tvthatdoesntsuck

REVIEW FOR

Pushing Daisies
Season Two
Episode Seven
“Robbing Hood”
Written by Jim Danger Gray
Directed by Paul Shapiro

The facts were these: Pushing Daisies was cancelled last week.  ABC will probably air the rest of this thirteen episode season, which ends on a cliffhanger, but after that, our Wednesday nights with the Pie Maker will be a thing of the past.  A lot of people are enraged at this cancellation, but I’m actually okay with it.  Pushing Daisies was good, but it was also the least impressive piece of Bryan Fuller’s body of work.  With the second season, the show has become sort of monotonous, and I can’t help but think I’d prefer to see Fuller putting his nose to an entirely different grindstone, as much as I’ll miss the show when its gone.

Ironically, this week’s episode was quite good.  The mystery, involving an old rich man and his Anna Nicole Smith type wife, was probably the best one this season, and the emotional B plot going on was also interesting.  Dwight, friend of both Chuck and Ned’s father, continues to scheme after coming to the realization that the thought-to-be-deceased-by-her-aunts Chuck is actually alive and kicking… well, not so much kicking as working at a pie joint, but you get the picture.  Ned and Chuck go back and forth on the idea of bringing Chuck’s father back to life for one minute to get information about Dwight, which makes for a nice cliff hanger in the end.

Some funny one-liners and the most interesting mystery of the week this season made this an episode that I mostly enjoyed, but still… I’m more excited to see what Fuller comes up with next.

7/10

The Guild
Season Two
Episode One
“Link the Loot”
Written by Felicia Day
Directed by Sean Becker

For those of you who don’t know what The Guildis, take my hand.  I’ll help you get out from under that mossy green rock.  Felicia Day serves as writer and star behind what’s probably the best webseries ever.  The first season, which you can watch here, set YouTube on fire last year, and the second season premiered on MSN Video yesterday. 

Not bad.  After all the hype, I kind of expected it to be perfect, but a lot of it felt a bit off.  I felt like they were trying way too hard to put in a lot of technical jargon, which seemed to come a lot easier to them in the first season.  I liked the stuff between Codex and Zaboo most, obviously, as they’re easily the best in the cast.  After a few rough spots in the middle, the closing scene turned out to be really good.  Over an epic, Lord of the Ringsesque score, things start to unfold in a major way.  Zaboo’s talk of high powered Internet connection makes Codex go in for the kiss at long last, and an unfortunate move from Clara’s husband enables the neglected children to escape and unplug her connection.  Hilarious end to a pretty good episode.

Also, there’s a pretty hilarious extra at the end, so don’t X your window as soon as the video ends.

7/10

———————

Fringe
Season One
Episode Nine
“The Dreamscape”
Written by Zach Whedon and Julia Cho
Directed by Frederick E.O. Toye

Second best episode yet.  Inventive premise that reveals a lot about all the mysteries that have been developing.  The Massive Dynamics plot is touched, as well as Olivia’s brain-connection to a certain evil former lover.  Pretty much every plot thread that it seemed the writers left behind is picked back up and weaved skillfully into the mystery-of-the-week story.  I was shocked by how good this episode was.  Great job from everyone involved, writers and actors alike.

8/10

Heroes
Season Three
Episode Ten
“The Eclipse, part one”
Written by Joe Pokaski and Aaron Eli Coleite
Directed by Greg Beeman

Pretty big improvement.  Finally, we get a use of Isaac’s painting ability that doesn’t make the writer’s look like uninspired hacks who keep reaching to the past.  Arthur sketches up a series of drawings that leads him to believe something big is going to unfold, involving the coming eclipse and Claire, who has proven to be the catalyst for the formula that has become the centerpiece for this season’s arc.

The actual eclipse… well, this isn’t a spoiler, as it says this on the show.  It makes all of the heroes powerless.  That’s regular, human.  Not only does this shake up all the characters and register interested and revealing reactions, it’s also the first exploration of the central mythology of the show we’ve gotten since… well, the beginning.

