Geeky TV commentary - The Flash 2.4, Agents of SHIELD 3.5, Limitless 1.6

The Flash airs at 8pm on CW Tuesday nights.

This week, Stein was literally going unstable, and they had to find a new compatible that had been affected by the blast wave. They came up with two choices: a former high school quarterback that busted his knee and wound up working in a garage when he was hit, and a physicist who seemed really compatible personality wise, but turned out to be a loon. So, of course, it's the kid, who's good and wants to help, who manages to successfully bond into a new Firestorm and looks awesome doing it.

But there's other issues along the way, because that's how plots work. Caitlyn is lobbying for Hewitt, the scientist, because she's all about the scientists and seems to have some sort of education bias that functions a lot like racism, except that both choices are black.* Ageism? Classism? Some sort of ism. Hewitt is all gung ho, but when they try to bond, they fizzle, and he gets pissed. It triggers his powers but he doesn't have the ability to bond with Stein to stabilize either of them, so he's walking around on fire, breaking things and, bizarrely, stealing power from lights? When did that become part of the power set?

New Firestorm and Flash defeat him pretty easily, and it looks cool, and they put him in the Pipeline, which is so dumb. That place shouldn't be able to function as a jail, and yet they keep using it even after they have a jail to put him in. There's a lot of dumb things on this show, but it seems like there are a few particular dumb things that like to haunt us and it's starting to knock me out of the "heck yeah!" of the rest of the show.

And Iris is dealing with her mom. That whole thing is written sort of like the only experience the writers have with women is watching soap operas. It's nice that Iris isn't 100% on board with this mom that she didn't know who left her, but she was being mean when she's usually the single most forgiving person on the cast--like, to a fault when it comes to Barry and Joe and she should be mad and isn't. And Francine has such a cliched sob story. She's dying. It's because of how she used to be a junkie, she's got less than a year to live. That should have been sad and emotional, but since we don't know her as a character, only as a pile of exposition from others, it's just annoying that it's the same story estranged parents on TV always have when they come back. They should have brought her back, worked to have a relationship, then found out she was dying, if they wanted her to be anything but a contrived angst-and-new-character deliverer. The actress is doing her best, and they did a good job finding someone who looks like she might be her mother, but they didn't give her much to work with.

The whole sub plot there seemed awkward and out of character, and all it did was take Iris out of the action and set up for a new character.

And meanwhile, Barry was thinking about going out with Patty, and drew an explicit parallel between him considering dating someone who was not Iris and Caitlyn stopping being a prejudiced ass and thinking about the kid with the broken knee as a candidate, and it was just...weird? Because a) who his girlfriend is is not equivalent to whether or not she's severely biased, and b) if he's still actually in love with Iris, it's super unfair to Patty--just like it was unfair to Linda. (that was her name, right? the girlfriend who wasn't iris but had the same job?)

So the New Firestorm was cool. It was great that he was this kid that thought his whole life was going to be nothing, but still wanted to help people, and that he had the mental and emotional agility to adapt quickly and find the coolness in what he was doing. This show is best when everyone involved knows that they're not on broody ol' Arrow, and that for them, being a superhero is really neat. But the rest of the plots around that were all weird and didn't sit well with this viewer, and that's sad.

But since he wasn't killed, maybe we can get more Demore Barnes, of 12 Monkeys fame, as a recurring villain here or on Legends of Tomorrow, where Firestorm will probably wind up. Yay Demore!

Agents of SHIELD airs at 9pm on ABC Tuesday nights.

This is probably the best episode I've seen of this show, and it's sort of ticking me off because it doesn't have all but one character through 98% of it and features none of the current plot lines. But it DOES have phenomenal acting on Elizabeth Henstridge's part, piles of feels in multiple different directions, a new character played by an actor I like, and an evil planet that definitely seems to have a purpose and a plan.

This is the story of how Simmons didn't die through the portal.

There's no sunlight on that planet. It's mostly desert. She has to mark time by how many hours she's been there, using her amazing and powerful Fitz-widgeted phone that has a battery life of, like, months. She has to find water and food--the first of which seems to come only from one spring in the middle of all that sand, and the second of which is, for a while, only the fronds of an attack-plant that lives there and tries to eat her. It sounds awful when she bites into it, but it keeps her alive.

And then after more than a month, she falls through a hole, into a cage, and meets Will. He was from a NASA mission through the obelisk, stranded when his crew that he was meant to protect started going mad and dying, and they couldn't figure out how to reopen the portal, or where it would reopen on it's own. He's been there for 14 years and didn't even know it. And he knows the ways of the planet and how to survive it.

And, of course, they fall in love, because they're literally the only people on the planet. This point is...iffy. She could have discovered something that could help them with their current plots, about the Kree or Inhumans, even Thor and his piles of pocket dimensions in the Nine Realms, or something, but if she did, they haven't even hinted at it yet. All their combined brainpower is devoted to figuring out the pattern of the moons that opens the portal and getting home, and it's the failure to make the portal they predict that breaks her and makes her lose hope and give in to the growing attachment to Will. There's no hint that she found anything that could be of use on this side of the portal. Hopefully that'll change as they sift through her memories and knowledge about it, but right now, she's focused on going back--for Will, because he was right behind her, facing the creepy planet-ghost, buying her time.

She doesn't even know if he survived, though we do. And Fitz, too good for this world, too pure, who spent his whole life for months looking for her, doesn't even comment on it, just runs to the lab to help her do it. Ooh, maybe if they get Will home, he'll be the one who knows something about what's going on, the random detail that brings the obelisk into the main plot line--but hopefully, he doesn't know he knows it, and it takes Simmons and her secret SHIELD knowledge to make the connection, so that it's still her story.

It was tense and sad and charming and exciting, and so interesting, and a lot of that, unfortunately, was because the whole Hydra storyline is stale and dragging, and the focus on so many other characters all the time in the usual format of the show is splintering attention and the power of the stories they're telling. As far back as season 1, it seemed like if they went more like Lost-style, where they focused more closely and more completely on one or two or three characters an episode, instead of all of them, the stories would be better, and this episode seems to prove it.

And that's why it's angry-making. Because this episode was so good, and it was in large part because it broke from the pattern. It proves that our gut feeling was right, AND that the writers and actors are capable of doing it better, and that they haven't. The goodness of this episode makes me feel cheated, and the return of Hydra and all that scrambling around doing nothing next episode just depresses me.

How about you?

Limitless airs at 10pm on NBC Tuesday nights.

This episode, a lot of things come to a head, and it's what we didn't even know we were waiting for.

