Stay Tuned #7: More F-Moments
I don't have a new character for you yet, but it's finale-fest here at Stay Tuned, a time to see once again how different TV shows Fucked up and Finished off their latest seasons.
Grimm: this Once Upon A Time rival takes quotes from classic Brothers Grimm fairy tales, mixes them with Buffy-style creature morphing (referred to in the series as a woge--pronounced "volga") and police procedural drama. Portland detective Nick Burkhardt suddenly discovers he is able to see people who can woge after one of them kills his aunt, who had the same ability. The first season of Grimm (also the family name of those who can see wessen--human/animal hybrids who can woge from one form to the other) deals with Nick trying to cope with his status as a Grimm, solve wessen-related crimes, and improve the long-standing bad reputation of Grimms among non-violent members of the wessen community. The finale involved a Sleeping Beauty-inspired plot, wherein Nick's girlfriend, Juliette, was put into a coma by the same hexenbiest (a witch-like wessen) who killed his aunt. The episode ended with Nick coming to blows with his mother--also a Grimm--whom he thought had died when he was a child. Season 2 gets more global, involving the "Royals," a family of well-connected wessen who have sent assassins to Portland numerous times to deal with Nick and his allies. The majority of the season revolves around Nick's captain (who is a half-Royal and zauberbiest, the male equivalent of a hexenbiest) and his curse-fueled romance with a newly awakened Juliette, who cannot remember Nick as being her true boyfriend. The last few episodes of the season introduce legendary voodoo priest Baron Samedi, who is a pufferfish wessen capable of turning people into turbo-zombies, and was hired by the Royals to apprehend Nick. Nick ends the episode at the mercy of the Baron's toxin, locked in a coffin and bound for Germany. The third season begins with Nick breaking free of the Royals' plane and rampaging through the Oregon countryside, proving that you should never turn a Grimm into a zombie. Though he is eventually cured, side-effects linger, such as a significantly improved metabolism, enhanced strength, a dead man's heart rate, and a woge-like state in which he reverts to zombie form. I really hoped they would do more with this, but other plotlines got in the way, including a Blutbad (read "Big Bad Wolf")/Fuchsbau (a fox-like wessen) wedding between Nick's friends, Monroe and Rosalee, a Germany-set arc wherein Adalind (the resident trouble-causing hexenbiest) regains her lost magic and has a super-powered baby, and a tacked-on character named Theresa "Trubel" Rubel, a runaway and serial murder suspect who turns out to be a Grimm and receives training from Nick. The season ends with Adalind taking Nick's Grimm abilities from him (goodbye zombie-woge! Dammit!), Trubel causing trouble at the wedding, Nick's boss getting shot by a Royal-employed FBI agent, and Wu (a co-worker of Nick's who had a bad experience with an Aswang earlier in the season) finding a Grimm journal in Nick's house. Hopefully something will come out of all this unfinished-ness in Season Four.
B-
Speaking of Once Upon A Time: Emma Swan (House's Jennifer Morrison) has had to deal with being "the Savior" of a bunch of fairy tale characters, including her parents, Snow White (Big Love's Ginnifer Goodwin) and Prince Charming (Josh Dallas), her father-in-law Rumpelstiltskin (The Full Monty's Robert Carlyle), and a family tree so convoluted that I'm better off linking you to Wikipedia to trace it for yourselves. But that's just the way the Kitsis/Horowitz (Lost) production machine works. And work it does. Amid all the convoluted flashbacks, Disney promotions, character revamps (Victor Frankenstein is a plot convenience? Mulan is gay? Rapunzel is black? The Wicked Witch is blonde? The Wizard of Oz is a flying monkey? Greek myths are Disney property now? Oh, yeah, I forgot about Hercules...), and borderline-Broadway dramatizing, there is a decent story with a moral and a heart under there somewhere. The unlikely crew of heroes and villains have had to battle the likes of Snow White's Evil Queen (who is also Ursula the Sea Witch), Maleficent (a completely different evil Queen, from Sleeping Beauty), the Queen of Hearts (who is also the Evil Queen's mother and Snow White's stepmother), Peter Pan (who is also the Pied Piper of Hamelin, Pan from Greek Mythology, and Rumpelstiltskin's father), and the Wicked Witch of the West (who is also the Evil Queen's half-sister). In its third season, Once Upon A Time has gone through Neverland, come out a year later with a new curse (the fourth since the series began, and the second for this season) having been enacted by Snow White and co-opted by the Wicked Witch, and ended with a bout of history-altering time travel, wherein Emma inadvertently saves Maid Marian from execution, thereby ruining Regina's (the Evil Queen's "real world" identity) present day happy ending with Robin Hood, and brings back an urn from Rumpelstiltskin's vault, where he keeps "magic that even [he is] afraid of." The urn turns out to contain Elsa, the Disneyfied Ice Queen from Frozen. I didn't like the movie that much, but my curiosity about where the series will go next (revenge on Rumpelstiltskin? A Merida/Maid Marian mash-up? Some other alliterative phrase involving time travel and Pocahontas?) is outweighing my desire to "let it go."
