TV Reviews

House – Perils Of Paranoia

As the eighth – and by all reports the last- season of House creeps towards its midway point, it’s a sad fact that even die-hard, long-time fans like me are beginning to feel as if the life-blood of originality that has kept us glued to the series for seven long years is quietly hemorrhaging from this show.

House’s rigid structure, often a subject of derision for its critics, isn’t broken or bent in any way for this episode. The POTW (patient-of-the-week) is the standard good-looking yuppie with an attractive (albeit mildly shrewish) wife, interrupted in the business of his every day life by a serious (but initially innocent-seeming) heart-attack. This normally wouldn’t interest House in the slightest of course, except that– quelle surprise – Foreman’s sneakily already ruled out all the boring stuff that might have caused the attack, impressing House so much with his deviousness we get the feeling he takes this one just as a favor to his star pupil.

Homeland – Crossfire

For anyone who’s been following Alex Gansa and Howard Gordons’fascinating and suspenseful drama so far, the quality of this last episode will have come as no surprise. This first season of ‘Homeland’ has delivered at every turn, offering us a riveting mix of drama and character study from a cast of actors that rivals the highest budget Hollywood blockbuster.

Our protagonist, Carrie Mathison (Clare Danes) has to be one of the most unconventional female leads to ever be featured in a drama series. A driven career woman and dedicated intelligence agent, Carrie is brilliant, unpredictable, passionate and audacious, with a non-linear way of thinking and a personality that thrives on risk-taking; apparently all symptoms of her carefully hidden mental illness.

Dexter – Sin of Omission/Get Gellar

For those of you keeping up with Dexter this season it isn’t likely to escape you that one of the episodes that I’m about to talk about is a week old. Let’s ignore my lateness and simply move onto business. “Sin of Omission” was a big episode for Dexter, both for the character and potentially for the series itself. On the character side Dexter had just about one of the most “human” episodes in the series’ run as he dealt with the fallout from his trip to Nebraska as well as his own emotions. With his sudden disappearance amidst the height of the Doomsday Killer case, Debra was pissed to say the least, so when her brother reemerged without plausible responses to her questions, things got interesting.

Whilst there was nothing direct about it, the way in which the inquisition was acted hinted towards two things: one, that Deb is finally coming to accept that her brother isn’t normal and two, that Dexter felt genuinely bad for lying to his sister and putting her in an awkward situation at work. Over the last six years Dexter has been humanized to a massive extent. He has gone from a soulless mass-murderer to a husband and father with genuine love for his family members, but one thing that has never really come to the surface is guilt. Sure, following Rita’s murder there was a certain quality to Dexter that wasn’t in line with his usual self, but it was anger at being outdone by Trinity more so than genuine remorse. 

Terra Nova – Vs.

After quite a few trials and errors, last week, Terra Nova
managed to produce a multi-storyline episode that was not only
entertaining, but was also the first to really break with the show’s
habit of holding back on the overarching story. This week, with its
first try at delivering an episode entirely built on that main story,
the series hit all the right notes.

Like
for everything else in life, not all TV shows are the same. When it is
your job to watch them, interestingly, the most striking difference
between them is not their budget, the number of viewers they draw or
even their category. What sets them apart is the ambition of the
production team. That’s how intuitively, as a reviewer, you sort out
“little league” shows from those that take themselves more (or maybe
too) seriously. It can be seen, among other things, in the way stories
are structured or how acting shortcomings are tolerated. Because of
that pervasive nature, occasionally, there is an episode that makes you
wonder who the writers and producers were and if they have done any
work for the show before. “Vs.” was such an episode for Terra Nova.

The Walking Dead – Secrets

With only one episode left until The
Walking Dead goes on hiatus, one would expect this latest
installment to be kicking things into high gear. That wasn’t quite
the case however, as while the tension did rise a few notches, not
much was happening plot-wise. “Secrets” turned out to be a
character focused episode, and as the name implied, the only story
developments came from some truths coming to light.

With so much time spent on the
characters this season – this episode included – it doesn’t even
seem possible that we would still know so little about them. That’s
where we are though, and in a scene like Glen and Maggie discussing
the morality of killing Walkers, what ends up standing out is Maggie
shakily recanting all the people she has lost when we still don’t
know anything about Glen.

How I Met Your Mother – The Rebound Girl

Just when you thought this season of How I Met Your Mother was done dropping the bombs, off goes another. A seemingly average episode ended in explosion with a twist only a soap opera could do better — or worse.