Rebecca knows about the file, and she does what Brian couldn't, because she has a deeper knowledge of how their office works: she comes up with a plan about how they can keep looking for information. It's great, because it unites them, once and for all, on the same goal. For the first time, they're truly partners, acting like partners, protecting each other and working for each other.

So, of course, the second they walk in the office to enact their plan, Brian gets sent off because Naz wants Rebecca on a project to think of hypotheticals the FBI can plan for and defend against. Naz is on the FBI side, which means Rebecca is on the attacker side, and she's really good  at thinking up ways terrorists could destroy America. Like, maybe she missed her calling as a terrorist mastermind, and it's a really good thing that she's so devoted to her job.

All the bosses are impressed, and the head of the FBI wants to talk to her personally, but that's where their plan, and Brian get in the way.

Brian's been investigating the history of NZT and identifying people linked to the studies. He identifies a drug company that has the right people and projects and interests at the right time, and they don't help at all. He finds a scientist on the study that involved Rebecca's father. But Brian's having withdrawal symptoms. He's still taking the pill every morning because he has to for the FBI, for Rebecca, and for himself if he wants to be able to find the answer to all these problems, but the shot is wearing off and he's getting sick. Sweating, red eyes, shaky, emotionally unstable, hallucinations, paranoia, time loss, difficulty understanding what people around him are saying. Rebecca notices and wants to help, but she's thinking too conventionally there, and he ditches the doctors and goes back to his investigations.

But he can't check out that scientist because he's dying. Rebecca calls off her career-advancing meeting to go talk to the guy and finds out almost nothing, worrying about Brian along the way. And Brian passes out on the street.

Just when everything looks like it can't go any worse, everything changes. Brian wakes up on a rooftop, mostly fine, with Morra. He's already given him the shot and he says it was a test, to see what sort of person he was--would he betray his partner to save himself? And he didn't, so now Morra wants him to be the action man, the one who gets things done that Morra himself can't do because he has to work his way through the government so he can make all the real change, and that means that he can't be a free agent behind the scenes.

And Rebecca goes into Naz's office, sure she's going to be fired for calling off that very important meeting, and learn that Naz knows she knows about the file, and that the file was the point of all this. She wanted her to be able to read it legally, which meant that she needed the clearance to do so, which meant she needed to advance, which meant she needed to catch people's attention who could advance her. And that's why she was on that panel.

But the future for both of them, though less desperate at this moment, is still up in the air. What choices will everyone make? And Sands, is he even really working for Morra? Because if he is, and that bomb for the scientist was on his orders, Morra isn't telling the truth--and since there was such a parallel drawn between Brian and Rebecca, can we trust Naz's word that she's telling the truth?

This show is a lot less like Chuck than it seemed in the beginning, and that's good. It's taken its set up and run with it, and it's growing into this great intrigue show that still has all of Brian's mental creativity and that touch of humor, even when Brian is in dire straits, that keeps it from being too heavy. And they're starting to rebel from the power structures that are trying to keep them in control, which is great. Brian is almost the definition of a loose cannon, but his heart is in the right place and he's probably one of the kindest people on TV right now, trying to do what's right without having to give up anyone along the way. And Rebecca is, we now know, a lot more creative and wily than she's been allowed to be up to this point, and maybe she can now start loosening up!

It's so exciting to see this show unfolding.

Flash

Tweets about #theflash from:pirategirljack include:retweets

SHIELD

Tweets about #agentsofshield from:pirategirljack include:retweets

Limitless

Tweets about #limitless from:pirategirljack include:retweets

• The Flash 2.3, Agents of SHIELD 3.4, Limitless 1.5
• Flash 2.2, SHIELD 3.3, Limitless 1.4
• Agents of SHIELD 3.1, Limitless 1.2
• Limitless 1.1

NOTES:
*It was uncomfortable to watch, actually, because she's usually better than that and it was sort of "where is this coming from now?" whenever she opened her mouth.

Geeky TV commentary - Supergirl 1.1 and Scorpion 2.6

This week, I watched the CBS run, since I wanted to see Supergirl, and they put it on at the half hour, meaning it made me miss two shows instead of one on the other channel, and then when it switched to Scorpion, and it was a 90 minute episode, I was already resigned to missing Blindspot too. I'll catch them up later!

Supergirl aired at 8:30 on CBS Tuesday nights this week, but will move to the hour next week.

What a fun hour! It's very sweet, but in a cute and bubbly and "oh my gosh I'm a superhero, how cool is THAT??" sort of way that doesn't clash with the action and the seriousness of battle. We get her daily life, and we get her superhero life, and she's not a billionaire, not a cop (or cop-adjacent), she's just a girl with a difficult job who happens to have the power to make a difference in her city when she can.

It starts with a nice voice-over that sums up all the backstory: she was a preteen when Krypton exploded, and she was sent after Kal El to keep him safe because she was his cousin and he was a baby, but along the way, she got stuck in the Phantom Zone and lost twenty four years so that she landed still a kid and he was already an adult and a known, active hero. So he didn't need her to protect him. But he did take care of her, finding her a family (with a previous Superman and Supergirl) so that she could grow up human like he did. Now she's in her early twenties, working for Cat Grant, one of the leading newswomen in the world, trying to be a normal person.

Until her sister's plane almost goes down and she has to figure out how to fly so she can save her, because who cares about aliases and normal lives when your sister is about to crash, right? 

She's psyched that she could do it, and it's adorable, but said sister isn't pleased. Alex wants her to stay low-key so no one knows she's there. But she's already decided to be a hero. She confides in her friend at the office, and together they find and stop crimes...until someone sticks her with a Kryptonite dart and she finds out that there's a special task force for taking care of alien problems and that her sister is part of it. They clash a little, but they also realize that there's a bunch of really bad dudes from space loose on the planet, and she's the only one that can stop them (since Superman has his own villains, I guess).

And, she uses her cute-young-girl-ness to get the first of them to underestimate her so that she can beat him. Ha! Take that Mr Females-Bow-Before-Males! But he's not about to get caught, tells her this is just the beginning, and then he stabs himself in the heart with the shrapnel of his own destroyed weapon. That's hardcore, dude.

And then we find out that the big bad is her aunt, who is called General, and who was with the prisoners in the Phantom Zone, so she must be awful.

And it was cool!

Her bestie is adorably nerdy and this story's older and less dorky Jimmy Olsen (James, sorry) is very pretty. Cat is like a slightly less steely Devil Wears Prada, but doesn't take up enough screen time to make this into Devil Wears Prada With Superpowers. The faceless silhouette of Superman looks like it could be Henry Cavill if they decide to link up the worlds after all, and the casting of her adoptive parents is brilliant and just nostalgic enough to make it really neat. I hope we get more of them.

