Desperate Housewives s6 ep 2

Susan faces up to one of her biggest challenges this week.  Her daughter Julie’s been attacked and is lying unconscious in hospital.  So as ever with Susan the question is: how can I make this all about me?  Credit where due, though; she always rises to the occasion, and after warming up by being visibly more hysterical and grief-stricken than everyone else, she picks a fight with Lynette who had done nothing more than keep her word to Julie.  Mike’s already wearing the look of a man who’s, well, married to Susan.  But he doesn’t have much to choose from now, following Katherine’s decision to be mad for a while.  And so another moderately sympathetic character bites the dust.

Against my better judgment, though, I must admit to being a little bit intrigued with the who-choked-Julie storyline, particularly given the hint that she was in a “complicated” relationship with someone.  And, frankly, all of the men on Wisteria Lane have a criminal past anyway, so it could be anyone.  At the moment everyone seems to think it must be the Fwas family, so Orson, Tom and Carlos form an unlikely little posse and confront Mr Fwas, who presumably remembering his days fighting Jack Bauer at the FBI is less than perturbed.

Other highlights?  Not many.  At least in acknowledging the possibility that seniors might, y’know, do it the writers are giving Mrs McClusky a storyline which doesn’t solely rely on her being a nosey old woman, although obviously she still is one, and (see series passim) has information that no-one else has about the crime du jour.  Then Lynette dipped the tiniest little toe-ette in Termination Lake, and withdrew it just as quickly after some useless boilerplate advice from Susan.  Chance missed, showrunners.

24 s8 ep 5; s8 ep 6

Poor President Hassan isn’t getting to enjoy his moment of triumph.  His preferrred means of dealing with political dissent back in Kamistan - rounding people up, perhaps imprisoning them, but mostly just killing them – is causing President Useless to go all squeamish about agreeing a peace deal with him.  Meantime, of course, the little off-the record briefings (along the lines, one assumes, of “My wife doesn’t do that for me!”) he’s been giving to his blonde journo chum haven’t gone down too well at home, and Mrs President Hassan’s leaving him.  UOTUS tries to persuade him to kill political opponents a bit more gently.

It’s not going so well for Ziya either, who had to sacrifice a thumb in the name of doing a deal with Renee.  But he gets over that remarkably quickly when she promises him money or something.  Renee’s trying to get back undercover so that CTU can get them some weapons-grade uranium, but if Jack thinks your methods are extreme, it’s safe to say that you might benefit from a wider review of your working practices.  As she makes clear, though, ”this deal is the only thing that I have”.  And she looks as if she’s telling the truth about that at least, which means that Russian mafioso Vladimir buys her cover-story and takes her back to his place.  He starts to set up the transaction,  then for some reason Renee needs a shower really badly.  Jack never showers when he’s pulling an all-nighter, Renee.  Trick of the trade.  Anyway, it handily places her damp and naked before a gangster who wants to have sex with her.  Heigh-ho.

Stuff’s happening with Dana and her criminal ex-boyfriend which would annoy me even to write about, so I won’t.  Except to say that the writers are making this storyline even more irritating by having Arlo, who’s behaving like the office sex-pest, demonstrating his concern for her by more or less pawing her.  Chloe sees him for what he is.

And Jack?  Jack’s running backup for Renee most of the time, then goes into deep cover by sticking a pair of spectacles on to play Meier, potential uranium buyer.  He’s already been scolded by Hastings  (“We don’t do that any more!”) for doing no more than hinting that he knows how to get information out of suspects  and had to listen to Vladimir sweet-talking Renee, so it’s not been a great couple of hours for him.  Or, frankly, for us: after the thrills of episodes 3 and 4 these two were a trifle dull.

Greek s1 ep 18

Look, this episode was a hoot, I admit that.  Lots of very funny stuff, and very entertaining.  I really enjoyed it, and I don’t want to come across as too negative about it, but there are two things that are really beginning to hamper my enjoyment of this show.  I may have mentioned them before, but, seriously, somebody needs to take the hint here, writers.  So listen up:-

No.1: – Every episode does not need to be about whether Evan and Casey should get back together/be friends/move on from each other.  Just pick one, dammit.  (And preferably the latter one.)

No.2:- Stop foisting Rebecca storylines on us. How many different ways can I say it?  SHE IS AWFUL.  Capiche?

