FlashForward “No More Good Days” – Season 1 Episode 1

“So you’re saying what? Everbody’s consciousness just jumped forward 6 months to April 29th?”

–Stan Wedeck, conveniently explaining the premise of the show with a healthy amount of skepticism

The TV adaptation of the science fiction novel FlashForward is here, and it’s even crazier than the book.  We’re not sure how much of the book they’re keeping at all really.  There’s the actual event, a two minute period of time where every human being on Earth simultaneously collapsed and caught a glimpse of their futures.

But instead of following boring old scientists in Switzerland (that’s not even a sexy foreign country) who are finding the Higgs Boson (maybe if they were studying something less nerdy), we get to follow super extreme TV protagonists.  What’s hot in American television?  Medical drama and police procedurals.  What do our protagonists do?  Well the husband is an FBI detective and the wife is a surgeon.

Does anybody know a cop married to a doctor?  With schedules that busy, they must spend like twelve minutes per day together.  It’s surprising that Olivia even has time to cheat on her husband.   But she will!  Or she did!  IN HER FUTURE-MEMORY.

So maybe this is the key to what makes FlashForward great.  Every new show on TV introduces you to a bunch of characters and you can basically guess who is going to break who’s heart.  FlashForward concedes that and actually lets the characters know their own future as well.  So now we can sit around for a whole season wondering if these characters can defy the inevitable.  Or are they doomed to do what every alcoholic lead investigator in a police procedural does: remit.

Well it’s going to be a long and entertaining struggle.   So far we’ve got our cop protagonist investigating the flash forwards and it turns out some surveillance cameras caught footage of a dude NOT passed out during the flash forward.  So this differs from the book.  All cameras and recording devices ceased working in the book, presumably because of the Observer Effect.  Trees falling in forests.

But in the show, some people didn’t pass out so there are still observers.  And they will be unmasked!  Who has perpetrated this evil deed?  I hope it’s actually the Swiss scientists.  I knew their neutrality was just a facade until they developed their neutrino technology to a point where they could make us all fall asleep and see the future.

And who will catch these no-good Swiss?  A cop struggling to keep his own life together, but bound by honor and duty to save his country.  There’s a point at the beginning, just after the event that sets the tone for this whole episode.

Agent Mark Benford slow motion running around crashed cars to find his wife at the hospital.  Then he stops running and he’s just a man slowly walking through water by a downed telephone line.  Then a taxi swerves by him wrecklessly and … he actually kicks the car as it drives by him.

The kangaroo is a symbol
for his inner turmoil.

And then we go back into slow motion for a bit as we see a kangaroo in the middle of the street and then the camera pans up to capture that quintessential “oh my god, my hometown has become a warzone” shot of military helicopters flying overhead.  Finally, Benford finds a group of people gathered around an electronics storefront watching news from around the world.

Oh, and the Rays are gonna sweep the Sox at Fenway IN THE FUTURE!

So I’m looking forward to forty minutes a week of slow motion running past kangaroos and really dramatic close ups of friendship bracelets (this actually happens in the show three times).  Like Jack Bauer but even benign tokens of affection given to you by your child are related to catastrophic global terrorism IN THE FUTURE.

And his wife? Doctor Olivia Benford?  She’s that angry kind of doctor who gets agitated and starts screaming in the middle of surgery.  “WHERE THE HELL IS THAT CHEST TUBE SPRAY?!  I need it now!”  (I’m not totally sure what she asks for, but it sounds like chest tube spray … in the future?).

And she’s got another doctor or nurse or somebody who was going to kill himself but the flashforward has changed his outlook on life.  And there is a child she saves on the day of the event whose professorly father is going to have a torrid, British-accented affair with Olivia SIX MONTHS FROM NOW.

It’s going to be a good year.  I am really happy ABC is continuing its pursuit of really complicated time travel-based action shows like DayBreak and FlashForward, and I hope they do more shows like this IN THE FUTURE.

Gossip Girl “Reversals of Fortune” Season 3 Episode 1

“Sleeping with the enemy is hot.  Why do you think I have the whole ‘Ivanka’ thing?”

– Chuck Bass on Gossip Girl, encouraging Nate to bed a Red State redhead

Before we drive our mom’s Camry down the L.I.E. to gatecrash the White Party, let’s pause to remember the seventeen-year-olds-who-were from season two.