But best of all, we have women standing up for themselves and each other. We have women in power, both in the normal mortal world AND in the villainous baddie world, where women are usually henchmen or side characters. Her sister is a scientist and field agent, and she's good at her job. And despite all of this, there's no guy-bashing, and no real points made of "see, women can do this too"--they just do.

Her development as a hero is pretty fast, but this is a world where she grew up knowing Superman and what he can do, and knowing that she should be able to do it, too. Also, montages, so it's fast in the story but could be weeks on the show (though I think it's probably more like days). And the fact that she's not super concerned about hiding who she is and what she can do from the people she's closest to is a really nice change from the standard where people hide it forever and it gets more and more ridiculous. 

Also refreshing is that her tech doesn't hide that he's into her, but also doesn't hold it against her that she's not into him, he just does what she needs him to do to help her. Her sister, too, supports her, since her main reason for wanting her to keep low was to keep her safe from people like her coworkers and the villains they chase, who all now know she's there.

All in all, it was a fun first episode, a good set up for future episodes, and a nice set of interesting characters it will be fun to keep watching. From the Next Episode On, it looks like they're not holding back and she'll find out who her main enemy is pretty quickly, so yay! That's a trend we can all get behind, I think.

Scorpion usually airs at 9pm on CBS Monday nights, but this time aired at 9:30 and ran for 90 minutes.

Yay, I got to see Scorpion live! I usually watch other shows, but today was a special case.

We got 90 minutes, which seemed to have mostly been commercials, so the difference in the length maybe didn't make much difference. Oh well, such is TV these days. The second someone labels something as a "special event" everything goes to the ads and it winds up eating up all the time.*

Anyway!

Walter is supposed to be coding something for the grand opening of Elias's brand new super-smart office building, and the second he does, everything goes horribly wrong. See, Ray talked him into mingling in a mixer after a conference he was attending, and while he was there, a pretty lady slipped him a mickey and he lost the rest of the night.

Cabe and Paige go looking for the lady, but she says she doesn't know anything about any computer stuff. Paige is wonderfully defensive of Walter while also being crazy jealous AND super competent as an agent. She makes a good partner for Cabe, and it's something we haven't seen much of, just the two of them working a case together. Plus, his reaction-faces for all the times she's getting close to crossing lines in her defensiveness are golden. I hope they'll make millions of reaction gifs out of him over on Tumblr.

Meanwhile, the building is breaking down all over the place. The elevators go out, trapping Toby. The geothermal power goes out, and Happy can't do anything about it; Walter helps and they barely put out the fires that have started there, but they have to take a long way back to the computers because the steam pipes seem to be out to get them. Fires, meanwhile, have started all over the place, but most notably right under where Sly is with the kids of some of the important people in charge of the building.

And everyone wants Walter to fix all of it, but he's consumed by guilt, still on the wrong foot from his drug-hangover, and taking really crazy risks. When Toby gets out of the elevator but then gets trapped in another server room, he sucks out all the air to kill the fire and also almost kills Toby. When Sly needs an anchor to hold the rescue team's rope ladder for him, he jumps out a 17 story window to anchor it with his own body. It's insane.

But in the meantime, Sly is facing his fears of the situation to keep the kids he's in charge of safe and calm, and to teach them about what to do in a fire. Toby is trying to do everything himself to prove that he doesn't need Happy and when she has to revive him from his near suffocation, he even says he can do that himself. It almost gets him killed a few times, not least by her. She was frantic when Walter was willing to two-thirds kill his friend to get to the next stage of the mission--she still likes Toby, but he's so desperate to prove he's okay with her not being interested, he can't see it.

Paige and Cabe discover that it's not the girl; she was hired by someone, and she's just a callgirl. Paige breaks into the computer of the office while Cabe distracts them**, and figures out the password herself--go Paige!--and they find out who hired her. It was one of the other scientists, who had his funding cut and had the virus broadcasting from a chip implanted in his own body so that whenever they managed to get it out of the computers, it would just load back up. He says it was just meant to freeze things up, not cause all this meltdown, but it was very much "cool story, bro, still sabotage". Elias had almost believed that Walter did this on purpose, or that he was a fraud, and that might be a problem for their ongoing mentorship; we'll have to see.

It was great seeing everyone calling Walter out on his crazy behavior. He's been more and more off the rails as the episodes have added up, and now he's putting his own people at risk, and there has to be a line drawn. If he won't draw it himself, they're going to have to draw it for him, and they all, in different ways, hinted at that throughout the episode. It was hard to like Walter this week. He was snappy, rash, alarmingly cavalier, frantic, begging--he was in distress at exactly the wrong sort of time, and even though he managed to pull it out of the fire, literally in some cases, I hope there's real fallout next week.

Sly had a revelation as he was using solar panels to step down the side of the building that he'd just found the woman of his dreams and he was not ready to die--something of a big step for someone constantly afraid of living!

Similarly, it looked like Happy was having a revelation about her feelings for Toby at the time, but he's further away from the same than he's been the entire time we've known the two of them.

And Paige is aware that she was being driven nuts by the idea that Walter had this other side he never showed her--though that other side was the drugs, not him, and it's unclear whether that part sank in--and the idea that he would have just jumped in bed with some woman that he only just met at some bar. That also didn't happen, but she was feeling it, and she knows she was, but they still aren't really talking about feelings despite her plan to never hide things in the name of team communication.

At the very end of the episode, it was like it was all okay because no one died and they got their dude, but that doesn't sit well; Walter was being callous and driven by a bad set of emotions, and he needs to deal with that. He needs to be held accountable. Community service is being held accountable for the damage he did at the end of last season, but it doesn't hold him to the emotional and mental trauma he's causing his team because he can't handle his own feelings about things. Maybe he'll pick up a psychologist at some point. Maybe Gordon Gordon is available now that Bones and Booth are out of therapy; he's got experience with people who can't parse emotions.

Also, there were so many slow motion shattered windows this week. Like, damn.


What did you guys think of this week's episodes? Share in the comments, or let us know on Twitter!

Supergirl

Tweets about #supergirl from:pirategirljack include:retweets

Scorpion

Tweets about #scorpion from:pirategirljack include:retweets

• Scorpion 2.1

Other Monday shows:

• Gotham 2.1, Minority Report 1.1, Blindspot 1.1
• Gotham 2.2, Minority Report 1.2, Blindspot 1.2
• Gotham 2.4, Minority Report 1.4, Blindspot 1.4
• Gotham 2.5, Minority Report 1.5, Blindspot 1.5

NOTES:

- I should make a header for this section, too...

