The Emmys results, 2015

The Emmys were last night! I didn't get to watch it, but here's the list of nominees and winners (totally ganked from here):

Outstanding Drama Series
Better Call Saul
Orange Is the New Black
Game of Thrones
Downton Abbey
Homeland
House of Cards
Mad Men

Outstanding Comedy Series
Louie
Modern Family
Parks and Recreation 
Silicon Valley
Transparent
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
Veep

Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series
Claire Danes, Homeland
Viola Davis, How to Get Away With Murder
Taraji P. Henson, Empire
Tatiana Maslany, Orphan Black (I really wanted Tatiana to win, but at least critics are taking note of all her hard work!)
Elisabeth Moss, Mad Men
Robin Wright, House of Cards

Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama SeriesOutstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series
Jon Hamm, Mad Men
Kevin Spacey, House of Cards
Bob Odenkirk, Better Call Saul
Jeff Daniels, The Newsroom
Kyle Chandler, Bloodline
Liev Schreiber, Ray Donovan

Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series

Jonathan Banks, Better Call Saul
Jim Carter, Downton Abbey
Alan Cumming, The Good Wife
Peter Dinklage, Game of Thrones
Michael Kelly, House of Cards
Ben Mendelsohn, Bloodline

Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series
Uzo Aduba, Orange Is the New Black
Christine Baranski, The Good Wife
Emilia Clarke, Game of Thrones
Joanne Froggatt, Downton Abbey
Lena Headey, Game of Thrones
Christina Hendricks, Mad Men

Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series
F. Murray Abraham, Homeland
Alan Alda, The Blacklist
Beau Bridges, Masters of Sex
Reg E. Cathey, House of Cards
Michael J. Fox, The Good Wife
Pablo Schreiber, Orange Is the New Black

Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series
Khandi Alexander, Scandal
Rachel Brosnahan, House of Cards
Allison Janney, Masters of Sex
Margo Martindale, The Americans
Diana Rigg, Game of Thrones
Cicely Tyson, How to Get Away With Murder

Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series
Louis C.K., Louie
Don Cheadle, House of Lies
Jeffrey Tambor, Transparent
William H. Macy, Shameless
Anthony Anderson, Black-ish
Will Forte, The Last Man on Earth
Matt LeBlanc, Episodes

Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series
Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Veep
Edie Falco, Nurse Jackie
Lisa Kudrow, The Comeback
Amy Poehler, Parks and Recreation
Amy Schumer, Inside Amy Schumer
Lily Tomlin, Grace and Frankie

Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series
Andre Braugher, Brooklyn Nine-Nine
Adam Driver, Girls
Keegan-Michael Key, Key & Peele
Ty Burrell, Modern Family
Tituss Burgess, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
Tony Hale, Veep

Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series
Julie Bowen, Modern Family
Mayim Bialik, The Big Bang Theory
Anna Chlumsky, Veep
Gaby Hoffmann, Transparent
Jane Krakowski, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
Allison Janney, Mom
Kate McKinnon, Saturday Night Live
Niecy Nash, Getting On
(look at that cluster of 90s child stars there, making good as adults!)

Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series
Mel Brooks, The Comedians
Louis C.K., Saturday Night Live
Paul Giamatti, Inside Amy Schumer
Bill Hader, Saturday Night Live
Jon Hamm, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
Bradley Whitford, Transparent

Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series
Pamela Adlon, Louie
Elizabeth Banks, Modern Family
Christine Baranski, The Big Bang Theory
Joan Cusack, Shameless
Tina Fey, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
Gaby Hoffmann, Girls

Outstanding Reality Competition Program
The Voice
Top Chef
Dancing With the Stars
The Amazing Race
So You Think You Can Dance
Project Runway

Outstanding Variety Series
The Colbert Report
The Daily Show
Jimmy Kimmel Live
Last Week Tonight
Late Show With David Letterman
The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon

Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series
The Daily Show
The Colbert Report
Inside Amy Schumer
Key & Peele
Last Week Tonight With John Oliver

Outstanding Directing for a Variety Series
James Hoskinson, The Colbert Report
Chuck O’Neil, The Daily Show
Amy Schumer and Ryan McFaul, Inside Amy Schumer
Jerry Foley, Late Show With David Letterman
Dave Diomedi, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon

