nixsight

Criminal Minds Season 2: 04-07

0204 – Psychodrama: A quartet of strong episodes begins with a fairly disturbing story in which the team are called out to deal with an armed robber who is showing signs of making the psychotic leap to becoming a spree killer.

The investigation features a lot of pretty nasty behaviour on the part of the episode’s unsub – who is apparently attempting to re-enact the story of his apparent abuse at the hands of his mother – although it’s a little confusing at times what the exact details of his crimes are, due to some uncharacteristically squeamish and euphemistic writing around the sexual elements of the story.

The episode wraps Hotch’s own failure to pay attention to his son’s childhood around the crime plot, which thematically works better than one might expect. Although I wondered whether I’d warm to Thomas Gibson’s performance – or perhaps Hotch’s stoicism – when we first started watching the show, he plays his emotional scenes with a quiet charm that now I quite enjoy.

0205 – Aftermath: Jason London guests as a creepy serial-rapist with his own, romantic agenda, in this episode, and in doing does a better acting job than I’ve ever seen him do before. The case plot is pretty horrible and cool in this episode, though at times the episode’s true driving force – that of showing how Elle’s survival of the attempt on her life at the beginning of this season has affected her – isn’t so well disguised.

The close of the episode has her performing actions that would have been quite shocking, had I not known that she was bowing out later on in the season…

0206 – The Boogeyman:… though I’d obviously failed to register, during my adventures on IMDB, that it was actually the very next episode that saw her departure.

An odd episode, this, as a series of child murders hit a small town, and the team – minus Hotch and Elle – try and fail to create a working profile. When the actual killer is revealed, it makes for a bit of a shocker, but fails to sustain any real drama, because the scenes where he pursues his latest victim end up looking a little silly. Quite aside from which, the team’s profiling skills have absolutely no effect on the outcome of the episode.

More importantly, Hotch has stayed behind to try and track down Elle, who has failed to show up for a psych evaluation. When he finally catched up to her, he gives her an ultimatum that ends up seeing her leave the show – though oddly, she seems to have been allowed to literally get away with murder. I have to admit, I’m not sorry to see her go – Elle, or Lola Glaudini’s performance of Elle, has always been one of the slightly annoying things about the show. With any luck we’ll see someone better replace her before long.

Great to see Geoffrey Lewis in this episode, as well as a solid performance from Sean Bridgers, one of my Deadwood favourites.

0207 – North Mammon: A very creepy episode that puts JJ front and center in the team, as they attempt to find three kidnapped girls in a small town obsessed with an upcoming football game. Though the team’s interactions are written perfectly, and A.J. Cook gets to do some nice character stuff with JJ, the real meat of the episode are the excellently nasty scenes featuring the three girls in captivity, where their captor has set them the terms that if they choose one of their number to die, the other two will be allowed to go free.

These scenes are excellently played, and create a lot of drama and gravity to their plight. It’s another one of those episodes where in the end, the BAU’s presence in the town actually has little to no effect on the outcome of the case, which kind of sorts itself out here, without them having much of a chance to do a proper profile!

Buffy Season 4: 12-19

Something quite peculiar has happened with Buffy – I seem to have missed talking about a whole bunch of episodes that we’ve definitely seen in the last few weeks.

Because of that, I’m a bit hazy on my most recent responses to them, so I’ll just pin it down to a couple of comments, with your indulgence.

I think the main reason I’m not remembering much about these episodes is that despite the quite cute developments between Willow and Tara, and some excellent Spike stuff that mostly happens earlier in the season, there’s not a lot that’s really memorable about the Initiative and Adam storylines that dominate the latter half of this season.

Having said that, within this bunch of episodes, there were some great highlights, including:

One of the better Faith stories, a two-parter in which Eliza Dushku pretty much justifies Joss Whedon’s faith in her after actually being a little two-note throughout most of the rest of her appearances.

The excellent “Superstar“, in which Joss Whedon and Jane Espenson opt to have one whole Jonathan dominated episode, rather than have Danny Strong play the character across a series of smaller appearances in the season the way he normally does. The episode isn’t particularly content-packed, but it is very funny, as we see all of the show’s characters responding to the universe that Jonathan made in various excellent ways.

The team discovering Giles as he plays an acoustic set at a local open-mic night – Xander’s dismay only made worse by the adoration of the female Scoobies.

The final episode in the bunch is one of my favourite Buffys of the whole run, though it’s also one of the most upsetting, as Oz returns – to reveal that he has got his lycanthropy under control. Willow has her own revelations, though, and the scenes between Alyson Hannigan and Seth Green are perfect and incredibly sad – not least because of the tragic finality there is to them. The two always give such good performances when they work together, and Green in particular just breaks my heart again and again in this episode.

And if that makes me a gigantic gaylord, than so be it.

