Shameless – El Gran Canon Review: The Triumph of Lip
Lip makes a satisfying comeback and Frank crosses the US border yet again. And, most importantly, Battlebots make an appearance.
Lip makes a satisfying comeback and Frank crosses the US border yet again. And, most importantly, Battlebots make an appearance.
The Boy Must Live tried and ultimately failed to convince us that its title meant something else than what we know, but it brilliantly set the stage for the series finale. It brought us to a specific future — the Observers time period — which is a first for the series, and we finally got to learn how the “boy” fits in the plan to defeat the invaders.
Two aliens enter. One… okay, the Thunderdome reference falls apart there. Despero has come to Earth to defeat its greatest guardian. Mal Duncan?
“Damn the Torpedoes” was not so much about the single torpedo that was fired or even the events leading up to the firing as it was about making choices. Whether stemming from a sense of righteousness, love, patriotism or the pursuit of happiness, those choices turned the episode into a much better story than it deserved to be.
Giving proper credit to the season four opener of Justified, I will say that I certainly didn’t expect…whatever the hell that flashback scene was. What I loved about it was, for the first minute or so, you’d think it was just an innocent piece of a storyline’s puzzle for this year.
Will Sister Jude become a monster? Will the son of Bloody Face kill again? Will we ever care about aliens?
The first name of “The Name Game” proves to be as forced and predictable as the season as a whole. But enough gems pop up in the second half to give us all hope for drastic improvement in coming episodes.
After the “special” episode last week with its fairy, ghost and cartoon all induced by LSD, we were back to a more ordinary plane with Anomaly XB-6783746, in spite of its title. The regular storytelling structure didn’t mean business as usual, far from it, as this was clearly the beginning of the end for Fringe. A long time regular character bid her farewell with an emotional swan song, and the final season’s story started to circle back to the beginnings of the show, or at least to reveal some of its mysteries with more or less success.
Black Blotter was Fringe at its best. The episode used Walter and Olivia to pull us into a story that tied loose ends. The episode also gathered several elements across timelines in a coherent narrative while restoring the team’s faith in the plan to defeat the Observers.
Blue Water tried very hard to be as gripping as the episode that came before it, but it didn’t quite manage to convey the same sense of urgency or to involve the viewer with a similar visceral intensity. Instead, the many developments and action sequences crammed within the hour-long episode seemed to lack the glue required to make them mesh well together.
