Geeky TV commentary - Bones 11.6, Sleepy Hollow 3.6, Elementary 4.1

Bones airs at 8pm on Fox Thursday nights.

So many guest stars this season! The latest was right here in the cold open, with Impractical Jokers Murr and Sal as street sweepers who find the body by street-sweeping over it and getting their whole truck all grossed up. And then Murr tastes it, thinking it's a prank. That's a nice meta-injoke, but it's also really gross.

The body turns out to be a senator. One that Hodgins actually liked enough to stop voting side parties for. He seemed to actually be, like, the only good guy in Senate, since the mysterious monthly pay outs turned out to be to help a daughter he'd just reconnected with, no an affair like they thought. It was the wife that was having an affair. A wife that would suddenly be a Senator because of some old law that widows of Senators take over when one dies because they're likely to be similar, politically. And it was his aid (or whoever that guy who used to be on Sleepy Hollow was) who killed him.

All very tidy. Because it's not the case that matters on this show anymore.

What matters is the people, as I probably say every week.

Bones got to turn her bluntness up to 11 to take on their political suspects so that she could be rude and ask personal questions and booth could get a read on her, and she took to it gleefully. It was kind of obnoxious, but it also showed exactly why they're such a good team: she antagonizes and cuts right to the truth, and Booth reads the social cues and emotional reactions, and together they can build a clear picture of what's going on.

And when he wasn't with Bones, Booth was with Aubrey, who was sort of their lovechild this ep--savvy and agent-y, but also not taking any guff from anyone involve and being less diplomatic than Booth. It was great. Aubrey was also checking out Squintern Jessica-from-the-commune's background, and found out about some questionable protests, and some drugs and rock'n'roll in her past. He was inclined to take it seriously, but she was arguing that pasts make us who we are and she's not who she was then anymore than he's who he was when his dad was arrested. It was very well done--talking on multiple layers, feeling out what could be a new 'ship*, all sorts of meaningful eyeballs.

Aubrey came in on a bad episode so that it was crazy-obvious that he was meant to fill a hole in the cast when Sweets died**, but he's done a good job of becoming an endearing, tough, honest, individual character! And he humanizes Jessica nicely. The two of them might even be good enough together to handle a spinoff or a continuation, if the main cast decides to leave at any point. An ER-style hand-off wouldn't have worked a few years ago, but now the Squinterns are all known characters and it would be nice to see them taking over the lab and carrying on the Jeffersonian's good name if the original cast gets tired of it. Bones: The Next Generation, all trained by Bones and Booth and Angela, Hodgins, and Cam.***

And we got Caroline this week! Any week with Caroline busting chops and calling Booth pretty is a good week, and she upped the ante by flirting with Aubrey, too, and it was wonderful.

Meanwhile, Bones and Booth were arguing over whether or not to get a TV for the bedroom, because Booth wanted to watch things snuggled up in bed, and Bones didn't want to give up sex--since statistics say that a TV in the bedroom makes for less sex for couples, and she loves statistics. They eventually do get one, after agreeing that it's an experiment to see whether they fit the odds or beat them, and it's adorable.

It still feels sometimes like Bones is coasting, but if they are, they're coasting at a good clip, on a good tone, and it's still fun and charming and full of quirk, just like we all love.

Sleepy Hollow airs at 9pm on Fox Thursday nights.

Pandora's plot is finally getting somewhere...but we have no idea where, and it sort of just highlighted how bad Abbie and Crane have been about following up with anything at all this season. She sent a wasp-woman from Trinidadian folklore to make people paranoid and dead, and then she harvested all those flowers to open a door in the tree and literally just walk out on them, and it was like ??????.

It was great to get a monster that came from something other than Revolutionary America (though it did, actually, tie back to that needlessly), even if she did look like a Power Rangers villain and didn't have much more story to herself than, say, a streetlamp. Maybe an evil streetlamp. But it was so easy to find where she was and to put the pieces together that it just made Team Witness look like selfish idiots for not ever wondering where Pandora was hiding out, or what she was doing, or what any of what she was doing meant. And even with the pieces together--six kinds of fear to open a door--we still have no idea what she's doing. Like, at all. Or why.

Ugh.

