Geeky TV commentary - Agents of SHIELD 3.1, Limitless 1.2

Agents of SHIELD airs at 9pm on ABC Tuesday nights. SO MANY SPOILERS BELOW.

Yay, it's back! It feels like it's been at least 83 years since we saw Fitz on that really bad day, and it seems like he's been taking it badly. All summer, he's been tracking down leads, over and over and over, and Coulson has been indulging him because he understands how much Fitz cares about Simmons, and he needs him back. Fitz, though, has just one more mission that takes him to Morrocco like some Indiana Jones / James Bond hybrid, where he walks up to a radial arms dealer like it's not big deal--a sign of bravery? or that he has nothing to live for and doesn't fear death?--and trades a case full of weapons for a scroll that claims to explain everything about the obelisk.

It's just one word inside the scroll, though: Death, in Hebrew. That brings to mind the Golem, to me, but who knows where the story is going?

Anyway, he flips out and screams at the obelisk, but it doesn't do anything and all our hearts break big time because he's the sweetest one and the world keeps hurting him.

And then! Then we get the last-minute-of-the-episode-reveal that SIMMONS LIVES! She's in a blue-filter alien world with two planets in the sky, in a rocky desert, hurt but not stopped. She looks scared. She looks like she's running from something. She doesn't look like she's been there for three months. It looks like one of the dead worlds from Thor, if anything, but again, who knows? Could be anything. But it means the obelisk is a portal! They just have to figure out how to activate it!

And, whoops, that's not the A-plot.

The A-plot is that the terrigan crystals have started spreading around the world and are starting to affect people. SHIELD has tracked at least five, and the one they're tracking in this episode is the first one they've gotten to before they get taken or killed. His name is Joey, and he melts metal, and he doesn't want to go into mutant relocation because he only just came out and got his life together and found something approaching happiness.

Skye is now going by Daisy, and she got him to safety at SHIELD with the neatest flying-room-pod ever, and there was no time in the episode for Fitz and Mac to take credit (or if either of them did, I missed it because it went too fast), but you know they came up with it. Daisy has a superhero suit now, and she controls her power effortlessly, and Mac is her partner but she's the muscle and it's so good. Mac is so much better going along with all the crazy around him and just sort of complaining and then being awesome anyway.

Daisy says they need Lincoln, since he's an actual doctor AND an Inhuman, and he knows what people need when they go through terrigenesis, but when they go find him at his actual job as an actual doctor in an actual hospital, he insists that he's not going to work for anyone anymore, and he just wants a normal life. Too bad that's now allowed. A big spiky-haired Buffy-monster came busting through looking for him and busted up the whole hospital before escaping. Linc goes on the run, Daisy and Mac go back, also on the run.

Meanwhile, Hunter and Coulson have been tracking a mysterious woman they think is responsible for the other Inhumans disappearing, and find that she thinks they're the responsible ones, which means there's a third faction neither of them knew about.

Coulson figures out that there's no more than 17 months and 21 days before the crystals spread their dissolving all over the world, and the new-power events will increase exponentially.

Other neat things:

• Bobbi is still healing her broken leg and gets to be a scientist since Simmons is gone and Fitz is everywhere; she and Mac both don't want to tell Fitz that he can't do this anymore, so they just pick up the slack and it's beautiful.
• Coulson's robot arm is amazing. His stone hand is in a case in the lab, where it can be studied and he can, presumably, visit it when he's feeling mopey.
• Coulson also has the axe that did it hanging on his office wall now.
• The new Bus is awesome, and less like a plane and more like a massive quinjet with helicarrier fans. It looks like the merging of the SHIELDs did them good, because they've got more toys and more lightbulbs.
• No sign of Reyna coming back yet.
• Bobbi and Hunter are debating getting married again?

I read a headline somewhere yesterday that said the show is now the superhero-powered show that we all wanted since the beginning, and I think that's accurate. It's definitely feeling more together than it did most of last season, with a better tone even on the serious stuff, and characters who know who they are and have stuff to do. And, probably best of all, they've been handed this plot point that will change everything in less that two years, and it's mostly their job, so far, to deal with it. Powered people popping up all over the planet with no idea what's going on and SHIELD still being small enough that a lot of them are going to fall through the cracks--that's a big deal. The movies will be getting that, sooner or later, but right now, it's SHIELD, and if we're all lucky, they'll be back to getting places before they're too late again, like they should be.

I've really missed Coulson-the-agent, who just does his job and knows what's going on and isn't at all flapped about it. If they can get back ahead of the crazy, we can get that back again, as well as a useful SHIELD, and any number of characters who can cross between the shows and the movies and do what this show should have always been doing: stitching the world together between the movies!

So all in all, it's a good looking start to the season!

Limitless airs at 10pm on NBC Tuesday nights.

Yay, it's still cool! And still fun! And still totally bonkers in that cheerful way that I love!

This week, the FBI wants Brian to be analyst and he was under the impression that he was going to be a field agent getting to do cool stuff with the team. They ration his drug (and since they're got making it, won't they run out sooner or later?), and they tell him he needs to learn Farsi because that's what they need.

Which he does, but doesn't take long because he's so smart, and he gets bored. The team is investigating a crash that killed a guy who's been doing exposes of big-business creeps. Brian discovers that there should be a chip and a bomb, which there is, and they trace that to a guy who somehow managed to build bombs on contract and then set himself up as a bomb expert for TV interviews. The gall of him. He admits to building it all, but he says he left the set up and someone else picked it up and the chip was never triggered.

So dead end. The doctors think the guy had a stroke. Which leads Brian to the theory, after a long day of running all over the place to talk to people and winding up in Rebecca's living room again, dead sober, hung over, and not really able to explain it well, that the stroke was the weapon. He found two other people of similar ancestry and important jobs who had a cold and then died mysteriously of a stroke, and he thinks there's a virus that targets people with the Genghis Khan genetic marker. How neat is that?

Tracking that leads to a coffee shop where they see someone spraying the cups, to a lady who can't be affected by it, but her lover can be, to a biotech firm. He says he's safe, which is practically a confession, and Brian figures out that everyone hates him and they can get rid of him if they send him the proof they need. Which they do. Before he's done talking.

Meanwhile, he's trying to convince his family that he's doing something right, but he can't tell them anything about a top secret job, and his dad figures out that he's lying about a lot of stuff, and is concerned about that drug connection from last week. Rebecca figures out that if he hires his dad as his lawyer, he can tell him anything and it's protected by confidentiality, which is brilliant...except that when he goes to do just that, he finds that his dad's new at-home nurse is that lady who gives him his anti-side-effects shot, and she reminds him that he's promised not to tell anyone anything.

It was a fun and exciting story, but like the pilot, the really great part is how it's told. The voiceover is clever and irreverent, the difference between enhanced Brian and hungover Brian is instantly feels-making, the team is great, and Brian literally knocking down walls to shake his guards and do what needs doing when no one will just let him do it is fantastic. I hope Mike and Ike stick around and become actual characters, even when he doesn't need guards anymore. Like Casey in Chuck.

The visuals, too, are exactly perfect. Montages of him being amazing are always good, and the maps with the dotted lines as he walks all over the city, and the floating equations and details as he puts stuff together are perfect. The lighting changes between enhanced and not were more consistent this week, and Rebecca cleaning up his messed and smoothing the way for this hyperactive world-changer she volunteered to work with are some of the most useful scenes in the episodes so far. She manages to be in control without being controlling, and there's little moments that show that she likes him, even with all the trouble he causes her; she's amused at least, and possibly a little charmed, and it's adorable.