Mad Men s3 ep 3

I really don’t know what the theme of this episode was, or even if it had one.  I suppose if it was about anything – not that it needs to be – it might be how 1963 stood at the intersection of post-war generational attitudes and those more commonly associated with the 60s. 

So we had a series of apparently disjointed storylines.  Don and Betty have been invited to Roger’s garden party, at which Roger’s younger second wife gets hogwhimperingly drunk, and Don makes an unexpectedly pointed comment about Roger’s behaviour in leaving his first wife.  I’m not quite clear where Don’s coming from in this series, I must admit: he’s already turned a blind eye to Sal and the bellboy, and elsewhere in this episode he makes it clear that he’s not entertained by Roger putting on blackface and playing the minstrel singer.  We know, of course, where he stands on the whole business of infidelity.  So is he that committed to the institution of marriage?  And Pete and his wife dance a quite remarkable, yet somehow sad, Charleston.

The junior creative staff are stuck in the office instead, and to relieve the boredom and try and get the advertising juices flowing Paul gets his drug dealer to come in.  Peggy tries marijuana.  I think she likes it, although it’s always hard to tell with Peggy.  Meantime, Joan’s throwing a dinner-party for a couple of her husband’s work colleagues, and making it clear that she knows what the etiquette for such events is.  She’s even quite nice to her husband, instead of calling him a rapist.  Then at his behest she sings and plays accordion to entertain the guests: once again, remarkable and somehow sad.  And, most sui generis of all, Don’s daughter Sally steals five dollars from her grandfather.  He tears the house apart looking for it.  She then pretends that she found it, but he totally knows she stole it.  And she knows he knows.  But he doesn’t confront her.

It scarcely matters whether there’s an underlying thread: ‘Mad Men’ is so very much more than the sum of its parts, and this episode has haunted me since I saw it.  Are any of these people actually happy?

Caprica s1 ep 1 parts 1 & 2

There’s a host of information about each of us across the internet.  Email, facebook, financial details and personal ones; that’s just the start of it.  Technology is a huge part of how we communicate, how we entertain ourselves and how we present ourselves, and it gets more and more advanced every day so of course we’re scared that it might eventually become too powerful – that’s why technology taking over has been a dominant theme in sci-fi for decades.  And of course, technology did take over in Battlestar Galactica.  The Cylons, artificial people created by real ones, rebelled and destroyed most of humanity.  Caprica is the story of how the Cylons originally came to be.

Eric Stoltz and Esai Morales play Daniel Graystone and Joseph Adama (father of the legendary Bill), respectively. Their daughters Zoe and Tamara are both killed in a religiously-motivated suicide bombing.  But death is not the end for Zoe.  Something amazing and wonderful and utterly terrible is about to happen to bring her back, as, before her death, she used all the available digital information about her to create a virtual copy of herself.  Her personality, her memories, her self.  Daniel wants to combine Zoe’s work with his own with cybernetics and bring her back into being in the real world, in a robot body.  He wants Zoe to live after death as the first Cybernetic Lifeform Node – the CYLON.

Shiver.

As a Galactica fan, I was always going to give this show a shot, but I found myself completely enthralled by the opening double-bill.  This is a beautifully crafted, fantastic piece of work, steeped in the classic BSG themes of science, religion, race and family.  The sets and the costumes are a sleek, gorgeous combination of futuristic and retro, the acting is great, and the atmosphere of grief and deep foreboding palpable.  Yes, it’s very slow, but watching it, I didn’t care; it’s absolutely compelling.  And especially exciting for those already acquainted with the BSG mythology. 

Newcomers to the franchise could easily follow Caprica and enjoy it, but they wouldn’t get the same thrill from meeting the young Bill Adama for the first time, or the same shudder of fear when Daniel produces the prototype Centurion, and calls it “Cylon” for the first time.  I’ve still got goosebumps.  Lovingly, respectfully written, Caprica can stand alone but definitely works best for the fans.  I’m one of them.

Heroes s4 ep 6

Soooo much better than last week’s, this was almost an entirely different show. 

Yes, we did open with yet another T-Bag voiceover, we did have to suffer yet another Sylar personality crisis, and we did have more of the carny rubbish, but those scenes were at least reasonably short and a good deal less annoying than they have been up till now.  In fact, I think they were kind of…..bearable. 