Outstanding Variety Sketch Series
Drunk History
Inside Amy Schumer
Key & Peele
Portlandia
Saturday Night Live

Outstanding Limited Series
American Crime
American Horror Story: Freak Show
The Honorable Woman 
Olive Kitteridge 
Wolf Hall

Outstanding Actor in a Mini-series or Movie
Richard Jenkins, Olive Kitteridge
David Oyelowo, Nightingale
Adrien Brody, Houdini
Mark Rylance, Wolf Hall
Ricky Gervais, Derek

Outstanding Actress in a Mini-series or Movie
Maggie Gyllenhaal, The Honorable Woman
Jessica Lange, American Horror Story: Freak Show
Felicity Huffman, American Crime
Queen Latifah, Bessie
Frances McDormand, Olive Kitteridge
Emma Thompson, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street Live From Lincoln Center

Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series or a MovieRichard Cabral, American Crime
Denis O’Hare, American Horror Story: Freak Show
Damian Lewis, Wolf Hall
Bill Murray, Olive Kitteridge
Michael Kenneth Williams, Bessie
Finn Wittrock, American Horror Story: Freak Show

Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited Series or a Movie
Angela Bassett, American Horror Story: Freak Show
Kathy Bates, American Horror Story: Freak Show
Zoe Kazan, Olive Kitteridge
Regina King, American Crime
Mo’Nique, Bessie
Sarah Paulson, American Horror Story: Freak Show

Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series
Louie, “Sleepover,” Louis C.K.
Silicon Valley, “Sand Hill Shuffle,” Mike Judge
The Last Man on Earth, “Alive in Tucson (Pilot),” Phil Lord and Christopher Miller
Transparent, “Best New Girl,” Jill Soloway
Veep, “Testimony,” Armando Iannucci

Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series
Episodes, “Episode 409,” David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik
Louie, “Bobby’s House,” Louis C.K.
Silicon Valley, “Two Days of the Condor,” Alec Berg
The Last Man on Earth, “Alive in Tucson (Pilot),” Will Forte
Transparent, “Pilot,” Jill Soloway

Veep, “Election Night,” Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, and Tony Roche

Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series
Boardwalk Empire, “Eldorado,” Tim Van Patten
Game of Thrones, “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken,” Jeremy Podeswa
Game of Thrones, “Mother’s Mercy,” David Nutter
Homeland, “From A to B and Back Again,” Lesli Linka Glatter
The Knick, “Method and Madness,” Steven Soderbergh

Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series
Better Call Saul, “Five-O,” Gordon Smith
Game of Thrones, “Mother’s Mercy,” David Benioff and D.B. Weiss
Mad Men, “Lost Horizon,” Semi Chellas and Matthew Weiner
Mad Men, “Person to Person,” Matthew Weiner
The Americans, “Do Mail Robots Dream of Electric Sheep?” Joshua Brand

Outstanding Directing for a Limited Series, Movie, or a Dramatic SpecialAmerican Horror Story: Freak Show, Ryan Murphy
Bessie, Dee Rees
Houdini, Uli Edel
Olive Kitteridge, Lisa Cholodenko
The Honorable Woman, Hugo Blick
The Missing, Tom Shankland
Wolf Hall, Peter Kosminsky

Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series, Movie, or a Dramatic SpecialAmerican Crime, “Episode One,” John Ridley
Bessie, Dee Rees, Christopher Cleveland, Bettina Gilois, and Horton Foote
Hello Ladies: The Movie, Stephen Merchant, Gene Stupnitsky, and Lee Eisenberg
Olive Kitteridge, Jane Anderson
The Honorable Woman, Hugo Blick
Wolf Hall, Peter Straughan

Look at how many non-mainstream-genre things were nominated this year! Not many of them won, but look how many there even were on the list! That's got to be a first for geeky-type shows, right? It's much-needed attention for these shows, and it's welcome! If the flap of good scifi and fantasy shows continue, though, I wonder if they'll get their own category so they're competing against their actual peers and not just everything that came out?

Geeky TV commentary - Fear the Walking Dead 1.4

Fear the Walking Dead airs at 9pm on AMC Sunday nights.