I hope he always winds up in her apartment when he disappears and comes down. I hope they both get to do stuff other than what he can do on the drug--or when he can't get ahold of the drug. I hope this trust they're building can go far enough to feel solid before things get really tested, which they'll have to be before the end of the season.

Other stuff:

• Boyle still doesn't like him, but is fighting him being around less, settling for snarking.
• Every time he tries to do a computer search for the Senator, he crashes the whole grid to his--or anyone else's--house.
• The boss lady is starting to get a personality, and her exasperation with Brian is golden.
• Brian winning Trivial Pursuit while on NZT is so great.
• Brian is so good-hearted. He's a hyperactive puppy, but while he's wandering around solving all the problems at once, he's also helping random people he finds along the way and taking care of stuff for his dad, and not doing anything illegal or unfair as he does it. I hope he stays that way, and that it becomes a thing--that he can be trusted to do what's right and kind, no matter that this is a show about willingly being addicted to a drug that's part of some big conspiracy.

Limitless manages to make it look effortless while they walk the line between cheerful cleverness and serious drama about real things, keeping it mostly on the cheerful side without devaluing the seriousness; it's just that Brian's point of view hasn't had a lot of seriousness in it up until now, and his general point of view is irreverent and funny and unconventional.

What did you guys think of tonight's shows?

Previous Tuesday commentary:

• Limitless 1.1

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Geeky TV commentary - Gotham 2.2, Minority Report 1.2, Blindspot 1.2

Gotham airs at 8pm on Fox Monday nights.

This week's episode was more fun than last week, and it's almost definitely because it was almost entirely about the villains. Specifically, about the Maniax, that group that escaped the asylum last week, consisting of Weasel Dude, Evil Josh Gadd, Tank, Probably Joker and Babs. They were hanging out in the penthouse of the rich guy, eating donuts covered in gold leaf and sipping tea while also playing with chainsaws and out-crazying each other with Russian Roulette, because people on TV love Russian Roulette. Probably Joker won, of course. And they tried to burn up a bus full of cheerleaders, but Jim saves them.

Then they went on a rampage that killed like 80% of all the cops we've ever seen, including their new boss who has been there for all of a minute and deserved better, But that leaves, basically, only named characters--Jim (roughed up but not dead), Harvey (back from the bar, hat and all), Nygma who got shot  in the arm saving Miss Kringle, and Lee, who is still being grievously underused.

Last week was a fake-out with the guy in the cape; these are the real villains, and they're bonkers, and Probably Joker is so good at this role that he elevates beyond the silliness without a trace of cartoonishness--though he does channel Mark Hamill's cartoon Joker a little--and manages to be about as chilling as you can be on network TV at 8pm. And, as we suspected, the show works better when the focus is on the baddies. It's unclear whether they're just that much more fun than anyone good, or if the very nature of the franchise makes it actually about the baddies and makes it very hard to be about the goodies.

Meanwhile, Bruce turns on his dad's computer, Alfred takes an axe to it, Bruce fires him even though it's almost definite that you can't just fire your legal guardian, but then stops him from actually leaving by saying he can come back if he agrees to train Bruce and make him strong. Oh, and fix that computer.

Alfred has no idea what to do with computers, so in a scene where he might have been coming onto Lucius Fox at a bar, he manages to tell him enough around the secrets to get him to come to the Proto-Batcave and fix it. He tells Bruce that he can, but it'll take time, and he doesn't know or want to know what's on it.

Also, Bruce heard that there was something at the precinct and rushes over to make sure Jim was okay, apologizes for being a brat before, and hugs him. He's almost as tall as Ben McKenzie now. Man, he's grown.

If the season has a majority of shows like this, and less like last week's mopey-Jim and weird tone, that'd be fine. But we need more Penguin. He wasn't in this episode at all, and that, really, was criminal.

Side note: How long ago were these episodes filmed, and will they do the ol' ignore-that-i'm-pregnant or will they work it into the plot, when Morena Baccarin starts showing?

Minority Report airs at 9pm on Fox Monday nights.

Case two! Dash is hustling chess, since he can see the moves ahead of time, and gets a vision of a girl with really ugly shoes getting killed. They figure out, through the magic of their vision-projector, that it's at a club, and they find her, but she's too early. Dash jumps the gun and almost gets arrested for assaulting her brother, and the guy who killed her in the vision hasn't even met her yet.

Turns out, their main suspect is a professional pickup artist--who uses science and psychology, so they say he's a pickup scientist, but he's gross either way. They tail him through most of the episode even though Dash is super unhappy with the idea of using her as bait. They can't arrest him early, because pre-crime is illegal, but they also can't let him kill her, so they have to catch him  in the act and stop him. He's a scumbag, and they're all ready to believe it's him, so of course it's not--it's the obsessed weirdo bartender who felt snubbed, and who got her when she went back to the bar after the pickup artist made her uncomfortable.

Meanwhile, Agatha is still trying to get Dash to come home and Dash is insisting that he has work to do, and Arthur is being a scumbag in the name of protecting his brother even though the brother in question has made it clear that this is not anything he agrees with. Arthur had them track a case from 30 years ago in exchange for the victim's name, and the case turned out to be their mother's--she died, and they were orphans.

And at work, Vega is getting in trouble because Akeela feels like she's being jilted as a friend since Vega won't tell her what's going on, and her ex partner wants to know what's up with her and assumes that she's mad at him for getting the job that should have been hers. She lets him think that, since she can't tell anyone that she's working cases off the books with an illegal precog.

Last but not least, one of the girls that Dash hustled in the park asks him to play another game in a very flirty way, and their caretaker gets a flashback where he was concerned that they might not do well out in the world.

The second episode was as much fun as the first one, and it's nice to see that there were consequences to stuff that happened last week, namely that Vega's story that the baddies from last week accidentally killed themselves doesn't add up and that's brought her unwanted attention. She continues to balance competence and a little stubbornness, with a huge compassion that covers their potential victims AND Dash, who needs it. She's not yet thinking of him in terms of partners, but he's already called her that because she's basically his only friend and he's there for the long haul--and he called her that even though he didn't know if she'd come talk to him when he called to tell her he'd had another vision.

He is the definition of cinnamon roll, and he needs to be protected at all costs.

He was also so awkward this episode, though he used that awkwardness to try to save the girl in a nice twist on the trope. It didn't quite work, but he wasn't embarassed and didn't fumble; he directly applied his bad new knowledge to intentionally weird her out and get her to go home, and he was cute while he did it.

And there were echoes of future events, which seems appropriate for a show about precogs. Agatha has some vision that involves Vega looking down on them, and the precinct is going to be part of the pilot program for testing a new robotic-mechanical-computer crime prediction service that's meant to be better and more controllable than the precogs ever were. Neither of those things will go well, if there's any plot in the world, which there is.

There's still a little more character balance that needs to be done, they don't quite all seem to have a handle on themselves yet, and there's a lot more character work that needs doing, but there's plenty of time, even if this is a short season. And they're mostly there; it's probably better that they grow into a true partnership, storywise, anyway, than just instantly be total besties.

This week's fun tech:

• A heads up display on a stroller for babies
• A game that involves what looks like a magnetic gauntlet and a flying sphere that goes all over the place
• A bracelet that uses your pheremones and biochemistry to tell you whether you're compatible with someone
• A single sheet of paper that acts like a whole book
• Training simulations
• Moving tattoos and moving posters

Blindspot airs at 10pm on NBC Monday nights.

