Geeky TV commentary - Supergirl 1.2, Minority Report 1.7, Blindspot 1.7

Supergirl airs at 8pm on CBS Monday nights.

This week, we got Kara not being very good at being a super hero, but also not giving up, and it was kind of the best. That plane she rescued last week? She left it in the river, and authorities still hadn't gotten it out yet. There was a boat this week, carrying crude oil and too close to a fire on the docks, so she dragged to to safety...and tore the bow off, causing an oil spill that she didn't clean up. She's not doing these things on purpose, but it's something I hope she deals with soon, because the show is already dealing with it--there was a report in the episode about how much trouble Superman has caused and how high rebuilding costs are, and how she looks worse right now. Maybe next week she'll figure out how to get that plane up and get rid of all the oil, because it makes her look less clumsy and more, like, crazy negligent.

But the episode is also trying to deal with that. She knows she's not doing a very good job, and she wants to do better, so she has her sister train her. Alex points out that there are ways to make her weak as a normal person--or worse--and so she can't just count on strength and invulnerability. She's got to have skills in there, too. She also isn't very good at taking direction, but she listens and works through it, and between her, Jimmy and Win, they find a bunch of smaller crimes* she can handle to hone her skills.

There's a dude with a hinge-out jaw who looks like the vampire from Blade II, but he's just a distraction to lure Kara out for the Big Bad--her aunt Astra, freed from the prison and totally not hanging back and working behind the scenes like I would have expected. She's Kara's mom's twin, and she says they used to like confusing their parents, which, if the writers know their theory, should come back to haunt everyone at some point, because it was just a pointed one-off this episode.

Astra is hard and mean and borderline vicious, and she has plans, but she also seems to think she's saving the world, so that should be interesting. At the very least, their show down, with dueling superpowers, was cool, and it was stopped by a kryptonite knife--a kryptoknife.

Meanwhile, Kara and Jimmy have some really sweet heart to hearts, Win is more enthused and a little less desperate than ever, and Supergirl agrees to do an interview with Cat Grant to save her image, because it helps both of their careers. Alex shows Kara a hologram of her mother that they've created (retroengineered?) for her in her own little Baby's First Fortress of Solitude on base. And their boss apparently is a super hard boss because of a tragic past barely hinted at--and has glowing eyes with absolutely no context. Is he an alien too? Being controlled by one? Some other sort of superpower?

Hopefully we'll know soon!

The theme of this episode seemed to have been Family and Reasons. Alex is Kara's family more than her actual aunt. Jimmy and Win help her do her job because she doesn't want the extreme isolation her cousin works with. Cat is hard because she has to be as a woman in a man's world, but she does want Kara to do her best. Bossman has a tragic past that's apparently still haunting him. Even Astra is driven by some vague combo of family and togetherness and a reason to her extremism. It'll be interesting to see how it all pans out and complicates up as the season continues.

Minority Report airs at 9pm on Fox Monday nights.

This week shook up the alliances some, and we got flashbacks to early-release Precogs! According to the flashback, they were woken up, given some physical therapy, and then dumped at the edge of town and told to never come back and make their own way. But they have almost no idea of how to live normal lives, not a lot of social skills, and definitely no idea what to do with these powers they still have. Back then, Dash was the cautious one who didn't want to get involved, and Arthur was sweet and unsure and liked a girl who got killed. I hope we get more flashbacks, because Arthur not being a jerk was a revelation, and it would be cool to see the two of them slowly switching sides as the years pass.

In the now, they miss a murder and Vega tells Dash to let it go, but that's not one of his current skills. Following it gets him captured because no one was supposed to know about the crime. He spends most of the episode tied up, waiting to be rescued, but somehow still not being a damsel in distress; he uses what he knows to get the kidnappers to fracture, to win over one of them based on what he knows of her story from his visions--which she finds and identifies in his notebook--and to keep himself alive. They do cut off one of his fingers, though, because they know he's Arthur's brother.

And Arthur was the one who stole the money they're looking for.

That means that he's the one that Vega can team up with. He wants Dash back, but he also wants to save his own skin; Vega just wants Dash to be safe. They work pretty well together, despite Arthur not wanting to and Vega being annoyed by his less than legal ways (and it's great when she punches him over them). And they manage to not only get Dash back, but also to bring down one of the biggest crime lords in the city by getting another syndicate to do it for them. Shifty, but very well played.

