Castle - The Taste Of Betrayal

I went back to the season finale of Castle, having - as predicted - forgotten most of the specifics of those final minutes.  I mean, the key points were still with me but, if they managed to hang on this long, odds of my forgetting them...low.

I really thought that the episode was going to be all about that big betrayal at the end.  It turns out, though, that everyone got a little taste of it along the way.  For those that have never experienced it, betrayal tastes like a combination of salt and stale cigarettes, and it feels something like a large animal sitting on your chest - you're still getting air, but you know it's not enough.

Poor Beckett takes the brunt of the betrayals and the slightly less paralyzing disappointments for this episode.  I'm sure she was relieved to get to spend the last couple minutes of the show lying on her back, ignoring everyone.  Let's see...

• Beckett's Dad, who doesn't even really know Castle, goes behind her back to him to try to get her off her Mom's murder case.  (Sure, it's the old 'just want to keep you safe' gambit - still sneaky and hurtful...)
• The friendly guard that was buddying up to Beckett turned out to be dirty - taking a bribe to help set up a prison murder.  (She only saw him once a week, although he was supposedly going to ask her out...)
• Castle goes behind Beckett's back to Captain Montgomery, to try to get her taken off her Mom's case.  (Because, even though he's been working with her forever and is deeply in love with her, he doesn't realize how important this is to her, or how much that betrayal would hurt her.) Montgomery says no, and tells Castle she wouldn't listen anyway. He indicates that Castle's the only one Beckett might listen to, so...
• Being incredibly dumb... I mean because he's so afraid she'll get hurt, Castle goes to see Beckett at home to talk her into letting this one go.  This is the man that has helped her with the case every step of the way up to this point so, while I understand that he's afraid she'll get killed, it really bugs me that he's suddenly okay with just walking away when they're so close to the murderer.  Apparently Beckett watched the same episodes that I did, as she tells him to go away and never come back, ever.
• Now Ryan and Esposito get their chance to make prune-faces of disbelief and distaste, as they are the ones who discover that 'boss of the year' Captain Montgomery is 'the third man'.  They get a nice little scene where they don't agree on this and it looks like they might beat the shit out of each other.
• Beckett, of course, is the one that gets to confront Oh-Captain-My-Captain face to face, and this is where I came in the first time around. Still sleepy and confused, and having missed all that came before, I have to admit that the Captain's motives made very little sense to me.  While I found it much clearer in the light of day with all brain cells firing, I still don't think it was done as well as it could have been.  The writers obviously wanted us to be uncertain as to whether or not Montgomery was going to hand over Beckett, and they obviously wanted Montgomery to redeem himself.  He did, to an extent, but I have to wonder - if he really wanted redemption, why didn't he give up the name of the big bad?  How did a standoff with a bunch of armed guys - alone - seem like a good idea?  The odds were against him and, if he hadn't succeeded, then Beckett would still have been a target.  He also implied that he'd taken care of her - that she wasn't going to be in any future danger.  Talk about an epic fail, huh?  So the intentions were good, the method sucked, the execution was acceptable - he got what he wanted - bad guys dead and no jail for him, and the aftermath was not planned for at all.  Logically, if Montgomery was a good guy who'd made a terrible mistake a long time ago and been working to make up for it through his entire career, and he planned to end the night dead rather than going to jail, wouldn't he have given Beckett the name she was looking for?  We'll call that one last big betrayal...

Torchwood - Have You Seen A Blowfish Driving A Sportcar?

Torchwood, that crazy Doctor Who spinoff from the BBC, premieres its new season on July 8 on Starz.  I'm interested to see how Americanized it's been, and I'm curious as to how the remaining original cast members will fit in with the new arrivals.

We all recognize that the month of June marks a serious dip in the number of original episodes that are available for quality shows so, if you haven't already seen Torchwood, I expect you to use this time wisely and commit to watching the first three seasons.  Series one and two (as the Brits call them) are full seasons of 13 episodes each, while season three is ten hours, over five parts.  No excuse for not watching. At all.

While Doctor Who is about a Time Lord, travelling through space and time with his human companions, meeting other aliens all over the place and righting wrongs, the characters of Torchwood are all human (although Captain Jack is a little bit special...) and are generally found in their own space and time, protecting the Earth from alien threats and collecting really cool alien toys.  The connection to Doctor Who is through Captain Jack Harkness, who traveled with the Doctor for part of a season.  The show was originally billed as darker and sexier than Doctor Who, and it certainly doesn't disappoint.

Also, there's a story arc that opens and closes the second season that features James Marsters (Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and is really excellent.

Hawaii Five-Abs - It Wasn't Me, It Was The Chairman From Iron Chef America!

So yeah, I finished watching Hawaii Five-Abs, and I just dropped in for a second before bed to say that it was all that I though it would be, which is to say, so much less than it could have been.

Things that are awesome:

1.  Larisa Oleynik is a nice addition, although her expertise is a little murky.  She's an analyst, but she's got an uncanny familiarity with the makings of car bombs.  Yeah, I get that it's the same type of bomb that Wo Fat used previously, but she didn't know that until she started looking, and the fact that she started, well, is she a bomb expert?

2.  The Chairman is the big bad guy.  That's right.  The guy that introduces the secret ingredient on Iron Chef America is planning to take over Hawaii.  And then probably the world!!!!

Things I don't buy:

1.  The governor keeping her enemies close.  I just don't think that she would give McGarrett his own unit and complete freedom to operate, particularly when the only reason he's accepting the job is because it gives him the opportunity to find his father's killer.  Seriously, send him as far away as you can.  She must have had some military strings that she could have pulled - didn't she have to pull them to keep him there?  It's like the writers decided suddenly that they weren't doing enough with Jean Smart, so they did their best to figure out how to make her evil in a hurry.