The hope that the beginning of the season brought that it would be better is starting to wear off as Jenny is still underused (though this week, she does get to do a little A-plot usefulness, and might be getting a story of her own now), as they announce that they're "not actively pursuing Ichabbie" and yet Abbie is also being denied actively pursing or being pursued by anyone else, and these flabby treatments of the plot lines they are actively pursuing. Combined with how Fox didn't even update the character shots for the bumps between commercials and didn't even mention that this show still existed until two weeks before it came back, feels like it's been abandoned. Which feels like this will be the last season. Which then, in light of all the lameness going on around the edges, feels like everyone has given up. If you're going out and you know it, make it good, and don't put off the storylines the fans have been wanting--especially when you were talking about them as a possibility before the season aired. If you're not giving up, act like it, and get your act together.

Anyway.

Jenny and Joe had to give up on tracking down Corbin's past, because of that case that the FBI has that we've seen literally nothing of, and Joe won't let it go. He trades the Shard of Anubis for info, and his dad's old criminal buddy says a bunch of bad-sounding things about money and crime and doesn't explain any of them. But Jenny had her boy's back, and they get the Shard back--except the guy had taken the real shard out of the big rock, and it sank into Jenny's hand, and she didn't think to mention that to anyone--like, say, her partner in this mission, or her sister, or the resident eidetic king of books. It gave her nightmares and made her glow, and that could be really interesting, but at this point, who knows.

Crane goes on a date with Zoe that proves they have no chemistry despite hitting up the same webpages, which really just makes it look like Zoe is stalking him or something. She's so not weirded out by his weirdness, never has anything to say against him, finds the same how-to-date webpages out of all the pages on the web...It's suspicious. And yet, Crane goes out with her again.

And Abbie has no joy left in her life. All she does is get annoyed, make sad faces when no one is looking, and not get to have a love interest of her own. Which might be fine if she got to talk about why, or explain herself to the boss who might still like her (though he doesn't treat her very well and also is not doing anything about it himself, so who cares if he's cute), or anything, but she's not doing any of that. She's a blank wall, not letting anyone in, not letting anything out, and it looks like she doesn't even want to be there--so why is she? The first episode had her choosing Witnessing over running away, but lately, she's just chasing down monsters but not following up, not trying to piece stuff together between cases, not even hanging out with her sister.

And if Abbie isn't happy, when do we get to get a plot for her about it?

Also, why wasn't Grace Dixon the new contact in the past? She's got the journal she passed down to Abbie, she was already there so she didn't need to be created new for this season that already has new characters, she proves that Abbie is equally as tied into whatever happens then that affects here, and she has actually met Abbie--literally almost the only person from the past who can say that. Oversight? Prejudice? More fumbling? It's an annoying choice.

And it's annoying being so annoyed by a show I like and used to love, that's so much better than it was, and still making dumb choices.

Elementary airs at 10pm on CBS Thursday nights.

Elementary is back! And there was only a small jump between the end of the season and the start of this one, story-wise. 

Sherlock fell off the wagon, but has gotten clean again since then, and doesn't intend to get back into a drugged out stupor. He feels appropriately bad about it. But more than that, he feels bad about how almost kicking that guy to death might have messed up Joan's life, since if he's gone from the NYPD consultancy, she is too. 

He tries to get her to take the credit for the case they're working, and she refuses--all that matters to her is the partnership, because she took the job to work with him, not the cops. So if she goes down with him, he wants to cushion that, too, and tries to get them both a job working for the feds instead of the cops****. Really, his concern for her is the heart of this episode, and it's moving enough that when he finds out he's not going to jail for the beating, she hugs him and he doesn't make her stop (though he also doesn't return it). Is this the season where they'll be allowed to drift toward something non-professional? Something where they admit that they care about each other more than once a season?

They're trying to prove that Bloom, who was horrible to them last season and killed himself right in front of Sherlock this episode, didn't kill his wife by proving that he's telling the truth about the two women he did kill and therefore telling the truth that he didn't kill the wife, too. Tracking the wife leads to another woman who disappeared, and a plot to get revenge for the death of her whole family during a failed attempt to smuggle themselves out of South America through Mexico. They find the guy responsible for that--who was also responsible for her death when she found him and confronted him about it. 