*This is an ongoing struggle I have with TV, and if Netflix had TV as quickly as On Demand, I'd give up on cable all together, because damn.

**If we don't get a call later saying they've found just the right match for Cabe, I'll be disappointed in a perfectly good lost opportunity.

Okay, so here's my problem with The Walking Dead...

So, I watched tonight's episode, I watched Talking Dead to work through it, I ate half a pint of icecream, and now I think I can put into words what my biggest problem with this show is.

I've been watching this show a long time. I'm aware that they're going to kill people. But that's also the problem. See, one of the major reasons I gave up on Game of Thrones was that it didn't matter who you loved, they were going to die, and by the second or so season, I just found it very hard to even care--and if you don't care, what's the point of watching.

The Walking Dead has been on for six years now, and my original favs are few and far between, and they aren't really being replaced, lately, by people who are as cool, as likable, or as interesting as the ones they're killing. And every time there's an episode like this one, it brings it up again: if they're just going to kill everyone, why do I bother investing? They feel like they're killing them off more quickly in the second half of last season and into this one, so if I keep investing, it's a form of self torture.

And that brings up a related issue that I've talked about before: if there's no hope ever, if nothing they do gets them anywhere, if there's no chance of setting up a new sort of life, and if every single other community they meet is made of psychopaths and cannibals, what is even the point? What's the point of their struggle and all the deaths and losses they suffer and survive? What's the point of them fighting so hard to establish something useful and maintain any humanity and civilization at all? And, most importantly, what's the point of tuning in? If they're all just going to die anyway, every new baddie is going to be worse and more perverse than the last, and nothing is ever going to get better, then there isn't a point.

If that's all I have to look forward to, as a fan of this show for more than half a decade now, I'm just going to call it quits.

I don't want to do that. I want to watch a show where I care about the characters and they have some chance of doing something that matters and continues and living long enough to enjoy that it matters. I don't want to watch a show where the nature of the show makes it impossible to keep caring. I also don't want to watch a show where the new characters are too idiotic or weak or indecisive or bland to care about.

Will The Walking Dead manage to avoid that hole? I don't know. In this moment, I'm close to calling quits. I was close after Beth, too, and it took a month to convince me otherwise. If anything happens to Rick, Daryl, Carol, or Michonne? On top of all the losses I've already taken? I don't know if it can. Every time it happens, no matter how artistically or how meaningfully, that thread tying me to the show frays a little more, and there's eventually going to be a point where the ends are too frayed to tie together again.

Guys, I'm very upset now.

What did you think? Can you talk me out of this? Do you have a point of view I didn't consider? Share in the comments.

Geeky TV commentary - Bones 11.4, Sleepy Hollow 3.4

Bones airs at 8pm on Fox Thursday nights.

The case this week was totally not interesting to this anti-sports--let alone fake sports--viewer, but they can't all be winners. The gross body chewed on by coy-wolves (that the kid who found it exploded the head of) was once a member of a fantasy football league. The wife of one of the other dudes, the one with the bad attitude problem and short temper, was having an affair with him, but the murderer was the other guy, who only had the league and almost lost it. Blah blah blah, crime blah blah. It could have been a more pointed look at how Booth is getting over his gambling problems again, and how it changes people and ruins lives, but there was barely one sentence on that topic, and so it just sort of came across flat.

But this was the episode with Betty White, so who cares what the case was. She was Dr Meyers, who was better at forensics than Bones, had been married six times and was still saucy, and had, several husbands ago, created the code that Angela built the Angelatron on! She served the roll of squintern this episode, and it was brilliant. She just kept going around being right about things everyone else never thought of, and giving lessons in how to handle life. And she said she's not going anywhere, so it would be amazing if she just casually joined the squint rotation!

The usual squintern for the episode was Welles, who was looking a little beardy and wild even before they encouraged him to get out of the lab and into nature to help with his "mr happy" problem / to help Hodgins gather missing evidence. The whole scene where Hodgins was woozy from Welles accidentally shooting him with a tranquilizer, so he was basically drunk (but no less good at his job), and Welles was in the background shirtless and howling like a wolf, was so great.

I've said before, and I'm sure it'll come up again, that this show's strength is it's characters, not it's cases anymore, and this whole episode was such a fun one for the characters.

Outside of all that, Booth dealing with the death of his inspiration-sake in Bones's new book, and her not understanding why it mattered was classic Bones. Their bickering was like Old Times! And when he said something about Agent Andy being replaced by a younger, sexier agent, while Aubrey preens and tries on the idea was so cheerfully meta-textual and read like the behind the scenes discussions shows always have to have around this time in their runs! Especially since we just got back from Booth being mostly gone for two episodes like characters do when actors want to leave the show, it was even funnier and a little sharper than it would have been otherwise.

So even though the case was not anything I care about, the characters were everything, and it made this episode such a joy to watch!

Sleepy Hollow airs at 9pm on Fox Thursday nights.

This week, Sleepy Hollow does what Doctor Who is really good at--taking something really ordinary from our childhoods and making it creepy as all get out. In this case, it was the Tooth Fairy, which, as we learn, is not the cute and helpful sanitized version so much as it's a The-Ring-inspired faceless demon from Assyria that eats the souls of children because the newly lost tooth allows a breach in their spiritual defenses. And it was so creepy, skulking in corners and closets, appearing out of nowhere, visible only to kids (maybe even only kids with loose teeth?). And where Bones didn't make the connection between the case and the characters very well right before it, Sleepy Hollow sets it up where one of the attacked kids has a sister, mirrors it with Abbie and Jenny and what they've been through, and runs with it.

And they gave us what we were missing last episode--Jenny being useful and vital to the team as part of the A-plot! And, one step better, they only even know about this case because Joe Corbin was also working as part of Team Witness and caught the story of a monster when he (as an EMT) was called to bring the girl into the hospital. 

All four of them do the stakeout, with Joe teasing Ichabod about all his flirty texts with Zoe, and Abbie and Jenny talking about the issue of their dad. Ichabod insists that Zoe is only helping him with his studying for his citizenship (even though he makes a point about not needing to study because he actually lived it). Abbie confessed that she found their dad and Jenny says she found him five years ago and doesn't give a flip, and didn't tell Abbie because she didn't want to upset her. Joe tells Ichabod not to overthink things too much. Abbie is upset that she's been agonizing over telling Jenny and Jenny not only doesn't care, but blames Abbie's childhood stories of how bad a dad he was for why she hates him now.

