Weekend at Bobby’s vs. Live Free or Twi-Hard vs. You Can’t Handle the Truth

… or the “Why is Sam such a Dick Trilogy”

It’s no secret that since Supernatural has been back I’ve not been the biggest fan. But then Weekend at Bobby’s happened and I remembered why I love the show.

Weekend at Bobby’s manages to make that “Monster of the Week” format, that the new series is running with, fun and exciting. It takes its lead from a classic episode of the X-files (I can’t remember which) where Mulder is sidelined and we focus entirely on Scully with on Mulder appearing on the phone. Well, instead it is the Winchester boys on the sidelines with Bobby taking centre stage, giving us a much overlooked glimpse into the life of Bobby Singer.

The trigger for the episode however comes from Dean, who rings Bobby up to complain about how different Sam feels since he came back from the pit.

True, Sam has been acting like a dick all season, but that’s not exactly new. Sam has been a dick for some time now, season 4 was dragged down notably by Sam being a dick! Anyway, I digress.

Live Free or Twi-Hard, while an amusing title and a nice little play on the current popularity of films like Twilight, fails on multiple levels. Firstly it follows the Star Trekkien style of storytelling. By that I mean, something happens to the one of the main characters, i.e. becoming a Vampire, that will be entirely reversed by the end of the episode, despite there being evidence to the contrary that is even possible.

Instead of providing an episode about the characters striving to overcome adversity, this method of storytelling simply drags on for 40 minutes until the inevitable conclusion is reached without the episode ever having had any meaningful impact.

The second reason the episode fails is that it breaks canon, Dean’s vampirism being reversible is both convenient and poor storytelling. Part of what makes Supernatural interesting and unique is the lore that Kripke creates for the monsters, changing that lore breaks an audiences engagement with the story.

What I would have found more palatable would be for the cure to fail, after all it wouldn’t be the first time. Back in season 2, one of the most memorable and shocking failures on the Winchester Brother's’ part happened in Heart. After promising to cure Madison of her lycanthropy Sam is forced to kill her when the cure fails.

Obviously, long term, turning Dean into a vamp would be a terrible idea, but a catastrophic failure of the cure would have made the fact that Sam let Dean get turned even more impactful.

Which brings me back to Sam is a dick. The whole point of Live Free or Twi-Hard was to bring to light this betrayal moment when Sam allows his brother to be turned into a monster. The rest of the episode is by the by and it really could have been any kind of betrayal really it didn’t need to be vampires.

So the final episode of this trilogy focuses on a Pagan god of Truth who is causing people in a sleepy little town to commit suicide. I had a brief hope at the start of the episode that Gabriel was back, but sadly, no.

Again, this weeks monster of the week is one of convenience, providing a simple way to finally get rid of Lisa (big damn shame) and out Sam as being a dick. (Have I mentioned that Sam is a dick) While I didn’t find this episode as objectionable as Live Free or Twi-Hard, it still felt staged, that everything which proceeded was only there to give some lead-in to the rather unshocking confession and plea for help from Sam and the rather more shocking and violent response from Dean.

To be honest I’m glad that Dean finally got to unleash his anger at his brother and not in a namby-pamby pre-watershed kind of way, but in a full on, brutally uncut kinda way. But overall the Sam possibly-not-being-human-storyline has been a bit of a downer. With only two characters in the show, having one of them continually antagonise the other really does a lot to alienate the audience. So while it might make sense from a story point of view (and I say might) it really doesn’t from an audience perspective, especially an audience that felt the show had come to a natural conclusion at the end of season 5!

Well, that’s My Two Cents anyway, until next time…

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

So, with Caprica finally back on the air, everything is up and running, so I thought I’d do a quick summary of what’s good and what’s not…

The Good

How I Met Your Mother, Raising Hope, Running Wilde and Big Bang Theory have all been great so far, performing at least as well as I had hoped, in some cases better. 

Nikita was a welcome surprise and has so far been an exciting little spy drama with a twist.

Hawaii Five-O is proving itself to be a fun little tongue in cheek crime drama, like Bones and Castle but with a high octane element that makes it a very enjoyable experience all round.

Chuck, well, Chuck is Chuck and what’s not to like about that? It’s good to finally see some love for this show from the network that very nearly killed it a year ago.

The Bad

Where to start? I had high hopes for Chase. A sexy, high tension drama produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, the studio behind such movies as Pirates of the Caribbean. But the show failed on all levels to be engaging. The characters were hard edge almost to the point of dislikeable, even the incompetent one was pitiful rather than endearing. With a season chock full of good stuff, this show just didn’t make the cut.