B
Speaking of Disney, who own Marvel Studios, who created Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: The series has apparently been floundering in Ratingsville, but I like it very much. It has the same good natured personality and contrasting darkness that has characterized past Whedonverse creations like Buffy and The Cabin In the Woods. I guess it takes a rare kind of viewer to understand Whedon's style and vision, and I am one. Plus I'm a polished and obsessive comic book nerd (I'm not a collector, but the internet has been good to me as far as learning what I don't already know), which helps with the Marvel aspect of things. If you've seen The Avengers, you know that Clark Gregg's character, "the son of Coul" (Asgardian culture makes me chuckle) was killed, and if you've also seen any episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., you know he's not dead. So how'd that happen? The series' freshman season attempts to answer that question (and raises a few more, as any good series should), while its titular team deal with various Marvel Universe chemicals (the Super Soldier formula, Hulk gamma juice, the Extremis serum from Iron Man 3, and the blue alien blood that was used to bring Coulson back to life) and "artifacts" (Chiutari metals from The Avengers, Asgardian weaponry). The cast is huge for a TV show, sporting names like Gregg himself, Chucky voice Brad Dourif (a false face for the season big-bad known as "The Clairvoyant"), Bill Paxton (a S.H.I.E.L.D./Hydra double agent who is also the real Clairvoyant, but not actually psychic, to his minions' disappointment), Two and A Half Men's Ming-Na Wen (the pilot and strong-but-silent ass-kicker on Coulson's team), Angel's J. August Richards (OMG! It's Deathlok!), How I Met Your Mother's Cobie Smulders (fan demand brings you Maria Hill!), Dirt's Ian Hart (Graviton! But not yet!), Jamie Alexander (Sif is back!), Lost's Titus Welliver (Felix Blake from Item 47!), Patton Oswalt (S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, and twins!) and Samuel L. Jackson! As Nick Fury! Twice!
The season ends with Graviton still in a box, but very much in play, the Clairvoyant being injected with the alien juice and later vaporized by Coulson, Deathlok going off on his own after being freed from the Clairvoyant's control, Fitz (one of the techno-geeks on Coulson's team) suffering brain damage after nearly drowning in the ocean, Raina (an associate of the Clairvoyant who is obsessed with human evolution, alien artifacts, and superpowers) coming face-to-face with Skye's (a hacker who was imprisoned by S.H.I.E.L.D. before joining Coulson's team) alien father, and Coulson carving some kind of blueprint or alien heiroglyphs into a wall. Could the blue alien from the revival project have been Skye's mother? Could Graviton break free? What's Deathlok up to? Can Patton Oswalt seriously help the team re-build S.H.I.E.L.D. after Hydra ruined it? Has Coulson lost his mind? So many questions and so much awesomeness. I truly can't wait for Season 2.