And that led to the option to work outside the city, though it was half joking, and who knows if that's what they'll do.

What made this a great episode was the caring between all the characters. Gregson brought them food and came to check on Joan, and separately on Sherlock. Bell helped Joan clean up their stuff from the precinct when they officially lost their job there, and it was very sweet when he said he'd miss her. Joan was trying to get through to Mr Holmes when he said he was finally going to come talk to them in person and never showed, because she cares about Sherlock and didn't want to be treated like that for it. Sherlock tried to shield Joan and Gregson from his fallout.

And Mr Holmes finally did show up, whether that's because he cares or not still remains to be seen.

All in all, a good start to the season, with lots of feels and somehow still some humor, and a good case.

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

Bones

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Sleepy Hollow

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Elementary

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• Bones 11.4, Sleepy Hollow 3.4
• Bones 11.3, Sleepy Hollow 3.3
• Bones 11.1, Sleepy Hollow 3.1

*One of the few left, now that almost everyone is paired off.
**They should have introduced him a few episodes before, let him interact, been a separate person before Sweets died, but whatevs, too late now.
***This is one of my hobbyhorses. Shows don't have to end when the main characters want to leave, but so far, really, only ER has done it right--introducing people and letting viewers get used to them before the old people leave. SG1 almost did it, trading O'Niell for Cameron and Vala, who were both great but only had a few years. X-Files tried, and Doggett and Reyes were good, but they came in too late and the show was already closing shop.
****Which would be so great, because then I can pretend that he'd be able to meet other fancy assets, like Jane from Blindspot at Brian from Limitless, even though they're both on a different channel. Ooh, or they could guest star Jane and Lisbon! Or Team Scorpion! They're all government contractors on CBS!

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

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Sleepy Hollow

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

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

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Sleepy Hollow

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• 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!

Geeky TV commentary - Bones 11.1, Sleepy Hollow 3.1

Bones airs at 8pm on Fox Thursday nights!

Bones is back! The new baby is a boy who can pee as straight and as accurately as Booth once shot, and the family is so cute. So of course everything goes to crap after that. Booth goes to work in the morning at his new job at Quantico, and then later in the day, the team is called in to investigate a skeleton found in a burned out husk of a van. It looks like Booth. No one can find Booth and his guns are gone from the lock box, and he left his wedding band behind.

While everyone is trying to cope with Booth being dead, and finding more and more proof that this body is his, Bones discovers that it's not Booth--it's Jared, his bad-news brother who we haven't seen in years. But that leaves so many questions about where Booth is, and why he was dealing with his brother that he agreed to not contact anymore, and what they were both involved in.

The Internal Affairs lady finds a bank account that has only been used to pay money to Jared. The FBI finds a bloodbath including the only lead they had after looking at the particulates on the body (because it's always the particulates and that's why Hodgins is King of the Lab). There's a big puddle there that matches Booth's blood; he was shot, but he lived long enough to get out. We get to see him bleeding in what looks like an abandoned building somewhere, but they don't see that.

Aubrey discovers that IA was not being forthcoming--other agents have disappeared, including the new Dragon Lady's partner, which is why she's suddenly so gung-ho about figuring out where Booth is.

Bones, understandably, is fiercely angry and protective, and before she discovers who the bones really were, there's a deliberately upsetting montage of those long-lost early-season shippy moments that once made us swoon and cry with frustration many moons ago.

And he's not back at the end of the episode. He's in a room with people who look ready to kill each other at any minute, including Roger Cross, who was supposedly Jared's closest friend. He's still bleeding, but he's acting like it's fine.

Meanwhile, Aristoo wants to propose to Cam, but this is a really bad time. Cam accidentally finds the ring and Aristoo shows it to her so she can see it and he can see if she likes it, and Hodgins walks in on them and it's probably one of the cutest scenes this show has had in ages! Plus, she wants to hire him to replace Bones as the main forensic anthropologist in the Jeffersonian, since Bones is apparently entirely out of the field now, but she's worried about how smart it is when she's dating him.