It feels like Fear the Walking Dead is finally coming together. Which is ironic on an episode where mostly nothing much happened until the last fifteen minutes or so, but they did nothing-happening better this time--it was a nothing-happening where people were asking questions and not trusting the answers they were given. A nothing-happening where people were trying to find things out for themselves.

And there was enough of a pause in the crazy that people could start thinking--which was what was seriously missing from the earlier episodes. Now, it's the characters who are being withheld from, not the ones doing the withholding, and it's much less annoying when shifty soldiers and doctors are obviously not telling everything they know than it is when characters we see are not saying anything at all even though there's no reason not to.

So here's the rundown of events:

Nick has been stealing morphine from a terminally ill neighbor who Liza has been helping with her nurse-skillz, and claiming that he's fine now. Which leads to the Mysterious Doctor that shows up putting him on the list of sick and injured because she doesn't believe that he's cured after she checks him out.

Liza has been helping all the sick and injured in the neighborhood, but the doctor knows she's not an actua nurse--though they didn't say whether she's full on faking it, or if she lost her certification somehow, or if she's just, like, partially trained or something. At the end of the ep, when things actually happened, the doctor strong-arms her into coming with, and Maddie is mad at her because they took Nick, too.

Griselda has a terrible infection and needs surgery on her foot, and they take her, too. Daniel doesn't trust them, and when he goes, he makes Maddie promise that she'll take care of Ofelia if he doesn't come back, because when he was a kid, he saw exactly what happens when you don't question government soldiers taking people away. They all die.

Meanwhile, Ofelia has taken up with one of the soldiers, but he gets really pissy when she asks with help with her mom before the doctor shows, so is any of them really interested in each other?

A neighbor has a breakdown, refuses to submit to the health tests again, and then runs away while his wife and kids aren't in the room. Travis, who thought he talked him down, tries to find him and only finds his car outside the fence the soldiers have put up in the "one of twelve safe zones". The soldier says he was taken to Headquarters to get help, and even though that was before the sick and injured were taken away, we're all pretty sure* that he's dead or locked up.

And Chris saw a flashing light across the valley and thinks it's someone out there where the soldiers say there's no more people, and that they're looking for help. Travis says it's nothing, because he trusts the authorities more than anyone else, it seems, but Chris tells Maddie, and she believes him. She goes out to see what's on the other side of the fence and finds dead bodies all over, just left in the streets--infected, but also totally ordinary people, gunned down and left there. And whole abandoned neighborhoods. Which is probably why she takes Daniel seriously when he talks about what happens when you trust governments.

Oh, and Alicia found a note that Susan left for her husband (before she killed herself? before she was turned but after she was attacked?) and realizes, finally, that her boyfriend is probably gone for good, and then uses a needles to self-tattoo that thing he drew on her arm, which is likely to give her tetanus or an infection, which, of course, will not be good in this world.

And the last scene is Travis looking across the valley--and seeing and hearing machine gun fire from where the flashing light was.

The episode was slow, but it was a slow that was going somewhere, and it was one that made sense, since it's now been nine days since the soldiers showed up and there's still only power a few hours a day, and no phones, and up until that lady showed up, no doctors. More than a week of living under military law, and nothing had been done that they'd promised yet.

Who wants to bet that they're basically freelancing and that the gov has already fallen or withdrawn to safety and left everyone to live or die as they can on their own?

It feels like the soldiers--who pulled people out of their homes at night instead of during the day, to take them for "help"--know enough of how the virus works that they're weeding out the weak, the sick, the injured in a sort of culling of the herd before someone can die at home and start a new outbreak. But they're such assholes about it, that it doesn't seem like they have public safety in mind so much as maybe power-plays and maybe something like experimentation?

They should have found a way to bring Tobias with them; he knew how to put whispers and clues together to realize what was actually going on, and he probably could have warned them that stuff was getting serious before it got to people being taken in the night like this. Maybe he'll show up again at the end of the season (which is only in two more episodes, really), and drop an info-bomb that changes everything on them.