The U.E.S. girls and boys graduated from Constance and that dude school and were super worried about becoming irrelevant.  Gossip Girl most def does not blast txts about college kidz, so how will anyone know that they’re fans of Chipotle in this man-really-is-an-island era of Facebook anonymity??

Luckily, Serena ruins everybody’s life and GG announces that she’ll continue to catalog their missteps in college.  “Caaaaaaannonbaaaaall!” shouted one CW writer to the other as they jumped into their Scrooge McDuck Money Bin.

The l’il high school grads, inexplicably driven to move the plot with something other than Nate’s libido, still want to know WHO IS Gossip Girl.  A billion minutes later, we learn that THEY are Gossip Girl, GOSSIP GIRL IS THEY!  This is exactly the sort of thing Maureen Dowd would write a column about.  Don’t even think about it, Red.

Third season begins.  The Humphensteins have taken to their new tax bracket like champs.  Li’l J is lounging poolside at Lily’s summer house, exhausted after wrestling dolphins and steering her clipper ship off the coast.  Are ripped up fishermen’s nets really in style this fall?  Don’t even think about it, Red.

Dan and Daddy are taking a casual walk in the lively, green woods — presumably to have signs of respiration around Dan as he explains three months worth of back-story without ever actually breathing.  No idea what he said.  Did an owl just hoot?  Moving on.

Nate touches down in his chopper with redhead, Bree Buckley.  Turns out she’s from rival political fam.  A red Ferrari magically appears and they time travel to a daytime soap where we can watch and hope that episodic amnesia and tight camera shots make them more interesting.

Now, the golden couple.  Blair and Chuck.  At the end of last season, Basstastic braved H1N1 in the damp streets of Paris to buy Blair her fav control top panty hose.  Then he said I-love-you.  He even kinda sorta smiled!  The stuff of fairy tales!  Now the pair is adding blondes to their bedroom rotations.  Being a kid is tough.

Serena, meanwhile, is hounded by paparazzi 24/7 when she gets back to the city.  She insists that no funny business went on abroad — only sun salutations and colon cleansings.  Tiny Dancer doesn’t believe her, but he’s blabbering on without a forest in the backdrop so we decided to check out Anna Sui’s new GG-inspired clothing line on the internets.

Eventually Diaper ends up at the coffee house, which looks more than ever like the saloon from the set of Deadwood.  There’s  Billy the Kid’s carafe for steamed soymilk!  Vanessa lumbers up to the splintered cafe table and asks where Diaper got that there fancy cowhide money holding dee-vice.  Diaper begins to cry and folds the 100 dollah bills into tiny footballs which he flicks into Van’s hair-don’t.

Score!  Every GG episode has a party, and we learn that our first party of the season is the Archibald’s polo match in Greenwich!  Evurbody’s invited, except people with bad hair.  Vanz and secretly respirating Humphrey son, Scott, hatch a devilish plan to gain admission that involves showing up and walking in.   The rich people will never see this coming.  Do buses even go to CT?

Party time!!  Long dresses are in.  Scotch tries to talk to Daddy Humphrey about the weather.  Yeah I’m a friend of Vanessa’s.  Of course I tried to put a comb through that nest.  But hey I took a train all this way to meet YOU!  Or maybe it was that bus from Chinatown to Chinatown? Look, I’m confused, and your soulful voice spoke to me through a free iTunes download.  Daddy Humphrey immediately recognized the blabbering idiot as his own lost boy.  Do you want a cowhide money-holding dee-vice, son?

Serena sweeps past the screen on a horse and is later found crying about daddy issues.  Chuck and Blair move to phase 2 of their relationship: Dancing With the Stars and a bucket of chicken.  And Gossip Girl signs off like Carrie Bradshaw — with a list of truths so simple, so touching, so relatable, that we remember why we watch pretty people with great clothes in the first place.  Next week: Grammy Rhodes moves into the apartment and bludgeons Diaper with a cane whenever he speaks.

The Vampire Diaries Pilot Season 1 Episode 1

“No, you’re worse, you want to talk to me, get to know me, see into my soul and screw and screw and screw until you’re done with me.”

