Sami on Agent Carter 2.1

Agent Carter airs at 9pm on ABC Tuesday nights*.

Peggy is backkkkkk!!!! And she's awesome right off the bat, as she should be, because she gets so little screentime despite how important she is to the MCU. We got a two-hour / two-episode launch this week, so there's lots to go over.

Jack is still an ass who can't handle a woman who can do things. Peggy managed to track down and set a successful trap for Dottie Underwood, and she'll only talk to Peggy, but when Jack gets a call from Souza over at the new Hollywood office, she's the only agent he can spare because he wants her out of his face. Which means, of course, that Dottie won't cooperate and he can't stop the FBI from taking her away. He does, however, make some career choices that are almost definitely how Hydra gets into Peggy's project.

The ass.

Across the continent in LA, Peggy is happy to see Souza, but he's surprised to see her because he expected more than one and not her. He really shouldn't have been surprised, because he knows Jackass as much as Peggy does, but whatevs. Apparently, they never did have that drink he asked her out on last season, and things got awkward, and it's adorable.

Their case is neat: a lake that froze almost solid in the middle of a heatwave, and a body of a lady in the middle of it. While they're trying to decide if the ice was to cover the murder, or the murder was incidental, the body of the lady keeps not defrosting, and then infects the ME who is supposed to autopsy her. He shatters, she stays frozen, and they track the trail to a science firm that once worked on the rush to create atomic power during the war, and accidentally created a rift in the world in one of their tests. Which led to zero matter: this angry** black stuff that sucks up all energy it comes into contact with, which is why people and things keep freezing.

Along the way, they meet a politician who had been dating the dead girl on the side, and his would-be moviestar wife. He attends at least one overly-pompous Hydra meeting, and she pays off the nobody cop who kills the guy who would have told Peggy what this was all about, but that doesn't really slow our Pegs down much. She's caught the eye of Dr Wilkes, who works for the company experimenting with this thing, and after he gets her to go on a date with him so they can talk about this stuff in a nice safe public place, she talks him into helping her steal the zero matter.

That doesn't go well. It gets out, Wilkes gets either exploded or sucked into a portal***, and Peggy is shaken and scared and sad. Plus, the actress-Hydra-lady gets infected with the zero matter in some new way that shows as a crack in her head rather than a violent freezing.

Around this, as always, is piles of delightfulness.

Mrs Jarvis is amazing. She's a hugging chatterbox who knows exactly what her husband was up to last season and is more on board than he is--which is saying something, since he basically begs Peggy to let him be her partner again because LA is horrible and his job is boring since they stopped working together. She also makes Peggy a gun-garter that hints at her being Peggy's Q and I want that so bad. And she has absolutely not a single shred of jealousy about Peggy's interactions with her husband, even when she walks in on them tussling as he's trying to prove his new fighting skills, and when she signals that she needs him in the middle of the night.

And best of all, she thinks Jarvis is equally as adorable when he's poorly trying to catch a flamingo named Bernard and when he's going off to save the world.

Rose is there, too, transferred with Souza, and she's already got more screentime to be awesome. She's taken up surfing!

Souza now wears low-key Hawaiian shirts and has a tan, and is dating someone that he didn't tell Peggy about. Violet loves Peggy on sight, and wants to show her around town, which makes both of them super uncomfortable, but not so uncomfortable as Pegs is when she finds the ring he was going to give to his cute little nurse girlfriend. Souza, however, still has feelings for Peggy--when she calls Jarvis, and Jarvis calls the office for help, Sousa drops everything and takes what he's got--Rose and Jarvis--and storms off to save her, despite her not needing saving. He was so upset! And he literally shoved people out of his way to get to her when she came out of the wreckage. Rose knows that he cares about her, too. He's not been subtle at all.

It's sort of glorious.

Peggy is semi oblivious; she likes him, too, but she steps back when she sees that he has a girlfriend, and haltingly starts trying to move on with Wilkes. So of course he dies / disappears. It's going to give Peggy a complex. She can't catch a break when it comes to love, and that makes her attempts to make friends and open up to people that much sadder.

Agent Carter is off to a great start for season two! It's snappy, it's delightfully vintage, and it's now set in a great time and place for Hollywood, and an interesting point in history as the world recovers from the war and tries to figure out what happens next. That's hinted at when Red Foreman offers Jack a place in whatever comes after the now-going-obsolete-he-says SSR. Hydra is making moves all over the place in the background, and it'll be interesting to see how it does that without Peggy, who fought them directly not long ago, noticing what they're doing.

And it's also great how much lady-bonding there is! No one is jealous of Peggy in the lady camp; all the girls think she's the coolest thing and just sort of wrap themselves around her socially clumsy but professionally awesome self and make room for her in their lives without her having to prove anything.

Her and Jarvis still have a delightfully Steed-and-Mrs Peele vibe about them, maybe moreso now that he's actively going into her cases with her. Her and Souza have a bond that's under whatever they're both currently doing with their lives, and it's great and sad and charming, and it'll be great seeing them working together again. There's that scientist who feels like the field agents get all the glory and leave him out. There's Rose who is probably the best receptionist in the world. There's the SSR's cover as a casting agent that should offer all sorts of bonkers interludes--and dovetails nicely with Howard Stark's new venture as a movie maker.