It was looking like Liza and Maddie might forge a bond that would make them the team that leads the group--which would have been awesome since Travis is too soft-hearted and Daniel just wants to keep to himself and the rest of the guys are kids. But now Maddie is convinces that Nick was taken because of Liza, so that's not gonna happen soon. Instead, I'm hoping that they realize that the government facility is not a good place, and find out what's really going on, and then Nick, Liza, One-Legged Griselda, and maybe one or two other people along the way (Tobias!) team up to break out and get back to their families, and then everyone hits the road like they said they were going to all along.

Through all the slow parts of this ep, it's hard not to look at everyone and weigh how they'd do officially in an apocalypse team. Should we just take them all? That might be full of liabilities--though hopefully the kids will prove to be more flexible than the adults and not be among those liabilities since there's so many of them. Should we take the ones who would be most useful? Because that would leave Travis, probably, and Griselda, which would also leave Ofelia and Daniel who wouldn't leave her, and it's almost definite that Daniel is the tank of this team, as soon as he decides he needs to fight for them. He's tough, and he has a history that includes violence, even if it wasn't his own.

They've said we're not going to get the full apocalypse here in the first season; but it finally feels like something is reliably going to happen, and like things are moving forward. People are coming up with survival tactics, not just running around like headless chickens. Some of them probably would have in reality, but not all of them, and it was annoying to watch characters who were only reacting; now, they're finally acting on their own, in different directions and with different but dovetailing directions, and as they actually do things, it'll open up that world that's so far sort of claustrophobically small. With the phones down (probably intentional, I'm betting, to force info-free isolation) and no radios but the ones in the control of the soldiers, they've had no way to know what's going on in the wider world, and that's made the story super-small and without a lot of wider implications. But now that they're out there in the world, finding stuff out, and hopefully comparing notes when they get home, their personal stories will really start to tell the wider story better!

What did you guys think of the fourth of six episodes? How do you think the first season is going? Share in the comments below, or come talk to me on Twitter!




NOTE:
*"We all" meaning "twitter".

Geeky TV commentary - Doctor Who 9.1

Doctor Who airs on BBCAm at 9pm on Saturdays.

Yay, Doctor Who is back! You can practically hear it from across the world, the internet of geeks all talking at once! It's been flipping ages since this show was on the air, and we're greeted with an episode that isn't finished because it's a two parter, so it's going to be a little hard to talk about definitively; if it wasn't the first ep back, I might have let it go until the story was finished. But it is, so here we are!

So! Here's what happened, and if you didn't see it, why are you reading this yet? Come back when you have!

The Doctor's missing. A slimy dude on casters is going all over the place trying to find him, including the the Shadow Proclamation (yay!). Turns out the dude is being employed by Davros, who is dying and has a message for the Doctor.

See, the Doctor messed with his timeline (which still hasn't shaken out yet whether that'll change everything, but we're thinking not), and he remembers, and he has some things to say.

Missy shows up with almost no explanation about how she's there at all--sort of an offhanded mention of other people?--and stops all the planes in the air to get the Doctor's or Clara's attention, which does get Clara's. Clara leaves her class in the middle of a lesson about Jane Austin to go check it out, and Missy tells her that she's got the Doctor's will. If it's there, it has to be delivered to his closest friend (unclear whether that's Missy of Clara), and it won't say what's in it until he's dead. Which, of course, Clara is not having.

Blah blah blah "fast and ugly time travel" by way of a bracelet I really hope Missy got from Captain Jack, and they find the Doctor in Medieval times with a tank and a guitar making an entrance as part of a long party he's been throwing himself. A pity party, because he knows that messing with Kid Davros is gonna get him in trouble one way or another. He even hugs Clara, which is terrifying because he's not a hugger.

Slimy-henchman turns out to be a stack of snakes pretending to be a man, which was actually kind of cool but has no reason behind it so far, and the Doctor agrees to go with him and face Davros, but of course Clara and Missy aren't letting him go alone. They travel through space in a neat shuttle I could live in, to a station that Missy immediately notices has some gravity weirdness that leads her, once they're alone, to just walk out the door.

Dun dun DUN--it's not a station, it's a single building and the rest of the planet has been hidden because DUN DUN DUN--it's Skaro! The Doctor sees it happening at the same time that Missy and Clara are being really adorable spinning in circles as the world reappears* and flips out because how could they bring him to Skaro? Wasn't it bad enough that he was talking to Davros?