So Bones Season 11 is off to a roaring start! At the beginning, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the gall of killing a main character in the first episode of a new season, but it seems like that's probably not what they're doing.* Cam and Aristoo continue to be improbably adorable for a hard-edged city pathologist and a political refugee from the Middle East. Hodgins is GOLD this episode, and Angie somehow still has the best clothes in a show full of good clothes AND is exceptionally good at her job.

And Aubrey! He's not the upstart little brother anymore. He's got his name in the credits with a picture of him eating something, and he's leading swat teams and standing up to Internal Affairs for Booth. He's on the list of Booth's friends, and Caroline folds him up under her wing with all her favorites.

It's like the show knew what we most loved about Bones-the-show and gave us all those things. And then bent some of them and left us on a cliffhanger to be sure that we'd have to come back. It's sort of a brilliant way to prove that the show still has what it always had, goofy charm in between affecting stories of murder and gross bodies. And eleven years into a show, it's good to know that it does. The youthful sexiness of the early seasons is mostly paired off with committed relationships, but there's still fierce love and fierce loyalty and Bones will still bust you up if you get in the way of her family.

Next week should be interesting!

Sleepy Hollow airs at 9pm on Fox Thursday nights!

It looks like Sleepy Hollow is trying really hard to give us back what we wanted all last season and had so little of, while we're talking about shows still having it. There's been a time-jump here, too, a longer one, and now Abbie is a full Agent in the FBI with a gorgeous office all made of wood and glass, and all new co-workers.

Crane has been in prison for a few days after getting caught smuggling antiquities--though that's not what he intended to do, since he was just bringing back a tablet he found in his own grave at his ancestral family home. It's Sumerian and tells of The Destroyers who take on the tribulations.** It took him five days to call Abbie, and when the episode starts, she's not super pleased with him because of that and how he hasn't contacted her in nine months. It doesn't stop her from throwing around her FBI powers to get him out and get his stuff back.

She's working a case with her boss to take down some crime ring, which stops her from being glued to Crane's side as he's researching a different case of two hunters killed by some creature who stopped their hearts with fear before it tore them apart--but the two cases become the same case when they realize that the monster is attracted by gunfire and the baddies are about to have a shootout with the cops.

There's shooting and infiltrating and Abbie goes to do her job and winds up talking herself back into being a Witness, even though she'd earlier said that that's all done and she just wants to do what she always wanted to do. Crane and Jenny take on the demon and Crane gets fear-froze, but Jenny stops the thing before it can kill him and Abbie kills it before it can try to kill him again. And they hug it out! Like old times!

All in all, it was not a bad season starter, and it feels like a promise to be better, but since three year olds always try to be better and sometimes still make horrible messes, we'll see how the rest of the season goes. It was great that Abbie talked herself back into her mission, that she was coming around on her own to accepting what she needs to accept, not because someone convinced her, but because she knows she needs to do it. Jenny was back, and she was sharp shooting and finding information on missing artifacts, and was basically back to being herself, and it was wonderful. And Abbie and Crane were back to poking fun at each other's foibles and joking and being so very amused by each other's foibles, and it was amazing.

Irving was not there, as we knew he wouldn't be, but the story was that he disappeared in the night, and that leaves the door open for him if he wants to come back to the show sometime in the future. It would be ideal if he could, even if just for one episode, to swing in and ask for help on something and swing out again. Maybe in the meantime, we can still get Macy or Cynthia to keep his story alive and ensure he's  not just written out, even if he's not there.

We got an Ichabod Crane Pantented Historical Rant, we got another weird twist on history with badass Betsy Ross*** who will hopefully stay in the past and not mess up the present, and we got the intro of impish and cute and scary new villain Pandora, who is probably at least half-mad and definitely very powerful. The episode didn't try too hard, but still felt like it was making it up to us. It didn't overstretch more than any of the first season episodes did to make its story work, and made more sense and was more in character than a lot of Season 2 was. Enough time has passed that the bad stuff from S2 is far enough processed that they can talk about it and make sense of it and get beyond it, and that's what we needed--not a whole season of moping and musing to get to this point. It's a smart move that will hopefully pay off!

I was cautious about coming into this season. Last season was such a problem. But this seems to be off to a good start, and if they can hold onto that good start--they're introducing new characters next week, so we'll see--it could be good. Whether it'll be as good as the first season remains to be seen, but the trepidation is a lot less than it was before airing.