There's so much going for this season, and it looks great and is just as delightful as it was before, but with new stories and new complications. If they can avoid letting the Hydra stuff take over the plot like Agents of Shield did, it could be even better than season one! I just hope that the first black character they've had isn't actually dead the same story he's introduced in, because that's lame as crap, no matter how great it is to see Peggy pissed off about racism.

What did you guys like best about these two episodes? What do you think the next episodes are gonna be like? Share in the comments below, or come talk to me on Twitter!

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*For the next six or eight weeks, anyway, and up against Shadowhunters and iZombie, which is a terrible crime of programming if you ask me.
**It's like literally angry, all thrashing around and attacking things. It looks like the portal from SHIELD when it's active, and like the Ether from Thor 2, and I hope that's  intentional and not just a lack of imagination from the SFX guys, because think of those implications, dudes.
***I'm rooting for portal so a) SHIELD can meet him later when he falls through or they find wherever that stuff goes, or b) Peggy can find him again but with a Blink-episode-of-Doctor-Who time-drift where he's old and they've missed their opportunity for love and it's sad and they have to deal with it, but he's got info now that she needs. If they go that way, I want him to not die like in Blink, but to get hired as a consultant or a scientist or whatever, and still be sweet on Peggy.

Sami on Shadowhunters 1.1

Shadowhunters airs at 9pm on Freeform* Tuesday nights.

You remember when Stitchers started, and I said the first episode was too fast and talky and not super naturalistic, but was also cool and kind of addicting?** That's apparently just how this channel does pilots, because this one was like that.

It's also both like and not like the books, and there was so much complaining on the tweets that it was hard to get through all that to get to the tweets that were more positive. Because it IS different--but it's also a different thing. They didn't just randomly change stuff like they did for the movie, they created something inspired by the books but not the same as the books, and they were very clear about that from the beginning. So on it's own merits, here's how the pilot went.

Clary is turning 18, and her mom keeps not just telling her what that means for her--namely, that through her whole life, she's been having her memories manipulated*** but now that she's adult, it's going to wear off, and that apparently also means that people who have been looking for her and her mom can find them. Jocelyn gives Clary a stele, but doesn't tell her what it is, what it means, or how to use it.

Meanwhile, Clary gets into a neat art program she wanted to get into, and hangs out with Simon and his band. But the art that got her in was mostly all those things she's not supposed to remember, and the band's gig happens to be near a Downworlder nightclub where she sees people no one else can see kill people who burst into flames and open up crazy jaws that aren't human. She tries to tell her mom what happened, and to her credit, Jocelyn tries to tell her, but they're attacked and she pushes Clary through a portal while she stays behind to stop the people following them. 

She manages to burn down their house, but doesn't stop herself from being captured, though she does put herself into a magical coma. They take her back to Valentine who has a hideout in Chernobyl of all places, and he actually seems to care about her and be mad that she's not conscious and whole as he told them to keep her. This scene was especially cool because 1) Jocelyn was a Shadowhunter and it's really neat seeing her fighting like one with my actual eyes, and 2) it would have been really easy to make Valentine a caricature like they did in the movie****, but they went just as evil but also much more human and a little more subtle than that.

Clary winds up at the precinct where Luke, her mom's sort of boyfriend, works as a cop, but her timing is not good and she sees him telling the people who were chasing her that she and her mom mean nothing to him. So she runs off. This scene was not so great, though, because the cuts were sudden and weird, and there was little context on Luke to know that he's bluffing--it just sounds like he's creepy and mean when he was nice one scene ago. Especially since he doesn't get beaten up or anything, he's just being cold. Also, there's no Jace at this point, so she has no context for anything that's happening, and when he saves her and she wakes up, there's a lot of weird exposition.

Inside the institute, he tries to tell her what's going on, but he's not nearly as suave as he thinks he is and they keep getting interrupted, and Clary comes off as a little dense and a little not-freaked-out-enough by finding a tattoo on her body that she didn't consent to. But they got it right that her main focus is finding her mom, and the start of falling for Jace is handled pretty well. Even better is the way Simon is always on the outside and trying to solve things in normal ways, but honestly trying to help, and how he has no chill for the crazy stuff happening around them. 

They're a little heavy-handed about putting Clary literally between Jace and Simon, but what evs. It's a pretty good set up for the story overall, and it's worth seeing more of.

The actors seem a little inexperienced and not quite settled into their characters, but they do a pretty good job of balancing the clash between normal life things and really weird things. The fight scene at the club was cheesy as hell, but later ones are better. The plot moves along way too fast, especially in the first half of the episode, and it really feels like it should have been a two-hour or two-part premier so that we could have more of the normal world, more of Jocelyn trying to tell her what's up, more of her having weird experiences before everything goes to crap, and more of the family interactions that were totally bulldozed over. As it is, we hardly know what's going on with her mom and Luke, with her and her school, with anything, before it all falls apart. And we don't get Jace investigating her and trying to figure her out before he rescues her, so his fascination with her looks less epic and more sudden.

The two biggest changes were Luke's job, and the Institute. Having Luke as a cop with a public job and a partner and crimes to solve will change things in unexpected ways. He's not keeping to himself or hiding in stacks of books, so he's already a more public and confident figure than he was in the books--and there's all these new characters we have to figure out. That's cool--we don't have a cheat sheet on them, so we have to actually watch them to see what happens. It's also strange, because so much of the rest seems a little cheat-sheeted.