As if it is the reverse of last week, the Elle/Sylar scenes are pretty much the only problematic ones.  It seems as if their characters, which were on the path towards redemption, have regressed to “do whatever the man says” villains.  Elle goes after Claire and attempts to shoot her father without so much as addressing how they–Elle and Claire–bonded earlier in the season.  It would have been fine–hell, it would have been tragic, dark, and ironic if they had addressed that… but nope.  It would have even been better if there were a hint that the driving force behind Elle’s decision is that she hates HRG for forcing her to demonize Sylar when he first realized his powers… but nope.  There isn’t really any depth to either her or Sylar’s actions here, so I’m not at all sure where they seem to be going with the arc that was just last weeklooking so promising.

All of the other stuff frankly rocks.  Nathan, Peter, (who have some awesome, Season One level brotherly issues) and the Hatian deal with a 24: Redemption-esque baddie; Matt learns a shocking and ironic secret about Diane; Hiro and Ando meet up with Seth f***ing Green at a comic shop; Mohinder loses his buggery; and Claire faces an injury that even she can’t overcome.

Overall, strong episode that might have been a 9/10 had the writer’s paid closer attention to the reasons why their characters do things.  The Heroes team looks like they’re on the road back to not sucking, but they need to delve deeper into their character’s psyches in order to get to their old level.

But I’m no longer scared for this show.  Pushing Daisiesis officially cancelled, so Bryan Fuller will likely be joining this writing staff.  I only wish he’d take over as show-runner and demote Kring to series writer.

7/10

24
TV Movie: Season Seven Prequel
“Redemption”
Written by Howard Gordon
Directed by Jon Cassar

It’s been a long time coming.  Due to the Writer’s Strike last year, the 24team decided to hold off it’s seventh season until the following year, in order to air a full, twenty-four episode season with no breaks, on time.  It was probably a wise decision, but at a really bad time for the series.  The last we saw protagonist Jack Bauer and his ever changing cast of friends was in the sixth and by far the worst season of the series, so a lot of the fans were already on the fence.  After leakage of many-a-spoiler, chief of which is the resurrectionof Jack’s dead friend Tony Almeida who is now apparently a terrorist, it seemed like 24 was delving even further into the cheesy soap opera plots that made up the sixth season.  So not only did they leave us with a bad season, they delivered a really odd concept for a seventh season… and then we heard nothing from them for about a year and a half.  Until last night.  24 returned with an original TV movie, a very hyped event that acts as a bridge between last season and the upcoming seventh season.  I was skeptical, for all the reasons listed above, but hoped the once brilliant team behind 24 would remind me how great that show used to be.  So what’s the verdict?

Eh.

Not bad.  Certainly not good enough to win back whatever viewers they lost last season.  The story seems to be caught between “unimportant prequel” and “standalone story,” and that lack of focus is a bit overpowering.  Instead of focusing on Jack Bauer’s redemption, which we fans were lead to believe would be the focus of the film, a lot of time is spent developing the political angle of the upcoming season, as well as developing a few bureaucratic villains that do little on screen but plot and twist their sizable mustaches.

The stuff that did go on with Jack was okay.  The fight scenes weren’t the best of 24, nor did the team go as far with the action OR character development as they should have in the first ever 24TV movie, but there were a few impressive touches of character development.  The basic plot involves Jack helping an old friend with a school he’s set up in Africa (specifically, the made-up nation of Sangala).  Things quickly get ugly when a team of rebels attacks the school, wishing the recruit the children into their army, forcing Jack to jump into action and save the kids.  This forces Jack to come out of hiding, and–in efforts to rescue the children–surrender himself to America, who he’s been on the run from since the end of Season Six.  That’ll be addressed in Season Seven, and I thought that part of the plot was really well done, as it worked well with the theme of the movie and also gave the next season a perfect launching point.

A few other good bits were the relationship between Jack and one of the young children, Willy.  We got to see the soft side of Jack again, which is always nice.  Carl Benton, played by Robert Carlyle, was a great addition to the cast, and his performance as the teacher/hero of the students was particularly riveting.  I wish I had something good to say about any of the other plots going on outside of Sangala, but the political scenes were basically old hat for 24.  I recognize that, in doing a prequel for a season that has already been shot, there are really tight limits as to what you can do, but I feel like there was a lot of expectation that 24: Redemption just didn’t meet.  I’ll certainly tune in for Season Seven, but I’m still as skeptical as ever.