And the rest of the episode more than made up for them. Peter and Bennett teamed up again (yes!), this time to help Hiro, and managed to save a desperately troubled teenager in the process, while Hiro took on his own mission helping Emma in a very sweet, very Hiro way; both great storylines with moving and engaging results.  The “House of Death” was properly creepy, Emma actually seemed to have some manners for a change, and Hiro was just adorable.  Loved it.

Lost s6 ep 1; s6 ep 2

At this stage in the game, it’s probably fair to say that no-one else in TV history has become as practised at the ‘WTF?’ storytelling genre as ‘Lost’ showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse.  And you can add to that, in my view, an absolute conviction that, yes, they do know what they’re doing and where they’re going.

So when faced with a masterful piece of television like, particularly, the first of these episodes, all you really need to do is sit back and enjoy.  As I said at the start of season 5, every single episode of ‘Lost’ is an event, in a way that no other show presently on TV can match, and the writers know it. Not only that, but their mastery of the whole process of producing the 21^st century’s most speculated-about show has become absolute – Darlton have, somehow, managed to leak-proof the ‘Lost’ set, and neutralise speculation about which actors might or might not come back.  Thus there’s still genuine and pleasant surprise when old characters crop up again – yes, there he is, and him, and her.  Even Dominic Monaghan has popped in, taking a break from whatever it is he’s doing in ‘FlashForward’ (and I must confess that, without going back and looking, I’ve kind of forgotten, which doesn’t bode well).

And, in fact, episodes 1 and 2 were relatively uncomplicated pieces of work.  By ‘Lost’ standards, that is.  It looked like a straightforward telling of the post-Boom story along parallel lines: this is what happens back on the island if Jack’s plan doesn’t work, and this is what happens on Oceanic Air flight 316 if it does.  So on the island it’s all about the usual ‘Lost’ stuff: hatches, torches, running about, Others and so on.  The familiarity might have jarred had this been a few episodes in, but at the start of a season it all feels fresh again, and it’s good to have them back anyway.  I’m not sure that introducing yet another gang of island natives is altogether helpful at this stage, but we’ll see where that goes. 

Off the island, though, the action was at least as intriguing.  We’ve invested so much effort in following the Losties through time and jungle that we’ve kind of lost sight of why they were all travelling from Australia to LA in the first place, and it was oddly moving so see flight 316 actually touching down safely after all.  Thereafter everything’s as it was before the start of episode 1: Jack’s trying to get his dead father home; Locke’s in a wheelchair; Kate’s a criminal.  How do these stories play out?  (And what’s Desmond doing on the plane, brother?  Just how much history has been rewritten?)  Looks like we’re going to get a chance to see.

But back on the island, it’s pretty much Locke as Satan, I think.  There’s what looks like some pretty explicit religious imagery of baptism and rebirth as well.  One of the strengths of Michael Emerson’s performance has always been the delicious ambiguity he’s brought to the role of Ben, and it’s kind of looking again as if he and Jacob might, after all, be on the side of the good guys.  If, that is, the world of ‘Lost’ can be reduced to concepts such as “good” and “evil”; something tells me that it’s not going to be that easy.  If I had to hazard a guess about where this season is going, I’d speculate that the two storylines will converge at some point thus making some point about destiny, but, hell, I don’t know.  And I like not knowing.  Whatever happens, though, I hereby promise not to complain about the ending: as these episodes proved yet again, ‘Lost’ has always been about so much more than the Answer that occasional viewers think they’re entitled to.  Welcome back, guys.

The Vampire Diaries s1 eps 1 and 2

From the top….

Elena is an orphan.  Her brother is in pain, and is therefore being a pain.  Her best friend Bonnie is a psychic, witch or clairvoyant, she’s not quite sure exactly, but she’s definitely a bit supernatural.  None of them are vampires though; so far so human. 

Stefan, meanwhile, is a vampire.  He too has a brother – Damon – who is a pain.  Not in pain, just a pain.  Oh, and Damon’s a vampire too.  Stefan and Damon are (im)mortal enemies for reasons that are not entirely clear yet but involve Damon suddenly appearing in woods, mirrors, roadways, anywhere really in an 80s-music-video-evil style (he has his own mist and crow fly in to herald his arrival) practically going “Mwahaha”.  (Damon is not subtle about his evilness.)  He wants Stefan to be a bit more supernatural, and a bit less “human.”  Specifically, to get off the “I don’t drink human blood” train that all the hippest vampires are on these days.