The Institute is now sort of a supernatural CSI with fancy computers and displays and lots of other people, and that's strange. In the books, a lot of the problems the Institute has comes from how behind-the-times they are, refusing to update their tech and deal with the mortal world, and with how few their numbers are. That doesn't seem to be the case here. It does, however, separate them from, say, Sleepy Hollow and Supernatural, where they go after the baddies alone and with only their wits and some basic magic. It's more organized, which does suit a professional evil-chasing organization. We'll have to see how it goes.

The only other really big change so far seems to be Maureen. She was a younger fangirl of Simon's band in the books, all childlike and obsessive, and close enough to the edge that she goes crazy when weird things start happening to her later on. Here, she's as old as everyone else, and a part of the band's support system, doesn't seem all that obsessed with Simon himself, and does seem pretty self-confident and competent. We'll see how that changes things later on, but I guess it doesn't really matter that much now.

But they got Magnus Bane so right.

It was fun, in between the strange bits where people talk too much or sound off, and it'll be super interesting to see how the story develops--how close will it be to the books? How different will it go? What will the changes wash out like as the story unfolds? Will it just suddenly click and turn from okay to awesome in the second or third episode like Stitchers did? It's good enough to stick around and see!

What did you guys think about Shadowhunters? Share in the comments or come talk to us on Twitter!

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*Used to be ABCFamily, but they're rebranding to be grittier and such.
**You probably don't because that was on my old page at Examiner and not here, and that's not mine anymore. But I did say something like that.
***Obligatory reminder that I really hate the "I didn't tell you vital pieces of information because I wanted to keep you safe" trope.
****I love me some Jonathan Rhys Meyers, but I think he was given a lunatic mess of that character and even he couldn't make it better.

Sami on The Expanse 1.6

The Expanse airs at 10pm on Syfy Tuesday nights.

Just past the half-way point, and it feels like the Scrappy Survivors are just getting started! As was tweeted to me:

@pirategirljack It's a big story. #TheExpanse

— Daniel Abraham (@AbrahamHanover) January 13, 2016

This week, they dock at super-awesome-looking Tycho Station, where they're met by someone who is known for not being super on their side--the guy given credit for blowing up those kids last week. He basically takes over: they'll never be able to hide a Martian ship from all the Martians coming through the station, so he's gonna take over the ship and the mission.

They say no; Holden says this is all his fault, all these dead people and exploded ships, so he's going to be the one to take the info about the mysterious new ships to where it needs to be himself. Of course, the rest of the Survivors go with; they're a team. But along the way, they have to come around to it. Alex and Amos go to a bar, where we find out that Amos apparently grew up in a brothel, though he doesn't say in what context. Alex was married but loved space more*. Both of them are more complicated than they first seemed, and are much more likable now that they are.

Naomi and Holden get drunk and toast Shed, but they don't notice they're being watched by a creeper with a bionic eye. The tech looks fancy, so someone from Earth?

And Fred finds the little chip with the new ships' specs on it, that Holden didn't know to look for and would really help his mission. He doesn't mention it to Holden, and he seemed to know exactly where to look for it.

Meanwhile, on Ceres, Miller gets seriously beat up by the rebel leader / mob boss Jared Harris With An Accent, and they have a really great philosophical discussion about life in the Belt. He killed his sister, but he thinks it's a mercy killing, not murder, because she was so damaged by being born and raised in the Belt that she couldn't survive and her existence was a burden. He didn't say what she thought about it. Miller says "everyone dies for the cause but you". They argue over whether Julie Mao knew what she was getting into or not.

And Jared Harris With An Accent realizes that Miller is in love with her. All he says is "Yeah," in a totally hopeless tone of voice. I'm a sucker for longing and pining and it's amazing. They did that scene so well.

He then gets dumped in an airlock and half-spaced, but his old flame saves him--by killing the thugs when she'd never killed anyone before, and when she freaks and he comforts her, and she tries to go back to old ways, he turns her down. She's confused, and he looks like he's sick of himself, and it's also a great scene,

Miller takes all his pieces of info to his boss--and she locks up the files, strips him of all his clearances, and fires him. On the spot. Because she's on the take and he's too close to the truth. She doesn't kill him, though, so there's that.

And back on Earth, the Ambassador is still pulling strings that look a lot like burning bridges, trying to figure out what all of this means.

The episode ends with the Scrappy Survivors heading off to their next mission on their new (and newly renamed) ship, and it literally feels like everything until here has been prologue--which is amazing. This is the start of the second half of the season, and the first half was amazing, so how much more amazing will the second half be?

The Expanse is so cool. It looks great, it's complex, it's packed with politics but not boring because of it, and I think that's because the characters are so flawed and solid and real. Miller falling for someone half his age who he's never met, and because of wanting to know what happened to her, uncovering a crazy plot to destroy everything. Holden trying to do the right thing and getting himself and his crew right in the middle of the crazy that's starting a war. Rebels trying to get a little of what they work for for themselves and their families. And who knows what Mars wants, or Earth. It's stunning. It looks gorgeous and so very real. It's exciting. And it's about hope and loss and mystery and desperation.

