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

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Minority Report

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Blindspot

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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?

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• 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?

@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?