Undercovers, the new Spy-Fi from J.J.Abrams, a name synonymous with sexy-confusion has managed to produce a pilot that fails to be anything but a joke. Undercovers picks up the story of two retired spies and throws them back into the field. They proceed then to not miss a single beat as they shoot or shag their way out of trouble. Yes it’s sexy and yes it has action, but it doesn’t take itself seriously.Abrams has so far disappointed me with Alias and Lost and Fringe, even Star Trek, but never have I been so disappointed so quickly as I was with this show. If you want a less serious spy drama then Chuck has the perfect mix of comedy and suspense, where as Undercovers tries so hard to cool and quippy that it feels like you’re watching something Sam Raimi might have churned out.

The Ugly

Supernatural… Wait what? You’re favourite show of all time??? Well yes, I said 5 was enough, Eric Kripke said 5 was enough, even the Winchester Boys said 5 was enough, but nobody listened and now look what’s happened. Supernatural is never bad per se (well Bugs was a bad episode, but aside from that) but this has been a clunky start to the season. Coming back from what should have been the end of the show should have been an explosion of goodness that explained why we absolutely needed a 6th season (and “because it makes money” is not a good enough reason.) but instead we’re back to the grungy, emo-ish style storytelling that bogged down the show’s 4th season. Sure Sam and Dean are back hunting together now, so things will pick up, but so far I have failed to be impressed.

Merlin, after a promising start the show has relapsed into it’s lazy scripting/bad British acting habits. It’s such a shame, the first season, despite its poor finale, was genuinely a surprisingly good show. Why BBC shows go downhill in later seasons has always baffled me, but still there are some good moments and some fun moments so I still have hope that once we get the “silly” episodes out of the way the show might return to form for a good season finale.

The Event has the potential to be a good show, however it is as ugly as all hell. The story is chopped, nay, finely diced into bite size chunks, these chunks are then all thrown in a bag and whichever comes out first makes up that week’s episode. In the wake left by the passing of Lost and Flash Forward, I’ve really felt the need for a mystery show, but somehow this is more annoying than it is mysterious. The entire pilot tells you next to nothing, forcing you to watch on in the hopes of figuring out why you just wasted an hour watching the last episode.

Admittedly, the second episode is better, but seriously, what was wrong with linear storytelling? Haven’t we had enough messing about with time and narrative for one generation (thanks Lost!) ???

Caprica and SGU are also back, Sy-Fy’s main dramas are both running one after the other on Tuesday nights and so far they are managing to be okay. Neither is blazing a trail of goodness, nor stinking the place up. Based solely on trailers I have high hopes for the second half of Caprica’s (final?) season where as I have no further expectations for SGU. I would be seriously surprised if I’m still watching either of these shows come this time next year. But they both have the potential to improve

So, that it, My Two Cents on this seasons TV. If I didn’t mention a show, its probably because I’m not watching it, in some cases like Bones and Castle I’m still working through previous seasons, in others I’m just not interested enough. So, until next time…

BRING BACK DOLLHOUSE!

Caprica: Unvanquished

It’s been a long, long time but Caprica is finally back for the second half of its first season. After only 8 episodes the show took a 5 month hiatus, surely that can’t be a good thing. Despite the fact that almost nothing happened in the first 7 episodes of the show, the eighth episode left us on a major cliffhanger and I couldn’t wait to see how it resolved.

The problem with Caprica, when compared to the massively successful Battlestar is that it’s not an action show, it’s a show about religion and about politics and unfortunately while that makes the show deep and interesting, it also makes it thinky and occasionally dull. This week’s episode was a little bit of everything. I enjoyed seeing the resolution to the explosive cliffhanger and yet I wasn’t blown away by it.

Initially we are led to believe that Daniel Graystone has lost everything, his company, his football team, his wife and as we later learn, the Cylon that contained his daughters consciousness. While that is an interesting plotline, it isn’t enough to sustain the show, we still need action in our sci-fi.

Meanwhile Clarice has returned to Geminon to meet with the Church elders. She returns to them proposing a new faith, one based on science rather than faith, one that can offer an afterlife for certain. She is talking about the software that Zoe created, about using it to create a virtual avatar of anyone who dies, so that they can be reborn in a virtual paradise. I never much cared for Clarice and her continual religious waffle is rather irritating, I was rather hoping she would be killed off in the midseason finale, but her death seems unlikely now.  

Back on Caprica Lacey has been fully integrated into the STO, working for Barnabas. I don’t know where that storyline is headed, but with James Marsters slated to have his own series very soon, I thinking we’ll know before the season is out.

In New Cap City, we finally discover what happened to Zoe after the car blew up at the end of the last episode, her robotic body may have been fried, but somehow she made the jump to the virtual world. Now she is on a mission to find Tamara. To what ends we don’t know.