Fringe – Wallflower

After an abundance of Peter in the previous two episodes, “Wallflower” took a little break and focused more on Olivia in the first story to truly explore the latest iteration of the character in the new timeline. She was led to question her emotional balance and her ability to find her place in life while the team investigated an invisible man whose ultimate life’s purpose was simply to be seen, to be acknowledged as being alive, no matter the cost.

In spite of the spectacular attack (and murder) very early into the episode, the intriguing case developed rather slowly. The Fringe division team followed the trail of a “ghost” stealing its victims’ pigmentation and turning them into albinos in their death. As often with Fringe, the team was quickly onto the murderer, because what really mattered was his story and not his identity, which incidentally he didn’t quite have. As a baby, he was known as baby boy Bryan in the hospital and as U. Gen (from Unknown Genetic Disorder) when picked up by Syprox, a subsidiary of Massive Dynamic, which experimented on him, turning the dying baby into a “healthy” invisible being. Because of her own past experience with the cortexiphan trials and her newfound worries of emotional detachment, Olivia could empathize with the tragedy of U. Gen’s life in a way that the viewers could not, considering his murder spree.

Supernatural – How to Win Friends and Influence Monsters

After weeks of supporting Supernatural in the hopes that something big was coming in season seven’s future, I all but gave up on the show last week. Perhaps more so than in any other season, the show had lacked what one might call a cohesive narrative, substituting logical (or even illogical) storytelling for weekly standalone outings that, while vaguely entertaining, mattered not one bit to the show on a more grand scale. With just a couple of episodes left until the mid-season break, it is pretty much do-or-die for Supernatural at this point and I’m happy to report, that for at least this week, they did.

For those of you that haven’t seen the episode, I wouldn’t go getting your hopes up just yet. While “How to Win Friends and Influence Monsters” was an improvement upon the show in recent weeks, it still didn’t live up to what I’ve come to expect of it over its run. Unsurprisingly to really anyone capable of cognition, the reason that the episode was better was because it wasn’t a standalone. Whilst there have been passing references to the Leviathan throughout the season, fewer episodes have focussed on them than not, and Friday’s outing used that deficit to full effect, making us think that the episode wasn’t about what it was clearly all about.

Terra Nova – Proof

After three episodes that tried — and essentially failed — to recreate the appeal of the beginning of the season, Terra Nova‘s got back on its feet. “Proof” not only worked as an episode, but it did so by succeeding where “Nightfall” and others failed: it developed several independent storylines that each had some value and that definitely put the Shannon family at the heart of things, a combination I was starting to doubt the show could achieve.

Maddy showed some promise at the beginning of the season, but then was either underused or paired with her soldier, which never quite brought the best out of Naomi Scott, who plays the teenager. With the love interest away, things looked much better as her story had no choice but to draw from her brainy side, one of the two things that made the character appealing in the first place. Her encounter with Ken Horton and the investigation that followed was, above all, a well-structured story. It brought in a character (Horton) that had enough gravitas to actually be seen as a great figure to prospective scientists. Then in an early move, the story showed he didn’t get along with Malcolm, smoothly planting the seeds for one of the funniest moments of the hour (Malcolm, upon discovering the unauthorized DNA test Maddy was performing was on Horton: It’ll go faster if I help!). Finally, the integration of Zoe into the story was clever, providing more humor, but also clearly building on the relationship between the two sisters and on the other appealing thing about Maddy: her personality.

Dexter – Nebraska

If you’re reading this a brief time after it’s posted or just have some appreciation of how a calender works in retrospect, you’ll notice that this review is coming pretty late, there is however a reason for that. No, my life isn’t so incredibly hectic that watching Dexter was put on the back burner this week, rather, it took me this long to figure out if I liked “Nebraska” or not. In short, I’d have to say that I did, but it is entirely possible that, that stems from an overall appreciation of the show and of all things Michael C. Hall, rather than because the episode was particularly good. 

We had previously left off with an episode ending reveal that Dexter’s inner mentor had switched from his adoptive father Harry to his mass murdering brother Brian who he had personally offed at the close to season one. After a brief appearance in season two we hadn’t seen Christian Camargo on screen as Brian since, and as a bigger fan of season one than perhaps any other, I was needless to say, extremely excited to see where things were going to go. It is from that exact point that my conflict over whether the episode was actually good or not arises; Dexter and Brian on screen together is always good to me, so regardless of whether or not it sucked objectively, I might still enjoy what I’m seeing. In light of this I had to approach the episode from both an objective and subjective stance to arrive at some ultimate conclusion.