Angel Season 1: 09-15

0109 – Hero: I suppose it was a bit silly to follow that last episode of Buffy with this episode of Angel.

Audiences didn’t respond too well to Doyle when “Angel” first aired, if I remember rightly. At the time, I wondered whether it was something to do with his accent – that sounded a little deliberate to me at the time, but was actually Glenn Quinn’s real voice – or his general “annoying sidekick” demeanor.

Actually, watching these over again, I don’t think there was anything wrong with his performance, and have to wonder whether it was just the fact that, at the beginning there, it wasn’t the shock of the new – he was the only regular character and actor who hadn’t made his way across from Buffy, for starters, and he was also the conduit through which all of the show concepts that were alien to viewers of the other show were introduced, such as Angel’s new ongoing mission, and the way in which he received each case.

However, over the first three or four episodes, he started to win me over, and I think he might have endeared himself to the viewers, too. Certainly, by the time this episode came around, he felt like a part of the family, and thinking back it’s weird to think that he was in less than half a season worth of episodes in a five season run.

Because of course, this is his final episode. And they get rid of him in quite a final way, sacrificed to stop the plot of a band of hellish fascist demons, and save the lives of a group of innocent refugees.

Despite the nastiness of his demise, Girl One didn’t quite believe that he was gone, and I think this was for a couple of reasons – for a start, she hadn’t heard anything about it in that way that one gets vaguely spoilered about shows through conversations with other people, down through the years. She also didn’t buy how out of the blue and arbitrary it was – the writers had, after all, gone to a lot of trouble to try and establish Doyle, and there seemed to be storylines that would now go nowhere.

So for her, the episode wasn’t as potent as it was for me, because she didn’t really know how final it was – I kind of remember having the same vague response to it at the time. But for me, they did a good job of giving him an emotional send-off, that allows the repercussions that Angel and Cordelia feel over the next few episodes to ring true, despite the shortness of the run till this point.

Course, it’s possible that it means a lot to me because I know that Quinn died later on, and quite young, in real life.

The rest of these episodes are fairly standard, compared to this one, so as with Buffy, I’m going to scurry through them – which seems pretty lazy, but we’re really forging forward with these shows at quite a rate!

Wesley, who never managed to distinguish himself on Buffy, joins the cast here in the very next episode after Doyle exits, and it seems a little too soon, really. It doesn’t help that it seems, for these first episodes at least, that he is only brought in as comic relief. While slapstick is always fun, his buffoonery sometimes seems a little much for a show that was supposed to be Buffy’s darker sibling.

However, he does a good job in the horrific exorcism story at episode 14 – “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” – in which we see a harder, realer side to him as we learn that he was abused by a dominating father as a child.

We also see Wesley and Angel dancing. This is… well… this has to be seen to be believed, really. It’s one of those moments that stuck with fans for years.

The phantom, Dennis, who lives with Cordelia, is the best thing about an episode in which Cordelia is impregnated by a demon and gets very quickly pregnant – though there are lots of great moments in the episode.

And in the final episode of this run – “The Prodigal” – there’s a nifty little moment that I still loved seeing it the other night, as Angel, uninvited, stands yelling at the open doorway to Kate’s father’s apartment, as two vampires, invited, kill the old man in plain view of him. When Kate’s father expires, Angel suddenly finds he can enter the room, but it is too late. It’s a silly thing to be so impressed by, but it’s a moment that fits so well, and garners a really solid tension from an idea that could only exist inside that particular mythology – it just works.

The I.T. Crowd Season 3: 03-04

0303 – Tramps Like Us: After my first episode fears that this series was going to be a bit lacklustre, every one since has been pretty consistently awesome.

This episode continues the theme. Jen’s job interview perfectly captures both her blagging nature and the general silliness of job interviews given by managers who don’t know what they’re doing, and it leads into a perfect exchange with the concussed Moss.

Moss, himself, is great value as always, with his uncharacteristically risky prank that goes wrong, and the aforementioned concussion. And Matt Berry as Douglas gets to have some fun with his electric sex pants.

If there’s a weak link in the episode, it’s Roy’s storyline, which starts strong with a telegraphed but great moment of public inappropriateness, but descends into an extended and whimsical montage of his two hour adventure as a homeless.

0304 – Speech: Though the second episode is still my favourite one of the series so far, this one has some of my favourite set-pieces. There’s a little more Douglas than I’d hope for (the character is great, but runs the risk of becoming a Kryten – A cool supporting character that ends up becoming the focus of a show that they can’t support), but the pay-off of all his deep-throated shenanigans in this episode is just perfect.

Perfect, too, is how Moss and Roy’s plot to humiliate Jen when she gives her employee of the month speech plays out. It’s an excellently executed prank in the first place, but how completely they have misjudged the speech’s audience, and how badly wrong it all goes, is just perfect. The central idea of the prank-puller’s overestimation of the general population’s intelligence is similar to the episode of the US Office in which Jim plays a similar trick on Dwight, but Linehan’s surreal execution, and the fact that the “Internet” is a central theme here, just makes it sing for me.