5/10

True Blood
Season One
Episode Twelve
“You’ll Be the Death of Me”
Written by Raelle Tucker
Directed by Alan Ball

Raelle Tucker, who also wrote “Cold Ground,” otherwise known as the best episode of the series, was given the monumental task of writing the season finale to Alan Ball’s wonderfully dark new series, True Blood.  She had a lot of stuff to wrap up, and with creator/genius Alan Ball on directorial duties, the team did a very good job.

It was revealed at the end of last week’s episode that Rene is really a man named Drew Marshall, who was connected to the murder of his fangbanger sister before he disappeared.  This revelation that Rene was the murderer was only to the audience, as the fax that revealed Drew’s face was discarded by a sh**-for-brains secretary, so that dramatic irony made for some damn good tension in the first half of the show.  Michael Raymond-James did a great job as the sinister, volatile Rene, who seemed so nice before that revelation.  The way they sprinkled clues throughout the season brings to mind the way Rob Thomas subtly revealed the killers in the first two seasons of Veronica Mars.  Aaron Echolls was established as being capable of killing when he went into a violent rage on his daughter’s boyfriend, similar to how Rene was shown to have an explosive temper when he blew up at Jason in (I think) episode ten.  The fax with his face on it also brought to mind how Cassidy “Beaver” Casablancas was revealed to be the murder by Veronica finding him in a little league photo… it was all she needed to connect the dots.  Great minds obviously think alike, because the techniques that Thomas and now Ball used worked amazingly.  The early build-up of Rene might have put questions about him into the audiences head, but the hints were never too obvious.  It was really nicely done.

So, of course, the finale had to climax with Sookie facing off against Rene when she finds out he is the murderer.  Both Sam and Bill were used nicely in that fight, though I’m glad that Sookie was able to be the hero.  She deserved that.  The scene was changed dramatically from how it was done in the books, and Ball definitely improved on it.

I wasn’t sure about the rest of the episode, though.  It was all good, entertaining stuff, but I would have liked a bit less Season Two build up.  If they could have stretched out the confrontation between Rene and Sookie for a bit, the tension and pay-off would have been even greater.  Nevertheless, the establishing scenes that will lead into the arc of the next season has definitely got me hungry for more True Blood, so I guess–as one Borat would say–the finale was no less than a great success!

8/10

Today, we’ve got a double review of Supernatural.  Sorry for missing out last week, but hopefully the beefiness of this post makes up for it.

Supernatural
Season Four
Episode Nine and Ten
“I Know What You Did Last Summer” / “Heaven and Hell” 
Written by Sera Gamble / Written by Eric Kripke and Trevor Sands
Directed by Charles Beeson / Directed by J. Miller Tobin

Supernaturalreally out did itself this year.  It’s about to go on a little mid-season break, so we won’t see the Winchesters in action again until late January, but Kripke and the rest of the creative team managed to elevate this from a crazy good genre show to the best show of the season (so far).  These past ten episodes are the strongest the show has ever been.  There is a compelling, apocalyptic season-long story arc, both Sam and Dean have developed immensely, and the monster-of-the-week plots have been fantastic.  I’ll miss the hell out of the show while it’s gone, but the team deserves a break.  They’ve given their all and more.

As for the past two episodes, they mark a turning point in the season.  Dean, Sam, and Ruby try to save a woman who has somehow tapped into the angels’ conversations from angels and demons alike.  The uneasy alliance between the boys and Ruby leads Sam to reveal to Dean what happened between them while Dean was in hell.  I thought those scenes were by far the strongest Sam-centric stuff we’ve gotten all season, and that both the writers and Jared Padalecki did a great job selling the “bond” between Sam and Ruby.  What I didn’t like, however, was Dean’s reaction to discovering that Sam and Ruby had sex.  It seemed like it would be treated in a very dark manner, what with the way it was built up to and the battle scene music that played while Sam and Ruby bumped uglies, but Dean’s response was more “Ew, don’t tell me that!” than “You had sex with a demon, Sam!?”  I don’t expect them to keep going down the Dean thinks Sam is an idiot plot, but I’d at least have liked Dean to be as horrified as the viewers.