What did you guys think of tonight's shows?



NOTES:
*If they do in the second or third ep? It's past wailing and gnashing of teeth, and onto punching of walls and studio effigies.
**Unclear whether it's specifically about them, or if it's like a general thing--like how there was always a Slayer. Maybe there's always two Witnesses, and there's just longer times between them. How cool would it be if we got to have stories of other Witnesses and the weird things they went through before Ichabod and Abbie, and what happened to them???

Tweets about #bones from:pirategirljack include:retweets

Tweets about #sleepyhollow from:pirategirljack include:retweets

@pirategirljack livetweet roundup Week 17 2015

MONDAY 4-20-15

 Tweets about #scorpion from:pirategirljack include:retweets

You guys, that finale had ALL THE FEELS. Like, we all knew Walter was going to be okay, what with him being the main character, and, like, a real person who is alive, but what we didn't know was how or will it be  now or will we have to wait through an endless cliffhanger? We didn't have to wait--thank God--but also, we didn't have to deal with a cliffhanger after that previous one! I approve of seasons NOT ending on cliffhangers!

Also, being someone who watches TV shows for their emotional and character content more than for their "core episodes", I really liked this finale. The story was as simple as could be--Walter was on a cliff and had to not die with his team's help. But the genius (see what I did there) was in how the storylines set up by the last few episodes were resolved by the characters and, further, by them working together. Look:

• Toby and Happy have been sort of tense around each other; fixed by them leading the team to save Walter, as evidenced by the two of them together watching Ralph so Paige could stay with Walter in the hospital.
• Cabe was off the team and off Homeland; solved by him coming in and helping anyway, and being the literal last hope of the rescue effort. Walter even came to his senses about his sense of betrayal and they had a whole moment of apologies.
• Sly got his RC bird back, and proved yet again that he's underappreciated.
• Paige followed through with her decision to take Ralph somewhere safe--but realized that it was a bad decision the second she saw Walter on that news report and didn't even question the need to go back, to be there, to rejoin the team, Ralph and all. And at the end, there was the payoff of Ralph actually connecting with her and thanking her very sweetly for coming back.
• And there was Walter. He admitted he was emotional and that he didn't know what to do with it. He made up with Cabe. He gave every one of them a special message, reminding them of his favorite memories of each. He almost confessed his feelings for Paige (though since it's a first season they couldn't allow that, could they?? (I'm looking at you, 12 Monkeys, too)). 
• And at the very end, Paige confessed her feelings first, and it was very sweet.

All in all, exactly what a finale should be--emotionally complex, very effecting, and about these people we're watching the show for, not about the plots. Take a hint, NCISLA, who are in the same world but keep ending on crazy cliffhangers that wind up meaning nothing as soon as we come back.

Tweets about #gotham from:pirategirljack include:retweets

This show. Like, I like this show, and I watch it every week, but, like, I don't really remember all that much that happens week-to-week? I don't know why it hasn't really captured me, but it definitely takes up less space in my head than any number of other shows I watch.

Stuff I don't care about:

• 50 Shades of Serial Killer, unless Barbara decides to go full villain because of him.
• Police politics. Like, at all.
• Mob politics. At all.
• How Fish's story has basically been pushed off to the side and is a totally different show about Morloks.

What I do care about:

• Penguin, and how he can't ever get a break.
• Nygma, and how he just wants to be loved and totally can't manage that. 
• Harvey Bullock and whether he's eating or punching something.
• Bruce and Alfred being cross-generational buds.
• Whether or not everyone is leaving Morena Baccarin alone, because I swear, if they lay a finger on her...!
• Cat and Ivy squatting in Barbara's apartment.

So, basically, all the plot stuff bores me, but the character stuff delights me. So more character, please! I almost died of cute when Cat and Bruce went to that party, and everyone was all "Aww, baby CEO brought a date!" while the two of them totally scammed that guy to pick his pocket and copy his key. Brilliant. That's what I want.

Maybe next season we can have a whole episode that is just Penguin, Nygma, Harvey and the kids. I don't know how, but that'd be golden.