Right when it because obvious that there was a "to be continued" coming up, every Dalek from the BBC warehouse shows up with the Tardis, and while the Doctor watches, Missy stops them from destroying the Tardis by offering herself as a guide to destroying the universe by way of the Tardis, and they exterminate her. The Doctor begs for Clara's life, and they kill her, too. Then they kill the Tardis. Then they kill every fangirl watching because WTF guys.

The last scene is the Doctor back with Kid Davros, trying to exterminate him, and THAT is where they leave us until next week!

It was probably an amazing episode, but it's hard to tell before the end has aired and the plot has shaken out, but it was definitely alarming and exciting and they crammed so much stuff into the hour. Including, in addition to all the stuff above:

• UNIT--who has a dedicated Doctor channel on the comms that he never uses, but Missy knows about.
• Brigg Daughter! And a new scientist with awesome hair so that basically that whole scene had one guy in it and he had almost no lines.
• Clara knows her way around UNIT and they listen to her when she Doctor-ly orders them around, and now she's earned a new entry on the list of Doctor Who Spinoffs That Probably Won't Ever Happen.
• "Since he was a little girl!"
• A strong whif of timey-wimey, because how else can this happen?
• At least one hint that there's already more going on than anyone in the show is realizing yet.
• Another Doctor-Clara heart-melting moment, since he knows immediately when she's in the crowd because he always sees her and he didn't realize there were other people there as soon as she showed up.**

It's so great to have the Doctor back on our screens, and there's so much story here that's barely started, and it's already shaping up to be an exciting and complicated season! What's still to be determined is whether it'll be so complicated that it ticks everyone off, or whether it'll actually make sense in the end? Right now, that's impossible to judge. But what's not impossible to judge is how exciting it is to have more new episodes ahead of us once again!

NOTES:
*and seems to be that same beach outside where the Byzantium crashed and maybe where Bad Wolf Bay is.
**It's very hard not to ship them when he keeps doing that.

Good TV has made me picky!

You know how back in the day, there'd be like one show you just loved each season, and how that show would sometimes be the same one you watched every year? And how all other TV was like "eh, I can take it or leave it"? And how if you have two or three shows that you just adored, you'd count yourself as stunningly lucky? And how the rest of the TV shows weren't that great and you knew it and so you didn't expect all that much from them, and were therefore forgiving when they weren't good?

Yeah, I don't think we're in that world anymore.

We're in a golden age for really well-made shows, not just well-written or well-acted, but also really beautifully produced and with amazing music and with fantastic wardrobes and amazing plots, and everything about them is just good. And even better than that, lots of them are geeky--they're about heroes or brilliant crimesolvers, about historical events or time travel, about life in a post apocalypse or about zombies or about hackers or about any number of wonderful, speculative-fiction-style things that never would have been made before the last few years.

And it's amazing.

And it's made me picky.

See, TV networks seem to think that Monday night is the only night you're allowed to put shows on, so every week we're forced to make that judgement call--which one is better? Which one needs the ratings more to survive? Which one is okay to wait on for the DVR, for Hulu, for Netflix in six months?

And then, after that, there's the actual pickiness of watching them. Is it fulfilling it's potential? Is it holding up to the promise of those first few episodes? Is it maintaining the same level of writing--and is it at least as good as all the other good shows we already watch?

I'm much less forgiving than I was before. I good show that stumbles feels like it's done a much worse thing than a middling show that stumbles the same amount. A smart show that does one dumb thing, or a progressive show that has one plot point that's disappointingly typical, feels like it's damaged itself more than a dumb show that does the same things. And when a show just goes right off the rails, there's less incentive to see if it can find itself again, because hey, there's all these other good shows around, isn't there?

That being said, I haven't given up on shows. I haven't given up on TV. I've just gotten more critical and more likely to talk about it as I've gotten more involved with it. Being picky about TV hasn't damaged my enjoyment--quite the opposite, because it's made it so that I don't have to watch stuff I don't like just because it's on, like back when there was only one or two really good shows on TV and dull boringness the rest of the week. No, it's made it so that basically all I watch are shows I love, and that's a much more engaged and active sort of viewing.