I didn't expect to love this show and these people so much.

What did you guys think of this week?

Tweets about #theexpanse from:pirategirljack, OR from:sineater_danyi, OR from:kiddle, OR from:trincynna, OR from:ohgress, OR from:manisandmakeovers, OR from:acciolacquer include:retweets

• Sami on The Expanse 1.5
• Sami on The Expanse 1.2
• Sami on The Expanse 1.1

*Amos apparently isn't as straight as he's seemed, based on how he reacted to the people in the bar. And Alex didn't say whether it was a wife or a husband he had and lost. These are character things to think about and I hope they come up again!

Last night, Syfy started playing 12 Monkeys mini-marathons after The Expanse, and it was so good

12 Monkeys is currently airing three episodes a week after The Expanse at 11, 12, and 1, Tuesday nights on Syfy.

This week, we got "Splinter", "Mentally Divergent", and "Cassandra Complex", the first three episodes of Season 1. I hadn't really forgotten how good the episodes are, but I did forget how great it is talking to other fans live on Twitter while watching them. This was the first show I jumped onboard with so quickly while livetweeting, and I've met so many awesome people because of it--including most of the Professional Fangirls!

It's also interesting, going back to the beginning of a good show, after a gap where we watched other shows, and seeing how much was set up in the earliest episodes. And 12 Monkeys is a fantastic one for this second (or third or tenth) viewing--even if just to sit there and admire the construction of it. So many things that seemed unimportant on the first viewing became secretly important after seeing the end and thinking about it all year, most notably everything Jones says about anything. And now that we've seen ads for S2, there's even a few things that start looking like foreshadowing--like the scene in Cassandra Complex, where Cassie is learning how to shoot by holding a gun on Cole.

One of my favorite things is that they went for the feels right away. Cassie is declared crazy for believing in this man, Cole is amazed that she believes him, it's immediately them against the world, even before they decide to do it that way. Jennifer is joyfully nuts, but also haunted and damaged and looking for...absolution? The truth? And then Cole fights for his one connection in 2015, and gets to see exactly what his showing up in her life did to her in "Cassandra Complex". And, of course, Jones and all her secret feels, and Ramse and his devotion that is so bittersweet once you've seen the end of the season, and Max, and Whitley--and all in the first three episodes! Worldbuilding and character building at once, and it makes everything have all these layers of meaning and context and potential.

And damn, but this show is good. It's so bold and sure of itself and defined. I'm so happy it's back on the air, even in reruns, before the second season launch!

Did you watch those three episodes? Any new theories? Did you see anything in a new light? Are you watching it for the first time and want to talk about it? Share in the comments or come talk to us on Twitter!

Tweets about #12monkeys from:pirategirljack, OR from:sineater_danyi, OR from:kiddle, OR from:trincynna, OR from:ohgress, OR from:manisandmakeovers, OR from:acciolacquer include:retweets

Sami on Limitless 1.11

Limitless airs at 10pm on CBS Tuesday nights.

After a weird several-week break, Limitless came back for one episodes--the Fall Finale! And it was one of the ones that plays with story structure and storytelling, and gave a large part of the spotlight to everyone other than Brian.

Mike and Ike start out the episode. They're going to the dispensary every morning to get the pill they give to Brian, and every morning they argue over whether this is a permanent thing or a temporary thing, whether they can look forward to something else if they do well here, or if this is all they've got. And then, one morning, they walk in on a robbery that ends in Mike getting shot.

It sets off a string of events.

The team (mostly Brian) tracks down the robbers, and Rebecca and Casey go to catch them, but she's been trying to break up with Casey while he's been planning a weekend away without really listening to her feelings or noting her hesitance on the subject. She finally breaks up with him by text--but the text doesn't go through until they're in a meeting and he's sitting right across from her. A meeting where they're discussing what happened to 80 pills that went missing sometime between the dispensary's last inventory and the count of what was seized.

Because Casey was broadsided by the breakup, he gets reckless--he and his team go out for a night on the town and it turns out they're the ones that stole the pills, because all four of them take them and go do whatever they always wanted to do...which results in Buffy the Vampire Slayer's old boyfriend killing his teammate for sleeping with his wife.

Casey decides to blame the dead guy for stealing the drugs and get rid of the body so that they can say he disappeared with them.

Brian figures it out, though, which puts Casey in a corner. He kidnaps Brian and Rebecca, and Brian has to talk him out of it, because even on NZT, Casey is a mess right now and not thinking straight. He also, however, warns Boyle, so that when the SWAT guys are trying to use him and Rebecca to get out and tear-bombing the office, Boyle is prepared with a mask, and takes Casey out.

Boy Boyle had been dealing with caring for his sick grandmother when his mom was away, and when they're cleaning up after the case, he finds a dropped NZT pill--and pockets it--after talking about how when you're on the drug, you can figure out other ways to do things that you never would have thought of before.

And through the whole thing, Brian was learning that he can't think of Mike and Ike as nobodies--that one of them almost died for him (sort of), and deserved to be respected as the actual trained agent he is.

It was a tense and kind of sad episode. The goofiness was toned down by most of the episode not being in Brian's exclusive point of view, but it was really nice seeing what happens to the others when Brian isn't around--and seeing how they feel about things away from what Brian picks up on. The episode as a whole made the point that all of these characters do, actually, have their own lives and their own concerns outside of work, and it was a really good character-building episode.