The Office Season 0412

0412 – Did I Stutter?: This is quite exciting – we’re getting to the end of the episodes that I have already seen, so after the next one, Girl One and I will both be watching the episodes fresh together.

This is a bit of a harsh one. It begins with an outburst at Michael from Stanley that at the outset is pretty short and inconsequential. But when Michael is unwilling to acknowledge or deal with the slight, the situation builds, until Michael, being Michael, decides that rather than approach the problem head on, he will hit Stanley with one of his “scenarios”.

This backfires badly, and it makes for an interesting sequence, in which Michael is severely dressed down by Stanley in front of the whole office, and then explodes himself, in an impressive and utterly suprising moment of anger.

Which of course instantly gives way to wheedling and silliness, the second everybody else is out of sight. But when Stanley still fails to apologise, Michael performs one of the few solid bits of management we’ve ever seen out of him, and Stanley ends the episode not particularly repentant, but at least back at a more appropriate level of behaviour.

It’s a sign that the showrunners know what they’re doing that they can pull off the awkward and uncomfortable scenes that play out in this episode, and still make it funny, even if this one doesn’t have as many straight-out jokes as usual. There’s also a very mean-spirited and nasty scene in which Ryan, with Toby on hand, gives Jim a completely out-of-the-blue verbal warning. It’s a moment of bad management, and John Krasinki plays it like the true slap in the face that it is. It’s interesting to see Toby gloating, obviously fuelled by his jealousy of Jim’s relationship with Pam – Toby normally endeavours to be fair, and is such a nice character, but it’s realistic to see nice people be nasty when they feel they’re in the right. In TV we more often see it the other way around – with bad guys showing touching moments of humanity – so it’s good to see Toby being a jerk.

So that’s three characters getting dressed down, running down to the end of the season – and season closers in “The Office” are normally pretty nifty.

Survivors 0104

“Survivors” continues to be entertaining, and it seems counter-productive to be too critical of British genre television when it gets most things right, as it doesn’t happen that often…

However, this most recent episode did make Girl One and I raise the same concern simultaneously as the final credits rolled:

This all seems a little bit too safe. Both the ongoing situations and the television show housing them.

I suppose this is the point where that question gets asked. The episodes so far have each had their role:

Episode 1: Set-up – in which the scenario and different central character drivers and traits are established.
Episode 2: Establish physical conflict – in which the group’s safety is physically threatened for the first time, and we see that there are, in fact, dangers out there.
Episode 3: Establish ideological conflict – in which the questions of right and wrong away from matters of moment-to-moment physical survival in this new world are addressed, as we see for the first time how exactly an attempt to return to organised civilisation on a large scale might go wrong. This is the grittiest and hardest episode so far.

So episode 4 is the stage at which lots of groundwork has been set, and now we start to see how people are dealing with it. There’s a return to the organisation of the domed sanctuary, which, following the shocking events of the previous episode, seems to have made a shift to Stepford style symbolic comformism over difficult questions asked by idealists who are objectively good people.

At the same time, we get a look at what happens when the Lord Of The Flies syndrome kicks in, and a group of teenaged boys go near-feral – although still for the most part speaking RP English – and take over a manor house, violently fending off the place’s rightful owner.

There’s a very small sub-plot wherein Anya and Greg see off some invaders at their own home base.

There is plenty of room in this episode for this to be the point where hard lessons are learnt, in at least one of these stories. We are enjoying each of the characters and would miss any of them, but there is a point where Max Beesley’s Tom could easily have ended the life of Sadiq – the drama is built to suggest it – and created a deeper conflict and more meaty secrecy in the show – just as there is a point when the teenagers could easily have reverted to primal behaviour and betrayed the trust that Abby put in them, subverted the message that all they needed, even in this terrible world, was a mother figure to come along and sort them out.

Anya and Greg, too, could have been forgiven for taking the lives of the two invaders – in fact, it would have been the smart choice, and right or wrong would have caused some emotional torment for them – but instead opted to leave them out there, and angry.

Our concern was this – if the world that these characters live in continues to be a place where most bad situations can be solved with a bit of talk, or a danger-lite escape, that world starts to loose a little of what makes it worthwhile watching. If it becomes idyllic, we’ll start to switch off.

Of course, this is only episode 4, and there’s plenty of time for these decisions to start coming back to haunt the characters. But the thing about continuity and consistency of plot in a show is that it’s a matter of faith – there’s no way to know how much attention will be paid, or how much causality there will be in a show’s run, until the run is well on it’s way. Right now, Girl One and I are hoping this doesn’t go down a mediocre road.