and House has, more or less, fallen into full-on relapse, I don’t have anything to whine about. Instead, I’ve used my crying time to reflect on the season. Living through it sucked: House was distant from his diagnoses (his puzzles and reason to live) while maintaining an uncharacteristic level of patience with his girlfriend, Masters was a shade of Cameron with potential for complications that were never realized, the other ducklings became two-dimensional shadows of their former selves unless a spotlight shined on them. It was all about enough to turn me off entirely. But, on the whole, the season works in hindsight. If we forget the ridiculous way Cuddy and House got together at the end of last season, we can see Huddy for what it is: an escalation for House’s eventual valley-making crash. Thirteen would’ve been adjunct to this season since her misery would have no company as House experienced his version of bliss. The exploitation of Masters is a missed opportunity but might’ve felt forced anyway with the jaded goblins she works with turning her into one of them. Even though in the back of my mind I knew it all had to come crashing down at some point, I didn’t believe it. And now House as a mess again makes me feel like the season was almost worth going off course to sink him lower into misery than ever before.

And misery sure does love it some company.

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“I don’t think you know what Spain is.”

So that episode felt relatively pointless, and I’m not entirely sure where to begin with how many kinds of frustrating the episode was.

Maybe with the quickly (semi-)resolved Lily is frustrated plot that kind of nearly recycled the season 1 finale (different motivations, but same almost result)? Or Barney’s latent emotional issues? Or with the fact that Zoey is, as we all kind of suspected, a really annoying, overly challenging person, and that Ted is going to come to completely and utterly loathe this woman (except we already knew that from a previous episode).

On the upside, Robin broke up with Scooby.

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Would a smile kill you guys?

I’m completely over monster movie zeitgeists in our culture lately. The legends of undead villains and armies have been tampered with so much recently that people are running thin on ideas. What’s next? Unearthed mummies involved in romantic comedies? Finding a reason for Dr Frankenstein to make covens of monsters? Would they be covens? Gaggles? Maybe take after crows and be a murder? That might be a little too on the nose.

But it is getting a little silly. Zombies are showing up in remixes of classic literature and are being codified in fake survival guides. The Walking Dead has its heart in the right place (at least they carry on the tradition of zombies not actually being called zombies a la Night of the Living Dead) but is kind of ridiculous in every other aspect of its television being. How long until they go the path of the vampire, the story of whom has become so romanticized in the last decade that it’s almost centrist, somewhere between blood-curdling horror and wacky but lovable character. Do the people on Team Edward ever stop to think that the dude is a monster that drains to empty the blood out of things with teeth like a violent bestial killer while he’s amassed centuries of knowledge in stealth, slaughter, and being sparkly?

Such is the trouble with a lot of the yesteryear’s legends existing in our time of post-modernist reboot. We tire of these larger-than-life icons existing on a plane separate from us. We want to see their human-ish struggle. It’s even evident in superhero reboots, where Superman has a child, Iron Man is dying of the thing that saves him (to be fair, Marvel had a head start on the human hero thing), and Diana is riddled with neuroses as she tries to find a man (is anyone hopeful for the Wonder Woman reboot? I’ve already given up).

The problem with these things isn’t that we want to see these human sides of otherworldly characters. The issue is what we end up doing with them. Vampires have been taken to a treacly place that pop culture begs them to be in, at least a little while, until the backlash comes and they forget all about Sookie and their terrible Foghorn-Leghorn accents to become violent monsters again. No, showing a monster struggle isn’t a terrible thing but there needs to be a balance. Show the drama in a formerly human horror figure dealing with that which makes him or her other. Keep the humanity with the beast because that is the conflict. And Being Human does exactly that.

Didn’t think I’d get back to it, did you?

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“If I had real eyes, I would cry right now.“

So that’s that, the final episode of Sym-Bionic Titan. While the episode description that circulated was about Lance and Illana (somehow) returning to Galaluna and facing off against Modula, the episode served to tie up the plot threads from the past two episodes as the show finished what would’ve been its first season, not its only season. I ended up not reviewing the previous two episodes due to time and health issues, but it’s probably best to address them both here in relation to the finale, since all three are really a set of episodes that should, ideally, be watched together.