Tweets about #ncisla from:pirategirljack include:retweets

This felt like a set-up episode. Like, stuff happened but nothing was resolved. No one really found much in the way of answers, but things started moving toward a finale that will bring together NCIS and LAPD and the internal investigations and Callen's Mysterious Past and probably some terrorists, since that's the sort of baddies this show fights. It wasn't bad, and there was some cute stuff in between, but it was definitely a glide episode--barely a thing, just a way to get from one status quo to the next.

Tweets about #startalktv from:pirategirljack include:retweets

StarTalk is on TV! And it's basically the same thing as the StarTalk podcast that I love, except that now you can see their faces and hand gestures. I wish it was longer than an hour--these convos went FAST because they had to hit their points while also staying within the TV shape, and I would have liked to see more of the interview with George Takei, and heard more of them nerding about various shows and the tech that could be extrapolated off them. Maybe there'll be extras up on the website or in whatever episode of the podcast is closest--just more of this, is what I want.

It was a little bumpy at the beginning, but it evened out before the first break when everyone--who was non-white and included a lady, b-t-dubs--settled into their topics, the format, and their particular ideas of what it all meant. I loved it.

Ideas of the week: 

• Scifi doesn't predict the future, it sets a bar far out there for us to achieve and then surpass ourselves.
• Science fiction needs to be more optimistic to foster a general optimism that the world can be fixed, that things can be discovered, etc. Not that we're doomed to fail and die.

I didn't live-tweet this show, and I watched it on Sunday night after DVRing it on Monday before, but it's so neat. I love how Brian Unger hosts a history-info show, all conversational and loose and charming and informative. Go see it.

TUESDAY 4-21-15

Tweets about #theflash from:pirategirljack include:retweets

Barry went to Central City (for pizza, like you do) and there was a Ferris Air billboard! Does that mean we'll get Green Lantern and all that alien crazy spillover? I hope so. DC is as big a creation as Marvel, and I'd love if at least one show on TV manages to keep that feeling of bigness. Because Shield is doing a piss poor job of it.

There was a double! Who could look like any of them now, and I'm sure that won't come back to haunt us ever (insert sarcasm emoji here). But not-Barry trying to be all suave was great, and Caitlyn's face when he kissed her was pretty awesome, all WTF-eyebrows...before she sort of gave in, creating future complications...

Iris is still in the dark about everything except that Eddie has been working with the Flash. I guess that's a start? It's become one of my Common Gripes--all these shows where they aren't telling the one woman in the cast because of whatever dumb excuse when literally every other main character knows. It's condescending and it's stupid and it makes things hard to believe after a point--that Arrow just passed this season with Thea.

And they found the Secret Welles Room!

Tweets about #forever from:pirategirljack include:retweets

Tear my freaking heart out, why don'cha, Forever??? Like, it was bad when it seemed like the first body buried under the roses was Abigail; and then at the end? It was so much worse. She died after deciding that she'd been away too long and didn't want to give up her family. She died because of Adam. She died because she was protecting Henry and Abe! ALL THE FEELS when I hadn't even gotten over Scorpion's feels yet.

And in between that, we got Jo and Henry being a good team again, and Henry assuring Jo that things were still good between them, and PILES of wonderful Henry-Abe father-son stuff. 

Next week is the finale, and it looks like Jo will finally find out, and I hope that totally backfires on Adam since we hear him holding that over Henry's head as a threat--defuse it by having her already figure it out, and Henry telling her anyway, or her witnessing it happen, and then Adam being all "well damn, I got nothing". 

But mostly TELL HER OR LET HER FIGURE IT OUT, because of Common Gripe.

Tweets about #agentsofshield from:pirategirljack include:retweets

Still not sure where this story is going. Like, Ultron comes out soon, so I'm still hoping for some Real And Actual Connection, but I'm also trying to hold back hoping for too much. The Thor tie in what a joke, and the world on this show has become so muddy--all small and isolated and so hemmed in with mistrust that I don't even give a flip about two Shields, I just want Coulson to have his whole team back together and to go handle things. Screw the rest of this noise.