This show is something else! Already this week, there's a guess at who Jane might be--though they don't tell her that they have the guess since they need to run DNA tests first. Usually, a show based on a mystery would have drawn that particular one out longer, but this one is just barreling along, and next week's preview seems to have the answer to whether their guess is right.

And while last week was mostly about Jane, this week, Jane steps back just a little and lets the others do their jobs and, in the case of Weller, gets a little backstory. He's got a sister who's been staying with him with her kid. He doesn't do well with kids being taken--which, of course, this week features--because a girl he knew as a child went missing. His dad was blamed for it and has suffered for 25 years under the idea that he murdered her. That same dad is dying of lung cancer, and his sister wants him to go talk to him, but he doesn't want to.

For the team, Weller insists that Jane needs to go into the field with them because she's proven she can keep track of herself, and they still don't know when the tattoos will come in handy or when she'll get a memory. Reid disagrees on almost all points, and is endearingly sassy about it. The Doctor is so cutely nerdy about her computer she's built to decipher the tats. And the other lady on the team gets to have some descent scenes with Jane and is starting to get a personality of her own. She is, apparently, pretty hardline about what good and bad people do, which worries Jane, since the memory she got today was her shooting a nun in the back of the head.

That, of course, isn't the whole story, and the nun looked more like an agent in the rest of the memory she got after chasing down their perp--a rouge drone-operator / bomber who is so traumatized by PTSD that he's taking out everyone he blames for what happened to him. There's three huge explosions in a short amount of time, and because of how this show is structured, that wasn't even the most interesting part!

Right before one of the explosions, Jane saw the bearded guy from her memory who killed Chao last episode, but they have to get out of the way of the incoming drone and she loses him in the shuffle. But he's around, and he's real, and right at the very end of the episode, he comes out of her darkened other room in her apartment and grabs her. Cliffhanger!

Jamie Alexander has nailed this woman. She's got this perfect balance of extreme anxiety and complete deadly control that she's always surprised when she has. She's scared that what she'll find out is that she was horrible and not worth remembering, but she also can't really function with no past and no knowledge of what she likes or doesn't like, what she can and can't do, where she comes from, who she knows. It would be nice if, after a while, she can start having less-stressful moments where she tries different foods and looks at clothes and basically gets to take the time to find out what her own opinions are. There could be really sweet moments of wonder in amongst all that trauma and fear, if they want to put them there.

Weller has always been steadfast in believing her, and now we know that he's decided that it's because she's definitely that girl; it would explain why his name is on her, though not who sent her to him, and why they both just clicked, but it's so early in the story that there has got to be more to it than that. It feels like it's more likely that someone wants him to think that she's that girl than that she actually is, and if it turns out that she is her, there's got to be a bigger mystery than her identity. Despite that being one of the big ones now. Honestly, if it turns out that her identity is discovered that easily, it might feel a little like a bait-and-switch, since it was sold to us as the mystery of Who She Is. That other bigger mystery would have to be super-good. The good news is that the writers of this show seem to be up to the challenge, so far!


What did you guys think of today's shows? Share here in the comments, or come talk to me on Twitter!


Previous Monday night commentaries:

• Gotham 2.1, Minority Report 1.1, Blindspot 1.1
• Scorpion 2.1

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Weekly Geeky Link Party #1!

So I was looking for Link Parties where I could share my geeky stuff, and where I could find other great geeky blogs to look at, and I couldn't find any! There are some awesome link parties around, but they seem to mostly be fore mom-blog stuff--recipes, DIY, home school, and a subset of writing and classroom ones.

But link parties are such a great idea, and so that all the geeky posts don't get lost in the shuffle of awesome but non-geeky stuff, I decided to start a specifically geek-themed link party myself, here on my blog! I'll put it up each Monday, and it'll stay open all week so you wonderful readers can link up whenever your posts go live.

At the end of the week, I'll choose a few posts to feature in the next week.

For the purposes of this link party, geeky counts as almost anything that geeks love:

• Genre books, television, and movies--reviews of them, discussions, art, fan works, commentary, news posts, whatever.
• Video games from all ages and of all sorts.
• Comics! Any and all comics, really.
• Geeky genre events--cons, concerts, classes, online stuff, anything.
• Geeky fashion--profiles, lists, how-tos, discussions, whatever.
• Music! There's not a whole lot of genre music coverage that I've seen, so if you're talking about it, lets see it!
• Cultural discussions!

The rules:

• Pick your best post or three, and link it up
• Comment on some of the other ones--don't be a dick
• Keep it clean--no porn, no attacks, nothing mean or gross
• Revel in all the geekery!

An InLinkz Link-up

Geeky TV commentary - Fear the Walking Dead 1.5

Fear the Walking Dead airs at 9pm on AMC Sunday nights until next week (the season finale) and then will be replaced by The Walking Dead.

Do you guys remember when Flash Forward was on and their main problem wasn't the concept or the characters, but that they kept looking at and focusing on the ones that had very little going on while people off screen kept having much more interesting stuff happen to them? That's what I kept thinking of as this episode unfurled.

See, Ofelia's soldier boyfriend was captured and was being tortured by her father to get the information needed to save her mother. Did we get to focus on Ofelia and what that must be like? No, we focused on Travis trying to talk to the soldier we already know is a raging a-hole and not likely to help them at all. Even when Travis is on his way with them to the Facility and gets stuck in the car while the soldiers get in a firefight, we were stuck with him. It was atmospheric how he could only see snippets of what was happening and could only hear people dying on the radio, but it wasn't story--not the way the slow-mo drive-by of the hospital the other episode was. It was a perfect chance to take us in with the soldiers and show us what's really going on outside the fence and with the military, but nothing really happened to anyone we know there.

Or we were with Alicia. Her mother went looking for her, found the soldier boyfriend in the basement, and promptly forgot that she had a daughter or a story of her own, and, from what we can see, basically sat at a table in another room while all that was happening. Meanwhile, Alicia and Chris went and busted up a rich person's abandoned house up the road.

Nick was in a cage, going through withdrawal again, with a guy who talked Doug The Neighbor into a breakdown and then turned around and saved Nick, but we only got two little scenes of that, and there's not much indication of what's going on with that except that the dude has a plan and thinks he needs Nick.

Griselda was off-screen, then unconscious in a cage with a missing leg, then feverish, then dead. Liza had to put her down so she wouldn't get up, and like barely a handful of moments were spent on that.

The focus was in all the wrong places. It's the second to last episode, and it feels like they're holding back, and that's annoying. Don't save your best stuff for the finale, show, give something good in every episode.

What we did learn this ep, though:

• Daniel is almost definitely a retired hitman, and definitely used to be a torturer
• Griselda knew about whatever he was and seems to have defied someone about it
• The doctors definitely know what's going on, but they apparently keep disappearing
• The soldiers had a plan to abandon everyone, and it goes into operation in the morning
• They're already leaving late at night when Alicia and Chris are heading home, and they don't so much as blink at two kids out after curfew
• There's a plant to "humanely dispose of..." something
• Daniel found a stadium PACKED with zoms that will almost definitely cause the first real havoc in the finale, if we're lucky
• Travis is STILL to soft-hearted to survive in the wild now, and can't stop seeing zombies as people and somehow it hasn't killed him yet
• This family was all manner of fragile before the end of the world or be so fractured and disjointed so quickly now

We already knew the soldiers were awful people. Except for that one, apparently, who looks like he's going to get as abandoned as the civilians there in the fence. It would be useful if he stayed with the group, but will he want to, after being tortured for his information when he was the only nice soldier we ever saw at all?