In their words, Elena and Stefan “met” and “talked” and “it was epic.”  And because I’m completely predictable, I absolutely loved it.  Lots of textbook smouldering, and tortured longing and whatnot, and Elena’s very pretty and Stefan is kind of handsome (in a square-jawed slightly Dawson Leery-esque kind of way, true, but still handsome) so it was all very Twilight-ish and thus subject to much girlie squeeing.  However, plenty of self-awareness and humour in the script meant that the romantic cliches were slyly sent up so, as well as being cheesy, episode 1 was pretty smart and funny too. 

The second episode was a bit less smart, a bit less funny, and a bit too Damon-heavy.  Ian “Boone from Lost” Somerhalder did his best, despite being far too old to pass for a teenager, but Damon’s a panto villain, and an irritating one at that.  Still, Nina Dobrev’s Elena and Paul Wesley’s Stefan are both very likeable, and the episode was still good fun. 

The show does have another problem though – the diaries themselves.  Stefan and Elena’s journal entries form the voiceovers and for all the rest of the dialogue is witty and self-aware, the voiceovers are just naff.  Pretentious, corny nonsense. And that might be realistic given the characters supposedly writing them, but it also sucks.  Nowhere near enough to stop me tuning in every week, though.

Glee s1 ep 5

Comfortably the best episode since this one, and if you wanted to argue that it was the best so far I wouldn’t try and change your mind.  This was mind-bogglingly wonderful TV.

Will has found out that rival glee club Vocal Adrenaline has kept one of its star members in school for years, and decides to invite hard-drinking former star pupil April Rhodes, played by the indescribably wonderful Kristin Chenoweth, back to the fold.   The Glee gang, still smarting from Rachel’s (Lea Michele) defection to Sandy Ryerson’s production of ‘Cabaret’, are at first reluctant to welcome her.  But she wins them round with a combination of alcohol, muscle mags, and threesomes in the changing-room showers.  Oh, and by showing them how a real star singer tackles ‘Maybe This Time’ from ‘Cabaret’.   The writers, though, use the simple but clever device of cutting between Chenoweth and Michele singing the same song, and what’s striking is that the absurdly-talented Michele more than holds her own.  Together with her recently-demonstrated ability to scrub up rather well for the awards shows red carpets, I think we’re looking at the birth of a star.

Anyway, while Rachel risks getting cast in Mr Ryerson’s future production of ‘Equus’ (“Have you ever hung out in a stable?”) April and the glee club are cowboy-hatting their way through ‘Last Name’, and Will gets to duet with her on a karaoke version of Heart’s soft-rock classic ‘Alone’.  Finn, needing the glee club to succeed to get a scholarship, flirts with Rachel to get her to rejoin (but OMG you can totally see that he’s really into her!) but that’s before she finds out that Finn’s about to become Quinn’s babydaddy, so off she goes again.  Drunk April gets fired by Will, though, leaving the way clear for Rachel to step in at the last moment and rescue a quite amazing version of ‘Somebody To Love’.

OK, there’s a bit too much hugging and learning for me.  Not only that, but the whole “everyone deserves their chance in the spotlight” message was undercut by the showrunners, who very clearly edited some major cast contributions out of ‘Somebody To Love’, all the better to focus on Finn and Rachel.  But ‘Glee’ is one great big, silly, wonderful, joyous, life-affirming show, and this episode had added Chenoweth – and regular readers will know how I feel about her.  She plainly knows a good thing – she’ll be back later in the run.  As for the rest of us – the only question is how on earth they’re going to top this?

Greek s1 ep 17

“Parents show up and everything goes nuts.”

My thanks to Casey for pretty much giving us the episode in a nutshell.  It’s freshman parents’ weekend.  Casey and Rusty worry about their mum and dad’s approval, reconciling their college selves with their home ones, and the whole “you’re the one they like, I’m the problem child” issue.  Repulsive Rebecca’s father turns out to be equally repellent and beautifully illustrates the meaning of the phrase “learned behaviour”.  And Dale realises that you can love your parents to bits without spending 24/7 with them. 

Nothing revolutionary about any of it, but funny, warm and a nice calming break from the vampires, mind-wipings, cylons and what-have-you getting me all worked up this week.  Now where did I put my glass of warm milk?