This was an Arthur episode, for sure. Breaking up the Dash-Vega duo showed how much Vega values Dash, and also showed how much Arthur will do for his brother, something that's always been there but also always been a lot vaguer, since he keeps not helping them when they ask him. And it was so nice seeing Arthur with a purpose. He's formidable when he's not just lining his own pockets!

But there's storms brewing on the horizon. Reed Diamond has taken an interest in Vega's career, and that will never be good since he knows who the Precogs are.

This is where we insert the constant complaint that Fox can't be trusted with good shows, since it was announced recently that they cut the episode order, which is as good as calling it canceled most of the time. This is also where we hope Syfy or something** will pick it up and give it the space and support it needs, because it's getting really good and that looming cancellation is making it really hard for people to care. I still care, though, and I'll keep watching and talking about it!

Blindspot airs at 10pm on NBC Monday nights.

And Blindspot! Still the best show of the season. 

This week, they get sent into the woods to see what's up with a treasure map, that leads them to another map and a cache of weapons just enough for the team to each have one, and leads to the capture of an informant who is also known for killing a whole bunch of people and is the second most wanted man in the US. They drag him along as they follow the clues, and he takes every opportunity to poke holes in their functional reality. He points out how crazy it is to be chasing tattoos. He sees how Jane and Weller are acting together. He makes them all doubt everything. And it's great, because they really do live in a crazy idea of a world right now.

But Weller is still working on that idea that he needs to be objective, and when they have to split up in the woods, the takes Zapata instead of Jane, which does two things. It gives Zapata a chance to talk to her boss alone that she hasn't had since Jane showed up, and point out that there's a difference between knowing you're protecting someone, and not knowing that's what you're doing. And it gives Jane and Reade a chance to work together, which makes him have to invest a little faith in her, since they never know what she's going to be able to do in each situation. That one was the best part of this episode: Reade being snarky and flippant, but also competent and believing in Jane when he wouldn't have only a few episodes before. Including when they found a helicopter, it was their only way out, and he had to trust all of their lives in the idea that if wouldn't be there if she didn't know how to use it.

Meanwhile, Jane discovered that she's really bad at flying in planes--the turbulence about gave her a rolling heart attack--but she's fine with being in control of a chopper leaving a gun battle. It's about control, she says. And Weller held her hands and looked at her like she was the cutest thing he'd ever seen. Didn't even hide it from the team that time. She says while they were separated, all she thought about was him (and herself and Taylor Shaw), and she decided that they're all in this together.

I've been wanting the two of them to decide that the advice to stay objective is bad advice and to just run with this personal connection, and maybe that was it--a quiet and unspoken version of "no thanks, we've got this". Because the team, and especially Weller, are literally all Jane has in the world, and keeping separate from her like that is hurtful to her and upsetting to the rest of them. They're stronger when they all care about each other and act like it. 

Meanwhile, Weller confronts Mayfair about Daylight and why she's not telling them things they need to know for their cases, and she starts to make him the fourth person in the world who knows about it before it cuts to black. The teaser for next week makes it seem like it's not going to go well, but it's great that she's letting him in, because it really has been getting in the way. And it means she's choosing her team.

Also meanwhile, Patterson and her boyfriend*** chase down a new lead that takes them to a gorgeous old library in one of the old parts of town, and a book that's being used as a message-passing cipher. Before they can figure out what the messages passed back and forth mean, Mayfair tracks them down. Patterson is very nearly fired. David is very nearly arrested. And to answer the question about whether they'll move in together or not--Patterson chooses her job that she loves over a boyfriend she has commitment issues with. If he turns out to be shifty, she'll be glad of that choice.

Finally, the guy with the tree tattoo, who Jane dreamed about sleeping with last week and who was spying on her at her house, is shown digging in the foundation of a building somewhere, but not why.

The whole main plot was super-convenient, and now they're all thinking that whoever did this to Jane is trying to help them--but if so, why be so circuitous about it? Why not just go snitch and turn in all the info they have normally? Not to mention that the early tatts were apparently uncovering corruption, and at least one of them was not specifically for them, and it's a lot of questions. And why, now, would they switch from uncovering stuff to setting up a scavenger hunt? Plots on plots on plots!

What did you guys think of this week's episodes?

