Did someone in Greg Berlanti’s organization replace the Green Arrow TV series with a video game? There are at least three sequences in the opening episode of Season 5 where it is basically CGI-like fight scenes, straight out of the latest spy/fight games. Cool looking, but almost looks animated. Very disappointing scenes.
Meanwhile, basically there are three things happening in the episode. First and foremost, there’s a new baddie in town who wants to take on the Arrow so kidnaps some people to do it. Second, Team Arrow is seriously undermanned on the street side, with Diggle, Thea, and the Canary all gone. Speedy is around, but she doesn’t want to be part of the Scooby Gang on the street side anymore. She just wants to be the Mayor’s right hand.
Neither of those storylines is particularly compelling, but the third one is how Oliver became a member of Bratva, one of the flashback story lines from his third year missing, when he went to Russia to keep a promise to kill someone. Highly entertaining and potentially character-revealing.
If you follow TVGrimReaper on Twitter, you’ll know that the popular view for ratings is that once a show is renewed for Season 3, they are pretty much guaranteed a Season 4 because S4 is where the syndication money kicks in. My question is more “Is Season 3 good enough to keep pumping money in or will we do S4 on a small budget to eke out every last dime no matter what it does to the show” (Hello, Andromeda, I’m talking to you!).
The reason I mention this is that Season 3 of The Flash can either be “swing for the fences” with conservation and judgement or go crazy and do whatever you want. With the S2 season finale where Barry goes back in time and messes with the timeline to save his Mom, S3 was looking like “anything goes” might be the order of the day.
In this timeline, Barry is still a CSI but because Mom and Dad are alive and well in an idyllic world for Barry, he was never adopted by Joe, never grew up with Iris, etc. Instead, there is a “kid Flash” that turns out to be Wally and a rival Flash battling it out. Barry doesn’t even have to be the Flash, cuz someone already is.
He goes out of his way to meet Iris, sets it up so he can ask her out on a date which she surprisingly says yes to, and tries to help Joe (who’s a spiraling drunk). The problem is that Barry’s memory of the alternate reality is fading, and as he tries to let the new reality take hold, Wally gets hurt to the point of near death. In other words, Barry has traded his mother for Wally, Joe, Iris, Cisco, and Caitlyn.
In the end, he has to go back in time and let the other Flash kill his mom after all. Then when he returns to the new timeline, Reverse Flash basically teases him that it won’t be the reality he was expecting. Everything starts off the same, and then he finds out Iris and Joe don’t talk. Not the world he left. Reverse Flash changed something, which looked like how he killed the mother (perhaps a knife instead of a vibrating hand).
I confess I was shocked they reversed the timeline that quickly. I was sure it would run several episodes at least. But overall good yet not awesome.
I really want to hate this show. I do. I really want to. Up front, I watch very few comedies on TV. Frasier, Cheers, Mash, sure. Friends, not so much. Seinfeld at times. With all the TV watching I do, the only one that currently makes my “possible” list is The Big Bang Theory and I have missed lots of episodes. I enjoy it but it’s lost its appeal as it approached everyone’s coupled status.
Romantic comedies for movies? Almost never. Heck, I’d almost prefer male slapstick stuff, and I *hate* that. It’s like Porkies for a less T&A-oriented crowd.
So what attracted me to this 1 hour romcom about two young 20 somethings? It wasn’t the RomCom side. It wasn’t that she works for the equivalent of an Amazon distribution centre leading an Office-Space-like position. The first ten minutes are almost mindless to watch. I simply didn’t care about Evie’s life. Fate, serendipity…zzzzz. But there was something a bit intriguing about two people ticking off things on their bucket lists.
When she actually meets Xavier, he’s awesome. Except for one minor red flag. He believes the Earth will go bye bye in about 8 months because of a meteor. So he’s quit his job, living each day to the fullest, ticking off things on his bucket list. Or his apocalist. And he wants someone to share the last 8 months with.
Xavier lives life to the fullest; Evie takes no chances. And that is the basis for two thirds of all RomComs out there, which I don’t watch; and the basis for some shows like Remington Steele, Castle, Moonlighting, etc., that I do like, but those are mysteries. So why the RomCom? Here’s the catch.
Evie is charming. The two of them together are even more charming. I am sick this week and taking tylenol to keep any fever at bay, but I may be losing my mind cuz I really like the show.
I’ve seen Evie before or rather the actress Tori Anderson. She played Sabine on Killjoys last season, and will likely come back in the future. She was badass there, here’s she’s sweet and, umm, well, charming. Delightful even. Totally light. Xavier is played by Joshua Sasse (Galavant) and while I don’t know him, he’s pretty good here as the roguish bachelor tempting the sweet princess. Right up until he commandeers her phone and sends an email to her boss as her, saying she resigns. That wasn’t so cute. Given the control issues that go with stalkers, and men who isolate women, I didn’t find it a particularly appealing note, particularly when she forgives him later. A fickle hand of fate does seem to be playing with their lives, making it better as it goes, but still.