In the closing moments of the episode we discover that Amanda Graystone is also alive and well, and for some reason, living with Clarice. This of course puts a whole new spin on Clarice’s afterliffe idea. It would seem that the Graystones and the STO may well be working together.

Overall I thought the episode was a bit of a mixed bag, I liked some of it, I didn’t like other bits. The CGI was all very nice, I loved the look and feel of Geminon, even if the action that took place there felt a bit stagey. I like the idea that the Cylons are now in full production, trained to be soldiers without a conscience, although the removal of Zoe brings up the question of how they achieve a higher level of conscience and evolve into the monotheistic Cylons we see in Battlestar. However, I’m glad that it’s back as I really want to see where it’s going to go, but I have my doubts about the possibility of a second season, especially after the bizarre way the schedule has been treated.

Stargate Universe: Intervention

SGU is back and do you know what? It’s not as bad as it has been… Sure, that’s not exactly a raving compliment but there has been little positive about the show on which to rave. Bad scripts, poor acting and poor plotlines that focused on petty squabbles rather than action.

In fact, the only reason I tuned in to the season premiere this time around was to see how last season’s cliffhangers would be resolved. The writers literally left every single cast member is some kind of jeopardy, a trick designed to make people do what I did, tune in next time.

But, unexpectedly it wasn’t too bad. I’m pretty sure you need prior knowledge of the Stargate mythology now to really follow what’s going on though, which is a shame because I don't think I can sit through 10 seasons of that, not even when Browder takes the lead role! But there was plenty of action and it was a fun little episode.

What annoys me most about this series are the missed opportunities. For example, in this episode only handful of the crew were left on Destiny, while Col. Young and most of the civilians were banished to a storm- blasted planet, alongside a bunch of the mercenaries who had come to kill them in the first place. Little more is said about this planet and 5 minutes later everyone is back aboard Destiny.

Why not instead have Destiny jump into FTL, stranding Young. Now he needs to work together with the mercenaries to stay alive and make it back to Destiny with his people intact. Meanwhile Rush and Eli have regained control of Destiny and are searching for Young, but with so few people to man the ship, things turn sour, especially when the nasty aliens turn up… Or something like that. Why confine the show to Destiny, why not explore the Universe, after all it’s the name of the show.

Anyway, will I keep watching? Maybe, if the next couple of episodes are as good as this one or better, but Caprica’s back this week and that’s so much better.  

First Impressions: Hawaii Five-O

So, I finally got around to watching the pilot episode of the reimagining of the classic tv series Hawaii Five-O, I know it’s been around for almost two weeks, but I’ve been really busy and to be honest, it was near the bottom of my list of new shows to watch, the only one lower than it being Undercovers.

Anyway, to cut a long blog post short, I enjoyed it. I’m not exactly sure what I was expecting going in, probably a police procedural drama I guess. I’ve never seen the original, but my assumption was that it would be like CSI: Miami, but probably with better scripts. Instead the episode opens with a fire fight, a metric ton of explosions and a helicopter gunship. Throw in James Marsters as a recurring bad guy and I was already sold.

When the opening action is over and done with Anton Hesse (James Marsters’ brother) lies dead, alongside Jack McGarrett, the father of the show’s main character Steve. Fast forward a day or so and Steve is back in Hawaii looking to bury his father when the Governor approaches him with an offer. She wants him to lead a special division of police officers to seek out the corrupt and nefarious citizens of Hawaii.

Obviously Steve turns her down, that is, until he realises there is more to his father’s murder than simple revenge. Steve quickly takes over the task force, appointing “Hawaii Hating” Danny Williams as his second in command, mainly so he can wind him up I’m guessing. Not long after  that he ropes in his childhood friend and ex-cop Chin (Daniel Dae Kim) who was kicked off the force after supposedly taking a bribe and his kid cousin, Kono, fresh out of the academy and played by the stunning Grace Park.

With him team assembled they set off after Marsters (Victor Hesse), after a quick but well executed rumble in the shipyard, James’ body is in the drink and presumed dead… Really, is he…? I doubt it. Although with Caprica and his rumoured lead role in an upcoming superhero show, he could well be.

Anyway, whatever the case, it was a fun and exciting first episode and it holds a lot of promise. I found the characters believable enough that they were engaging to watch, but also fun and stereotypical enough that the show was not too heavy. I was certainly surprised by how much I enjoyed the pilot,  a lot more than I did the Chase, which I was much more excited about.

Whether I will stick with the show, I don’t know, it’s certainly a good show and I love the cast, but I think it really depends on what kinds of episodes they choose to do and whether or not there will be an engaging season subplot. But for now it’s definitely on my ever increasing watch list. And for those who have been dying to know, yes it still has the classic theme tune!