And then, when they go after the monster (using a weapon made out of dental tools and silver nitrate from Paul Revere, who, refreshingly, couldn't care less about Ichabod's presence in history), the little girl with the afflicted sister helps them out. At their first meeting, Abbie got hurt by the monster, and the hospital scene was so much what we've been wanting--minus, maybe, some loving hand holding. Jenny is worried and barely holding back tears, and Ichabod tells her that Abbie is the strongest person he knows, then tells Abbie that her job is to heal, and calls her "dear friend" and looks at her in that way where maybe he would have been more hands-y if Jenny wasn't there.

With the girl's help, they figure out how to see the monster, then Jenny and Ichabod, who are a very good team considering that Jenny isn't the Witness, go after it and get it, while Pandora is harassing Abbie in the hospital, trying to figure out what she refuses to live without. She knows it's not her mom, and doesn't sound like it's her dad, but she doesn't yet suggest that Abbie can't live without Ichabod, but my sense of story says it could go that way--whether they're ever a thing, they are partners decreed by heaven and foretold by prophesy, giving each other purpose and meaning, so it would make sense. It would be better, however, if she won't live without the family she has built for herself--Ichabod, but also Jenny and Joe and maybe some other side characters that they can adopt along the way (cough - Big Ash - Macey - cough). 

And while Pandora is being all creepy, she says a word that Ichabod traces back to the same language and location as their mysterious "destroyers" plaque. So maybe she's actually older than ancient Greece, and probably more terrible. Another flower opens on her creepy fear-tree. But wouldn't it be neat if she's there to bring fear and to test them, but not as a force of evil so much as as a force of fate--to make sure they're strong enough for what comes after. To make sure they have their priorities straight. Like a really weird forced couples therapy leader, from a very strange other level of reality. That would be so cool.

And, of course, we got Ichabod all drugged up after a tooth cleaning, mumbling and half-singing and mushing his own face and getting all choked up over chibis. AND we got resentful gamer Ichabod mainlining sugar and playing XBox to avoid responsibilities. And maybe just the slightest hint of a jealous Abbie when she noticed how often Zoe texts him? We got Ichabod lecturing an actual class on historical inaccuracy--and Jenny filming it because it was priceless. We got Mills Sister Solidarity. We got Witness Solidarity. We got Betsy Ross being way too modern in her turn of phrase and disappointingly actually a love interest when it would have been better if she was the one that got away because he didn't follow his heart (there's still time for that if he keeps overthinking), but hey, we can't win them all.

All in all, it was a neat episode. Abbie is working through some things in the background still, but Jenny is there being involved and supportive and useful, and Ichabod adores her regardless of whether it's romantic or not. Joe knows to call her when weird things happen, and seems able to keep up now. Ichabod is finding his identity as curator of a historical museum, regardless of whether it exists yet or not. And, best of all, the show seems to have almost found that balance of goofy and scary and strange that made the first season work so well, and was almost totally missing from the second.

Bones

Tweets about #bones from:pirategirljack include:retweets

Sleepy Hollow

Tweets about #sleepyhollow from:pirategirljack include:retweets

• Bones 11.3 and Sleepy Hollow 3.3
• Bones 11.1 and Sleepy Hollow 3.1

Geeky TV commentary - The Flash 2.3, Agents of SHIELD 3.4, Limitless 1.5

The Flash airs at 8pm on CW Tuesday nights.

It's all family drama on The Flash this week.

Joe doesn't want to tell Iris that her mom is actually alive and wants to see her because he's afraid how she'll act, but after a pep talk from Barry, he comes clean. Iris is far too understanding, but that's consistent with her character, so it's okay. But it would have been nice if she'd made some protest about how everyone keeps keeping secrets from her, and how unfair that is.

On the other side of that coin, though, we get to see Iris at work, being well-liked and respected, getting her first cover story. It's only a few minutes of her loving her life, but it's more than we got before, so there's that.

Meanwhile, Barry is trying to find out what's up with Captain Cold working with his terrible-person dad, but it turns out that he has no choice because Daddy Cold is bad enough to implant a bomb in his own daughter's head to make his son use his freeze gun to get at some diamonds. All of that could have been done better, in a story line where they didn't have to make Gold Glider into some sort of sad victim when she was a self-posessed badass before, and didn't have to depend on freezing lasers, because that's just dumb.

It was nice seeing Cisco save the girl, but it seemed off the whole time, and never turned out that she was playing them again, and never had her take her own life back, and it was annoying because this show is usually better than that.

Also meanwhile, though, Jay and Caitlyn manage to figure out, mostly off screen, how to stabilize the breach closest to them. They're calling it a Speed Cannon, But they stop Expository Boy Jay Garrett from going back to his own world because he can still help Barry with the speedforce and they might need his help with Zoom. And, you know, Caitlyn wants him to stay. I guess he's squatting in one of the labs?

But of course they leave the gate open when Stein has some sort of Firestorm fit that was almost the most interesting thing in this episode, and then some sort of alt!Welles comes through looking all evil.

Dun dun DUUUUNNNN!

The episode was more set up, as far as it goes. It felt like it was arranging pieces for later, which has been a pretty common feeling this season, and that's starting to get a little old. Shouldn't it get going now? Without getting all character-compromise-y like they've been tiptoeing around? But the thing with Welles and the thing with Stein having the power without Ronnie, those are good set-ups, and so interesting.

Agents of SHIELD airs at 9pm on ABC Tuesday nights.

Adventure time on SHIELD!

SHIELD is working with the Task Force, who's alphabet mess I can never remember, to find Inhumans. We get to see a married inhuman couple for half a minute, and then their friend Alicia who can be several people at once. Then Lash attacks and kills all three, sending the other Alicia into shock. That was a bit abrupt because Coulson was acting like he already knows her, but we don't, and it distracts from the scene. They track Lash but he's gone, and the Task Force shows up to be soldiers all over the place.

Coulson and Task Force Lady decide to sort of play fair and share info, and Daisy manages to find a virus on the dead Inhumans' computers--which the Task Techs claim they didn't see. They trace it back to an IRS dude who was changed, and got the power of being made violently ill by the presence of other Inhumans. He's been telling Lash where to find the ones in hiding, but after he's taken in, Lash comes for him--and looks right at Daisy, but doesn't kill her.

The IRS guy said that death is a mercy; Lash says he's not merciful, he's necessary. Then Daisy watches him transform, by way of seeing his shadow shrink into a normal sized person, So that explains how he can just disappear on them.

Over in the Ward side story I'm totally bored with, Hunter finally makes it in, and is immediately exposed because Ward knows who he is. There's taunting and threats and shooting, and then Ward calls his goons on Andrew to get May to call off the attack. Hunter won't be called off, so it looks like Andrew is toast, and if he thought that's gonna get them off his case, he's more messed up than we thought. Because duh, Ward, you know these people, so you'd better be actually trying to start a war. Otherwise, this is the dumbest move he's made yet.