Seen in that way, as one chain of episodes as opposed to three individual episodes, the final run of Titan is actually fairly strong, even if “A New Beginning” isn’t too much of a finale and isn’t very aptly named as the episode returned the series to its status quo.

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Mommy Dearest is back! Ready to f some shit up. (Spoiler alert: she does a good job of that.)

The Vampire Diaries is back! And boy ever. Just when you thought this series had gotten a bit tired, it reminds you that there are few rules here. For instance, the endless betrayals by Katherine and Isobel eventually begin to seem routine—gee, Katherine can’t be trusted—who would have guessed that? But then a new type of betrayal happens, and the show takes a new direction. I imagine there are other viewers like me—waiting to see how long the writers and producers of TVD can keep up this lightening pace. According to this week’s episode, they aren’t slowing down a bit.

Some events that occur during this episode excited me (Matt!), some horrified me (Ric!), and some simply entertained me (all things Damon). But despite my personal allegiance to particular characters (Ric again) or aversion to them (Bonnie) I have to admit that particular moves suggest the writers’ are all too aware of critiques and have responded to them.

The title of this week’s episode speaks to a whole host of characters—Katherine, Isobel, Uncle John, Elena, Awesome Vampire Caroline, among others. All these characters are unsure who to trust. The best answer in the world of TVD, of course, is trust no one, but as these characters reach out to find someone in whom to put their faith, they remind us that the human part of all of them (dead and undead alike) is that part who wants to believe in someone else. It is an interesting message for a show that often fails to highlight any drawbacks to being undead, perhaps suggesting that it isn’t the status of your beating heart that matters, but rather the ability of your heart to care for another—that is what divides the alive from the dead.

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“I’m just trying to ascertain the extent of your humiliation.“

After last week’s just off episode, it was nice to see the show come back with something that clicked along better. I don’t know what it was about last week, the songwriting serial killer or the choppy transitions between scenes, but nothing really worked for me. And it wasn’t like the episode was trying something new (like a musical episode or something (though The Good Wife should TOTALLY do a musical episode)), but it just didn’t feel like an episode of The Good Wife.

“Wrongful Termination” did feel like an episode of The Good Wife, and a very good one. Not good enough to help me through my writer’s block, but enough that I’m willing to try and eke out a post on it. So this may be briefer and less in-depth than my usual thoughts. Apologies in advance.

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Big damn hero shot. And it looks oh so good.

I’ve been struggling with Sym-Bionic Titan since the second half of its season started (are we saying season 2? I have no idea any more). “The Ballard of Scary Mary” and “The Demon Within” were rough episodes (to say the least) while “I Am Octus” was a great meditation what it means to be human. And while I didn’t review it, “Disenfranchised” just kind of okay. I’ve not been totally blown away by these episodes like I was for much of the first run of episodes.

These two episodes, “Escape from Galaluna” and “Under the Three Moons”, probably encapsulate the good and the not-so-good (but not horrible) that the show offers up, seemingly on an alternating basis. But there other challenges the show faces as it moves into the last few episodes of its run apart from its quality from episode to episode. Read more »

“Can you ask me that question again?“

What do you do with a problem like Kalinda?

I’ve never been crazy about Kalinda. She of the Awesome Boots and Tight Mini-Skirts has never really done it for me. Instead Kalinda has been unnecessarily mysterious and opaquely sketched as a character, suddenly having knowledge or skills that makes her useful in each episode. And while she may be smarter than federal bomb experts, her talents (for me) have always left outside the norms of the show (as I point out in the link), making her a crutch for the show to rely on to get out of tight narrative spots with a sultry wink and a smile.

And now, after digging itself into a very deep, dark, and unnecessary hole all season with the Blake absurdness, the show needed a way to pay off all that time spent on a story that essentially went nowhere and failed to reveal anything particularly earth-shattering about Kalinda. So in an episode hyped up to reveal some serious character meat (and what better way to do that than a grand jury investigation?), The Good Wife instead turns Kalinda into another wedge in the larger story of Alicia and Peter’s marriage. Read more »