It was also quietly setting stuff up for the second half of the season*. Brian has realized that these are real people that he works with every day, and will hopefully treat them better going forward**. Rebecca had a traumatic experience--breaking up with someone who doesn't think anything is wrong is bad enough, but to them have him wind up dead by your friend is above and beyond. How will she handle it?*** Boyle is having a hard time with his mom and his grandma, and is looking for a way out or a new solution, and taking the NZT can't be the best way to do it...but he's probably going to do it anyway. Mike and Ike have issues with their job to work out. And the team is now without their SWAT contingent, and will have to break in a new team; will they let them know what's really going on with their secret mission?

And the fact that this is the first time we've really seen other people we know on the drug and all this happened brings up issues with the drug itself. Casey, who always seemed mellow and affable before, got all cold and calculating; was that because of the breakup, or the drug? And Buffy's ex killed a dude because he figured out with perfect clarity what was going on and couldn't control himself during the confrontation--was that the drug, or would he always have gone that far? If this is the drug, does that mean that Brian is just that much intrinsically nicer a person, that he hasn't gone so far? Especially since he did let those guys kill each other when he was kidnapped in the woods, and even encouraged it, without any mental problems from it, these are scary questions to apply to our favorite crime-solving goof.

What does long-time use of NZT do to someone's personality and their moral compass?

What did you guys think of Limitless's fall finale? Any guesses on what'll happen in the second half of the season? Share in the comments below, or come talk to me on Twitter!

• The Flash 2.5, Agents of SHIELD 3.6, Limitless 1.7
• The Flash 2.4, Agents of SHIELD 3.5, Limitless 1.6
• The Flash 2.3, Agents of SHIELD 3.4, Limitless 1.5
• Flash 2.2, SHIELD 3.3, Limitless 1.4
• Agents of SHIELD 3.1, Limitless 1.2
• Limitless 1.1

*Which we have because the back episodes were picked up! Whoo!
**But hopefully won't "grow up" so much that he becomes too serious or gets boring!
***And did she break up with him in part because she's getting sweet on Brian, or is that wishful thinking?

Sami on The Expanse 1.2

The Expanse airs at 10pm on Syfy Tuesday nights.

If the second episode of Childhood's End was annoying, the second of The Expanse sort of made up for it by being awesome. I wish this had been the two-hour one, and the other had been one hour!

Ep2 picks up where Ep1 left off: with everyone screwed.

The rescue ship that now needs rescuing immediately gets hit by the shrapnel left by their ship being exploded, which was awesome because that facet of reality almost never happens in scifi. They manage to barely pilot out of it, but they lose their comms and a lot of their air. Everyone has a different idea of what they should do, and no one particularly likes each other. Naomi-the-awesome takes charge, which pits her against James-the-distraught (his girlfriend died on the ship that exploded), and everyone else just wants out.

They manage to get themselves together long enough to get their emergency beacon back online, thought they can't agree on who should send the distress call or what it should say. The also manage to all not suffocate, even though two of them almost did.

And then they manage to be rescued and boarded by Martian marines who take them custody--even though it was the Martians who attacked them to begin with.

Meanwhile, Miller, who is a cop and not a gumshoe despite having all the hallmarks of being a private investigator, is still looking for the lost heiress. He finds where she's been staying in the poor part of the station, hacks her doorlocks* and accesses her files, and finds that she's been denying her dad's goals and intentions for her. She's got a scar that she could have had removed. She's living like a normal person when she could be living like a princess. She's doing what she thinks is right when her dad is doing something probably shady that she disagrees with. Miller's impressed.**

His partner is less impressed, but he's also new and inexperienced and mostly out of the loop on this case. And possibly dating a hooker? That scene happened kind of fast.

Along the way, they discover that someone has been stealing water from the rich parts of town and leaving the perfect green gardens there to turn brown. They're selling it off to people who need it more, but in irresponsible ways, and they're only there because the gang that controlled that area mysteriously pulled up stakes and left a power vacuum.***

And back on earth, the diplomat finds out that her captive Belter is only part of the story she's trying to figure out, and then when she's shipping him off to holding on the moon, he uses the g-force to pointedly and publicly commit suicide, so she can't get any more info out of him.

All of which is to say, things are heating up quickly, and I really want to read these books now.

The show continues to be well-done and tense, even in the quiet parts. People take time to talk things out without it getting boring, and something is always happening to each of them, so that the story is always complicating up. And Syfy seems to be really getting behind this show--they've released the next two episodes online for those who can't wait for weekly viewing, and to keep up the buzz during this awkward-for-TV time between seasons.

Here's my hope: Mars isn't a one-dimensional faceless enemy, but something neater and more complex, which greys up the morality of both the Belters and the Earthers. They're the only ones we haven't seen any first-hand story from, and it would be cool if we get their lives and views the same way as we've gotten the other two.

And this show is addicting. It feels something like Dark Matter, but more High Scifi and less Criminals In Space. It's delightfully complex without being annoyingly lacking in answers, so far, and it's really great to watch.

Bring it, next episodes!

What did you guys think? Are you loving it as much as I am? Comment below, or come talk to me on Twitter!