Bobbi wants to get back into the field, but she's still not good enough to pass the physical, and she hates it.

And Fitz wants Simmons back as his partner, but Simmons is being cagey and acting fine but obviously not. He finds her folder full of portal research, and he doesn't really have to confront her with it--in the last minute of the episode, she says she has to go back because something happened to her there, and she needs to tell him what that was. Which means next week should be mostly Simmons, and that can only be good!

Aside from how tired of Ward I am, and his whole weird and inconsistent HYDRA remake, the show is mostly going well so far this season. It's nice that they've finally been given a main MCU plot point to handle, though it would be very nice if they could keep some of these people, and stop getting them all killed. And if any of these new Inhumans start popping up in the movies, they'd better at least have Daisy in there to help them, if not finally allow Coulson out of his self-imposed exile.

And any time Simmons and Fitz can be in the same room together, being on good terms, and any time Coulson admits that he misses and needs people, it's a good day.

We also got a hint of people in the Inhumans population who want to bring everyone together as a united front, and possibly a separate group that existed before the mass triggering and feels like they're different. How long before that comes back around?

Limitless airs at 10pm on NBC Tuesday nights.

This is the second show on this channel in as many days that dealt with a dirty bomb being put together, and I was half expecting Jane and the guys from Blindspot to show up, since they're all in the FBI.

Anyway, there's a kid who's involved with a terrorist attack, and it's nice that it's home-grown terrorists this time, and they aren't pulling any punches about calling them that. They go in looking for a meth lab and instead find bomb-fixins, and Brian runs into the main baddie's little brother, who thinks his bro isn't bad, he's just confused. Brian makes friends with him, and he becomes their main informant while they track down the baddies, and the one who will make contact when he's called to bring something the bombers need.

Brian tells him whatever he needs to hear to get him to agree to do it, and then he's killed in the crossfire, the accomplice gets away, and the brother isn't so much as scratched--which makes Brian feel like he's to blame, since the kid wouldn't have been there if he hadn't convinced him to do it.

The whole episode, Brian has been dealing with what he should and shouldn't do. He's been recording messages for his morning-and-no-NZT self, telling him that he can't tell Rebecca anything about her father, and he can't tell anyone else about anything else either, and he just needs to look out for himself. But looking out for himself is what got that kid killed, and even though he saved who knows how many other people, it doesn't convince him that night-time-NZT him knows what he's talking about.

So he takes the  file about Rebecca's dad to her. Mr Sand all but threatened her life when he asked why he can't tell her about that, and he did it anyway. He even knocked on her door instead of just breaking in again, so she has the option of not talking to him if she doesn't want to hear about it. He leaves a message for his NZT-self saying that he's not going to be heartless if this is what happens, and all of us watching cheered.

Other than that, Boss Lady decided that he needs hand-to-hand training, which he applies his NZT to and picks up creepy fast, which tips of Casey that something is up with him. Casey is also secretly dating Rebecca, and wants to know what the deal is with Brian, though he hasn't yet asked if there's any feelings going on. Sand basically says that he thinks there are feelings going on, and that that's a problem, but Brian denies it. He figures out that Rebecca is seeing Casey and doesn't seem to care, which surprises her; she expected some fuss that he doesn't give. 

The episode was a little hard to watch; the best part about Brian is how much he cares, and how good his heart is, and this whole episode had him trying to be hard and uncaring, and that isn't him. And it went badly, which is terrible, but it convinced him to do what he thinks is right regardless of his own self-interest, which is good. What's in that file will either unite him and Rebecca as a team once and for all, or it'll divide them--at least until they don't give him his anti-side-effect shot next week and he gets sick and crazy. Between the two, they've got to decide whether they're going to be friends or just coworkers, right?

Favorite random cinematography this week: the thought bubbles and the claymation dioramas.

All in all, not a bad evening for TV!

 Flash

Tweets about #theflash from:pirategirljack include:retweets

SHIELD

Tweets about #agentsofshield from:pirategirljack include:retweets

Limitless

Tweets about #limitless from:pirategirljack include:retweets

• Flash 2.2, SHIELD 3.3, Limitless 1.4
• Agents of SHIELD 3.1, Limitless 1.2
• Limitless 1.1

Geeky TV commentary - Gotham 2.5, Minority Report 1.5, Blindspot 1.5

The theme of this week's episodes is "FEELS".

Gotham airs at 8pm on Fox Monday nights!

Mama Cobblepot is apparently not dead, but she's still missing, and Penguin can't afford to turn down any of the bottom-run jobs Gallavan brings him because he can't risk his mom. But it's wearing on him and driving him more off the edge than he already was. He's always been unstable, quick to kill, but he has a code, and he's his own man now. Or he was. Now Gallavan wants him to burn up this list of buildings, like some sort of thug. Penguin hands off the job to Butch, who takes it to Cat, because she's friends with a girl who has firebug brothers.

Cat is not pleased with how those brothers treat her, but the girl just wants to be treated well at all, and when the third brother, the one in charge of setting the fires, gets asploded in a raid on their literal black market (which is like a big box store and is hilarious), she takes his place. Cat wants her to ditch them, but she doesn't until they ditch her when the cops stop them from burning up the book depository--as they should, because Books.

Turns out all the places they were told to burn were Wayne Industries holdings. And that Gallivan is actually the last heir to some Old Gotham family that was disgraced by a failed relationship with a Wayne girl, and ran away to found a secret society for the purpose of destroying the Waynes, as far as it seems. The flashback was the worst thing this show has ever done, which is saying something. One, it's incredibly lame, like a really bad romance or gothic gone wrong. Two, the hair and clothes are wildly distracting. And Three, it turns Gallivan from a creepy and suave self-made psycho to a hereditary blood-feuder who never thought to not go and kill a twelve year old even though he's more than twice his age. So dumb.

But on the other hand, we had a Nygma-Kringle / Jim-Lee double date that should have been a disaster and actually went off without a hitch and was very sweet.

And more and more, Butch just has to put up with everyone else's crazy. He's just trying to do his job, and he's as loyal as a puppy, and when Penguin sends him to infiltrate Gallivan's circle and does it by cutting his hand off, he's just got to take it. It's not right.

This show is always sort of walking thin lines of taste and too much, and it sort of wobbled around on that line today, but mostly it feels like set up; the ad for next week looks like more actually happens, and more of consequence, so this week is the one that puts everyone into new places so they can all be knocked down next week. There was no Bruce or Alfred at all this week, which is a point against it, but there was Cat being Cat on her own, which is always good. I almost couldn't care less about Gallivan and his gross family, but the fact that Barbara is probably one of the other last heirs of Old Gotham and he's probably keeping her around because of that could make that storyline less blah.