The best part of the episode was that scene in the hallway where he saw Skye and she saw him and they said each other's names and went to run into each other's arms--and then Gordon showed up and took her back, and Cal jumped on the Bamf wagon. If he hadn't done that, I'd be super annoyed at the reunion-blocking, but since he did, it's all complex and interesting, so I forgive it a little. 

Really, the whole ep was kind of sweet for Cal. He was trying so hard to be normal, to show his daughter the world he wanted to give her, and all his fav shops were closed and his building was a shambles, and then Hydra shows up again and is still indistinguishable from Shield because we really need to have three factions that all look the same and use the same tactics (insert eyeroll of epic proportions). And how Skye is starting to sort of understand him, and doesn't want him hurt. It was sweet. He's still a monster, but he's more understandable now, and not the worst thing ever.

Still don't like her mom. She's so calm and frosty that I don't trust her to not be a total jackass when it comes right down to it. Not sure about Lincoln who was all "I'm our friend" but was also all "I'm just gonna spy on you" and also "I know about things I'm not saying". Basically, I just want Skye to get back to Shield and stop being off on some other show being not-a-shield-agent when she spent so much time earning that badge. And I want her to be friends with Reina.

Tweets about #izombie from:pirategirljack include:retweets

Thank god Major isn't dead. I don't want him and Liv to get back together the way things are now, because 1) he's her past and she's literally a different person now, and 2) pre-existing love is dull when shows exist to show us how people fall in love. But he still has a lot of story to handle and I want him to have the chance to handle it, and to find out for himself what's going on in his weird city.

Liv, meanwhile, was being an agoraphobic internet troll and it was sort of amazing. How she was simultaneously dismissive and knew all the codes and sites and everything? How she kept slamming caffeine and cheesy-poofs? Wonderful. 

And I loved her and King Arthur together. They have a good chemistry, and he's a good resource for her--someone who has been going through the same things as her, who can understand what no one else can, not even Ravi, who tries. Even though I adore Ravi.

More Babineaux, though, okay? He keeps getting sort of squeezed out by all these other new characters. I did LOVE how he called her his partner and didn't even bat an eye at her being half-drunk on meds, and then too scared to leave her house so he just turned the laptop to face the suspect without question. I just love it all.

WEDNESDAY 4-22-15

Tweets about #arrow from:pirategirljack include:retweets

Olicity Did the Done! And it was a very well-handled scene, coming right after Felicity faced down the semi-immortal head of the world's biggest assassins union, and right before she drugged Ollie's stubborn ass to save his life. It was AMAZING, that whole sequence of scenes. Their mutual love was all over them--how they locked eyes and stayed that way, how there was no more holding back or hesitation, how sweet they were after. How he looked like he was being given the best gift in the world. How she ran her hands over his scars. 

Oh my god.

Unfortunately, those were the only good scenes in this episode because ugh, this story. Basically they went all the way to Nanda Parbat again, and really only managed to revive Thea from the mortal wounds Ra's gave her to get them to go to Nanda Parbat, to make them do what they then did. Ugh, shitty shitty shitty, and Thea still gets the worst of it, because first she's killed in service of this mess, and then she's brought back in a way that will basically guarantee that she's crazy or awful or something else stupid.

But we got Olicity without any hemming and hawing!

THURSDAY 4-23-15

Tweets about #bones from:pirategirljack include:retweets

This show. I love it, but I still feel like it's sort of coasting on its own goodness. Still, I want to come back and see these people every week. 

Bones found out she was pregnant again! We've all known anyway, and she's showing super-much, so no one should be surprised, but they're pretending her six months is like three months, so what ever. Yay Bones Baby #2! Booth thinks its a boy. I'm wondering if Angela and Hodgins are going to have another baby, too, or Cam or someone. Ooh, Cam having a baby when Mr Viziri is in unknown circumstances might make for some super-sad drama, and they seem to drop all the sad plots on her, so...

Also! Hodgins invents a thing that I'm pretty sure will bring back his fortune, which is funny because we were just wondering, before the episode started, if they were ever going to deal with all that money and influence he lost ages ago.