When the demons rush in, about the same times as the angels do, to pick up this “special girl,” things get very interesting.  Seeing Castiel and Uriel throw down with demons–namely Alastair, who remembered Dean from Hell–was so, so epic.  The way that fight was tied up to was well done, and really leaves a lot of options open for the writers.  Dean and Sam are sort of clashing with the angels, who need them, but will dispose of them the moment they aren’t useful.  All of this makes for a very tense drama with sooo many possibilities that it’s really impossible to guess where they’re going.

These two episodes were pretty good, but didn’t take it to the next level like I expected.  A lot of the episode this season really shat on the expectations and delivered a shocking good product, but this episode just about met my expectations.  Genevieve Cortese, who plays Ruby, is pretty much a godawful actress, though.  How she got past the first casting call is beyond me, and she’s pretty much been the only consistent stain on this season.  From her facial expressions, to her delivery of the lines, she simply can’t act.  It’s not even that she’s not doing as good a job with the character as Katie Cassidy did, it’s that she’s twisting the lines to be completely whiny… and is overall an appallingly bad actress.  In a show that casts guest stars as good as Misha Collins (Castiel), I don’t see how an error this gaping can be overlooked.  Ruby’s body got cut up pretty bad last episode, so hopefully she’ll vacate that shell and find a new one so we can wave goodbye bye bye to Ms. Cortese.  As long as we’re on the not-so-shiny side of things, I thought that we got a lot of angelic mythology dumped onto us in one sitting (the “Heaven and Hell” episode) that it was a bit overwhelming.  Other than the three problems I mentioned, these two episodes were solid.

I loved the way “Heaven and Hell” ended.  Dean finally reveals to Sam, in a teary monologue, exactly what happened to him in hell.  Ackles is a f**king great actor, and really sold Dean’s pain and regret.  It was astonishingly well done, both the build up and the execution.  We won’t see this show again until January, but Kripke and co. sure left us with a damn memorable scene to ponder for these few months.

Rating (4×09): 8/10

Rating: (4×09): 8/10

The Office
Season Five
Episode Eight
“Frame Toby”
Written by Mindy Kaling
Directed by Jason Reitman

While the style of The Officeis so strong that you can’t really tell one director’s work from another’s, it was great to see Jason Reitman’s name on the screen.  Nice little surprise.  This episode is also considerably better than last week’s installment.  Toby gets reintroduced into the mix, much to Michael’s dismay, but those who think the good ol’ Dunder Mifflin boss would take this sitting down are mistaken.  Michael and Dwight spend the length of this episode trying to frame Toby for sexual harassment and drug dealing, which is such a crazy concept that it just has to work.  This time, though, things get a bit too serious and the cops get involved, which leads Michael to almost see Toby as a person when he realizes that he’s really mistreating this man.  The Michael/Toby relationship has always been so interesting, and it was great to see that spin put on it.

There was a somewhat interesting, somewhat dry Jim and Pam plot.  I thought that the last scene with them was well done, with a particularly nice piece of acting from Jenna Fischer.  Overall, it’s definitely one of the better of the season.  I’m a bit let down that none of the subsequent seven episode of this season have been as good as the premiere, but I have faith that we’ll get there.

7/10

REVIEW FOR

Pushing Daisies
Season Two
Episode Six
“Oh Oh Oh… It’s Magic”
Written by Katherine Lingenfelter
Directed by Adam Kane

It seems like Pushing Daisies is on the road to cancellation.  All thirteen episodes of the second season are shot and ready to go… and ABC has yet to put in the order for a full season.  Some might take that as bad news, and as a fan of the show, I do feel their pain… but I actually wouldn’t mind this show ending after 2×13.  Providing that episode offers at least some semblance of closure, I wouldn’t bat an eye at its cancellation.  The thing is, the novelty is starting to wear off.  Three weeks without the show passed, and I sort of felt like it was a chore to watch this new episode.  It’s still quirky and consistent as ever, and even has some standout lines… but it’s just not up to Bryan Fuller’s potential.  If he let’s this show (sorry bad pun coming up) push daisies, then maybe he can either a) save Heroes by rejoining the writing staff like he said he would or b) come up with a new show.   Either would rock my world.