This show is pretty cleanly divided between the great stuff--Penguin, Nygma, the kids, Alfred--and the stuff that bores me--the precinct, blood feuds, politics. Last season, by the end, there was too much on the side of boring or frustrating; so far this season has stayed mostly on the side of fun. Can they stay there?

Minority Report airs at 9pm on Fox Monday nights.

This week, Vega comes up in the vision, and it ties back to her dad's murder 17 years ago, before precrime--but not before they were in the milkbath having visions. It looks like she's the one who's going to be the victim, which Dash does not like at all.

Vega is sort of on edge and emotionally compromised by it being her birthday, which she shares with her dad, so that every year reminds her of his unsolved death. Dash is adorable about her birthday, bringing her flowers and being so very sweet, but when he has the vision, he gets super concerned about her. He even punches Arthur in the face over it, something he didn't do over any of the other cases or any of the things that mattered to him personally.

He's so in love with her, guys.

Anyway, Wally has a machine that can dig up the old memories that Dash can't access on his own, but since the memories were created in tandem with Arthur, they need both of them for the machine to work. Arthur doesn't want to, but Vega convinces him because as Dash's twin, he has the same weakness for her (or something).

They get the memory and realize that it's not the old gang leader Vega sent to jail who has a history of threatening her life--it's the lady who is working to rehab the criminals. Back in the day, she was a really bad junkie, and she was hired to make it look like a mugging.

So she knows now who killed her dad, but she can't bring herself to kill her or arrest her because she's served her time for her past and she's got a kid now. And there was a tense stand off with that kid, so they had to talk him out of making a choice you can't ever make up for like his mom did. But the little detail of how she was hired--that means there was a reason he was killed, and now, in true Catherine Beckett fashion, she wants to find out why.

It was great seeing Dash stand up to his brother, and side once and for all with his partner. It was also great seeing exactly how concerned he is for her, and still offer her any help she needs, and make sure she's safe without stopping her from doing what she needs to do. Because he understands that need to fix crimes--that's why he's there. Arthur still thinks Vega is going to turn on them, but he doesn't seem totally on Agatha's side about  her after their talk and their adventure this episode, and he can see how much Dash cares about her. Whether that last detail sways him toward her side or away is probably up to the rest of the season to figure out.

And it was great seeing Vega not in control, with her being the one making rash decisions and taking crazy risks. We got more with her mom, which is all sorts of neat because she's not there nearly enough, and this is a big chunk of backstory and motivation from her in only five episodes; time was, this would be an end-of-the-season episode, or a future-seasons episode, and the reveal of who did it would have gone on much longer. Stories move so much faster these days!

Blindspot airs at 10pm on NBC Monday nights.

And speaking of full-tilt storytelling and big character things happening much sooner than expected, we have Blindspot!

This week's case is about some terrorist group that's smuggling radioactive cesium to build a dirty bomb, and manages to stage a bank robbery to save their best bomb-builder from a secret CIA torture chamber. It was pretty clever, and with Weller serving as the agent trying to get through to them and Jane figuring out that something was wrong with the way people were moving around, it was pretty tense.

And that was, like, ten minutes.

The baddie gets away and they have to figure out where the radioactives are before they can build the bomb. Which they do. But, as usual, it's the stuff around the case that matters most, and that's how this viewer likes it.

Their boss finds out that Jane's tooth-test doesn't match Taylor Shaw's and wants to know what Weller is going to do about it, but he's adamant that he knows who she is. He takes her home to meet his sister, which is definitely too early, and his sister tells embarrassing baby Weller stories--and his nephew asks questions that are too pointed and sets off Jane's panic attacks. She flees. But she's fine the next day because the field is the only place she feels at home, which he says he understands.

But she's not alright. Later, she tells him that it wasn't the questions or the stories, it was him--how he expects her to be someone she doesn't know anything about, how he looks at her like he knows her when she doesn't know herself, and how she can't handle that. But when she starts remembering things and she freaks out--something she has plenty of reason to do much more than she does--it's him who can calm her down and center her. By putting her hand on his chest so she can feel his heartbeat, and holding her gaze, and promising that he'll always be there.

Later again, when he's checking her new safehouse before he will leave her alone in it, he apologizes for putting that pressure on her, and for losing her to begin with, and gets more emotional than we've seen from him this whole time. And this time, she puts his hand over her heart, and she says that he's her starting place--he'd told her that Taylor Shaw was a place to start to figure out who she is, but she says that he's the start. There is a definite moment as they're sharing that pile of feels and guilt and hope and fear. But he pulls away, scared again, and she doesn't stop him. When he gets home, he finds that his sister has brought his dad back, and he just walks out. Probably not back to Jane's to talk about it, though.

She remembered being taken this week, and didn't see the face of the man who did it, but saw his hands, and saw the scarred, starved, dirty kids who were trapped on little mattresses on the floor in the place where he took her. Child slavery? Child soldiers? A training program? Something else entirely?

Meanwhile, Reede still doesn't want Jane around, and he's started questioning her in public where others can hear, which Zapata doesn't like because they need to seem to be a unified front in public to do their jobs. 

And the head of the CIA offers to trade the terrorist bomber for Jane, effectively saying that she's more important to a possible key to a whole network of terrorists, but not saying why. Mayfair takes her side, against her old "buddy", and probably starts a war by doing it. But Zapata has those debts she needs to pay back, and she goes to him after the fact to sell what she knows about Jane.

This is so much story. It's not too much, but there's questions piling up and the mysteries and crazy loyalty-patterns are all over the place, and it's got the amount of plot points that would have filled a whole season a few years ago. It's amazing, really, that they've come so far in only five episodes, and I hope they can keep it up, since they were recently confirmed for the tail end of the season, giving them a full order of episodes. The characters are so good, complex and with complex interactions, and with divided loyalties. The team is falling apart in stages, and that raises the question of whether they can manage to not fall apart entirely when they'll undoubtedly need to be united, as Zapata said, before the end of the season.

And they really know how to pull the heartstrings.

• Gotham 2.4, Minority Report 1.4, Blindspot 1.4
• Gotham 2.2, Minority Report 1.2, Blindspot 1.2
• Gotham 2.1, Minority Report 1.1, Blindspot 1.1

Other Monday shows:

• Scorpion 2.1

Gotham

Tweets about #gotham from:pirategirljack include:retweets

Minority Report

Tweets about #minorityreport from:pirategirljack include:retweets

Blindspot

Tweets about #blindspot from:pirategirljack include:retweets

Geeky TV commentary - Bones 11.3, Sleepy Hollow 3.3

Bones airs at 8pm on Fox Thursday nights.