Minority Report

Tweets about #minorityreport from:pirategirljack include:retweets

Blindspot

Tweets about #blindspot from:pirategirljack include:retweets

Supergirl

Tweets about #supergirl from:pirategirljack include:retweets

• Supergirl 1.1 and Scorpion 2.6
• Gotham 2.5, Minority Report 1.5, Blindspot 1.5
• 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

*On their lunch break, it seems, since it's the middle of the day and they all have jobs.
**USA could make it a little grittier and more realistic and really delve into the world, too, I think, with their new focus on awesomely well-done shows. Syfy is in a shakeup, but if they caught it when they settled, they could let it get really into it's scifi roots and awesome. They saved SG1 back in the day; I never understood why they aren't saving these other shows that keep popping up and fizzling out on channels that don't undetstand the needs of speculative fiction shows.
***Who is suspicious because of how into these tattoos he's not supposed to know about.

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 - Gotham 2.4, Minority Report 1.4, Blindspot 1.4

Gotham airs at 8pm on Fox Monday nights.

This whole episode is a pile of Penguin-feels. He's trying to get all the 80s hair metal and girl-goth gangs to get along, and Theo has the nerve to just send a car to summon him like some underling. Then he tells Pengs that he's going to level block after block of housing to build big sleek towers, and to do that, he has to be in control of a lot of city planning, stuff, so he's going to let the people demand that he run for mayor. To ensure that he wins, he needs to have everyone else killed, but he can't be linked to that while running on a Clean Up Gotham platform, so Penguin has to do it.

Robin Lord Taylor was amazing. His barely-suppressed rage, while maintaining perfect civility and politeness is amazing.

And then Theo shows him that they have his mother in a little room somewhere, crazy and scared and super-threatened. Penguin has no choice. So he goes and kills some people, and he's so upset about it that it's more heartbreaking because of him than it is because of his victims. But when it really gets ya is when Butch asks what's wrong without challenging his authority, and he tells him, and you can just see that he's barely holding it together.

And then the news is bad anyway. and that's gonna be terrible, and if our perfect civil Penguin is ruined by this, it's gonna be really upsetting.

Meanwhile, Nygma is still battling with his douchey side, but he manages to ask Miss Kringle out all confidently, and she goes, and he cooks a super-fancy molecular gastronomy dinner for her, and it actually goes really well. He almost tells her that he killed her boyfriend, and almost loses his chance, but then they're making out. Hopefully he can win her over enough that he can still be loved even when he goes totally off the edge.

Also meanwhile, Captain Barnes (The Commish, not Bucky), swoops into the precinct and fires, like six people who were crooked cops, making Jim look really ineffective since he couldn't do that in the whole of last season. He's a hardass, and he's not taking any excuses, and he doesn't care why someone's crooked, he's just getting rid of all of them. And he likes Jim, so he's gonna be really pissed when he finds out how close Harvey and he are to Penguin and co.

Off to the side, Baby Bats is embarassed to be picked up by his butler, Alfred tells Cat off and slaps her for killing Reggie, even though Reggie tried to kill him and almost succeeded, and Bats meets Silver, Theo's ward. Which can't possibly be a bad idea, what with Theo's whole family being awful all the time always. Cat's not pleased, and is still skulking around.

But all of that is blah blah blah, because the one who stole the show is really Penguin, beginning to end. It's all significant, and it was well-told and mostly less trashy than the show usually is, but Penguin being used, again, by someone leveraging his good points against him. All the wants to do is be a benevolent (and murderous) king, and all the other money-grabbers and land-grabbers all around him are so much worse. It's gonna be so tragic to see him living in a sewer or whatever he does in the Age of Batman.

It's funny. They set up this show that is the backstory behind Batman, with the beloved Commissioner Gordon as the lead, and he's really the one that is...not least interesting, but least fun, maybe. It's a show full of what I can only call sin-namon* rolls, and the ordinary ones just sort of can't compete. They could make the show just about Cat and Ivy living in Barbara's old loft, Baby Bats and Alfred haunting that mansion, Nygma, and Penguin, and it would be fine.

Minority Report airs at 9pm on Fox Monday nights.

This week ep is just as tight as fast-moving as always, but there's so many more feels than usual! Dash, as of last week's ep, works for the police so that he and Vega and use their resources and not get in trouble for working off the books. His latest vision brings them to a rich guy's party, and they meet Franki--who Dash is totally taken by, like, immediately. And she likes him back! And it seems genuine.