It feels almost like the characters are not characters so much as they're pawns being moved around by the plot. Maddie is a self-possessed and reasonable potential leader--except when she's not because that would get in the way. Alicia is the only one with a heart--except for when she's entirely gone. Chris is the activist--except when he's also gone, and busy whining and complaining instead of doing anything useful like he was one episode ago. The show as a whole seems to be drawing things out and pulling punches and looking in the wrong place. It's possible that this is intentional--that in the finale they'll all find out they are the ones focusing on the wrong things and looking in the wrong directions, and then the second season will be more focused because they are...

But if that's the plan, it's awfully risky. And it's very annoying to sit through. The parts that are good really just make it more annoying when the rest of it is so bland and contrived. Maybe this series would have done better as a four-episode, or three-episode intro, and then picked up again next season with more episodes after they get out of the Safe Zone and have to actually scavenge and fight and make choices and keep moving.

What did you guys think of this episode? Do you think the finale will change the context? Share in the comments, or come join me on Twitter!


Previous episodes of Fear the Walking Dead (still don't like the name):

• Episode 1.1
• Episode 1.2
• Episode 1.3
• Episode 1.4

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Geeky TV commentary - Doctor Who 9.2

Doctor Who airs at 9pm on BBCAm Saturday nights.

That was so much fun! What a twisty, existential, yet somehow peppy and fun episode! It's basically Missy that saved it from being dreary, what with it being about how Davros is dying and wants the Doctor's help. Everything she says is quotable, and even when it's a totally ordinary line, she delivers it as if it's quotable anyway. I wasn't sure about her when she first showed up, but she's basically a gift.

So! The Doctor is trapped in the little room with Davros the whole episode while Davros goes on about how compassion is a weakness and how it'll kill the Doctor in the end, and how happy he is that Gallifrey is back because everyone needs to belong and he's happy the Doctor can live out his days with his own people. It was creepy, to be honest, and super red-flag-inducing, and it lasted for ages and made us sort of question our instincts.

Because Doctor Who likes to do that, and then assure you that you're actually fine. This case is no different. Once it's been a full night of talking to this dying, sad, weepy Davros who actually does still have actual human eyes in there, when he's almost dead and too weak to see his last sunrise, the Doctor is all "here, have some regeneration energy" like a doofus. Which, of course, is the trap. As soon as he touches the wires plugged into Davros, he starts sucking out all that sweet sweet regen*, and he transmits it to all the Daleks on the planet. It's unclear whether there's other cities than the one they're in, but even if they're all there is, that's A LOT of Daleks who will be regenerated and possibly get the ability to keep regenerating?

And this is where the B-plot with Missy and Clara comes in.

See, they were only seemingly destroyed because Missy had a teleportation device that she used to save them at the second that the extermination bolt should have hit, using the bolt's own energy to do it. They land out in the desert outside the city, and Missy threatens to eat Clara if they're not saved soon, but they wind up saving themselves by going back to the city to rescue the Doctor. 

And climbing through the sewers.

Which happen to be less sewers, since the suits are self-contained and don't produce much waste, and more a sort of icky squishy slime-mold graveyard because the Daleks can't actually really die, but they can break down until they can't run a suit anymore and they have to send them somewhere. The Doctor has already made it super clear that he wants Clara back in a declaration that kept reminding of Nine's demand for Rose from some of these same Daleks (probably), so Missy uses her as bait to capture a suit. 

Which she then sticks Clara in.

And which turns out to be the most disturbing scene in the episode. Because whenever Clara tries to say her name, the suit says "I am a Dalek" and whenever she tries to say anything positive or frightened or anything other than angry, it says "Exterminate" and now there's that begged question of whether the Daleks inside there sometimes have names, and whether they actually do have emotions and independent thoughts, and the suits just force them to conform? A person could write a whole paper on the ethical implications of that scene. Also, probably, on the absolute glee Missy takes in it all.

Anyway, there's this whole enormous slime-mold living under the city all Dalek-angry about everything ever because they're Daleks that can't be Dalek-y, and when Davros sends them all the regeneration energy, he sends it to all of them. Davros is so classist, he never thought about the slime-molds. 

So Missy rushes in and blows of the machine, and the slime was the Doctor's backup plan because he knew about all this red-flag plan the whole time, and he possibly just wanted to be the better man for a minute? They're running through the halls like a good Doctor does, when one of the Daleks that wasn't rebooted by all that regen-juice corners them. Missy is trying to convince the Doctor to kill it, and he almost does, but he notices that it's not angry, it's frantic, and eventually Clara manages to say she'd never kill him, and the suit translates it as "Mercy".

But now the Doctor knows that Missy has designs against his current favorite companion, and he tells her to run and gets Clara out, and they escape. Missy seems to be trapped in the city as it collapses, but she also seems to have a plan, and now she's on the loose again. But when the Doctor and Clara are watching the city collapse, it occurs to him that there shouldn't be any way for the Dalek suit programming to know about mercy--

--and that's when he goes back in time and saves Kid Davros instead of leaving him there to die, and makes a point to tell him that there always has to be mercy, and it apparently sank into Davros's DNA and got into the Daleks and / or their programming. 

And it was so much fun!

More stuff we learned this ep:

• Missy's brooch is made of dark-star material; it's also the gift that the Doctor gave her / him when her / his daughter did...something. Daleks got in the way of that story.
• Missy considers switching to lady-form to be an expensive upgrade that the Doctor can't afford.
• It's possible that the Doctor didn't leave Gallifrey because he was bored; Davros thinks he left so that he wouldn't get involved in the war that could only end in the Daleks assimilating Time Lords and stealing their regenerations. This might just be Davros being a megalomaniac again, but it's something.
• Daleks have respect; they never attacked Davros because they respect him. This doesn't mean that he didn't have his chair made with a force field that cannot be breached by Dalek weapons.
• The Tardis's defense protocol of the moment is to disperse as dust.
• The Doctor no longer has a sonic screwdriver, but he does have sonic sunglasses.
• Daleks take everything at face value and apparently don't have any sensors in their city to keep track of whether anyone is teleporting, which seems like a security flaw to be exploited like woah.
• "The only other chair on Skaro!"
• Clara needs a lot more practice before she becomes a Dalek sharpshooter; this is after Souffle Girl for the Doctor, but earlier in history for Clara, so maybe that's something.

There was some of that by-now-standard Moffat hand-waving that I love but that seems to annoy a lot of people when the Doctor stole Davros's shielded chair and waltzes out into the middle of all the Daleks with it with a cup of tea and says "The real question is where did I get tea? The answer is: I'm the Doctor, deal with it." I assume that the Doctor has a lined pocked that he can hold even a cup of hot tea in, since we've already established that his pockets are bigger on the inside anyway, so why not. There will be people who will probably give this episode points off because of that, but by now everyone should just know that there's going to be a certain amount of it in a Moff production.**

Last week, I said it's hard to talk about an unfinished story; this week, I can honestly say that it was a good story, and a weird and wonderful way to start the new season! If we're gonna get a whole season of quirk and strangeness, and Missy running around saying outrageous things, and Twelve being bizarre, we're in for a good season.

What did you guys think about this week? Share in the comments, or come talk to me on Twitter!