Good TV has raised the bar--for all the rest of TV, but also for itself.

What do you guys think?

Geeky TV commentary - Fear the Walking Dead 1.3

Fear the Walking Dead airs at 9pm on Sunday nights on AMC.

Finally something is happening that actually moves the story!

Travis and co are in the babershop for all of, like, five minutes (though they mention at least two hours that they've been trying to wait out the rioting and hoping for the authorities to do something), and the shop nextdoor gets broken into and set on fire. They have to flee, and the whole "when we leave, we go separate directions" line that Daniel said all of a minute before they actually had to goes right out the window.

They dodge through the crazy crowds, where sometimes people are eating each other and the cops are doing almost nothing despite the riot gear. As always, riots are all chaos and destruction, and in this case, do almost no good and actually a lot of bad, since they're not getting supplies or rescuing people, they're just trashing their own neighborhood and making it easy for the zombies to get dinner.

Hopefully, Travis learned a lesson about the need to park closer. And then when they're almost out from under scaffolding in their way, the cops start hosing down the crowd, which knocks down the scaffold, which knocks down Griselda, and her foot gets crushed. It looked like someone stepped on her on the way down, too, so maybe she'll wind up being like the first lady on Independence Day and get got by the internal bleeding; we'll have to see how that goes.

So everyone gets into the pickup and heads to the hospital where the cops are shooting and shooting and shooting and there's no help to be had. They go back to Travis's house.

Meanwhile, Maddie and the kids have been trying to pretend it's normal--until their neighbor Peter eats their dog. They then break into another neighbor's house to get a gun Nick knows they have, and manage to leave the shells behind when Travis shows up and walks in on the zom; Maddie goes to warn Travis while Alicia goes back to get the shells and discovers that their neighbor Susan is turned and trying to get them.

Travis still wants to help people and it gets him nearly bit, until Daniel the mysteriously hard-edged barber takes Peter out with a shotgun shell to the face--which doesn't stop him, so then he tries again point-blank. Mess everywhere. Daniel wants to stay till morning, when his "cousin" will come get him, and Maddie wants to leave now, and they eventually settle on everyone waiting until morning because the grid is down and they don't know what's out there.

In the morning, they're all ready to go and leave the Salazars there, and then Maddie sees Patrick, the husband of their zombie neighbor Susan, and tries to save him--and he's the most heartbreaking one so far in three episodes of this show. He's so happy to be home, and then he sees his wife all dirty and crazy and looks so crushed, and he goes to hug her and she goes to eat him, and then the soldiers arrive and snipe her before she can get him and all he knows is that she's been shot.

Seriously, it was traumatizing.

So now they think everything's gonna be alright because it's daytime and there's soldiers and hummers and we all know that there's three more episodes and then a second season--and also that this is only the beginning of the End of the World, and their moment of hope is mostly just a mix of "um no" and "oh honey".

This was a much better episode than the others, finally! I still think it took too long to get here, where stuff happens that actually involves making plans and talking to each other and trying to make sense of things, but if the rest of the season is more like this and less like the slow beginning, we'll be okay.

There was also some really nice artistic sections here, which is great, because those scenes where the sound goes down and the movements slow give us a chance to process what we're seeing, and then it has much more impact. In this case, it was going past the hospital, which should be a safe place, and seeing what looked like Nick's old-man room mate lurching through the parking lot and taking rounds from at least six cops who apparently haven't talked to their comrades from last ep who knew to aim for the head. We also got to pause and listen to the radio without pausing the action, and learned that the National Guard has been called in and the area has declared a state of emergency, and that things are bad in more places than just here.

Probably the best character this episode was Daniel. He seems to know something about things like this--I wouldn't be surprised if he turns out to have dealt with an outbreak back wherever he's from, but that's probably unlikely. It feels like he's being set up to be a retired hitman or something, and he doesn't want to get involved with things or to owe people because of whatever made him retire, but that he'll be invaluable to them when he does join up. It also seems that Griselda knows what's going on with him, and was maybe part of it (is that why she's so devout and penitent?), but that their daughter Ofelia doesn't know any of it.