A
Bates Motel: You know the movie. And the sequel. And the other sequel. And the other sequel. And the re-make with Vince Vaughn that didn't go over very well. But you haven't seen how it all began until you've seen Bates Motel. Carlton Cuse (speaking of Lost) weaves together a gripping prequel series that follows Norman Bates (Billy Elliott's Freddie Highmore) and his mother Norma (The Conjuring's Vera Farmiga, sister of American Horror Story's Taissa Farmiga) as they struggle to keep the motel afloat in a changing and dangerous town full of corrupt cops (Sherriffed by ex-Lostie Nestor Carbonell), sex-traffickers, and marijuana farmers. The infamous house and motel sets are intact and as creepily nostalgic as ever. In the first season, Norma moves Norman to the town of White Pine Bay (a fitting name for the average pennitentiary or insane asylum) to protect him from the fact that he blacked out and killed his father. Norman spends the first season caught in an unfulfilled love triangle with motel employee Emma and classmate Bradley, learning his future obsession with taxidermy from Emma's father (Ian Hart, mentioned above), living a platonic, borderline-Oedipan life with his mother, and blacking out some more and killing a few people who threaten their twisted relationship, including his teacher, who turns out to be the daughter of a local drug lord in Season Two. The second season saddles Norman with a new love triangle featuring Emma and a troubled classmate named Cody. Norman's half-brother, Dylan, is stuck in a pot-farmer storyline where he has to kill the teacher's father, and Norman is on the verge of learning that his blackout personality is his mother. Episode filler aside, I enjoy the acting and I look forward to Season Three.
B+
Elementary: Lucy Lu and Dexter villain Johnny Lee Miller star as Joan Watson and Sherlock Holmes, modern day re-imaginings of the classic literary characters who work as consultants for the NYPD. The usual know-it-all-detective-clashes-and-collaborates-with-police motions characterize each procedural episode, underlaid by such social arcs as Holmes' struggle with drug addiction and Watson's quest for independence and/or failed romance. The characters make the show watchable, and the more-than-friendship-less-than-love relationship between Holmes and Watson adds dimension to what could otherwise be called CBS Cop Drama #35. But after making such an impact in its first season by reuniting Holmes with his lost love Irene Adler (and then revealing her to be a female version of Moriarty, a "riddle wrapped inside a mystery inside an enigma I had sex with"), the best its second season had to offer in terms of a twisty climax was to make "my idiot brother," Mycroft Holmes (Amazing Spider-Man's Rhys Ifans) a secret MI-6 agent and frame him for murder. I'll keep watching to see what Sherlock will do for MI-6 when he returns to London in the new season, but I am not very impressed with the lead-in.
C
The Blacklist: Off the bat, let's just say I'm loving this show! The Silence Of the Lambs-style working relationship between Raymond Reddington (James Spader, being the right amount of goofy and evil) and FBI agent Elizabeth Keen (Megan Boone, being the right amount of cynical and gullible), Spader's ability to deliver reminiscent monologues as though he just made them up on the spot, and then shoot whoever he's talking to, and the show's tendency to dangle the too-obvious right in front of our noses long after a well-placed rug-pull has knocked us on our know-it-all asses; it all keeps me coming back for more. But now there is no more. After surrendering himself to the FBI and slowly coughing up a laundry list of unknown international criminals whom he has done business with in the past, Reddington has fostered a tenuous relationship with Agent Keen (who is Reddington's daughter, but not really), destroyed her relationship with her husband (who turned out to be a sleeper agent working for the season big-bad), and gotten away with stealing secrets from apprehended Blacklisters with the FBI watching, obviously not closely enough. It doesn't take a criminal mastermind to realize that Berlin (the aforementioned big-bad, played by Fargo's Peter Stormare) is Agent Keen's real father, and that he wants revenge against Reddington for abducting his daughter (perhaps using the episode thirteen Blacklister, the Cyprus Agency?). But that particular rug has yet to be pulled. Berlin is still at large when the season ends, and there are more names on the Blacklist that haven't been apprehended, so who knows what might happen next?
A-
The season finale of The Mentalist made such an impactless impact that I have nothing else to say about it, and I have yet to see the season finale of Arrow, but I'm three episodes into The 100 and I like what I see. I hope to have a character for you soon, so stay tuned for what is to come.