So Dash has an in on the case, and he gets some of those nifty contacts that Vega uses all the time, and through them, she can give him cues about what to ask while he's talking to the pretty girl. They hang out, they talk a lot, he gets some info, Vega is distinctly uncomfortable with it. It might be too soon to call it jealousy, but she's definitely not pleased by how he's getting all involved. While she's monitoring his feed, she catches his post-romp emotional bonding** and she learns a lot about her partner's tragic back story that she never heart before, that he's never talked about, and she looks really affected by it.

Anyway, they know that Franki is the victim from the vision, and the rich guy is the killer, and they find out that her sister was one of his friends and he left her to die of an overdose during a party. She says she wants justice, but as the episode goes on, it becomes obvious that she really wants revenge, and Dash barely manages to keep her from killing the dude (after getting past his security with a cloned eyeball that she just casually carries around in her purse). He doesn't help her get away, but he doesn't stop her, either. Hopefully, his star-crossed love with a price on her head is going to come back and make things difficult and morally ambiguous later, because she was really good for the emotional depth of this episode.

Outside of that, all sorts of things are going on, too.

Vega told Akeela about the whole thing last week so that she could help make sure that Dash actually got the job at the precinct, so now she's on the team. She and Wally immediately didn't hit it off, and it was the exact perfect sort of geek-territorial bickering. If this show lasts a few seasons, they're totally going to get married. He could read her on sight, and she read him pretty well, too. Wally called out some neat backstory details*** that should be really interesting when they come back!

Arthur was still trying to lean on Dash about Agatha's vision of Vega and the milkbaths, and keeps insisting that they're back there because of Vega, rather than assuming that she's there to help them, like was my first thought. Dash won't hear it, and goes to work with her...but he also doesn't tell Vega about the vision even though he tells Arthur that he's going to.

And Agatha very coldly and chillingly manipulates her ex-con-in-hiding neighbor (by blackmailing him AND holding all the money she stole from him last episode hostage), into stealing the blueprints for the milkbaths, and basically leaves him to die afterward. She's so shifty and cold about the whole thing, so smug about her foreknowledge. It's really hard to trust her, and more and more often, I feel like if they wind up back in the bath, it's going to be because of her trying to stop it from happening by letting people know it exists.

This show isn't super complicated yet--it's mostly still adventure and crime-solving--but there's so many threads being woven together and introduced and backstories being hinted at, that it's getting really hook-y. It's addictive, and it's fun, and it hits you right in the heartstrings. Everyone is still fighting caring about each other, but they're gonna have to care about each other when all that stuff all starts coming together.

I, for one, can't wait!

Blindspot airs at 10pm on NBC Monday nights.

This episode was bonkers-full of all sorts of stuff! Patterson accidentally leaves her super-top-secret folder full of pictures of Jane's tats where her boyfriend can see them at home, where she isn't supposed to have them. Which should be a problem, but he helps her solve one of the tattoos that leads them to the CDC, where the decontamination UV lights show up some MORE tattoos they didn't know Jane had. These ones are all viral sample numbers, all ultra-deadly, all missing.

While they're looking at the samples and finding that every one of the numbers isn't there, there's an emergency lockdown that gives just enough time for the only person who could have been responsible for the missing vials to disappear. They track her to a car on the run, and tell the cops, and before she can be pulled over, she says she's saving the world and kills her husband and herself.

But they manage to figure out that everywhere she's gone on official business lately, viruses have broken out, and that leaves one super-ebola behind. They then track her to the port terminal, and find a bag that they have to "MacGuyver a hazard containment" on. 

And that's at barely half the episode!

The thing goes off, but their hasty duct-tape-and-plastic-tarp containment holds, and they get the CDC there. But Patterson is smart, and she cross-referenced the places everyone else has been from that office, and finds out that the guy they sent has just bought a plane ticket with lots of short layovers, and she figures he must be trying to get infected--which means they can't let him open their duct-tape seal. 

Weller fights him, but the guy somehow gets the upper hand on him, and Jane comes flying out of nowhere, without a hazmat suit, and beats him to a pulp to save Weller from also getting infected. Turns out the guy thinks that they shouldn't be trying to cure these diseases, that they're the things that are meant to control populations and that we need a plague to lessen the number of people and save the world.****

There wasn't a whole lot for Jane to do this episode. She's part of the team now, so she doesn't have to worry about being sidelined, but since this was a real team effort and didn't involve anything much to do with her past, she was just a member of the team, not the focus of it. All her story came in the B-plot. 