• Episode 1.1

*These phone-things are so neat.
**Must not ship two people who have never met, must not ship two people who have never met, must not ship two people who have never met...
***Also, they waste a lot of water in their fight and no one tries to clean it up, which is distressing. Since the smashed ship was bringing their water supplies in, and they're aware that it's missing, you'd think they'd be more careful even in their rebellion against the water-rations.

Sami on Childhood's End 1.2

Childhood's End is a three-part mini series airing between Dec 14-16 2015. This was part 2.

Guys, the show about lost me this episode. I love me some scifi, but I really really dislike when scifi gets itself into a philosophical debate with religion--there is literally no way to win, no way to prove either side, and it winds up being a bunch of jerks being jerks at each other.

That's what happened this ep.

There's another time-jump, and now it's several more years in the future. Milo is a scientist in a world where science, as they keep saying, is dying*, and he's not giving up inquiry. The newspaper people are gone, replaced by a groundskeeper who happens to have a wife about to give birth to a demon-baby named Jennifer of all things, and a rich guy who has been collecting up animal samples for an Overlord zoo that is of course not at all creepy, despite being totally creepy. The girl who was leading the youth-faith group before is now an adult councilor (also a dying breed, as they keep telling us), brought in because Jennifer-the-demon's big brother keeps having night terrors and screaming fits and tossing people across the room with telekinesis.

And here's where it loses me.

A kid telling stories of visiting a hell-like place and developing weird force-like powers is not enough of a concern for a family also having a demon baby that took them by surprise because the dad was sleeping on the couch the night it was conceived. He's a little like "um, what's going on?", but he's not really seeming scared or disturbed, and he's not doing research or looking for others with the same problem, or seeking advice other than sometimes talking to Jones and sometimes kicking her out of his house. And the mom is not concerned at all, and spends the whole middle of the episode being totally fine with two creepy demon kids.

Even after Jones's bent-up cross (that almost strangled her on it's own) seems to fend off the alien pod as if they really were the actual demons they look like they are.

Meanwhile, Ricky-the-farmer, who was fired from being the liaison, is dying of some terrible unknown disease, and the aliens aren't doing anything to save him, despite all he did for them. He's also still having encounters with his dead first wife, despite it being like almost twenty years since she first showed up, and that was already five years after she died and he was engaged to someone else. Ellie isn't having any of this, but she doesn't seem able to do much about it, and her whole story is hinged around her wanting kids like everyone else has, and them not being able to. Which brings back Karellan.

See, he made Ricky sterile specifically so they wouldn't have kids, because he knows what's coming next, and he didn't want his only human friend to suffer whatever that is...but he doesn't tell them what it is, nor did he ever warn them or do anything about it other than sterilizing the dude. Which is enough to convince Jones, who has made friends with Ellie, that he needs to die.

She shoots him, and she's totally not fried by a pod like the guy who shot Milo was, and he's not healed by one like Milo was; it takes Ricky giving Karellan his only cure to save him, and Jones jumps off a building because she's lost her faith--even though she has wrestled her life with the meaning of her mother doing the same thing, and it's dumb.

But back at the totally-not-creepy-why-do-you-keep-saying-that Animal Collection Place, a new room with a Ouija board device builds itself in minutes, and the mother of Jennifer-the-demon-baby uses it to communicate with someone by way of the most obvious tower of light ever. That allows Milo to decipher a letter he'd been missing and decode something vague that leads him to studying demonology texts**, and he figures out where the Overlord homeworld is.

That stuff was kind of cool, but there was still that icky mingling of science and religion with no clear stance on either.

This whole chapter felt...diverted. There were no free-the-earth things, and there had been no resolution to that story in Part 1. There was less than no indication of what any of this demon-baby stuff was. Karellan seemed to be playing both sides of the things happening, but neither side was clear enough to tell what was meant to be happening, and he wasn't around enough to make it clear that he even had a plan.

And...Okay, you know when all the way through Lost, we were told that it wasn't supernatural, no matter what it looked like, that there was a scientific explanation, and then at the end it actually WAS supernatural and there was no science? It's feeling like that. It's like it was set up like an alien invasion, when really it was Rosemary's Baby, and no matter how cool it looked, it's a disappointment because that's not the story they said they were telling.

There's still a third part, and so there's two more hours to bring it back around to where the story makes sense--where people are acting like people and not prop devices, where the aliens are actually aliens and not arguments with god given faces, and where there's a point to this wandering middle. I'm hoping it comes back. I really liked part one, and I didn't like part two, like, almost at all. I want to like part three--that's the one that will decide whether the whole six hours were worth it, so it's got to be good!

What did you guys think of it? Am I missing something? Share in the comments, or come talk to us on Twitter!

• Episode One: The Overlords

*I don't like that idea. I don't believe that just because we met an advanced species, all the scientists in the world will just go "whelp, I guess I'm unneeded now" and go become gardeners or something, and never even try to catch up. The aliens will know stuff they don't, so the logical and scientific thing to do would be to fill in the gaps, answer the questions you've been chasing, and then pick up where the aliens left off and keep going. The show is unclean about whether that's what happened or whether the Overlords actively shut down the whole process, but it's acting like it's the first one despite one half-assed mention of the second, and it's dumb. We have a scientist main character; SHOW science being systematically shut down the way you showed war and inequality being shut down!

