nixsight

Late again, but then, I think these SD/TV posts have been fairly consistently late since I started them!

More Buffy, Fringe and No Heroics, and a new season of Bones this week. As always, tell me what you think of the shows, or what I say about them, down in the comments!

Buffy Season 4: 09-11

0409 – Something Blue: Willow is still hurting from Oz’s departure, and tries to cast a spell that’ll get her over her lovesick longing. It’s “Buffy”, though, so of course the spell goes wrong. Before long, she’s infected all of her friends with her wishes, to varying degrees of seriousness, and has got the attention of Anya’s old bosses.

It’s a fun episode, but there are a few too many uncharacteristic turns in place to take the story where the writers needed it, so it isn’t one of the stronger episodes. Lots of laughs, but only Giles’ response to Willow seems consistent with their established relationship, with Willow’s mood-swings, and her friends’ attitudes to her pining, making them a lot less sympathetic than usual.

0410 – Hush: I wondered whether this episode would hold up after so many years of putting it on a pedestal, but it remains innovative and perfect. The story is vintage “Buffy”, the mixing of the character continuity, “A” plot and subplots works wonderfully, and the bad guys are actually properly scary – The Gentlemen are a fine invention alone, but their shambolic and horrific straight-jacketed accomplices are just a horrible and inspired addition, complementing their spookiness with a chaotic revulsion. There are even two or three of the rudest gags the show ever managed.

What’s most impressive, though, is how much the production department upped their game for this episode. Since the beginning of the second season, the show has remained very well made, with it’s TV sized budget only occassionally showing the strain of compromise. But in this episode, from the Burtonesque cinematography to the Elfmanesque soundtrack, the whole thing just looks like it should be on the big screen rather than the small.

Add to all that the soft introduction of Tara, who I wish Girl One hadn’t already known about, and the first really effective use of The Initiative storyline, and this is pretty much the ideal “Buffy” episode, by which all others will be measured.

0411 – Doomed: So despite the potential reopening of the Hellmouth, the return to the ruins of Sunnydale High, and Spike’s discovery – finally! – that his chip doesn’t stop him fighting demons, as well as the fallout of Buffy and Riley’s discovery of each other’s secrets, “Doomed” doesn’t even nearly measure up to “Hush”.

It’s a shame, really. It isn’t a bad episode – it just isn’t a very tight one. In the aftermath of so many cool things happening in the previous ep, this was always going to be a reflective one, and there’s still a lot of good stuff in it – albeit mostly in the scenes with Willow, Xander and Spike. The potential world threatening threat of the Hellmouth being reopened never really carries the weight that you’d think it should, either.

Bones Season 4: 01-03

0401 – Yanks In The UK: After a dramatic, albeit rushed, climax to the third season, “Bones” hit the ground running with a “stunt” episode – a double-length episode with Brennan and Booth transplanted to the UK.

Well, more honestly, they aren’t in the UK, they’re in London – the two of them there at the same time for reasons that are just too contrived to really be examined too closely.

And again, more accurately, they aren’t in London – they are in Hollywood London, wherein everyone is either a Cockney or a member of the aristocracy, and of course at least one of their suspects will end up being one of the Queen’s Guard. At the same time, Angela’s husband finally turns up, and the story back at the Smithsonian is all about that – a stronger character piece than the “a” story, perhaps because of the familiarity of the setting.

It’s a waste, to be honest. The scenes are written and delivered with the expected wit and charm that this show has always displayed, and we’re used to this sort of stereotyping – even guilty of it ourselves in a lot of our TV and films – but “Bones” normally takes a smarter and more pragmatic view towards the subjects and settings it covers, and I’d have liked to see a treatment a little bit more “Hanson Meets McGovern” then “Diagnosis Murder Meets Curtis”.

Still, the showrunners obviously felt it was necessary to have a light and daft episode after the tragedy and bleakness of the season 3 finale, and they were right, I suppose. There’s good support from the every lovely Indira Varma, and Eugene Byrd does a great job, once again, as a proxy for the absent Zack – this is the second season that has started with him in that prominent position, and he handles it well.

And the episode manages to pull a shocker out of it’s final few minutes, that is both incredibly upsetting, utterly out of the blue, and totally convincing. It made Girl One very sad, which is a trick in itself.

0402 – The Man In The Outhouse: And we’re back with textbook “Bones”. This is a fairly typical episode, though it’s notable for two things. First, it almost entirely ignores the shocking event that the last episode closed with, in a way that really seems odd at the time, because you wonder whether they’re just going to draw a line under those events, which would be extremely unsatisfying.