Previous Doctor Who commentary posts:

• Episode 9.1

NOTES:

*If that doesn't make it really risky and scary when he goes from 12 to 13 because he used up a big chunk of that proper energy, I'mma be really annoyed.

**Also, I'm going to assume that if it's not a pocket, any of these hand-wave dismissals are just storylines we haven't gotten to yet until such time as Moff's time ends and they haven't been closed up. He likes the big-frame story, and I like that, too.

Tweets about #doctorwho from:pirategirljack include:retweets

Happy Premier Day, The Jetsons!

The Jetsons is an American animated sitcom produced by Hanna-Barbera, originally airing in primetime from September 23, 1962, to March 17, 1963, then later in syndication, with new episodes in 1985 to 1987 as part of The Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera block. It was Hanna-Barbera's Space Age counterpart to The Flintstones.[2] 

While the Flintstones live in a world with machines powered by birds and dinosaurs, the Jetsons live in a futuristic utopia of elaborate robotic contraptions, aliens, holograms, and whimsical inventions;[3][4] The original series comprised 24 episodes and aired on Sunday nights on ABC beginning September 23, 1962, with primetime reruns continuing through September 22, 1963. It debuted as the first program broadcast in color on ABC-TV.[5] (Only a handful of ABC-TV stations were capable of broadcasting in color in the early 1960s.) In contrast, The Flintstones, while always produced in color, was broadcast in black-and-white for its first two seasons.[6]

--From their Wikipedia entry

Geeky TV commentary - Limitless 1.1

Limitless airs Tuesday nights at 10pm on CBS.

What a fun ride that was! This week's second movie-to-tv continuation is snappy and artistic enough to look different from just about anything else there, and was so much fun to watch.

Brian is going nowhere until a friend gives him a little pill that makes him the smartest man on the planet. He, being a slacker, uses it to slack off in super-time--but also uses it to get two weeks of temp work done in two hours, to solve several court cases, and to give the credit to the girl who hired him so she can move up to a job she deserves. All of which proves he's a good guy.

Which is good because when he comes down and goes to find his friend to get more, he finds his friend dead and the pills gone. He manages to figure things out even without the pill, which is nice, because it means it's not all the drugs--he's got that potential all the time, it's just harder to get at. Anyway, of the three people he knows of who use NZT, his friend is dead, the second name on the list is dead, and the third tries to kill him when he's down and weak and sick. He gets shot, and he calls the FBI lady to help him out with how to fix it himself, but while he's on the phone with her, the pain and the bloodloss make him black out.

That was a great scene, though. He was hurt and scared and vulnerable, and she was believing in him and helping him out. New shows setting up for good crime-solving partnerships have to have that moment where they call on each other before they care enough to volunteer, and this was that moment, and it was done well. She's competent and compassionate, and smart enough to not jump to conclusions about him and to go with her gut when it tells her something is off. He's a neat combo of half perfect, when he's on the drug, and half a total mess when he's off it, and I hope that no-side-effects shot he got doesn't make that haplessness go away in the rest of the series.

When he's out, that's when Bradley Cooper steps in to explain to him some things about living with NZT and to offer him that shot so that he won't get chewed up by the drug's side effects, which of course he takes. There's a hitch somewhere along the line; Bradley Cooper is maybe going to run for president, and he might need someone in Brian's position. But that hasn't happened yet.

Before he passed out, he told the FBI who was the killer, and once he's hopped up again, he robs a bank and tells them to call lady-agent specifically, and together they find the piece of evidence they need to arrest the guy. That's also the proof she needs to convince her boss that he's an asset, not a problem. Bosslady wants to study him and find out why he's not getting sick from the NZT; agent lady wants to use his skills to solve the whole problem. After she gets his dad the liver he needs to survive his hemochromatosis*, he agrees, and she tells him that her dad had the same sheen in his eye, so she thinks he was on the drug before he died. It's personal for both of them to solve these cases and study the drug.

She only asks that he never lies to her.

I hope he doesn't. Not even a little--I hope he's just cheerfully honest like he was through the whole pilot, and tells her everything even when she doesn't want to hear it, so that when he has to cover for the senator, it'll be that much more dramatic. Or choose not to, and lose his supplier and his shot and his life, because he'd have to choose his partner and her cause to make that call, wouldn't he?

There was some great stuff in this pilot, and it set up for a really fun and, dare I say about a show based around drug use, addictive. We had:

• Color-scheme shifts--when he's down, everything is washed out and grey and blue, but when he's on the drug, everything is golden and warm looking.
• When he's figuring things out, there's a nice sort of ongoing visualization that is really cool.
• He's got a wry, cheeky sort of voice over that shows don't do much these days.
• His mom is Nina Sharp from Fringe; will they use the actress for the shiftiness we know she's capable of?
• He's like a ninja when he's on, and can barely stand sometimes when he's off.
• Both main leads are complicated and have pasts that inform their choices now, and instinctively believe in each other in that way that good partners should, and both showed several sides of their personalities like real people do.

Combined with the fact that they have no real idea what's going on with this drug, where it comes from, who's making it, how many people are using it, or what they might do to keep using it, all that means this is a really interesting set up for a really neat show. This bouncing, clever pilot could lead to a bouncing, clever show--or it could lead quite naturally into a really interesting and more serious show full of conspiracies and secrets and lies.

This reviewer is hoping for that one.

How did you guys like the first episode of Limitless? Come talk to me in the comments, or jump over to Twitter!

Geeky TV commentary - Catch-up edition - Continuum 4.1, 4.2

Continuum returned tonight! Syfy Friday at 11pm. (Yay, it's back! I can't believe it took me so long to get caught up!)

Episode 1!
Season 4 picks up almost exactly where Season 3 finished up, with the lights going out and the Kellog-future soldiers coming through. Kiera runs while Brad tries to stall them, which gets him scooped up and her shot by concussive weapons like four times this episode. Then the soldiers leave her and the cops find her, she's unconscious and in a psych-hallucination brought on by her CMR because of brain trauma that they don't really talk about too much but that sounds worrying. She sees Sam and wants to stay, but Carlos and Alec wake her up with their combined force of caring about her.

So Brad is trying to get info from the soldiers, and they're letting him be there, but they're shutting him out because they're on a need to know mission and he "can't see what we see". That, combined with how the leader says things got worse after Brad left (and how long after?), makes it sound like there's way more afoot than everyone thought, and now Brad's semi-trapped and definitely out of the loop. Kiera keeps hoping he'll call in, but he can't, so she goes to spy on the team, which gets her shot again and thrown off a building. Good thing that suit can do literally anything they need*, and Garza was creeping around and knows to look out for a kerfuffle.

Meanwhile, Kellog has taken over Piron and Alec wants it back--half because it's his, and half because Kiera has asked him to send her home, despite the fact that they know for sure the future has changed and she might not be able to get there even if he does send her forward. He and Lucas hack Kellog's servers and lock him out of them while simultaneously stealing all the data so they can work on it whichever way this goes. Lucas has reservations about everything that's going on, and Garza doesn't like it either. Kellog also doesn't like it, but he's on the other side of the argument, with Curtis the rouge time agent telling him that he can use Brad's crew to his own means, and whatever he does about it, Kellog has a destiny that will lead him back to Curtis and the Traveler.

It's neat that it's Kellog that's got all this destiny-weight on him this time, since he was such an annoyingly free agent all along, and that leaves the free agent slot open for Alec, who has accomplished his goals and is now able to do what he wants so long as it doesn't result in him being Old Alec sitting on a totalitarian regime.

