TV Reviews

Spartacus: Gods of the Arena – The Bitter End

The final episode of Spartacus: Gods of the Arena offered a
few surprises, while at the same time finally moving all the pieces into the
places they need to be for the show to make sense when it picks back up five
years later. It’s a bit overly convenient that all these major tumultuous
events in everyone’s lives would happen right in the same time span, but if you
let the TV logic do its work, the show turned out to be a solid, thoroughly
enjoyable trip back to Capua.

Smallville – Fortune Review

Have you ever had a night that was so awesome, so mind-blowing, that you couldn’t remember it the next day? Well, you should definitely watch The Hangover. After that, watch this episode of Smallville. There are only seven episodes of the whole series left after this and it’s their last chance for some goofy fun before Darksied comes to kill everyone. Was it as terrible as the concept sounds? Was it as funny as the trailer made it look? Well…

The
episode opens up with Lois’s hen party with Chloe and Tess while Clark
goes on his Bucks night with Ollie and Emil. What they didn’t see coming
was that Zatanna had roofie-charmed the Champaign and no one, not even
Clark, can remember what happened the night before. They wake up to find
that they’re all in a ton of trouble. Clark apparently married Chloe
under the supervision of a lemur, Lois wakes up with the wrong shoes and
her engagement ring gone and Emil has been mistaken for the thief of an
armored truck after becoming Metropolis’s number one Elvis
impersonator. Even Tess gets in on the action when we see that she and
Emil made a sex tape. While this episode could have fallen flat on its
ass, it didn’t. Nearly all the jokes work. If you watch the episode
twice, you’ll notice jokes you didn’t see before. Clark stealing the “L”
in Luthor Corp was great and had me rolling on the floor. The lemur was
a nice touch and seeing Tess take a break from being a hard ass bitch
was a refreshing change of pace.

30 Rock – TGS Hates Women

This week on 30 Rock, Jack got a new nemesis in the form of a fourteen-year-old girl, and I spent the entire episode wondering where I’d seen the teen actress who plays her, then I caught her name in the credits and… holy crap!  It’s Chloe Moretz!  Hit Girl from Kick Ass!  After playing an unstoppable killing machine in one movie and a twelve-year old vampire in Let Me In, it’s great to see Chloe doing some comedy.  As we learn in the plot twist, she’s still playing a bad-ass, but this kid is really demonstrating some talent.  30 Rock has found an excellent use for this rising star.

The Office – Todd Packer

The Office has been on a pretty good roll lately, but last
night’s episode unfortunately felt a lot like a pretty typical example of a
show that might have exhausted most of its best ideas by now. There was just
something a bit listless and tired about the whole thing. I laughed a few
times, but it just wasn’t that great of a showing by anyone.

Archer – The Double Deuce

Archer continues its recent trend of backstory episodes by giving us the
origin story of Woodhouse and even setup some interesting stuff with
Malory. Couple that with the regular hilarity we’ve come to expect from
Archer and we’ve got another killer episode. Not the best episode this
season, but still good.

Bob’s Burgers – Crawl Space

Linda’s parents are coming to visit for the weekend which has put her into a cleaning frenzy. She begs Bob to fix their leak in the roof because she doesn’t want her mother commenting about the ten or so pots they have catching the water. Bob agrees after he realizes he doesn’t want to hear her voice on the subject either. Before he heads to the attic he and the kids have to decide which room the in-laws are staying in. At first Gene’s room is chosen because it smells like farts and he’s transferred to Tina’s room. Tina’s fine with it, but Tina has night tremors and gets up every night violently punching and kicking the air. Tina goes on to explain that it’s due to watching Night of the Living Dead when she was eight, but now due to her budding sexuality she’s making out with the Zombies that are attacking her. Bob quarantines Tina to Louise’s room and puts the other two into Tina’s room.

The Cape – The Lich Part 2

Last week ended with a cliffhanger ending.  The Cape’s sidekick Orwell had fallen into the clutches of a terrifying new villain named The Lich.  The Cape had been out fighting The Lich’s army of sorta zombies in order to prevent them from poisoning the city during the big Palm City Founders’ Day Parade and… you know what?  None of this actually matters, because the zombie powder poison thing pretty much went right out the window in this episode.  

Spartacus: Gods of the Arena – Reckoning

Last night on Spartacus, things finally started coming to a
head. Most of the drama around the ludus got resolved in a very blood way,
leaving only the conflict with the Roman nobility that has been taking
advantage of the house left to take care of next week, in the miniseries’ final
episode. It was brutal and dramatic in the ways that the show excels, and as
bitter and depressing as TV usually ever gets.

The Office – Threat Level Midnight

“Threat Level Midnight”, which finally revealed the film Michael’s
been working on for years, was a mixed bag. On one hand, most of the
episode was taken up by the movie itself, which was generally hilarious
and terrible without falling into too many standard terrible-movie
cliches. On the other, some aspects of its production just didn’t fit
within the world of The Office, and the story around the movie wasn’t
very good. Still, it was fun to see so many old familiar faces again.

Bob’s Burgers – Human Flesh

Bob’s Burgers is the newest member of Fox’s “Animation Domination” in which they cram the Simpson’s and three version of Family Guy together on primetime Sunday. The first thing to note about Bob is that it’s created by the co-creator of Home Movies Loren Bouchard. Bob is voiced by H. Jon Benjamin who many will recognize as the voice of Coach McGuirk and of FX’s Archer fame.

The pilot episode “Human Flesh” begins with Bob giving his family a pep talk. This scene is used to quickly establish two things 1) Everyone’s personality and name 2) Everyone other than Bob is an idiot. This is very apparent when Tina, the oldest daughter, informs Bob that her crotch is itchy. Bob fires back asking her if he’s telling him as his daughter or his grill cook and that neither one should tell him. The pep talk ends with Bob telling his family that their all terrible at their jobs and that if he could he would fire all of them.