TV Reviews

Terra Nova – Instinct

Terra Nova followed its good two-part premiere with an even better episode. “Instinct” struck a more personal chord with its villains (pterosaurs fighting for their breeding ground and an old flame hoping to re-conquer Elizabeth Shannon) as well as with its protagonists (teenagers discovering and parents rediscovering love). The relationships that seemed clumsily dealt with in the extended premiere were handled with care in an episode that did not need dinosaurs to make us fear for our characters.

Sometimes, an episode has an identifiable moment that wins the viewer over and after which the writers, and the cast, have to do a pretty bad job to get him or her to reconsider. “Instinct” had such a moment for me right at the beginning with the survival training, especially when Lt. Washington (aka Wash) described how beetle grubs could become a delicious alternative to real food (“If you find yourself low on provision and starving, you won’t be saying ‘ew’ [like Zoe], but [pauses after gobbling a larva] ‘hmmm’.”). After that scene, I was not only taken by the episode, but found myself paying much more attention to Simone Kessell’s Washington.

Haven – Sins of the Fathers

Haven, the series, is a bit like the beautiful shots of Haven, the city, and its surroundings: there is a certain modesty to it, but it can be definitely bewitching. What the series lacks in the way of pace and structural discipline, it makes up for in the performance of its leads and the very distinctive way it draws the viewer in. However, it is still a TV series, so it cannot really shine when it completely throws any one aspect out of the window. Despite significant improvements over the first season, this is what has occasionally mired the show until now and is the reason why “Sins of the Fathers” is not the finale it could have been.

Right after things became interesting with Audrey’s outburst, Dave and Vince had the type of conversations that seem designed to ruin wonderful moments. The beginning of the investigation and the always entertaining Duke turned things around until Nathan’s warning (about Duke) happened, raising its ugly head above the surface of a story that was again getting smoother. Unfortunately for the episode, this was the pattern until the end. Before I get into why that string of carelessly thought out scenes is wrong, let me discuss a couple of them, because they are representative of the series’ issues and because they are also a good taste of what followed in this story where the dead came back to deal with unfinished business.

How I Met Your Mother – The Stinson Missile Crisis

How much do you buy into Barney and Robin? That’s the question that might divide fans of How I Met Your Mother the most this year. In Season 7’s fourth episode, “The Stinson Missile Crisis,” Robin’s rediscovered feelings for Barney take front and center as she begins a series of court-ordered therapy sessions with a psychiatrist played by Kal Penn of “Harold & Kumar” fame.

Dexter – Those Kinds of Things

After almost ten months off our screens, Dexter returned on Sunday with “Those Kinds of Things,” an episode that just about perfectly set up the season ahead, while remaining thoroughly funny and dramatic throughout. Taking place around a year after the events of last season’s finale “The Big One,” the episode picks up with Dexter in high spirits, with basically everything in his life going right for once. Admittedly his wife is still dead and his next love Lumen is gone, but things really are on the up for everyone’s favorite serial killer. Although I knew the time jump was going to happen, I was pleased to see that it was well executed. It would have been easy to have season six come back just a few months or even weeks after season five and have Dexter be depressed and kill-crazy, but instead, the writers took a leap with all of the characters and it worked very well.

The opening scene should also be commended for showing us what has to be the coolest way that Dexter has ever attacked his victims. With Dexter dialing 911 claiming to have been stabbed, there was a moment of genuine worry that things really weren’t going so well for him. That is, until the two paramedics who came to his aid got a shot of M99 in the neck for their troubles. Both being part of an organ harvesting ring, Dexter quickly disposed of them and on went the show. Back in the real world, we were introduced to Dexter’s new babysitter (Batista’s sister, Jaime), and also to the knowledge that Dexter had bought the apartment next door to his own. Whether the two apartments are to keep the two halves of Dexter separate is unclear, but as Batista himself pointed out, it makes it very easy for him to come and go unnoticed. 

Person of Interest – Ghosts

With some room to breathe after a jam-packed pilot, new CBS crime thriller Person of Interest found its groove this week in “Ghosts,” a case-focused episode, but one that continued to highlight some long-term questions about our future crime-stopping duo, Reese and Finch.

The see-all know-all machine, whose past we get to see a little of in this episode, wastes no time making things interesting when it churns out the Social Security number of a girl believed to be several years dead. Reese (James Caviezel) and Finch (Michael Emerson) start digging up the past to see if the machine is right and the girl is, in fact, still alive. Not only must they solve what happened to her several years ago, but also what might happen to her in the near future.