Tweets about #backstrom from:pirategirljack include:retweets

Backstrom continues to be just a little different from all the other cop-solves-crimes or bad-person-does-good shows. He himself is still awful, but he's being forced to realize why he's awful and at least start to deal with it, and the interaction between him and Valentine is almost always the best part of any episode. The fact that he's a cop but sort of shady, and Val is a criminal but sort of not shady enough is really fun to watch, too. I heard that this show is on the bubble, as they say, and I hope Fox takes a chance on it (ahahahahaa, as if Fox ever does ever), because it's finding its legs and they're good ones--and Thomas Dekker needs a show that doesn't get cancelled too soon; he's good at these weird and complex characters with strange goals and morals.

Meanwhile, the rest of the team continues to be awesome, and the way they just...don't listen to the bad stuff from Backstrom is like the air I breathe. He gets meaner when he's frustrated or scared or upset, and they just act more and more like he's a normal human being, and it is hilarious--but it's probably also what he needs: a whole functioning team of people who don't make a big deal about how awful he is has got to make him feel more normal and functional, too, right?

Tweets about #elementary from:pirategirljack include:retweets

Best part of the whole episode: Sherlock firing Alfredo as his sponsor so that he can be his friend without conflict of interest, and then looking all sorts of lemon-faced about the reality of having ANOTHER friend to deal with who immediately goes all sass-mouth about the whole thing. It's amazing that he has friends now, not just acquaintances and people he calls on when he needs help with something, and I hope whoever is his new sponsor next season is similarly just absorbed into this group of people that Sherlock likes and values. But I hope that it doesn't sideline his interactions with Joan even more; she's holding herself / her story is holding her somewhere intentionally off to the side, and the only hope I have is that Holmes keeps trying to bring her back in. Which I love. He's so awkward and strange when he's dealing with feelings, and she's so isolated. I'm waiting for a scene where she's had enough and breaks down and he's the one she turns to because a) that'll be so good for the characters, and b) Holmes trying to be a good shoulder to cry on would be amazingly strange, and I want to see how he works it out. I'm also trying not to want it too hard or to count on it too much because this is a CBS show in the classic CBS mold, where emotional matters are dealt with excruciatingly slowly. Le sigh.

Meanwhile, the team is developing nicely, and Bell is getting more screentime, and Gregson is being a good papa bear, and I'm loving it.

FRIDAY 4-24-15

Tweets about #themessengers from:pirategirljack include:retweets

New this week! I'm still a little unsure about this show. Like, there's a lot of good story-potential, and I like the set up of people having to stop the apocalypse (my other current favorite genre right now, I guess), but it's firmly in the Biblical range of plotlines and the fact that one of the characters is a TV preacher is already making it a little too preachy for me. Add that to the fact that one of the Chosen is an atheist, and I just feel like this whole show is going to boil down to Making The Atheist Believe, and I'm not here for that. It's not a 700 Club special episode, and I don't want all that dogma flopping around on my screen.

On the other hand, they all have neat powers and abilities, they keep winding up in the same places, and two of the characters are actual trained scientists, which could be cool. As soon as that other one gets back with the group, it should lighten up, too--two episodes in, and the show is really taking itself seriously, which gives it a sort of Rosewell feel that puts me off a little. CW is King of the Melodrama, but the best ones--Supernatural, especially--temper it with snark and wisecracking and the occasional totally bonkers episode to keep it from being opressive, and I'm waiting for The Messengers to find that balance. I know that they're dealing with Heavy Issues, but they're almost the same issues as Sleepy Hollow, which probably has a similar audience, and SH always has humor to keep it real. Even in the depths of that terrible middle of last season, it does.

So I like The Messengers, but I need to see where this story arc is going, because if it stays vaguely heavy handed, it's going to lose me, and the people who make the show have been so nice on Twitter that it would be sad to stop caring. On the other hand, if it goes instead to the science of the apocalypse, and the issues of crime and race, and has the characters seeking out reasons to love the world and want to save it instead of just doing it because they have to, that'd be cool. Super cool. And if they all sort of remember that things are sometimes funny even in the worst times.

SATURDAY 4-25-15

I had a rough weekend this week and it's now Monday and I haven't yet seen Outlander OR Orphan Black, so I'll catch up with them and talk about them on next week's post.

SUNDAY 4-26-15

And I have yet to pick up a new Sunday show.

What did you guys think about this week's TV? Is there anything I'm not watching that I need to be?