TV Reviews

Dexter – This is the Way the World Ends

Where do I begin? Before talking about the episode itself, I suppose it’s appropriate to take a quick look over the season as a whole, allowing me to come to some general conclusion about it by its termination. If you’ve been keeping up with my reviews, it hasn’t escaped you that my ratings for this season of Dexter have been fairly, if not very, positive. However, this is not necessarily a reflection of show’s quality, or rather, it is not only a reflection of its quality. As a long-time fan of Dexter and an even longer-time fan of Michael C. Hall, I tried fairly hard to avoid bashing it and even went so far as to defend its weaknesses on some occasions. However, now that it’s all over, I don’t really have any legs to stand upon.

Early in the season there was hope. With episodes in hand, there are always innumerable possibilities about where things are going and as I pointed out last week, season six has ticked along fairly slowly. So, with things close to the chest, there was still some mystery. Brother Sam came into and swiftly exited Dexter’s world, which was the true beginning of the season’s downfall. But nothing takes the “ruined the entire season” trophy quite like Travis and his imaginary friend. It’s easy to see where the writers were trying to take this story and why they went the direction they did (somehow, it seems that a fair percentage of the populace of the internet were genuinely shocked by the reveal, thus validating the attempt), but it just didn’t work for me and many others.

American Horror Story – Birth

This was one emotionally charged episode of American Horror Story. I was absolutely exhausted by the time the credits rolled, and that was mostly down to Connie Britton’s relentless performance during Vivien’s extremely traumatic birthing scenes. The woman could scream for her country! ”Birth” was the penultimate episode to a completely bonkers first season and managed to round out quite a few paranormal arcs, as well as raising one zinger of a question: where do we go from here?

Picking up from the heels of the last episode, the hour immediately addresses Violet still trying to come to terms with being six feet under (her own house). This was actually a really strong episode for Violet and made leaps and bounds in redeeming her as a character. When she wasn’t summoning Billie Dean to help her rid the house of Chad and Pat, who have their sights set on Vivien’s twins, she was banishing her own murderous rapist boyfriend from her life…er, death. And to cap it all off, Violet shares an extremely tender, underplayed scene with her recently deceased mother come episode’s end.

Terra Nova – Within

“Within” was a generally pleasing episode of Terra Nova — especially considering what came just before — as it laid out the groundwork for what will hopefully be a riveting season finale. The story wasted no time, and right from the start, took us back (for the first time since the series premiere) to the portal terminus, the place where the time fracture endpoint in the Late Cretaceous has been “fixed”. In just a couple of sentences, we learned why the members of the eleventh pilgrimage or anyone else coming from 2149 would be expected at that very point. What followed was a story structured to bring an end to the spy subplot and get that out of the way before the next stage in the settlement’s story.

In the previous episode, we discovered that Skye was the Sixers’ spy. I didn’t particularly like how that was brought about, but I welcomed the development, because some level of complexity is always good in any character, especially in those like Skye who seem to have more potential than the others. The show, contrary to what was common practice in the first half of the season, picked up where we left off with Jim Shannon’s investigation taking center stage and quickly producing results. Skye was generally used much better than in the previous episode, torn between her desire to save her mother and her wish to protect the settlement. However, it is a pity that the farewell scene with her mother (when they decided she had to stop spying for the Sixers) was either too short or not emotionally charged enough to justify everything Skye had been through.

Dexter – Talk to the Hand

This season of Dexter has been a pretty strange one. While the show has never had an incredibly deep story that needs to be dished out rapidly to reach a convincing conclusion, perhaps more so than ever, it has been a pretty slow year. Add to that the fact that we’ve stepped somewhat outside of the usual parameters of our story (we spent nine episodes with an imaginary friend) amongst other things and the abnormality is compounded. Whilst I maintain that the show is still fundamentally strong, I concede the widely held belief that season six isn’t really matching up to the usual quality we’ve come to expect. Personal opinion will dictate the cause of the show’s downfall in your eyes, but for me, it comes down to that pacing problem once again.

On that front, this week’s “Talk to the Hand” didn’t really have a problem. The episode only really followed one key story line, but it was comprised of several elements, each with their own payoff that drove the episode through its running-time. Whether or not they were worthy of making it to screen however, was another question altogether. The key story was of course the continuation of the now Gellar-less Travis attempting to bring on the apocalypse. Last week closed out with Dexter bringing the police into the mix after discovering that the Wormwood tableau was going to be a poison gas attack and Angel falling into Travis’ hands, because Quinn is a drunk. In a fairly strong positive for the episode, Angel’s captivity was dealt with fairly quickly instead of it being drawn out until next week’s finale, with Travis escaping the mini-manhunt that ensued.