Alec is also now working with Julian and his revolutionaries, at least on this.

And someone has kidnapped Emily, despite her kickass skills.

And then Kellog gets a call from his old self.

What a way to kick off a season! There's only six episodes this year, and then the whole thing is over forever**, so they have no space to mess around, and it's good that they're not even pretending to--they have a lot of story lines to wrap up, and they're just going for it, action and excitement and revelations right off the bat, and there's still space for quiet scenes where she hangs out with Carlos*** and they try to figure out what's happening.

There's so much going on that it's a little hard to talk about just yet, but it makes sense when the show is running, and that's an accomplishment this show always had down. It's good to see that they're bringing their A-game for this season they almost didn't get! It's always a little nervous-making going into a new season. It's always, like, "is this the season where it all falls apart?" and a show like this where the plots happen in multiple realities and time frames has more to balance than a regular procedural, but so far, it's just as amazing as it was when we last saw it.

Episode 2!
It was Kellog who took Emily! This surprises no one, really, nor does how he's trying to use her to strong-arm Alec into giving him back his data--in hard-copy on a drive that Kiera has to hand to him and stay until he's sure it hasn't been contaminated in any way, and then he'll release them both. And apparently, he really wanted to see Kiera in a sweater-dress because he makes her change out of her super suit and into that, of all dresses, and acts like she's wearing the newest Fashion Week premier. Maybe sweater dresses are the newest thing.

Anyway, while they're doing that, and she's trying to get him to confess and he's trying to get her to tell him everything, a whole lot of stuff happens at once:

• Kiera realizes that Kellog doesn't actually know what his future self wants him to do or what his soldiers are up to.
• Garza and Travis show up all creeper-like, waiting for their plant in the restaurant Kiera and Kellog are meeting at to poison them to death.
• Carlos is spying on them and notices Team Liberate, so he does what any lunatic would do, and crashes his car into theirs to stop them, and gets into a fight with Travis.
• And Alec impersonates himself to get at Emily after he's pinpointed the building where they have to be keeping her, and walks in on her beating her guard to death and gets into a fight with the one who took him in.

So while Kiera is trying to save herself and Kellog--which involves busting out of the plate glass window and then drowning him to get the poison out of his lungs, and then bringing him back--Alec and Emily are fighting for their lives and Carlos is shooting Travis a lot and not making much headway until Dylan brings in Kellog's security people and puts and end to it all. Carlos is all beat up and took several point-blank shots to the vest, but alive, and he's back on good terms with Dylan. Kiera insists that she is now owed one by Kellog, though he says that the CPR counts as a kiss**** and that they're even.

Back at Team Alec headquarters, Emily asks Jason if she's his mom, and when he says she's not, she makes up her mind to leave, because she won't be taken and used against him again, and it's the only way she can think of to protect them both. And that was right in the middle of a really nice and super domestic dinner with Lucas, Kiera, Garza who followed Kiera home like a lost cat again, Jason, Alec, and Julien. 

And then Kellog gets another visit from Curtis. He's figured out that since Curtis couldn't manipulate him directly, he manipulated Liberate to move against him and force his hand--and it works. He asks Curtis what he needs to do, and Curtis says that soon he'll get the change to send Kiera home...and then totally doesn't say whether he needs to do that or stop it, because people from the future are all jackasses, apparently, and don't ever just say things.

Because of that huge three-location fight in the middle, there was less story this episode, but what we got was fast-paced and exciting and moved the plot along by breaking up all the waiting and watching and making people actually do things. 

We're one third of the way through the season, and everything is in motion. Brad is working his people, Kiera is working hers, they say they trust each other but Kiera always has a little pause before she says it that looks like a red flag. Liberate is mostly gone but still fighting. Kellog is trapped between several rocks and hard places, and despite his note from the future, for the first time doesn't know what's going on but is still trying to do whatever he can in his own best interests with it.

Carlos doesn't want to be boss anymore, but looks more and more like he's stuck there, and doesn't want to see Kiera go, but won't stop her if she gets the chance. Though he does look really bummed when she said without a hesitation--with the opposite of a hesitation since she says it before he's done asking--that she'd go back in a second. But at least it looks like he can count on Dylan to back him up when it's needed.

And Team Alec is all trying to do what's best for everyone and basically keeps breaking all their own hearts.

I wonder why Future Alec never just sent Sam back in time to where Kiera is, to sever that last thing holding her to that future that probably no longer exists? Maybe Alec now will remember that when he's Alec then, and that's how the show will end--with her staying in the present, retiring from saving the world, with her kid and her man and a bright new future. We can hope, right?

But this week has also brought us some new questions!

• If Emily is not Jason's mom, who is? And does Alec love her, or is it just to get the heir he needs?
• Why can't Kellog give a straight answer even to himself?
• What is Curtis really up to?
• What are the future soldiers really up to, and why do they need that one specific building that they want Kellog to procure for them?
• Does Kiera not actually trust Brad, or is her insistence that she does stalled by her surprise that it's real?
• Is Kiera's brain trauma actually gone, or will it come back at an inconvenient time? And what about Carlos's ribs now?
• Will Emily leaving willingly break Alec's heart in a different way than him losing her before?
• If Garza's all that's left, will she play nice?

If the six episodes make a consistent three-act story, that's act one, and it's been a doozy! I can't want to see what happens in act two!

What did you guys think about these episodes? Share in the comments below, or come talk to me on Twitter! I don't have enough Continuum fans to talk with!

NOTES:
*Best widget ever, since the Sonic Screwdriver.
**Insert inconsolable tears.
***I still think he loves her, but in a non-grabby way because he knows he can't keep her and that she doesn't return those specific feelings, and that's great.
****Why do dudes on TV always do that? Like, CPR is a totally different thing that just happens to involve the same part of the face. Ugh.

Geeky TV commentary - Catch-up edition - Scorpion 2.1

Shows I didn't get to watch live!

Scorpion airs at 9pm on CBS Monday nights.

Oh my GOD these nerds are gonna kill me!

The writers of Scorpion have figured out exactly how to make silly stories really, really stressful to watch but also addictive, and how to break up the intensity with personal moments that are just as intense in entirely other ways. If I have a heart attack in my 30s, it'll be because of this show literally stopping it.

Scorpion (the team) has been on hiatus over the summer while Walter recovers and gets physical therapy, and in that time, Toby has been gambling, Sylvester has shifted his collecting to higher-end Super Fun Guy products that Toby won't leave him alone about, Happy has taken up paintball, Paige has taken on more business responsibilities for the team and put in an intercom, and Cabe has been acting as a tech adviser for the movies. All of which is gold. Paige has also had nightmares about having to return to work as a waitress if she fails the team, and Walter has been having post-concussion syndrome where he can't focus or get under too much stress without getting headaches and dizzy spells and sometimes blacking out.

Which is all bad news when there's an old satellite coming down right over SoCal that happens to have enough of a nuclear power source to make it an A-bomb if it hits land. New head of Homeland Security Adriana Molina--who is tough as nails and wants to believe in the team and have them succeed, and immediately wins me over--has brought them back together a few weeks sooner than Walter should be back in the field because they're the only ones who can help. Walter agrees, because he's getting bored and restless in PT, and everyone is happy to have him back because they've basically been without a case since his crash.

