Even with Ted and Marshall having had too many sandwiches, nothing could shake the fact that this week’s episode of How I Met Your Mother was about as dramatic and soap opera-y as they come — and need I mention downright sad?
Faithful to their habits, the minds behind Fringe
followed a major event — impacting our characters emotionally — with a
seemingly standalone story having subtle parallels with some elements
of the earlier event. Also, by leaving their options regarding the
physics of timelines open, they kept us on our toes in a story that put
Peter at the center and very successfully built on what we know while
developing this beginning of season overarching storyline.
In
“And Those We’ve Left Behind,” the Fringe Division investigates strange
time displacement events, meaning events from the past or future (in
this case only the past) bleeding through the present with potentially
devastating consequences. The team understands the anomalies are caused
by human technology and quickly identifies the source and this is where
it becomes interesting for the parallels. The source is a house owned
by Raymond and Kate who have been married for thirty years. Raymond has
created a machine based or his wife’s works in theoretical physics and
has put their house in a time chamber, meaning a bubble where time
doesn’t flow like on the outside. With the machine, he has been using a
past iteration of Kate to complete the equations so that the time
distortion is “infinite” and keeps them together in the chamber for
more than a few minutes or hours. Love is his motivation as in the
present his wife is very sick.
For the past few weeks now I’ve been backing Supernatural to start to deliver us something in its seventh season, with its strong track record and my personal attachment to the show. It may however sadly be about time for me to stop. “Season 7, Time for a Wedding!” followed suit with several of its predecessors in that it didn’t totally suck if you’re a fan of the show. This time around humor was leant upon perhaps more strongly than in previous installments but once again, nothing happened. The extent to which nothing is happening in these recent episodes really is such that writing these reviews is becoming as difficult as pretending you don’t know what’s going to happen next. The plots to at very least the past three episodes could be well defined in less than a paragraph and I’ve got 800 words to fill here!
What we did get, as anyone with a brain could guess, was a wedding. Having stayed away from any promotional material for the season, I never definitively know what’s going to happen episode-to-episode, so when it was revealed that Sam was the one getting married, I do have to admit I was vaguely surprised. His wife-to-be, veiled (both verb and noun) as she was, wasn’t exactly difficult to guess however, as the previously on…/then and now was so crammed full of Becky Rosen that the attempt to hide her identity actually made me laugh. For those of you new to the Supernatural world, Becky is essentially Eric Kripke’s way of making fun of the people that watch his show. The most meta of all meta story lines brought Becky into existence, but all you really need to know is that whilst she may seem unrealistically and pathetically creepy, she’s just about a spot on, on-screen version of internet fan-girls.
“Nightfall” perfectly illustrates why Terra Nova‘s choice to be all things to everybody — by attempting to deliver a fast-paced action show centered on a family — is slowing down the story and is starting to affect the overall quality of the show. The earlier episode “What Remains” worked because there was one prominent family story that happened to be interesting. Unfortunately for this episode, having multiple such storylines (of equal importance) backfired, as none of them really shined.
“Nightfall” started with one of those details that makes the viewer appreciate the irony of the situation. The sight of the two meteors zipping through the atmosphere had to conjure up thoughts of the Cretaceous extinction that marked the end of the reign of dinosaurs. We know the settlement is in a different timeline, but the odds of a large meteor impact are as significant as in the 2149 timeline around the same geologic period. The introduction of sonic waves and an EMP (however unlikely they may be) was a nifty and spectacular way to get to the different situations developed throughout the episode.
Oh Slap Bet, how we missed you. The re-emergence of the long-standing How I Met Your Mother bit after a two-year hiatus was a welcome surprise in Episode #7.9, but fans could hardly consider the reignited romance of two of the show’s main characters a slap from out of nowhere.
“Disaster Averted” marks the third use of storytelling flashback this season, the age-old HIMYM tactic that usually works despite being a bit frustrating. Robin’s boyfriend Kevin (Kal Penn) sparks the episode by asking how MacClaren’s came to have a “no boogie-boarding sign” out front. Turns out this is a story not three months old that took place on the eve of Hurricane Irene’s collision into New York City.