American Horror Story – Smoldering Children

A more focused episode than American Horror Story‘s usual scattershot storytelling, ”Smoldering Children”, perhaps doesn’t quite pack the  punch I’m sure we’re all supposed to be left reeling from, given the  twist we do get here: Violet is dead and has been for quite some time  now.

Dang. As twists go, it’s a doozy.

In retrospect, there were more than enough clues to support this  reveal, including a rather obvious one: she hadn’t left the house in  quite a while. But Violet, as a character, never fully recovered from  betraying her own mother just so she could appease her mass-murdering,  rapist boyfriend (also dead), and so dedicating an entire storyline to  the both of them became more torturous to watch rather than compelling  viewing. They’re both completely unlikable individuals (not uncommon on this show) and cementing their eternal relationship into the series doesn’t  exactly send me to my happy place.

How I Met Your Mother – Symphony of Illumination

The soap opera drama we thought we had on our hands drastically shape-shifted before our eyes. But despite the misleading tease of baby-daddy drama, How I Met Your Mother Season 7 is probably all the better for it.

Homeland – Representative Brody

Just in case you’d thought about relaxing during this week’s Homeland –maybe kicking back and enjoying a cold beer, whilst soaking up some more useful exposition like we did last week – it seems that the writers had other plans.

After the reveal in ‘Crossfire’ that Brody has tasked himself with a covert mission in the name of Nazir’s son Isa, we open with a newly re-energized Brody, seemingly now fully on board with the concept of running for Congress and carrying out his mysterious plan (whatever that might be). As Carrie astutely suggested in ‘The Weekend’, it seems that Brody is now committed to playing the long game, carefully maneuvering the people he loves into the positions he needs them, in order to move on to stage 2 of ‘Brody vs. Vice President Walden’.

Dexter – Ricochet Rabbit

Last week’s Dexter wasn’t exactly what you might call groundbreaking stuff. Sure, the idea that two serial killers are actually the same guy was a fresh approach, but so many people saw it coming that the effect was next to nothing when it happened. It is because of that fact that “Ricochet Rabbit” had an awful lot riding on it. It’s not just that the fate of the season depends on how the writers are going to wrap things up, but also that, given the show’s past ability to shock us into loving it, we’re all kind of sitting around waiting for the real penny to drop. Undoubtedly, the writers will have approached this story with the hopes that somehow no one would notice what was coming, but at least some of those that did are likely wanting something more to turn them around.

Based on a slightly less than subtle sub-plot that has come into the show over the last couple of episodes, as well as the promo for next week’s “Talk to the Hand,” it seems we’re going to get our wish (although this isn’t really what I had in mind), but we’ll come to that later. As for “Ricochet Rabbit” itself, the episode wasn’t half bad. Last week I called for a resolution to the question of how Travis doesn’t know that Gellar is dead if he’s the one that killed him and to my surprise, we actually got sort of an answer. Although it’s not that clear, the idea seems to be that Travis is so far gone mentally that even though he has seen Gellar’s dead body and actually remembers the moment that he “killed” him, he believes that because they are God’s two witnesses, God made Gellar impenetrable to biblical swords, so the violent stabbing didn’t actually do any damage.

Supernatural – Death’s Door

This is set to be less a review and more an expression of the fact that my head hurts. First off, let’s make no mistake, “Death’s Door” was about one thing and one thing only: Bobby doing his best to hold off a Reaper in his mind, whilst trying to get a message to Sam and Dean in the extra-cranial world. When you look at it simply as that, the narrative by itself wasn’t what go me turned around. We’ll get to what did in a few words, but for now: the story.

Essentially, what we got with “Death’s Door” could probably best be described as Bobby’s greatest hits. There was an element of confusion initially as we dealt with both the present timeline outside of Bobby’s head as well as some time jumps going on inside, but once things settled down, it played out true to form. Although they’ve only made a few appearances in the show’s run, Sam and Dean have picked up some tricks to deal with Reapers and Bobby is obviously no fool as he figures out that his reality isn’t all that real almost immediately upon entering it. When he comes face-to-face with his Reaper, he refuses to believe that it is his time and spends the rest of the episode battling to bring himself back from the brink.

Terra Nova – Now You See Me

Last week, Terra Nova delivered an episode much better than what we have come to expect. Unfortunately, with this week’s “Now You See Me” the show didn’t even manage to get back to its usual self. Interestingly, in its failure, the episode definitely established that only Shelley Conn (who plays Elisabeth Shannon) can really carry an episode convincingly.

It is not as if the show-runners didn’t try. It is simply unfortunate that they just happened to create a story that needed some qualities most of the cast lacks. Every single story in “Now You See Me” required the viewer to do more than just understand what was going on, each of them required us to empathize with its main protagonist(s) to really enjoy the experience, which is where acting skills come in.