Other things about this episode:

• Nick is once again the only voice of actual reason; he understands that they aren't their neighbors anymore AND that they're actually somehow animated dead people.
• Alicia wins points by going back for the shotgun shells when they need them and without being told, but then sort of loses them by being hysterical about her boyfriend--though, to be fair, literally no one told her what was going on even in a vague sense, and that's really unfair to her.
• Chris seems to have a crush on his step sister to go with the huge chip on his shoulder.
• The collapsed and bloody bouncy castle says so much more than all the screaming they've been doing about what's going on.
• The lights going out transformer by transformer as they drive along the highway on the way home was very well done--little by little, the world just disappears around them. Symbolism!
• Maddie gave most of the drugs she stole for Nick's come-down to Griselda for her smashed leg; how long before a) Nick does something crazy or gets sick again, or b) they have to amputate Griselda's leg to save the rest of her from gangrene-induced zombieness? 
• (the answer to a) is not long, since he almost immediately goes to break into a different neighbor's house, except a little girl sees him and he backs down)
• The zombie ATE THE DOG. How could he? How could they leave him there? Dogs are invaluable resources in the apocalypse! These guys are so bad at apocalypses, and they haven't yet thought to go find Tobias, who isn't entirely crap at them.
• Maddie might wind up being the one to watch out for. She went with a hammer to take care of Susan, and it looked like she actually would have done it if it weren't for Travis being too kind-hearted for the apocalypse and talking her out of it on the off-chance that it might be cured. Which led directly to that heart-wrenching scene with Patrick, so he really should have let her do it.
• There's also a hint of comradery, hopefully, between the ex and the girlfriend when the ex said that they need to stick together for the kids, and Maddie said if she turns, not to let Travis take her out.

All in all, it felt like the characters were settling into themselves and the plot was actually happening instead of just setting up. Which was a relief. This marks the half-way point of this short season, and it would have been criminal to spend the whole six episodes only setting things up, when that was so frustratingly punch-pulling. The pace was much smoother, the visual storytelling was more artistic and creative, and the sense that they were shorthanding things was much much less than it was before. Plus, everyone is starting to feel like more rounded, human people--though it's still concerning how little the main family communicates, especially since the Salazars are communicating just fine, so we know the writers know how to do it. If they make it a point that they don't think things out much and don't ever talk to each other about them, it'll be okay; if it's never a point, it's going to keep being annoying.

What did you guys think about this week's episode? Questions, comments, small cash gifts here, or come talk to me on Twitter!


Previous Episodes:

• Episode One
• Episode Two

Are you guys getting excited for The Return Of The Shows?

This week, we have:

And then next week we have:

AND THEN! The week after that, we have:

AND THIS ISN'T EVEN ALL OF IT! More stuff comes after that! And through October! You guys! This is clearly some sort of golden age for geeks, I mean, look.

What're you looking forward to? What're you going to watch live, and what're you recording? What're you hoping will be really flipping awesome from the new shows? Let's talk about the new tv shows and our favorite returns in the comments or on Twitter!

When we get there, I'll make a list of all the October shows I'm going to try to find time for / space for / find a way to watch that counts for ratings even though I can't cram ANOTHER SHOW into Monday nights!

Geeky TV commentary - Mr Robot season 1 finale

Mr Robot aired, until tonight, on USA, Wednesday nights at 10pm.

Um.

What.

That episode was somehow simultaneously the most straightforward we've seen in weeks--and the most confusing. But confusing in what it means, rather than what it is, like usual. Let's see if we can figure it out:

Elliot wakes up in Tyrell's car three days after we last saw him taking Tyrell to the hideout. Tyrell is nowhere to be found and Ellliot has no memory of what happened there at all. He goes looking for clues and for Mr Robot--because he's got to have been the one in control, and therefore the one who remembers what happens. Darlene tells him that he set off the program on his own and it was a roaring success, and now the banks are all down and everything is different. He finds a flashdrive that just shows a video of him pushing himself off the pier.

Mr Robot doesn't show until he calls the cops and threatens to turn himself in, and then most of his plot is an ongoing argument with his delusions about whether he'll finally start listening to them and stop fighting it or not. It seems like he finally breaks down because he goes home when they tell him to, and watches the news footage when they tell him to, and then someone knocks on the door and BAM, cliffhanger!