The sister and mother are beyond annoying though, complete caricature characters, as are some of her friends and coworkers.
Hopefully as the two focus on their bucket lists, the final premise of the show, the others will fade into the background.
I confess up front — I’m a complete sucker for time travel shows. Within Star Trek, Quantum Leap, anything really. If time travel is involved, I’m probably watching. What do I want? Time travel! When do I want it? Irrelevant!
So when I saw there was a new time travel show called Timeless, I was good to go before the screen even filled in the first pixel. Which is not to say I’m not nervous…you can really end up with bad shows about time travel. (Time Bandits, I’m talking to you!).
And if you see Abigail Spencer in the trailers as the lead “historian” (they always want a historian), you might think, “Hey, she looks like the chick from Sliders!” And she kind of does. But Spencer always sparkles. She was fantastic on Suits as Scotty, even with the limited role for her. I liked her when she guested on How I Met Your Mother, The Glades and Castle (I really liked her on Castle). I even vaguely remember her from Angela’s Eyes back in the day, and that’s saying something. So despite her fish out of water, bopping around time, wide-eyed innocent doe role, I was excited to see her in a full show.
Her sidekick in crime time is played by Matt Lanter. He seems familiar to me, but the only thing I’ve really seen him in is the original Heroes, but that’s not where I remember him from. I think they’ve just got him done up as generic soldier boy #27 and so he looks like other actors. Good, not awesome.
And they need a techie, with the chance to make him black and give them some plot points for time travel (or as his character puts it, there is no point in American history that is going to be good for him as a black man). Again, good, but not awesome.
And the story for the pilot is kind of weak. ** spoiler alert ** Terrorist steals time machine, goes back to Hindenburg, and stops it from exploding. Sort of. Actually he wants a bunch of industrialists to get on board for the outbound flight and then he intends to bomb it. So it will still explode, just not in the original way. The team goes back to stop it, bungles it initially, and the Hindenburg lands safely. When it goes to take off again, they have to stop the bomb. Which they don’t do very well, but they do save almost all the passengers.
The show has established the basic ground rules:
Super genius invented machine, it’s a prototype;
It uses gravitational power to force time to fold back on itself momentarily to allow the machine to cross between times;
You cannot go back in time to any point you have already lived through, for fear of “doubling” yourself;
Ergo, you can’t do the same time event more than once either.
Change one thing, butterflies ripple throughout history.
It’s the last one that is the cool part here. Frequently, the focus in time shows (Star Trek, Time Cop) is entirely on “I stopped things from changing and therefore everything back home is the same”. And when the team returns semi-successful, some small things have changed, but it looks relatively the same. Put a checkmark in the win column for now.
Until Spencer’s character, Lucy, gets home to her house and finds out that her Mom isn’t dying of cancer anymore (good), Lucy’s engaged to someone (who?), and oh yeah, her sister doesn’t exist (oops).
It will be interesting to see if they “correct” those anomalies, or they accumulate more and more anomalies towards almost an alternate timeline. One that only the time-traveling three will know is different.
Elementary kicked off its fifth season without the detritus of the previous season hanging over it. In previous seasons, there’s often some big kerfuffle to recover from — invasion of privacy, moving out, relapse, beating someone, etc. Some trauma that provoked change at the start of the next season. Now don’t get me wrong — Morland taking over a big criminal enterprise at the end of season 4 wasn’t small, but it wasn’t affecting Sherlock and Watson as directly as previous season finales.
Season 5 starts with a bomber setting off bombs around a neighbourhood of NYC, similar to bombings that went off six years before. The Bensonhurst Bomber has returned, and is targeting Flushing. It doesn’t take much to find a suspect — Sherlock chases someone from the crime scene, the guy leaves some prints, but he’s cool as a cucumber. But Sherlock is convinced, even when he has an alibi for a new bomb. They zero in on an accomplice, put 2 and 2 together, round it off to 5, and crack the case. Nothing extravagant, and the deductions are a bit basic for them.
The only real “new” element is that Joan is feeling a little out of sorts that she’s missing the social / psychological perk of helping people the way she used to as a doctor or sober companion; now that she’s in the punishment business, she feels there is something missing from her life. The episode ends with her finding a possibility — as a mentor / reintegration companion for someone newly released from prison. It may mean she gets her own Baker Street Irregular, but for now, she has someone to help.
Okay episode, not the strongest, but still pretty good. Now, what’s going on with Morland?????