–some waitress side character, proving that I am not good at remembering names of forgettable characters.

Certain people have criticized us for not writing about all the girly shows we watch.  Mostly Gossip Girl. But today, that changes.  Introducing the Vampire Diaries.

The first episode starts off promising.  This is not exactly Twilight.  It doesn’t happen in Washington state.  And the vampire’s name isn’t Edward.   .   . Other than that it is pretty much Twilight.  A girl enters the alien atmosphere that is high school and has a conveniently sexy run in with the handsome new guy that everybody is inexplicably attracted to.  He is, of course, a blood-sucking vampire.

So this is promising to be a serialized, CW-style rip off of Twilight to ride the coattails of True Blood’s success… but wait. It all changes 14 minutes into the episode.  When the voiceover narration of the titular vampire diary kicks in.  That’s right.  This show is going to follow the voice over journal of a vampire.  “I lost control today.  Everything I’ve kept buried inside came rushing to the surface.  I’m simply not able to resist her.”

Whereas Twilight is a macabre look at Bella’s fascination with hooking up with a guy that ultimately wants to eat her, this is a show that promises to deliver the same anti-feminist philosophy BUT FROM AN IMMORTAL MALE PERSPECTIVE.

The show apparently cannot stop the soundtrack once it starts.  There are just like four sequences, six full minutes of omnipresent generic alt rock/indie bands playing over the drama of our heroes.

There are also side stories about a drug dealing dork who is in love with the hot waitress, a superficial blond extra from Gossip Girl who is stuck in this show by accident, the insanely violent vampriric brother that nobody can know about, a cool aunt that raises the protagonist vampiric love interest a little too laxly, and SO MUCH MORE.

I’m not going to lie, I liked it when the vampire corrected his history teacher about the local civil war history.  You liked it too. Gloriously bad!

wisevid streaming episode link – http://www.wisevid.com/view_video.php?viewkey=cp6aahu3i1y1p4411111#

Supernatural “Sympathy for the Devil” Season 5 Episode 1

“Life as an angel condom. That’s real fun.”

–Dean Winchester

The boys are back and beating the snot out of demons and angels alike.  After some apparently Divine intervention inexplicably removes the Winchester brothers from the explosive arrival of Lucifer on earth, we get to follow the hunters as they sit around and read about Christianity.  I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, Supernatural has some real ambition despite its sometimes lacking budget.

This episode basically has a few computer generated flash-of-light style explosions and a lot of fake blood.  But they get some mileage out of those puddles of fake blood.  The writers interweave the quiet drama of the hunters with the psychological downfall of Lucifer’s vessel, some dude who slowly goes crazy as he sees his dead family haunting every aspect of his life.

These writers don’t have a huge budget, but what they “do have is a GED and a give ‘em hell attitude,” as Dean describes himself.  So the angels browbeat the brothers in a cold dark room with only three characters on screen for most of the dialogue.  Mostly close ups so the actors don’t have to spend the whole day together.  The angels don’t use big flashy effects or explosions.  They just say “let’s see how Sam does without his lungs” and then we cut to Sam writhing around like he has no lungs.  Or the angel says “Bang” and points at Sam and he acts like his legs are broken.  And we hear some big bones breaking sound effects.  See what I mean?  They’re getting a lot of bang for very little buck.

Anyway, this show has everything good about bad tv.  Dean has a pretty priceless  “A-ha!” moment.  Bobby says something about their dad and Dean goes “Dad.  That’s it!”  The episode also furthers the running joke that there are people who write slash fan fiction where the Winchesters brothers are sexually intimate.  .  . which I assume is one of the seals that had to be broken for Satan to come to earth.  They’re also apparently using the “Lucifer never lies” trope.  That’s cool.

And there’s a cheesy confrontation between the brothers too. “I DON’T KNOW IF I CAN EVER TRUST YOU AGAIN, SAM”.  This is going to be a season about true Christian values like forgiveness and slaying thy demonically possessed neighbor.

streaming episode link from zshare sympathy for the devil season 5 episode 1  http://www.fastpasstv.com/watch/2/2922/1

Sons of Anarchy “Albification” Season 2 Episode 1

“Climb back into your little German clown car and drive back to Nazi Town because the next time you piss all over my shoes, he will kill you.”
–Claudius…err…Clay, it’s so easy to get them mixed up.