Grimm: this Once Upon A Time rival takes quotes from classic Brothers Grimm fairy tales, mixes them with Buffy-style creature morphing (referred to in the series as a woge--pronounced "volga") and police procedural drama. Portland detective Nick Burkhardt suddenly discovers he is able to see people who can woge after one of them kills his aunt, who had the same ability. The first season of Grimm (also the family name of those who can see wessen--human/animal hybrids who can woge from one form to the other) deals with Nick trying to cope with his status as a Grimm, solve wessen-related crimes, and improve the long-standing bad reputation of Grimms among non-violent members of the wessen community. The finale involved a Sleeping Beauty-inspired plot, wherein Nick's girlfriend, Juliette, was put into a coma by the same hexenbiest (a witch-like wessen) who killed his aunt. The episode ended with Nick coming to blows with his mother--also a Grimm--whom he thought had died when he was a child. Season 2 gets more global, involving the "Royals," a family of well-connected wessen who have sent assassins to Portland numerous times to deal with Nick and his allies. The majority of the season revolves around Nick's captain (who is a half-Royal and zauberbiest, the male equivalent of a hexenbiest) and his curse-fueled romance with a newly awakened Juliette, who cannot remember Nick as being her true boyfriend. The last few episodes of the season introduce legendary voodoo priest Baron Samedi, who is a pufferfish wessen capable of turning people into turbo-zombies, and was hired by the Royals to apprehend Nick. Nick ends the episode at the mercy of the Baron's toxin, locked in a coffin and bound for Germany. The third season begins with Nick breaking free of the Royals' plane and rampaging through the Oregon countryside, proving that you should never turn a Grimm into a zombie. Though he is eventually cured, side-effects linger, such as a significantly improved metabolism, enhanced strength, a dead man's heart rate, and a woge-like state in which he reverts to zombie form. I really hoped they would do more with this, but other plotlines got in the way, including a Blutbad (read "Big Bad Wolf")/Fuchsbau (a fox-like wessen) wedding between Nick's friends, Monroe and Rosalee, a Germany-set arc wherein Adalind (the resident trouble-causing hexenbiest) regains her lost magic and has a super-powered baby, and a tacked-on character named Theresa "Trubel" Rubel, a runaway and serial murder suspect who turns out to be a Grimm and receives training from Nick. The season ends with Adalind taking Nick's Grimm abilities from him (goodbye zombie-woge! Dammit!), Trubel causing trouble at the wedding, Nick's boss getting shot by a Royal-employed FBI agent, and Wu (a co-worker of Nick's who had a bad experience with an Aswang earlier in the season) finding a Grimm journal in Nick's house. Hopefully something will come out of all this unfinished-ness in Season Four.
B-
Speaking of Once Upon A Time: Emma Swan (House's Jennifer Morrison) has had to deal with being "the Savior" of a bunch of fairy tale characters, including her parents, Snow White (Big Love's Ginnifer Goodwin) and Prince Charming (Josh Dallas), her father-in-law Rumpelstiltskin (The Full Monty's Robert Carlyle), and a family tree so convoluted that I'm better off linking you to Wikipedia to trace it for yourselves. But that's just the way the Kitsis/Horowitz (Lost) production machine works. And work it does. Amid all the convoluted flashbacks, Disney promotions, character revamps (Victor Frankenstein is a plot convenience? Mulan is gay? Rapunzel is black? The Wicked Witch is blonde? The Wizard of Oz is a flying monkey? Greek myths are Disney property now? Oh, yeah, I forgot about Hercules...), and borderline-Broadway dramatizing, there is a decent story with a moral and a heart under there somewhere. The unlikely crew of heroes and villains have had to battle the likes of Snow White's Evil Queen (who is also Ursula the Sea Witch), Maleficent (a completely different evil Queen, from Sleeping Beauty), the Queen of Hearts (who is also the Evil Queen's mother and Snow White's stepmother), Peter Pan (who is also the Pied Piper of Hamelin, Pan from Greek Mythology, and Rumpelstiltskin's father), and the Wicked Witch of the West (who is also the Evil Queen's half-sister). In its third season, Once Upon A Time has gone through Neverland, come out a year later with a new curse (the fourth since the series began, and the second for this season) having been enacted by Snow White and co-opted by the Wicked Witch, and ended with a bout of history-altering time travel, wherein Emma inadvertently saves Maid Marian from execution, thereby ruining Regina's (the Evil Queen's "real world" identity) present day happy ending with Robin Hood, and brings back an urn from Rumpelstiltskin's vault, where he keeps "magic that even [he is] afraid of." The urn turns out to contain Elsa, the Disneyfied Ice Queen from Frozen. I didn't like the movie that much, but my curiosity about where the series will go next (revenge on Rumpelstiltskin? A Merida/Maid Marian mash-up? Some other alliterative phrase involving time travel and Pocahontas?) is outweighing my desire to "let it go."