We know how I don't like cliffhangers. That one would've been SO MUCH WORSE if they hadn't announced the second season before the first even aired.

Man. What.

Meanwhile, Angela has accepted the job at Evil Corp, at least partly, I would guess, because Elliot won't talk to her and tell her anything of value in the matter. But the guy she's assisting, who is supposed to calm the populace about the threat of the hack goes wildly off script and kills himself on the air. Which would be why they didn't show this episode last week. She's told to get over it and get some new shoes that don't have blood all over them, and finally stands up for herself when the shoe salesman tries to tell her off about working for them--which is great, but is also why on their behalf?

She goes to the dude's funeral, but her new old rich guy mentor says he's glad the guy killed himself and won't lose any sleep over it because the guy was terrible--and then gets terrible himself when he says he can't stand weakness. Angela is the only woman  in the room through the whole scene, and it looks like she's fallen into the Illuminati or something; he says she's there because she's refreshing and bold and different, and that's what they need. He almost definitely knows more than he's saying.

Darlene and the other hackers of fSociety get rid of the evidence at an animal shelter's incinerator and free all the dogs (and hopefully keep them, though we never see them again), and then have a huge party at the secret base to get lots of strangers' fingerprints all over whatever other evidence might be there. She's thrilled about the whole thing--to her, they've done exactly as they should have, no matter how much Elliot disagrees.

Ellliot's psychiatrist's cheating boyfriend contacts her with the lie that he's dying so that she'll talk to him, and says that the dog Elliot took from his abusive self was chipped, and when he took her to the vet for that thing she ate the other week, they scanned the chip and notified him. He's been looking for him and he doesn't think that he should be allowed to invade people's privacy like he does, and he wants her help to take him down. She doesn't want to hear it.

Gideon knows he's going down with the security company that let this happen, and he's not pleased about it.

Mrs Wellig and the baby are creepy, and she sounds perfectly polite as she asks Elliot when he last saw Tyrell, but somehow makes it sound like a threat. Elliot is sure she's lying to him and not saying what she knows about what happened to him.

And through the whole thing, there are riots in the streets, protests all over the place, news footage of cops in swat gear and riot gear, soundbites from politicians and CEOs--the whole system is rocking, and the poor and indebted are happy, and the rich are very upset. After the credits, BD Wong, as we're more used to seeing him, talks to Angela's new mentor about some problem in the Congo that he knows the cause of, and about Nero playing as Rome burns.

What does any of this mean?

It was a bold choice, having the virus's execution happen off screen, but that winds up working out so that they can feed that mystery into the next season without continually withholding it--it happened, and the after-effects are very interesting, but it happened while Elliot was in a fugue state or something, and he doesn't remember it. A lot can happen in three days; what creepy mysteries will unfold as he figures out what happened?

So here's the questions we're left with:

• What will that cheating creep do about knowing who Elliot is?
• Will Angela get free of the sort-of-Illuminati she's fallen into, or will she be set up as the opposite of Elliot or their sacrificial lamb or their new queen?
• What happened to Tyrell? Did Elliot kill him or did he take the chance to run off--or did they come up with some other plan that he's away enacting?
• Will actual-fSociety break up, or will they start expanding and keep altering how the world works?
• Will people start claiming they're in fSociety when they're really just freelance loons?
• Was that Elliot in the fSociety TV hack-cast?
• If Mr Robot is a now-sentient semi-independent entity, and he's fed up with Elliot's BS, what will happen to Elliot? To him? To the flashback-family? And how much of the rest of the world is also a hallucination?
• Is that mentor the new baddie they need to take down?

It was an amazing season. It was like a ten hour long movie, with an amazing soundtrack and gorgeous cinematography and makes not sense but somehow still told a cohesive and intelligent story that is addictive and sort of unnerving and deserves all sorts of awards that it probably won't get because they like to give Emmys to much more ordinary shows. 

Maybe the rest of TV will take a few hints about the quality and artisticality and trusting that your audience is smart enough to keep up.

What did you think of the finale? What do you think happened in those three days, and what do you think any of it means?

Comment below, or come talk to me on Twitter!