Image via Wikipedia

Oh wow.  So Sons of Anarchy Season 2 is here.  And it’s everything I could have hoped for.  For those who don’t know, Sons of Anarchy is a show about a midwestern gun-running biker gang that loosely follows the plot of Hamlet.

That bears repeating.

Sons of Anarchy tells the story of a midwestern biker gang, and that story is the story of Hamlet.

This episode largely focuses on avenging the murder of a gang member’s wife.  Jax (Hamlet) knows that Clay (Claudius) is actually responsible for the murder, but he insists on secrecy and goes along with Clay’s charade.  Clay pins the murder on some random guy in the Mayans–that’s the Latino gang they sell guns to.  I didn’t really like that part of Hamlet where Claudius and Pollonius betray the Moorish gang they broker arms deals with, but I think they did a good job with it in the episode.

OKAY, so converting Hamlet into a modern day gangland serial requires a few deviations from the original themes and specific plot points.  But maybe that’s what makes this show so wonderful.  It’s like somebody really loved the first act of Hamlet and said “I wish Hamlet didn’t pretend to be insane.  I wish he just got tons of swords and fought Claudius and then conquered neighboring glens.”  And then the guy who thought that met this other guy at a strip club who thought “That sounds awesome but what if we had guns and strip clubs and motorcycles that go vroooooom.”  And then both of those guys met Ron Perlman.

This episode is called Albification because the important development unrelated to the revenge killing is that white supremacists are moving into town.  They describe themselves as separatists not supremacists.

• Firstly, albification i’s a great word.
• Secondly, I’m glad they decided to put white supremacists into Hamlet.
• Thirdly, I’m glad that somebody thinks they can be whiter than Shakespeare.

The episode ends with fascist white separatists kidnapping and raping Gemma (Gertrude).  That part of Hamlet always scared me.

FastpassTV / WiseVid streaming episode link: http://www.wisevid.com/view_video.php?viewkey=9vwmif2glfsyi3a72727#

Supernatural “When the Levee Breaks” Season 4 Episode 21

“Congrats, Sammy. You just earned yourself a bitch warmer seat to the apocalypse.”

–Dean Winchester, Supernatural

This episode is a welcome return to the Heaven and Hell storyline of Supernatural.  I know that I started watching this show because it was a zany little midwestern American Gothic horror show.  It had episodic encounters with ghosts and zombies and norse gods and I loved it through every cheesy moment.

But then something remarkable happened.  The show evolved past its Scooby Doo origins to show the Winchester brothers fighting a battle between heaven and hell.  All of a sudden, demons in every episode.  And the brothers are at the center of the Apocalypse.

Every now and then, the show lapses into a couple episodes of nonsensical ghost chases, but the main storyline revolves around this epic battle between angels and demons.  As much as I love good fiction that preys on Christian allegory, I absolutely love bad fiction that preys on it.

Supernatural gives us a recap episode of sorts.  Sam is sitting in a room, in a sort of intervention designed to force him out of his demon-blood addiction.  Brilliant.  We get to see all the characters we know and love.  Cheesy Marlon Brando demon.  Young sammy apparition.  Dead mom with a big hole in her stomach (even though she died in a fire, pinned against the ceiling).  They all have expository dialogues with Sam to explain what’s happened in the show so far.  Classic.

I can’t lie.  This show was bad and I loved it.  It got worse and I love it more.  The angels don’t know what’s going on.  The demons don’t know what’s going on.  This is forty minutes of emotional struggle between two brothers as the world falls apart.  Sooo ambitious.  You could make an oscar winning movie based on this premise… or you could make a TV episode on the CW.

Personally, I’m really happy that it boiled down to the CW so we can talk about how Sam can kill demons if he just drinks a little more demon blood.  Characters whisper platitudes to each other.  We don’t have to get too invested in the acting or the direction.  We can just appreciate these wartorn brothers duking it out.

Most of the action in this episode is off screen.  The seals are all breaking.  There are only a couple of seals left.  That means demons are going to be here very soon.  The apocalypse.  Does the episode show any seals breaking?  No.  We’re stuck on three or four sets.  This episode focuses on the story of these two brothers and it culminates in them resorting to fisticuffs.