This episode was fair.  The mystery of the week didn’t really grab me at all, but there was a nice character moment at the end with Chuck that saved the episode from being a complete bomb. See, the thing about this episode isn’t that it sucks as a standalone.  It’s a fine example of what makes the show tick.  The only thing is, it feels exactly the same as every other week.  Nothing new is being offered.  And despite how pretty the sets look and how innovative the way it’s all executed is, you can’t base an entire series off of being innovative and witty.  There has to be substance, and I feel that the character arcs are being stretched way too thin.

4/10

Fringe
Season One
Episode Eight
“The Equation”
Written by J.R. Orci and David H. Goodman
Directed by Gwyneth Horder-Payton

Another fairly good episode.  The mythology continues to get more complex, weird, and annoying… because the writers have this obsession with making sure every single mystery-of-the-week ties into this ongoing conspiracy.  This pattern.  Well, it’s going to be hard as hell to lay everything on the table when the writers finally, if ever, decide to make this pattern clear to us.  Some big stuff, as in revelations and whatnot, has to happen very soon, or else I’ll start to think that this series is all about build-up and not-so-much pay-off.  Much like The X-Files, which I grew tired of after one season.  I hope that isn’t the case with Fringe.

But, aside from the odd choice to make every-little-thing have relevance to the main arc, I thought this was a pretty good episode.  Walter goes back to the mental hospital he once resided in, in efforts to get information from an old friend.  Things don’t go very well.  We get to see John Noble act his chops off, which was great.  He seemed to be the main focus of this episode, which is something I’ve been waiting for since the beginning.  I also very much liked the scenes involved a kindnapped child prodigy, but that didn’t seem to have much payoff.  He was taunted with visions of his dead mother, and we barely get a reaction from him as he’s woken from this trance.  I thought that was rather sloppy.

It’s among the better Fringeepisodes, but the unfocused plot and odd decisions on the writers’ part ketp it from being as good as it could have been.

5/10

Heroes
Season Three
Episode Nine
“It’s Coming”
Written by Tim Kring
Directed by Greg Yitanes

Okay, I’m aware something big is coming.  I mean, the episode is titled“It’s Coming.”  I’m just left wondering WHAT is coming and why it’s taking so long to come.  That’s what she said.  But still, were nine episodes deep in the season, and other than some character development from Sylar and a reveal here and there… what has happened?  The strength of the episodes are moderately high, for the most part, but the arc seems to plod around aimlessly.  This week was okay.  It had some great stuff, some boring stuff, and some okay stuff.  Here’s the lowdown/downlow.

+ Sylar and Elle:  Best scenes in the episode.  Kristen Bell is by far the best actress in the series, so it’s always a joy to see her perform the more dramatic scenes.  This bit of the episode has HUGE significance in Sylar’s development, and takes both characters to a really strange, captivating place.  The dialogue could have been better here, but that’s never being Kring’s strong point.

+ Claire and Peter:  Horrible.  Worst scenes in the season, probably.  They have a confrontation with Knox and Cheddar Bob… and it just doesn’t really make sense.  I like the “Claire’s blood” development, but how they got there was careless.  Claire, in escaping from Knox and Cheddar, had a plan to distract them from Peter, who she thought they were chasing.  What was her plan?  Jump out the window in the exact direction Peter was climbing down.  What would that do?  Worse yet, when she landed, she said to Peter, “I told you I had a plan.”  The only thing that could have amended that was if Peter called her an idiot.  Spoilers: he didn’t.

+ Matt:  Meh.  Not bad.  Kind of anticlimatic, but I did like how, in the end, this plot made it seem like two definite sides were forming.

+ Hiro and Ando:  It’s like carnival food.  It’s good at first, but gives you the sh**s later.  So Arthur Petrelli made Hiro think he was ten years old.  Funny, yeah.  Stupid, yeah.  An excuse for Kring to make Hiro behave like an Anime character–very, very much yeah.  It might have been okay in an episode that had stronger B plots… but this just didn’t.

Hope it’s better next week.

5/10