So! They have to hack the controls, but that doesn't work. So they decide to shoot it down, and that misses because their Intel is wrong. So Molina chews out the president and gets better stats, but now it's too close to shoot down without nuclear-winter-ing the state. So they hack the shuttle replacement thing to get closer to the satellite, and that fails because Walter got a virus downloading the security camera footage of Paige kissing his unconscious self and by the time he gets it clear, everything is out of range.

So then! Then they get really bonkers and Happy turns a bank of microwaves into a science-fair EMP to force the satellite to reboot so Sly can hack it without any security measures fussing with him, but she gets thrown across the carport by a loose wire shocking her and damages her eye. Which means she can't go up in the weather balloon that she was meant to go up in because damaged eyes can pop that high up. Which means Paige has to go up. Once they're up there, Walter drops the EMP because of turbulence combined with a bad hand, and has to loosen his parachute to reach where it's caught on the side of the balloon, and then blacks out for a second and loses his whole parachute and gets stuck on the side himself.

Paige manages to not black out from lack of oxygen (but it's close) and knocks the thing out with EMP, which lets Sly hack it and send it into the ocean--but also sends it right through the weather balloon. They have, like, no time, and Walter keeps yelling at her to go and get safe and leave him, and she keeps refusing, and at the last second, she gets her straps around him and they get to parachute to safety together instead of one or both of them dying.

And that's all not even talking about the interpersonal stuff.

Toby is still trying to convince Happy to date him--or let him date her, really, let's be honest--and as he points out, she trusts him to save her vision on the fly, but not to date. By the end of the episode, he's gotten her to "use her words" and admit she's scared, and it looks like she's coming around a little bit again. It's very sweet.

Sly hugs Walter! Sly who doesn't like germs and touching people pushes everyone out of the way to hug Walter before anyone else gets there, and Walter doesn't exactly hug him back, but also doesn't really freeze up like he usually does, and mostly looked pleased.

And when it's all over, Cabe tells Walter not to lie about his health to him anymore, because he knows him and he could see it--with the implication that he was worried.

And then there's Walter and Paige.

At the beginning of the episode, she confesses to him in the interests of not keeping secrets and committing to clear and open communications, that she kissed him in the hospital. That's when he drops all those files, and it's so great in context. But then she goes on to say that she doesn't really feel that way and his face just falls, but he recovers pretty quickly and agrees that they should stay professional, even though it's clear that neither of them really wants that.

And so that they don't have to then either keep this discussion from the team or rehash it, of course, Toby and everyone else hears it on the intercom that Paige had installed.

Later, when they're in the balloon and heading up into the thin air up there and have nothing else to do until they get into position, also in the interests of communication, Walter just quietly and openly admits that he has been having feelings for Paige. That makes her happy, but when he does like she did and immediately goes on to say that it really is best if they leave it so that they won't destabilize Scorpion (in this case, probably the team or the show), her face falls the way his did before. It's a nice bit of mirroring that makes the point that this isn't at all what either of them wants, but they're both doing it because the other said it is. Toby hears this, too, of course.

It's attempted murder by feels.

Once they're back in the garage and everyone is gone but the two of them, they try to keep that up and fail miserably because as soon as they say that their "destabilizing the team" is a theory, well, theories have to be tested.

And then they kiss.

The ad was cut cleverly to make it look like she kissed him out of nowhere, but that was a mutual kiss. He met her half way and it was half his idea, and it was awkward and needy and fierce and wonderful--

And then they both rip themselves away from the other and insist that they really do need to keep it professional and yes, good, they tested it and they can just not do that again. They also both insist they didn't feel anything, but Paige flees a little too quickly and only makes it as far as the door before she's leaning against it and sighing out of his line of sight, and he can barely keep standing after she leaves and flops down into her chair, and this is fanfic stuff. It's so great.

What a heart-racing return to the series! It's refreshing to have a head of Homeland who wants to believe in them and let them do their thing, and who will literally fight to allow them to do it. She's so feisty and fierce, and she's as impressed by them as they are by her! Plus, it's nice to get another lady on the show!

It's also nice that they didn't draw out getting everyone back together; it was literally one phonecall and no need to fuss about it, it just was, and we were back on the story-road as if they hadn't really missed a beat.

Except that Walter has been compromised. He doesn't want the team to see it, though by this point it's probably pretty obvious, and will hopefully stick around at least a few weeks since they made such a point about how he's not 100% yet. It humanizes Walter, not knowing everything, and it gives him new things to do--mostly with feelings and interpersonal relationships, since it means he has to handle fear of failure and trusting his team to pick up more of the slack since he can't think as fast as usual. It also means that the team gets to be more of an actual team, not Walter and the team, and that should be good for the show as well as for him as a character.

There's a lot of potential story set up here for the season as it unfolds, and it should be so much fun to watch it go!

What did you guys think of it? Share in the comments here, or come talk to me on Twitter!

Geeky TV commentary - Gotham 2.1, Minority Report 1.1, Blindspot 1.1

What a good night of TV! And it kept getting better with each episode!

Gotham airs at 8pm on Fox Monday nights.

We're back and some stuff has changed, and as per usual, Jim (poor Jim) is the least interesting part of the show, though they're trying. He's busted down to traffic cop, which means he's the one who is there when a loopy guy in a purple suit starts shooting the place up and talking about taking everything over, so he's the one who take the guy down. During that, though, he gets into a fight with another cop and loses his badge all together. Lee is happy about it; Jim takes up with Penguin and has to basically rob a place and accidentally kills a guy.

This is...out of character? What happened to him over the break? Is he gonna come back around after a year or three as a vigilante, and rededicate himself to being a good cop, and that's why he's so likely to not think Batman is a problem later? (Aside from how he knows Bruce from an early age like this anyway)

Meanwhile, Harvey is clean and working as a bartender and is happy--so that's probably gonna go down in flames, just not this episode.

Penguin is king of the world, and he's strong-arming the weaselly little commissioner that Jim has already promised to take down.

Selina is catting around Penguin's house.

Bruce can't figure out the code to his dad's Batcave, so he decides to blow it up, and he and Alfred are far too cute building a bomb out of stuff around the house. They do manage to get in to find a letter in the smouldering wreckage from Papa Bats who tells him that the code is his name--and it's great that Bruce wasn't so self-involved that he figured that out. He also tells him that he can't have truth and happiness, that he has to choose, and he hope Bruce chooses happiness for whatever family he has. The whole letter makes it sound like he knew he was going to die, and like he was maybe speaking from experience, the kind that comes from maybe wearing a black suit and fighting crime?

And then there's also the villains. In prison, Barbara is almost immediately queen of the block, even though she's the only girl in a with a lot of criminally insane murderers. The kid who is probably the Joker takes to her immediately, and Deacon from 12 Monkeys* is her bodyguard. Until the cleaner from last season's Orphan Black** comes in. He's some important guy, but is also apparently in the market for some criminals, and he comes with a lady who kills Deacon from 12 Monkeys when he disagrees with what Cleaner is saying. He got at them all by having a time-release knock-out gas hidden inside the street-shooter they picked up earlier, and he breaks them out after.

Barbara also, earlier than that, tried to convince Jim that Lee was the crazy one, and then immediately called Lee and threatened her life, and can we all just stop terrorizing Lee for a while?

And Nygma! He's super-divided now. Literally--he sees his reflection in the middle as a separate, much more suave and bold but also more sociopathic version of himself. One that wants to make a move on Miss Kringle.