**Not even looked at scientifically. Ugh,

Geeky TV commentary - The Flash 2.5, Agents of SHIELD 3.6, Limitless 1.7

The Flash airs at 8pm on CW Tuesday nights.

The Flash has been getting a little...loose as of late. I mean, freezing a laser? But this week, things came back to the tighter, character-centered way of the show that we all know and love.

Zoom sends Dr Light to stop Barry, presumably because she's actually Linda Park, even though this Linda has no idea who Barry is, and she's not a killer, so that whole thing goes sideways when she runs from Barry and fails to kill her Earth-1 self. Which implies that Zoom knows all sorts of stuff about Barry. Like that his ex-girlfriend's face will make him pause and allow her to blind him? Since Barry doesn't seem to exist in the retro-future Earth-2 so far, how does he manage that knowledge?

Dr Light isn't thrilled about any of this either, but Zoom is holding something over her and forcing her hand. She misses when another reporter at the newspaper dies saving one of our known characters*, and doesn't keep trying, because she's a robber, not a murderer, and she's spooked. But it means that now Iris and Linda know that Linda has a double here, and Linda is now in police custody to keep her safe.

While this was going on, Blind Barry is adorable and useless as a hero, so he goes on a date with Patty, where Cisco serves as his eyes until she figures out that he can't see and they take over for themselves. It very sweet, and Barry is adorable when he can barely walk, but it makes me worry for Patty's safety, or what her story holds. And, after a first kiss, he regains his vision.

The really good part of the episode, though, was Alt!Welles. He's golden. He's fussy, kind of an ass, and he has no time for all the baggage that comes with everyone knowing the person he looks like. His exasperation with the whole story of this world's Welles is perfect, and his bluntness is refreshing through the whole episode--especially when he cuts through the dumb plot choices and calls out Cisco for not telling everyone he's got powers now. Which means that Cisco can then help them with Dr Light's location, and he can then get a superhero name**. It also means he's got more confidence and he asks out the new girl at the coffee shop, who will turn out to be Hawkgirl.*** The Welles-Cisco dynamic through this whole episode is the best thing ever, and should be more of the series as a whole.

Welles also has no patience for Jay's inability to stop Zoom, which, as it turns out, is because Zoom has his daughter--because this Welles has family, and is presumably not actually Eobard (which is what they should be calling their own Welles now, but what evs).

Other things of note: Caitlyn and Jay almost kiss but it makes them miss the attack that ends their stakeout. Apparently the shark-man from last ep is being called King Shark. Iris still doesn't know what to do about her mom. And Joe is so done with Welles that he just opens fire on sight before he finds out that this is an alternate-reality double.

It was a fun episode!

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

After last week's awesome episode where Simmons got to shine, I wasn't looking forward to getting back to the Hydra storyline that has long been my least favorite part of this show, but it actually wasn't that bad, I guess?

Andrew managed to survive the explosion last time we saw them, and says it was because he had a SHIELD bodyguard who gave his life to keep him safe. But he's all busted up, and May is pissed. She blames Hunter and gets him grounded. She goes after Bobbi to make her prove that she's fine and it's fear that's been keeping her out of the field. And then the two of them go on the warpath. That part's pretty glorious, because they make an amazing team and they have all sorts of widgets and skills outside of just fighting--but May wants to fight and Bobbi wants to talk her way out, and they don't really agree on how to handle things.

Together, they manage to get to that big guy who does Ward's dirty work, who is at that moment beating up Werner von Strucker for not finishing his mission. Bobbi takes out the thug with some awesome fighting and zapping, and May finds out what she can about Ward, but the kid is done. So much for the Hydra royal family that make no sense anyway.

Meanwhile, though, Werner has called for help on one of his dad's old cronies, who seems to feel that everyone should fear him. Ward doesn't, but it's unclear so far whether he actually should or not.

I'm just over here like -_- about the whole thing. It feels like they're setting up for a Hydra spinoff with how much story time they're handing over to Ward's actions, but it still seems more of a mess than a plan to me****, and it would be nice if Hydra would go underground again for a while.

In the always-more-interesting B-plots:

Coulson is getting to know Rosalind. He's decided it's time to see her facility, and she makes a detour to her own house where there's been a suspicious break-in that just makes him more suspicious. She finally takes him to see the literal warehouse where she's been literally sealing the Inhumans into stasis crates and storing them like cargo, and he's not nearly as upset as he should be. She thinks being Inhuman is an illness and wants to cure it, which leads directly, in comics-land, to things like Mutant Registration Acts, Genosha, various genocides. If they're setting this up as part of Civil War, okay, but if it's not, it's going to drag on and be so annoying.

Daisy and Mac and Hunter witness Coulson's lack of appropriate response. They're looking for Lash, and have decided that Rosalind's second in command is most likely him (though that's got no backup other than them not liking him), and they were tracking him while Coulson was flirting. They'd just sent a drone into the facility when they see Coulson looking okay with the crates, which makes Daisy not okay with him, and that's never good. As I said on Twitter last night...

We don't need more divides inside shield. We need Shield to get functional and rejoin the rest of the MCU. #AgentsofSHIELD

— Samantha Holloway (@pirategirljack) November 4, 2015

Because we really don't. We suffered through that two-Shields BS, and the everyone-in-Shield-is-actually-Hydra BS, and this is just more of the same dumb. It bogs down the plot and distracts from them finally getting a major plot line of their own--the Inhumans.