I really don’t know where to begin with “Just Let Go.” Brother Sam’s shooting last week was an unexpected twist in the story to say the least; the character has been an interesting one from the start and the possibility of losing him so soon was honestly something that I hadn’t begun to consider. The more I think about it however, it was kind of inevitable. Yes, if you haven’t seen the episode, Brother Sam did die, but his death wasn’t really about him dying at all. Over the last five episodes Sam has used what little screen time that he had to drastically alter Dexter’s outlook on life, and with his death, that part of the story was truly allowed to come full-circle.
Ignoring the religious side of things, Sam taught Dexter that there can be goodness or “light” in all of us. His own story was definitive proof of that fact – a murderer turned honest-to-god (literally) saint. With the prospect that such a light exists within him, Dexter began to question quite a lot of things, most importantly his relationship with the person that he has known as himself for his entire life. If light exists within him and people really do have that capacity to take such a drastic change of direction with their lives like Sam, then why can’t Dexter do the same thing: hang up the killing tools and assimilate to normality.
Of the many facets of the supernatural, one of the least touched upon in Supernatural is that of psychics. When they have come along, they have been almost uniformly instrumental in significant plot twists throughout the show’s run, but they had yet to serve as the focus of an episode until now. Before getting your hopes up about this being a mythology-heavy piece that serves to create an amazing episode in the scheme of things, know that “The Mentalists” really didn’t delve into anything. Instead, almost all of the “psychics” seen were complete fakes.
The premise was fairly simple: supposed mediums in a supposedly extremely psychic town were being offed by a real supernatural entity and Sam and Dean were brought back together after last week’s separation to hunt down the killer. The latter part of that sentence is really where the episode found its strengths, but it also contributed to a lot of what I found wrong with it. After finding out that Dean had killed Amy behind his back, Sam was naturally pissed last week and mirrored his season one self by taking off on his own. The idea of having the brothers then collide on the case was perfect – it is exactly how they should be brought back together – but its execution didn’t quite work as well as I’d hoped.
For those surprised that Jonathan Nolan and J.J. Abrams’ new fall show Person of Interest would be a week-to-week procedural, here’s a fistful of continuity for you. The show caught all its viewers off guard this week by upping the stakes in not an unforeseeable but nonetheless surprising manner.
The last time the aftermath of a cliffhanger rested on Peter’s shoulders was in “Entrada” where he had to confront Fauxlivia, and where I think he was poorly used. In “Novation,” however, we couldn’t get enough of him. Yes, there were other things happening, things which might turn out to be at the heart of whatever threat the story has in store for us this season. There was even the ever beguiling Olivia Dunham around, but all that mattered was Peter. In just one episode, Fringe has managed to turn the lead that, to me at least, always seemed an accessory into a character I now want to see as often as possible.
For all his brilliance, his involvement in almost every significant scientific project ever mentioned in the first seasons of Fringe, Walter has never been the heart of the series. The first of the three leads we saw in the pilot was Olivia (or “Liaison” as Broyles called her then), and really, Fringe has always been mostly about her. While she was the cornerstone of things happening in the present, the overall backstory was clearly dominated by Walter and his son. That is until “Subject 13” brilliantly turned the Bishop family drama into a story about the already beguiling young Olivia Dunham.
Jim
Shannon took center stage in “Bylaw,” and this not necessarily because
he had more screen time than the other members of the Shannon family,
which he did, but because the main story was an investigation following
every single rule in the book of police procedurals. A choice that,
understandably, exposed the episode to some of the weaknesses of the
genre.
Motive
is rarely an issue in police procedurals as it would seem we are
capable to resort to murder for virtually any reason, but the way the
killing is carried out very often deserves some attention. At some
point in the story, Jim Shannon says, “Between the wildlife and the
Sixers, there are a lot of ways to die in this jungle,” and he is of
course right. The settlement is surrounded by a nature teeming with
dinosaurs, flying reptiles and even plants that are a danger to human
life, not to mention the infamous Sixers. If the sight of Foster, the
murder victim, going alone to the communication relay station was
already a bit of a surprise, the way his murder was set up was even more
so. The killer used a nicoraptor as the murder weapon, trapping it in
the relay station, which is extremely dangerous to do alone as one
would be exposed to the raptor and potentially to several other
dinosaurs (raptors or not) drawn to the same bait.