Supernatural – Hello, Cruel World

Following a semi-game changing premiere last week, Supernatural had its work cut out for itself when “Hello, Cruel World” came along. After spending four months thinking that Castiel was going to be the new big bad for the year, as a ruthless god-like figure, mostly all viewers would have been shocked when that story was put to bed by the premiere’s end. Instead, we learnt that Purgatory wasn’t just a hang out for the souls of evil, but rather some of evil itself. More specifically, the Leviathan. Touted by Death as the first monsters ever created, the exceptionally powerful Leviathan took control of Castiel at the end of last week and that is where we picked up this week in the third part of an ongoing arc.

Much like the souls previously held within Jimmy’s body, the Leviathan found themselves unable to be effectively contained and vowed to return to finish off Dean and Bobby before leaving to find somewhere else to go. Regrouping, Dean and Bobby quickly found the previously missing Sam, who was in the midst of another Lucifer induced hallucination, and caught up with the Leviathan just in time to see Jimmy’s body disintegrate and the evil creatures make their way into the local water supply. Dean had a short moment of grieving for his almost certainly dead friend before the three headed back to Bobby’s home to formulate a strategy. With Leviathan feelers out there in the hunting world, everything slowed down a bit while Sam explained what was going on in his head.

Community – Geography of Global Conflict

Community provided more than a few laughs this week with a quirky, clever little episode which managed to entertain and amuse without needing a great plot or dramatic theatrics.

At the start of last week’s episode, the cast of Community told us, by way of song, that this year would be just as awesome, but a little less weird. I couldn’t help but feel concerned by that declaration. As much as last year’s theme episodes went a bit over the top with their frequency, season 2 of Community was no less funny than season one. So, to be told that the show would be getting a bit “less weird”indicated that the writers might be pandering to the demands of the critics (the fans were certainly not complaining about the paintball episodes). But we can put those worries to bed. This episode helped remind viewers that Community doesn’t need a clay animation set-up for it to still be funny (and weird) in all the right places.

Fringe – One Night in October

It
might be the slightly more advanced tech. It might be the way they
dress. It might be Fauxlivia’s gung-ho attitude and her deriding
smiles. It might even be the particular orchestral music in the
background, or it might be all of the above. The fact is that whenever
an episode of Fringe is set on The Other Side, there is an
extra quality to it. And when the story is as well put together as “One
Night in October” was, we are in for a treat.

The
episode starts on This Side with Lincoln used once again to bring us up
to speed on past events of the current timeline. We discover that our
Olivia was kidnapped and replaced by Fauxlivia for (only) two weeks, so
there was no voluntary trip to The Other Side to retrieve a nonexistent
Peter or someone else. Walter still has a weakness for baked Portuguese
food, and after Fauxlivia returned to The Other Side with some stolen
parts, the machine created a bridge instead of destroying This Side as
they apparently hoped. Still no detail, however, on whether the machine
needs a specific person’s DNA to function.

Parks and Recreation – Ron & Tammys

Not the ‘stache, Ron, not the ‘stache!
It’s been mere months since watching that glorious piece of facial
hair go up in flames, now tragedy has struck again in the latest
episode of Parks and Recreation. “Ron & Tammys” took
us on a journey back to the genesis of our favorite libertarian, and
the women that made him what he is today – or in some of their
cases, what he isn’t. Any time Ron is taking center stage an episode
is almost guaranteed to be a winner, and while one of the episode’s
subplots did fall short, the other more than made up for it. What
can I say? This episode was Snapple, baby.

Alphas – Original Sin

Alphas‘ season finale “Original Sin” was full of surprises. Even more than the previous two episodes, it dramatically advanced the main storyline and left everyone wondering what will become of the team and, more importantly, what sort of world the second season will be set in.

The story starts with Dr. Rosen’s team chasing down Isaac, the Red Flag assassin responsible for the murders that, in the previous episode, triggered their arrest and incarceration in Binghamton. While the team is after the killer because of the sudden disappearance of many Red Flag leaders, the man himself is on the trail of a young woman, Dani, who has apparently stolen something from Red Flag. Dani turns out to be an Alpha and, to everybody’s surprise, Rosen’s daughter.