Back at the lab, Fitz has been researching Will, and his research on the portal isn't paying off, but Simmons is closer to being able to be back to work since they have a purpose now. She's helping Andrew through his injury by giving him back the words he gave her, and she's the one that finds out that their suspect is not even a little bit Inhuman. Werner tells them that it's Andrew, as he dies--he failed in his mission because Andrew wasn't just a person.

And that means that he's among them. He's been using his position to track down the people they've been trying to help and then kill them. He's been lying to the people closest to him. And he's probably been denying everyone trying to get field clearance or release papers because it's his weird job to take them out of society.

Dun dun DUUUNNNN.

That's a promisingly super-heroic storyline to end on, and hopefully it'll bring the team back together. And hopefully, Coulson will have a reason for his lack of response and will make the decision to not work with the task force if that's what they're going to be doing, because it's a terrible way to handle the Inhumans, especially when they're working so hard to keep them good and teach them how to live with their new abilities. The obvious parallels between being suddenly Inhuman and being chronically ill or disabled or foreign or some other thing that's considered out of the norm really should be handled carefully, and if the show as a whole decides that curing something that's genetic, not a choice, and not deadly, is the way to go, it'll be really disappointing. It was bad enough when Jemma was sounding all human-purist last season; we don't need to go over that ground again.

Limitless airs at 10pm on NBC Tuesday nights.

It seems like the CIA is trying to get ahold of all the FBI assets on all my shows lately.***** This week on Limitless, they do it!

Brian pulls a very accurate and funny and endearing Ferris Bueller to get a day off, and before he's done with the opening monologue, the black ops dudes taze him and take him into the woods. They have NZT and they have a signed letter saying he's supposed to help them. They want him to solve problems as they catch and interrogate some Russian dude.

So Brian keeps taking the pills. Like, five or six of them during the day. It's worrying that there wasn't much difference between a regular day, except three of them in the self-discussions, and it begs the question of whether there'll be other fallout later that he'll have to deal with? He figures out that they're not out on a regular black op--they're out on a bounty hunt, and they're going to split money they get for selling this guy they're after to people who will pay a lot for him. Brian manages to turn them against each other, and winds up being the only team member to survive the mission, and that's only because he gives the Russian guy the last pill, even though he told him he'd poisoned it with deadly nightshade.

Along the way, he managed to get a coded message to Rebecca, who figures out that he's telling them where he is. She's pissed, the whole time that he's gone, and it's beautiful. She and Boyle are pulling every string they have and throwing around the law like crazy--the CIA broke the law and even if they can't prove it, they can make a fuss that they'd have to answer to, and all of this went over their heads. Naz is also outraged, and it's good to see her picking her team over this outside meddling.

Brian uses the plot of Ferris Bueller to keep himself alive as he's coming down off the megadose of NZT in the woods at night, and manages to make enough noise that the team can find him before anything bad happens. But the way he just casually tells the story of all this death and his part in it upsets Rebecca--he was so nice and so harmless before, and she feels like it's her job that ruined that part of him, and that she should have tried harder to protect his niceness. 

The vague implication, though, is that it's the drug that did it--that it makes other people matter less. He hallucinated her showing up (dressed like Sloane from the movie, no less), and she told him that he had to survive even though he'd have to kill people to do it--which is not what actual-Rebecca thought of the matter. And that's troubling. Especially since Brian seems to have missed that distinction. All the cute graphics and the fun voice overs and the cleverness are starting to look like side-effects covering up the actual damage that's being done to his personality, even with the anti-side-effects shot. Will he notice what's going on? Will she? Will they be able to do anything about it?

And he still didn't seem at all worried about all these dead people...

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

Flash

Tweets about #theflash from:pirategirljack include:retweets

SHIELD

Tweets about #agentsofshield from:pirategirljack include:retweets

Limitless

Tweets about #limitless from:pirategirljack include:retweets

• The Flash 2.4, Agents of SHIELD 3.5, Limitless 1.6
• The Flash 2.3, Agents of SHIELD 3.4, Limitless 1.5
• Flash 2.2, SHIELD 3.3, Limitless 1.4
• Agents of SHIELD 3.1, Limitless 1.2
• Limitless 1.1

*It's seriously a bad idea working in that office. Never make friends with Iris or Linda.

**Vibe!

***Which should be fun! When does that happen, and when do all the fun characters leave for the bonkers team up that will be Legends of Tomorrow?

****He says old-Hydra was bloated and entitled, but he's acting as entitled as anyone else and recruits the son of the previous boss? What? And he says they were undisciplined thugs, but his recruiting process is literally a fight club that rewards meatheads and jerks while not admitting a single scientist or thinker. Like, what is he even doing?

*****They're doing it on Blindspot, too. 

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

The Flash airs at 8pm on CW Tuesday nights.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How about you?

Limitless airs at 10pm on NBC Tuesday nights.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's so exciting to see this show unfolding.

Flash

Tweets about #theflash from:pirategirljack include:retweets

SHIELD

Tweets about #agentsofshield from:pirategirljack include:retweets

Limitless

Tweets about #limitless from:pirategirljack include:retweets

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

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