It was an episode full of fun dialog, and some really great early scenes where there wasn't a lot of talking, but there was a cinematic sort of re-establishment of where everyone was and what they were doing. Jim is still a sort of stick in the mud in the middle of all this gleeful lunacy, but maybe this trip to the dark side will teach him to loosen up and go with the flow a little. There was not nearly enough Jim-Harvey time, but he did semi-drunkenly forehead-bump him, which was unexpected in the middle of a bar.

Penguin is still the most fun ever. It would still be very much a gift if we got an episode that didn't have anyone but him and who he talks to in it.

And the best thing is that the writers seemed to have caught onto how much the villains steal the show and are, at least for a while, handing the show to them to see what happens, and that's enough to get this reviewer back on board after the way last season sort of fell apart and got annoying.

Minority Report airs at 9pm on Fox Monday nights.

Premier of a new show! Yay! And it's cool and interesting and seems tight and sharp! Yay! And it's on Fox. Boo! If that channel wants to regain viewer trust, they're gonna have to start leaving shows alone and letting them happen, and this looks like a good option for starting to do that.

Vega is a cop who can't seem to get ahead of crime. Dash is one of the three precogs from the movie Minority Report, and sees crimes happening, but doesn't get names or locations, only images, and that's slowing him down too much to stop them. He's recently off the island they all went to at the end of the movie, and he's adorably socially awkward and wide-eyed and really just wants to save people because even without the program, he's still seeing murders all the time.

Together, they fight crime!

But seriously, they do fight crime, though that's not all of the story. The current thing Dash is seeing is the wife of an important man dying in the man's arms, and they figure out with the help of their former-handler's home-made tech that it's a mass attack on the guy who was in charge of pre-crime division. The perp is one of the guys they sent away, who was damaged by those stasis prisons from the movie. His daughter is helping him out. They blame this guy for losing everything. Dash and Vega take him down, of course, and prove they're an effective team, but pre-crime is not a thing anymore so he can't be her official partner.

Which leaves us with the question, How long can they keep claiming he's just a useful informant or liaison? And maybe that's wrapped up in the bigger story that's just starting to unfold. See, precogs can't see their own futures, but they can see each other's, and his brother (who gets names and places) and his sister Agatha (the one Tom Cruise saved in the movie), can see his, and they both know that something he does with Vega or the cops leads to them being captured and taken away again--but they haven't told him. So he doesn't know that he needs to be careful, and he already trusts her.

It was a good pilot. It set up the characters nicely--including how isolated Dash has been, how he has big gaps in his memory and his experience because of what was done to him, and how Vega is sort of a mess in her personal life, but not in any big ways, just in a I've-focused-on-my-job-a-long-time sort of way. The worldbuilding is amazing. It looks something like Almost Human, which sort of makes the argument I had that that's actually the same world look more real, but also makes me nervous since it's the same channel that barely gave Almost Human a chance. Most of the tech that's there is there for a purpose--it's big-tech, but it's all useful.

There's also a little of a feel of Continuum when Vega is looking at crime scenes and has her heads-up-display running, and that's also okay.

There's callbacks to the movie, but not so much that you have to have seen the movie to understand the show--just nods, like them being the same characters, and the stasis prison, and that face-melting disguise. It's great that there's also all these consequences of the movie: most of the people who were caught by the precogs and put in stasis are now entirely insane or otherwise damaged by the experience, and at least a few of the ones who aren't entirely incapable of returning to citizenry are really ticked off about it. And also, the isolation that Dash has grown up in is directly to blame on how the program went down, and how they don't want to get taken and used again.

The first case we see is Dash trying to save a little girl who turns out to be a precog, too, because he didn't want to let her get what they got.

It was really good. It was tense, it was charming, it was smart enough, it balanced the whole setting-up-the-world thing with the whole let's-imply-there's-more-going-on thing. The two mains have a believable reason to want to work together, and she gets that he's a little off and figures out how to work with that instead of getting mad at him or frustrated--she handles him with caring that he's probably rarely gotten. And, as said before, he's adorable. There's a good cast of supporting characters that should be interesting to get to know. There's some mysteries outside of the murders they're trying to stop.

And everyone has something going on.

It's a keeper, and Fox had better keep it!

Blindspot airs at 10pm on NBC Monday nights.

I wonder how long it'll be before fans start getting these tattoos?

This was probably the best one of the night. The stuff we all knew from the adds--woman with no memory and a hundred brand new tattoos needs to solve crimes--is only the start of it. Jane is also a kickass soldier of some sort with all sorts of special-ops-style muscle-memory training that lets her more than defend herself, but she's entirely lacking in the confidence that comes from knowing who you are and what you can do, because she has no memory at all. That means she can fight with the best people on the planet--which these guys aren't--but she has no context for what she can do and it scares her. At the same time, she wants to save people, to stop that lady getting beat by her husband, to stop the terrorist one of her tattoos leads them to before he can blow up the Statue of Liberty, to work with the FBI people who just want to hold her and keep her safe rather than letting her get involved.

The first tattoo they handle is the one that says the name of a social agent who they hoped would know who she is, but who has no idea of anything about her. But he stays on her case, and he's the one who lets her work with them, and the one who believes she can take that shot when the terrorist is holding a knife to his throat, and he's the one who holds her when the emotional stress becomes too much--even though he doesn't want to and it looks like it hurts him or reminds him of something emotional he doesn't want to think about.

They're gonna be a hard-core ship if it keeps going like that, I can tell. When she was trying to see if she remembered him, and she held his hand and touched his face? When he caught her fighting with that wifebeater and took her bloody hands in his? When he cradled her after that first memory knocked her out and hugged her when she didn't know what to do with all her feels? That hits right in the middle of a shipper's squishy heart and it's only the first episode.

And that memory! She remembered running a gun training course with a guy in a beard, and it didn't look like military training since neither of them looked military-groomed and there were no other people around. And then that same guy kills the terrorist! There's definitely a much bigger story here, and this is barely scratching the surface--and that's amazing, because it's exactly the sort of story that needs a bigger picture like that.

There were echoes of, maybe, Long Kiss Goodnight, with the amnesiac killer. There was a little of Bourne Identity, too, but mostly it feels fresh and new and smart. Jane is someone who is very hard but doesn't know what to do with it, and she spends the whole episode just on the edge of a breakdown without once coming across as irrational or ridiculous, and it's perfect. Weller is closed off, but not so much that he doesn't know when someone needs comfort and support, and there's definitely something there that made him that reserved. The people around them are distinct characters and at least some of them have secrets, too, and it's going to be so interesting seeing how that unfolds.

The pacing was very good; the beginning was slow, but it was slow to establish the scene, and there was enough of how out of it and how shaking and scared Jane was to set her up as someone who has no idea what's going on. And the transition between that and someone who is taking a stand and demanding to be treated as a human being without being shrill or hysterical is perfect. The growing trust between her and Weller is rich and believable, and the way he is staying cautious but can't keep his distance no matter how much he wants to is believable, too.

That's the one I wanted to skip to next week to see the next episode of.



What did you guys think of these four episodes? Did you watch something else? How was it? Share your questions or comments here or on Twitter! (small cash gifts go in the sidebar!)



NOTES:
*Todd Stashwick, who is great, with his cheekbones and his sass.
**James Frain, who has now, I believe, played a bad guy on like 2/3 all the shows I've watched since True Blood.^
^And who would have thought that Gotham would be the place where 12 Monkeys and Orphan Black overlapped? It was so awesome watching the two of them chewing the scenery at each other for a few minutes, though!