The other standout is the introduction and subsequent dismissal of a new replacement for Zack. This looks, from these first three episodes, like it might be a trope that lasts for a while, and it’s a fun one, keeping things fresh as it does. The new girl is played with impressive annoyingness by Carla Gallo.

The last episode and this one have spent a lot of time establishing Brennan as a sexual entity – the progress that seemed to have been made between herself and Booth at the tail end of the last season has been reset to highlight the contrast between the two, and it makes for some interesting scenes between them, as he tries to convince her of his vanilla point of view.

0403 – The Finger In The Nest: This episode is all about the Hodgins. And the Sweets.

The case of the week is an interesting and impressively heartstrings-tugging story about dog fighting – when “Bones” decides it wants a reaction from you, no other show is as good at getting one. And there are some lovely scenes with Booth in father mode – something that was missing from a good portion of the latter half of last season.

But the real focus of the episode is about exploring the new dynamic back at the lab, and seeing how Hodgins has really been coping with the loss of the two people he was closest to in the last few months.

It’s a brilliantly handled story. The “assistant” of the week is an older jack-of-all-trades that Hodgins takes an instant dislike to – played with winning cosiness by Michael Badalucco. And Sweets establishes himself finally as a character who provides insight to the team that is not only unique – because he’s already done that – but that is actually invaluable. Which is nice, because so far he’s been likeable but hasn’t really found his place as a character.

My prediction here is that the developments between Angela and Hodgins may not be permanent. Though they work from a relationship point of view, I’ve got a strong feeling that, with Zack gone, the writers wanted the team broken back down to basics, to allow them to play with the dynamic a little until they have a permanent replacement and things settle down.

Fringe Season 1: 04

0104 – The Arrival: This show is just a mind-boggler. I was on the verge of giving up on it – and four episodes is probably the watershed on that, because if you sit through more than four, you’re probably on board for at least a season – or at least giving up on caring about it one way or the other.

And then this episode comes along, and mixes things up all over again.

I won’t say that it avoids the problems of previous episodes. Indeed, that worrying deja vu feeling that it’s making the same mistakes as the “X Files” did over several seasons, only in just a few episodes, remains. It’s encouraged by the introduction of a “mythos” character that we know is going to be recurring – a bald and spooky man who would fit easily into the pantheon of such characters in the older show.

However, this episode is also the point where – partly because of the introduction of said character – it becomes apparent that all of this heavy conspiracy plot stuff wasn’t just an awkward misfire by Abrams and co… this is what the show is all about. What looked like it was going to be a series with a kooky science monster every week and a mysterious subplot about a conspiracy is actually something else entirely.

I’m not sure exactly what that something else is yet, but the fact that so much mythos is being dumped on us so early suggests to me that there is a plan, and that it’s just unfolding in a different way than usual.

Not entirely sure I’m making my point, there, but I think it boils down to the fact that I’m still intrigued.

Peter Bishop, Joshua Jackson’s character, finally gets his very own reason to stick around, and John Noble gets something emotional to do with his character, as opposed to the previous few episode’s entertaining but ultimately unsympathetic lunatic genius. In fact, the show dynamic seems to be coming together fairly well in this episode, and the injection of emotional drama into the show helps with the watching.

No Heroics Season 1: 02-03

Oh dear, “No Heroics”, after all that effort I put into defending your virtues to the unimpressed, you go and let me down with two lacklustre episodes.

0102: After the quirky and misanthropic silliness of the first episode, this second one was unforgivably pedestrian – a non-deliberate pun, when most of the episode seems dedicated to The Hotness going on a particularly testing bus journey. There’s more humour to be had in Electroclash and She-Forces’ plot, wherein they visit a fan-club, but even that’s more sad than funny. And there seemed to be a concerted effort to give Timebomb something to do in this episode, but awkward and frank gay seductions that end in a pub toilet cubicle haven’t been shocking or funny since “Queer As Folk”, and in fact they weren’t actually funny then.

The problem here seems to be almost a case of having too much stuff going on, and not leaving enough room for the interactions and the laughs. There isn’t actually a need for each character to have their own little storyline in each episode, and the fact that they don’t in the first episode, which seemed quite natural and funny, and they do in this one, which seems very forced and had much fewer laughs, seems to bear that out.

0103: This episode is a little better than the last, but it still suffers from forcing each of the four main characters to have something to do. There are more gags – though I think they need to tone down The Hotness’ cretinistic tendencies, because right now he’s even more of a prick than is funny. But the problem with having too many of your jokes be locked into these episode long plots is that if a particular plot isn’t working – like She-Force’s pool table dalliance – you’re stuck with it, and with an audience that is just impatient for the episode to end so that they can get onto the next one.