Bones and Booth are back in the field! The case is about black market organ dealing, and the people who do that, but by this point in the run of the series, that's not really the point of the show at all, and it hasn't been in a long time, so why pretend? They barely got into the morals of it, and the science was cool, but there wasn't any really experimental testing or anything. And of course they got their killer.

The real story this week, as most weeks, is in the characters.

Booth is back at work, but he's been gone long enough between retiring, then going missing, then recovering, that his office has been given over to Aubrey, who is quietly becoming the new Booth in the FBI-focused alternate show that we don't get to see. He's also having trouble getting a hold of his brother's ashes, which should have been mailed to him from wherever they were being kept, and went missing. Adapting is hitting him hard.

Bones is trying to help him, Aubrey is trying to help him, and really, none of it is working because he's really having trouble with his brother being dead and under the circumstances it happened, rather than the actual job situation.

Meanwhile, Cam is having a hard time being single again. Aristoo and she are taking a break while he goes to find work somewhere else, since she can't hire him full time and date him. And there's a feeling in the beginning of the episode that she has beef with Bones over that, since Bones coming back made him leave once and for all. She assures Bones later on that that's not it, but she's still upset and it's still hard, and can we just agree that Cam needs a break for once? Everyone she falls for keeps leaving or winding up dead since she was introduced, and she's the last main cast member in the Jeffersonian that hasn't just been allowed to be in love. Hopefully Aristoo will find a forensic anthropologist job somewhere close enough to visit, at least, so he and Cam can work out their conflicts and get married already.

And Hodgins has set up a showing of Angela's photography without telling her that he was going to or asking her permission, and has invited everyone ever. She's freaked out by it, but she doesn't stop it from happening, and when it goes on, a Pullitzer prize winning photographer buys one of her pictures. Hopefully, that will lead to good things for her, since the whole going-to-Paris thing from the end of last season was sort of totally dropped and, I think, never mentioned again.

It was great having B&B back in the field together! They were barging in on funerals, Bones made someone faint, Booth tried to get her to be respectful, it was like old times for a minute.

And then they found Jarrod's ashes in the nursery where Christine was using them as a stool to get into her baby brother's crib so that she can take care of him in a whole sibling-helping-sibling symbolism thing, and maybe it will help Booth move on. Because he's had a hard several episodes, and he could use a bit of a break these days, too.

Sleepy Hollow airs at 9pm on Fox Thursday nights.

You know, Pandora could have been Katrina 2.0--you know, a weird witchy drag on the show--but she's actually turning out, so far, to be neat. She's got her box of tricks. She's raising some really weird subterranean roses. And she's throwing semi-random past-linked baddies at them in what looks, more and more, to be an attempt to find their weak spots. And it looks like it's working on Abbie, who looks more and more doubtful every time Crane says he's glad they're partners with a shared mission and he's happy they've found each other.

It's very worrying.

This week's villain is Jack the Ripper! Who, of course, Crane almost met when he was a teenager at Eton, and of course turns out to actually be a cursed knife that makes a jealous or rageful person into a ripper, and has been doing so for around 900 years by the time he kits Sleepy Hollow. This time's chump is a nerd from an office who can't get the attention of his lady crush. They figure that all out pretty quickly, and also figure out that the way to stop him is to infect the blood that the knife feeds on, breaking it's hold. They've got two darts full of malaria-blood, so two chances to take the dude down. One fails, of course, and then the second, Crane goes and does something CRAZY and infects himself just as he's stabbed in the stomach, and the way the episode was cut, there was not nearly enough time for the horror of that really dumb choice to sink in.

Thankfully, he's apparently immune to malaria because of trench warfare during the Revolution, and we'll just forget about how modern malaria has been around for two hundred years longer that the strain he would have been immune to, because he's okay. He's also sleeping on Abbie's couch, though it seems more like he should be in a bed (does he have a bed? did he tell Abbie not to give him her's? did she not offer??), and maybe, really, should be in a hospital. There were sirens, so they must've taken him to a hospital, but the show skipped all that.

But there was a great moment where he was failing and Abbie was holding him in her arms and brushing his hair from his face and patting his cheeks and begging him to stay with her. That moment, also, could have used a little more time to happen and sink in, but it was also edited short and fast.

And then Pandora showed up and was all "what does it feel like, to know his life is slipping through your fingers?" that sounds like a set up for Abbie's biggest fear being losing Crane, though she's been holding him at arm's length since they got back together.

Off in the various B-plots, Crane is trying to save the Archive, still, and his paperwork is continually being denied because they won't give funding to a non-US Citizen, so he decides to become a full citizen. Abbie likes the idea, and her smiling at him makes him smile. The girl who was telling him about the paperwork, and seems really sweet on him, offers to help him with his learning and everything, and he seems charmed by her attention. She's cute and nice; in previous seasons (season 2 - cough), that would have marked her for a horrible death. Whether that happens or not will be another test on how much the writers have actually turned a leaf.

Abbie and Danny still have unresolved business, and he wants to take her to dinner and talk about it, in a way that doesn't sound entirely like "we're over", but Crane getting evil-shanked puts and end to that plan. He does say that he thinks Abbie can go far, and he wants to keep pushing her if she'll keep pushing him. It didn't seem like that's what Abbie wanted to talk about, but she had a bedside to get to.

And Jenny and Jo had to go after the Shard of Anubis that was stolen from them last week. They track the Big Bad Voodoo Daddy to a motel where some girl says she was incidental and gets the drop on all of them. Jenny gets it back because she's awesome, but the implication of that conversation is that Jenny wasn't the only girl that Corbin was running all over the world to get mystical artifacts, and that doesn't sit well with Jens. I guess we're just running with the idea that Joe doesn't know anything about all this, though I'm pretty sure he learned something about it when he was a wendigo last season. What evs. Jenny wants to let him in, and it'll be nice when he's up to date and can work with Team Witness for real, and then Jenny can come back to the fold, too.

Three episodes in, and this season is pretty solid. It's not as madcap or as light as season one was, but it's appropriately more adult--they've all been through a lot, and they're working out the new ways they all fit together, and in spite of that, it's still fun and charming and goofy enough to counter the potential darkness in the story. Three points is a pattern, and hopefully the pattern will keep on!

 Bones

Tweets about #bones from:pirategirljack include:retweets

Sleepy Hollow

Tweets about #sleepyhollow from:pirategirljack include:retweets

• Bones 11.1 and Sleepy Hollow 3.1

What did you think of tonight's shows? Comment below, or come talk to us on Twitter!