Last week, DNA confirmed that she is, in fact, Taylor Shaw, the girl that went missing from Weller's care and because of that, his dad went to jail for murder for 25 years. All of which means nothing to her, of course. She wants to talk about it, but Weller has to focus on the case, but when they're back and safe afterward, he starts telling her about their lives together, the place they lived, what he knows about her mom and her. 

So, of course, that's when Patterson tells him that she had the isotopes tested from that tooth that Jane got knocked out last week, and the trace minerals and their ages all say that this woman was not born in Pennsylvania, despite the fact that Weller was there and remembers when they brought Taylor home. The elements say she was born in sub-Saharan Africa, and that means that they again have no idea who she is, and he's lost her all over again.

My theory is that they switched the records for her DNA, so that the paperwork that say "Taylor" would match her, regardless of who They are, or she is.

And meanwhile, their boss is still being cagey about the file whose number was in one of the tattoos, and her CIA "buddy" wants something done about Jane, but Mayfair says she's not a threat. Next week, though, it looks like they decide she is a threat, and that's only the fifth episode!

Also this week: Dude admits to her that he's not against her being on the team because of her, she's proven she does good work and is reliable; he's against her because when she's there, the stable, reliable Weller is not there--he's rash and unpredictable, and that puts the whole team at risk.***** And Lady-Z get threatened by a skeeze about a 40k gambling debt that she needs to pay back.

This show continues to be super-involving. It's packed with story, which can get a bit disorienting if you manage to miss something, but with so many dumb shows around, it's refreshing to think about it, and to be trusted to keep up. It's addictive and affecting, and sort of over the top, but in a really great movie-thriller sort of way, like The Bourne Identity or something.

What did you guys think of today's shows?

Tweets about #gotham from:pirategirljack include:retweets

Tweets about #minorityreport from:pirategirljack include:retweets

Tweets about #blindspot from:pirategirljack include:retweets

• Gotham 2.2, Minority Report 1.2, and Blindspot 1.2
• Gotham 2.1, Minority Report 1.1, and Blindspot 1.1

NOTES:
*You know, like a pure cinnamon roll, but evil? Like Loki or Spike, where they're awful, but you love them anyway?
**Did she listen in when they wound up in bed? From that station right out in the open that anyone could see??
***She was a "sprawl punk" who tattooed her face to fool ID cameras?
****And since NBC and Syfy are both owned by the same company, that totally means he's a member of the Markeridge Group, and that one of those samples is The Plague, and even though they stopped him, Jennifer is still going to go out and cause the 12 Monkeys future. I kept expecting Cassie and Cole to show up!^
^Which, by the way, would make a killer crossover.
*****We can say, she's his blindspot.

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

Tweets about #gotham from:pirategirljack include:retweets

Tweets about #minorityreport from:pirategirljack include:retweets

Tweets about #blindspot from:pirategirljack include:retweets

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!

Tonight's premiers (that I care about)!

These three above are ones I'll likely get to catch because they're ones everyone in the house agrees on wanting to watch, so look for the update on those later tonight / at some point overnight. And across ALL MY FEEDS! Whoo!

I'm a season into Gotham and I'm not sure if I'm excited for it, but the ads make Barbara look way more interesting deranged than she ever was weepy and being a pushover, so there's that. And I do miss Penguin and Nygma and fierce little Babybats.

I'm really interested in how Blindspot it going to be, and slightly more optimistic that NBC can be good to it than I am that Fox will be good to Minority Report--which looks good, but if it is, it'll just be that much harder for Fox to not destroy it. If they want my faith, they've got to leave their good-idea shows alone and let them be for a while!

These two shows are ones I'll most likely have to do as catching up posts later, because everyone wants to put their shows on at the same time and that's not cool, man. But I'm used to that with Scorpion--I think I saw maybe three episodes live last season! I'm super-excited for that first episode that they're totally selling to me as a fluffy pile of feels.

I think I need a new header for NCIS:LA though, because while I like Sam and Callen, I watch the show for Kensi and Deeks and the Nerds and Hetty, and none of them are even in this one!


What're you guys looking forward to Monday nights?