B
Speaking of Disney, who own Marvel Studios, who created Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: The series has apparently been floundering in Ratingsville, but I like it very much. It has the same good natured personality and contrasting darkness that has characterized past Whedonverse creations like Buffy and The Cabin In the Woods. I guess it takes a rare kind of viewer to understand Whedon's style and vision, and I am one. Plus I'm a polished and obsessive comic book nerd (I'm not a collector, but the internet has been good to me as far as learning what I don't already know), which helps with the Marvel aspect of things. If you've seen The Avengers, you know that Clark Gregg's character, "the son of Coul" (Asgardian culture makes me chuckle) was killed, and if you've also seen any episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., you know he's not dead. So how'd that happen? The series' freshman season attempts to answer that question (and raises a few more, as any good series should), while its titular team deal with various Marvel Universe chemicals (the Super Soldier formula, Hulk gamma juice, the Extremis serum from Iron Man 3, and the blue alien blood that was used to bring Coulson back to life) and "artifacts" (Chiutari metals from The Avengers, Asgardian weaponry). The cast is huge for a TV show, sporting names like Gregg himself, Chucky voice Brad Dourif (a false face for the season big-bad known as "The Clairvoyant"), Bill Paxton (a S.H.I.E.L.D./Hydra double agent who is also the real Clairvoyant, but not actually psychic, to his minions' disappointment), Two and A Half Men's Ming-Na Wen (the pilot and strong-but-silent ass-kicker on Coulson's team), Angel's J. August Richards (OMG! It's Deathlok!), How I Met Your Mother's Cobie Smulders (fan demand brings you Maria Hill!), Dirt's Ian Hart (Graviton! But not yet!), Jamie Alexander (Sif is back!), Lost's Titus Welliver (Felix Blake from Item 47!), Patton Oswalt (S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, and twins!) and Samuel L. Jackson! As Nick Fury! Twice!
The season ends with Graviton still in a box, but very much in play, the Clairvoyant being injected with the alien juice and later vaporized by Coulson, Deathlok going off on his own after being freed from the Clairvoyant's control, Fitz (one of the techno-geeks on Coulson's team) suffering brain damage after nearly drowning in the ocean, Raina (an associate of the Clairvoyant who is obsessed with human evolution, alien artifacts, and superpowers) coming face-to-face with Skye's (a hacker who was imprisoned by S.H.I.E.L.D. before joining Coulson's team) alien father, and Coulson carving some kind of blueprint or alien heiroglyphs into a wall. Could the blue alien from the revival project have been Skye's mother? Could Graviton break free? What's Deathlok up to? Can Patton Oswalt seriously help the team re-build S.H.I.E.L.D. after Hydra ruined it? Has Coulson lost his mind? So many questions and so much awesomeness. I truly can't wait for Season 2.