It’s great that the CW thinks this show is good enough to have a whole episode devoted to emotional character development.  It’s written like a stage piece.  No set changes, just dialogue.  Wow.

DEMONS, BEWARE.  We’re going Greek tragedy on your ass.

KROD MANDOON AND HIS FLAMING SWORD OF FIRE

THIS IS TOO BAD TO EVEN WRITE ABOUT.  STAY AWAY FROM THIS SHOW.

LIE TO ME: UNDERCOVER SEASON 1 EPISODE 11

Right off the bat a young black man gets blasted off a roof by two police officers after he pulls what could theoretically be a gun from his pocket.  The problem with this scenario is it doesn’t matter what you hear for the rest of the show because there is no possible way that any network drama television show is ever going to have a couple of cops get a legitimate kill on a black teen.  I don’t care if he accidentally pulled out a bazooka.

I teeter on my seat for a week for this show and the mystery is spoiled before I even get to see Tim Roth stride into the interrogation room.  Obviously one of the cops has to lie.  Someone HAD to plant the gun…so the lie better be a good one.

And boy do they deliver. FBI connections, terrorism, and double agents are abound.  It’s fantastic because throughout the entirety of the twists and turns into complete absurdity, it is never entirely clear why anyone feels the need to give Lightman extremely classified information.  I mean, this is the kind of shit George Bush wasn’t even privileged enough to know and the FBI discloses all of this to Lightman for particularly retarded reasons that never really make sense.

I guess it makes some sense towards the end when you find out that this entire fiasco is being headed by a double agent.  How do we find this out?  Lightman gets out chainsaw and rips right through this dude’s bullshit like only the keenest of ex-undercover cops (Reservoir Dogs reference, fyi) could.  First Tim whips out pictures of this guy’s dead daughter, then he claims the guy wrinkled his forehead or something and the whole thing blows wide open.  The double agent admits to high counts of treason and all in the name of his daughter who died to friendly fire in Iraq.

I’m really not certain how someone could have the level head to pull of one of the most complicated terrorist operations ever and yet be bat shit crazy enough to equate firebombing American civilians with rigged ambulances as revenge for a common war time mishap.  This is where the show is brilliant though.  You realize that Tim’s rapist wit is the only tool we as Americans have to protect us from ridiculous plot lines.  He cuts right through them with a level nonchalance that make me shiver.

What we need now is a House/Lightman Hybrid.  Boy, that sounds fucking steamy.  You would only be able to have 7 minute shows because the Hybrid would immediately see through all the lies and deliver a satisfying ending before the first commercial break.

Some of the other characters do stuff during the show as well.  I think one of them gets quasi-fired.  There is also a very subtle but erotic use of xylophones throughout the show.  In fact the soft use of New Age music makes you feel like you are at the Aquarium if you close your eyes and block out all the dialogue.  Which makes the second viewing of this spectacular episode FUCKING AWESOME.

Flashpoint “Perfect Storm” Season 2 Episode 11

“Ya, teenagers and anything aren’t a good fit.”

–Ed Lane, Flashpoint

This week, Flashpoint serves up a special treat.  An episode about high schoolers.  The episode delivers on every high school cliché that you can reasonably fit into a 40 minute show.  And the stock characters who don’t get featured are at least mentioned.  One of the SRU guys explains that there is “Nothing on the Internet.  No wacky look at my awesome gun photos.”  That’s paraphrasing, but you get the idea.

We have the geeky poor art kid going to an enormous high school full of rich popular kids.  Well it’s actually not full of them.  The extras in this episode are remarkably absent.  The school goes into lock down after the first shots are fired, so only the main characters are running around in the hallways.  How do they get around the lock down?  The main characters of course were all skipping class or fetching projectors from down the hall or whatever it takes to make sure they’re in the hallways.

Anyway, after art class, the geeky art kid explains his painting to the pretty girl who just started dating the foot ball jock.  Minutes later, there is a confrontation between all the jocks sporting their varsity jackets and the geeky kid.  The confrontation ends with him being beaten mercilessly (and includes a “why are you hitting yourself” moment) all on cool-kid-croney’s video phone.  The video is sent to everybody in cool-kid-croney’s phone list.

Geeky art kid goes home.  We are introduced to his dead beat dad.  No mom around.  Kid sees a revolver in the hallway.  Takes the gun and goes back to school where he accidentally shoots two people in an effort to find the kid he actually wants to shoot.

That kid isn’t in class though.  He is hanging out next to the OLYMPIC swimming pool at this high school.  The pretty girl is breaking up with him.  We also get a nod to a stock character I thought we were missing in this episode.  There wasn’t a geeky girl who lets her hair down and takes off her glasses to become the most ravishing beauty at the school.   Well don’t worry.  It turns out the pretty girl used to be just as unpopular as geeky art kid until this football player swept down and started dating her (probably on some kind of Pygmalion-styled wager that we are not privy to).

The rest of the episode is kids and law enforcement running around an enormous school that is devoid of students (because of the aforementioned lockdown) except, curiously, when there is a need for exposition.  See pretty girl and cool jock don’t know there is a shooter yet.  But the writers need to get them into the art room where we started this brave tale.  So they have a flock of school children run down the hall and go “Don’t you know there’s a guy with a gun in the school?!”  Cut to the art room where pretty girl pushes the door open saying “I don’t know where else to go.”

Geeky art kid tracks down the croney who recorded that humiliating video.  And he makes his own humiliating video.  At the end there is a gun shot and we are unsure if croney is alive or dead.

What I haven’t mentioned yet is that there is a struggle between the first responder local cops and the SRU over how to treat this situation.  The locals think this is a shooter at a mass shooting.   But the SRU knows this is all about profiling and strategy.  It is a subject. Not a gunman.  And this strategy pays off when they realize the subject has specific targets that can be contained.  OR CAN THEY?

It turns out that one of the local cops is Croney’s father!  The rest of the episode is less exciting, but pretty girl talks down the geeky art kid.  But then he reescalates when he realizes cool jock was in the room the whole time.  Then Croney’s dad comes in and shoots the geeky art kid despite the fact that SRU probably had it under control.

Cue the music.  Do a montage that shows nobody got hurt.  Cut to tortured SRU leader punching his locker in a fit of “IT NEVER GETS ANY EASIER”-styled rage.  I love this show so much.

Prison Break “VS.” Season 4 Episode 18

“How badly do you want it, mom?”

–Michael Scoffield, Prison Break

Oh man. I sort of spent the whole episode wondering which of Christina Scoffield’s lines I would use for the quote on top of this post.  Each and every one was priceless.  From her monologue about supernovas to her expository asides about Bengali, I knew they had added a character I could love to hate.  This complicated mother is unnecessarily conniving and then some.  Her lines and delivery are cheesier than Michael Rapaport.  And that is saying something.

But after jotting down all those quotes, Michael closed the episode with the above-mentioned pearl.  And I feel like his tone really gives voice to the questions bouncing around my head.  Where the hell is this show going?  Who came up with this ridiculous overlord mother character?  Is the show going to get super Freudian now?  How badly do they want this farce to continue?

Sara’s pregancy test is also laugh aloud funny.  Seeing Dr. Tancredi rummaging through a medicine cabinet to find a pregnancy test is comedy enough.  Cutting away to like several hours worth of action and then cutting back to Sara as she dramatically checks the result of her pregnancy test.  That is perfect.

I feel like Prison Break always exceeds my expectations. I’m going to include some other quote of the week elements for this show. Because I’m pretty sure this show will always deliver.

Self’s quote of the week. (God am I glad that Rapaport has a job again)

“This guy wasn’t trying to hurt you; he just didn’t like your tattoo.”

–Don Self, on Lincoln’s wounded arm in Prison Break

Weird shit quote of the week.

“Bengali has 14 different vowels. It’s a bitch to pronounce.”

–Mom, on cultural relativism in Prison Break

A supernova is not a moment that eclipses everything once every 50 years.

Lame metaphor/simile of the week.

“Have you ever seen a picture of a supernova? They’re quite beautiful aren’t they?  They’re very rare.  They only occur once every fifty years. We’re a day away from a kind of supernova.  A moment so powerful it will eclipse everything, and nobody’s going to stop me.”

–Mom, on totally showing that you don’t really know what a supernova is in Prison Break