A
Bates Motel: You know the movie. And the sequel. And the other sequel. And the other sequel. And the re-make with Vince Vaughn that didn't go over very well. But you haven't seen how it all began until you've seen Bates Motel. Carlton Cuse (speaking of Lost) weaves together a gripping prequel series that follows Norman Bates (Billy Elliott's Freddie Highmore) and his mother Norma (The Conjuring's Vera Farmiga, sister of American Horror Story's Taissa Farmiga) as they struggle to keep the motel afloat in a changing and dangerous town full of corrupt cops (Sherriffed by ex-Lostie Nestor Carbonell), sex-traffickers, and marijuana farmers. The infamous house and motel sets are intact and as creepily nostalgic as ever. In the first season, Norma moves Norman to the town of White Pine Bay (a fitting name for the average pennitentiary or insane asylum) to protect him from the fact that he blacked out and killed his father. Norman spends the first season caught in an unfulfilled love triangle with motel employee Emma and classmate Bradley, learning his future obsession with taxidermy from Emma's father (Ian Hart, mentioned above), living a platonic, borderline-Oedipan life with his mother, and blacking out some more and killing a few people who threaten their twisted relationship, including his teacher, who turns out to be the daughter of a local drug lord in Season Two. The second season saddles Norman with a new love triangle featuring Emma and a troubled classmate named Cody. Norman's half-brother, Dylan, is stuck in a pot-farmer storyline where he has to kill the teacher's father, and Norman is on the verge of learning that his blackout personality is his mother. Episode filler aside, I enjoy the acting and I look forward to Season Three.
B+
Elementary: Lucy Lu and Dexter villain Johnny Lee Miller star as Joan Watson and Sherlock Holmes, modern day re-imaginings of the classic literary characters who work as consultants for the NYPD. The usual know-it-all-detective-clashes-and-collaborates-with-police motions characterize each procedural episode, underlaid by such social arcs as Holmes' struggle with drug addiction and Watson's quest for independence and/or failed romance. The characters make the show watchable, and the more-than-friendship-less-than-love relationship between Holmes and Watson adds dimension to what could otherwise be called CBS Cop Drama #35. But after making such an impact in its first season by reuniting Holmes with his lost love Irene Adler (and then revealing her to be a female version of Moriarty, a "riddle wrapped inside a mystery inside an enigma I had sex with"), the best its second season had to offer in terms of a twisty climax was to make "my idiot brother," Mycroft Holmes (Amazing Spider-Man's Rhys Ifans) a secret MI-6 agent and frame him for murder. I'll keep watching to see what Sherlock will do for MI-6 when he returns to London in the new season, but I am not very impressed with the lead-in.
C
The Blacklist: Off the bat, let's just say I'm loving this show! The Silence Of the Lambs-style working relationship between Raymond Reddington (James Spader, being the right amount of goofy and evil) and FBI agent Elizabeth Keen (Megan Boone, being the right amount of cynical and gullible), Spader's ability to deliver reminiscent monologues as though he just made them up on the spot, and then shoot whoever he's talking to, and the show's tendency to dangle the too-obvious right in front of our noses long after a well-placed rug-pull has knocked us on our know-it-all asses; it all keeps me coming back for more. But now there is no more. After surrendering himself to the FBI and slowly coughing up a laundry list of unknown international criminals whom he has done business with in the past, Reddington has fostered a tenuous relationship with Agent Keen (who is Reddington's daughter, but not really), destroyed her relationship with her husband (who turned out to be a sleeper agent working for the season big-bad), and gotten away with stealing secrets from apprehended Blacklisters with the FBI watching, obviously not closely enough. It doesn't take a criminal mastermind to realize that Berlin (the aforementioned big-bad, played by Fargo's Peter Stormare) is Agent Keen's real father, and that he wants revenge against Reddington for abducting his daughter (perhaps using the episode thirteen Blacklister, the Cyprus Agency?). But that particular rug has yet to be pulled. Berlin is still at large when the season ends, and there are more names on the Blacklist that haven't been apprehended, so who knows what might happen next?
A-
The season finale of The Mentalist made such an impactless impact that I have nothing else to say about it, and I have yet to see the season finale of Arrow, but I'm three episodes into The 100 and I like what I see. I hope to have a character for you soon, so stay tuned for what is to come.
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