2.  How scummy was Danny - sleeping with his ex-wife and getting her pregnant while she's still married to (and living with) hubby number two?  Not a very good good-guy...

3.  Sure, your ex-husband slept with you and put a bun in your oven, and now you have to tell your current spouse that you're leaving him.  Is it really necessary to tell him about the baby?  That just seems hurtful and unnecessary to me...

4.  After the big deal in the pilot about McGarrett's dad trusting Chin, I think he's got to be working the inside.  Loyalty is a huge thing for him, so I expect he's going to be pivotal in getting the team back together.

5.  Should there, realistically, be a 'back together' for the team?  Two of them are in prison, one is going back to Jersey, and the fourth has his PD career back.  Plus, their supporter, the governor, is gone.  Who's going to grant that immunity now?  Where's their funding going to come from?  How easy can it be to find a new boss when, rumor has it, you killed your old one?

Supernatural - Home Of The Ham-Handed Reveal

Sometimes it makes sense to pour your guts out at a scenic overlook in the middle of nowhere - those panoramic views would make anyone emotional.

A charged exchange over the roof of the car - well, sure, they'll be driving somewhere when they're done.

Picnic table by the water... hmm... okay. I mean, people have to eat and it could conceivably happen that they do it in a ridiculously pretty place that serves as a lovely counterpoint to their eruption of angst.

I draw the line, however, at those completely random stops in the middle of nowhere during which two grown men - with or without beer (and, hey, you're driving!) - sit on the front of the car or turn back-to, presenting manly shoulders of pain to the other.  This is the clumsily executed setting where the brothers discuss the stuff that we all know but they've been to manly and stubborn to share.

Don't get me wrong - I love this show. Part of me recognizes that these guys - particularly Dean - have been horribly emotionally damaged by their upbringing, and these moments are painfully awkward for them, so of course they look awkward to us.  But how often do you stop by the side of the road while driving somewhere with a family member and share your innermost feelings?  That can't wait till the next motel?  Now, I see that the decision to open a festering psychological wound (think, Dad is dead because of me) is monumental and can't be approached casually.  On that occasion, the clumsiness of that moment was somehow appropriate.  However, the writers' decision to return to this device for most of the big reveals seems kind of cheap and redundant.  Since the emotional reveal has become almost a weekly device, it doesn't need to appear so clumsy and awkward anymore.  The brothers have been doing this off and on since season two and it loses some of its emotional charge due to the frequency and ham-handedness.  Jensen Ackles continues to be the prettiest man on television and there's a lot of talent there, but the material has really declined in its repetitiveness.  Come on, these guys should be accustomed to sharing and caring by now - they shouldn't continue to be so bad at it.

All this torment and angst, which made the characters very attractive in the early seasons (remember the episode 'Home' from the first season?) has managed to transform them over time into something a lot less appealing.  Remember Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer?  That character was a great villain in the early seasons, was still interesting as love's bitch in season five, and then got progressively less interesting as the writers forgot for a while that - as a fighter - he should be Buffy's equal, and then made him souled and mopey for most of the final season.

It was announced recently that Supernatural will be around for a seventh season, and I can only hope that the writers will use the summer as an opportunity to review their body of work and try to recapture the original spirit of the show.

I Am So Spoiled - The Hazards Of Previews, Recaps and Random Naptimes

I feel like it should go without saying on a blog like this but, just in case, if you don't want to know about the next-to-last episode of Bones or the finales for Castle or Hawaii Five-O, proceed with caution.  And let me  add that all three of these shows were spoiled for me, in three different ways.

First, as previously discussed, I saw a preview for the Bones episode where one of the team was supposed to die.  The ad implied 'main character' so I watched half of the episode fuming about how they'd ripped me off.  It was ultimately a good episode though, so I'm much calmer although still rather sheepish about how I let them play me.  Beware of the vicious, false preview.

Next in this spiral of doom was Castle. I fell asleep in front of the television at an embarrassingly early hour on Monday night, waking up at approximately 10:50pm.  My DVR - tasked with recording both Castle and Hawaii 5-Abs - had tuned itself to ABC while I slept, so my groggy brain absorbed the last ten minutes of Castle before it was able to signal my hand to tune to something else or just turn the TV off.  In a normal week - no big deal.  However, during the week of finales, this was a huge faux-pas.  I watched ten minutes of betrayal, sacrifice, mourning and WTF?!  I'm not sure if my sleep-addled brain was the problem, but the "bad" guy's motivations in those final minutes didn't make much sense to me, and even he didn't seem sure about what he was doing.  I definitely will need to see the whole episode while fully awake and give the writers the opportunity to convince me otherwise.  I'm just giving it a little time in hopes that my notoriously poor memory will forget the whole experience.

Finally - and most unfortunately - there was Hawaii Five-Abs.  I began watching the season finale with few to no expectations other than pretty people fighting crime.  This is a show that I love to watch, but it has the depth of a wading pool.  For this episode though, they apparently threw away style for substance.  I say 'apparently' because I haven't finished watching the episode.  While watching, I happened to read a recap on Facebook about the evil governor and the team breaking up and people being arrested and I had to stop watching because... well, what the hell?!  If the governor is evil then why does the team exist?  Perhaps this is addressed in the episode, but it seems to me that if you don't want someone in the military to interfere in your crime world, wouldn't you just let them continue their military service - probably back overseas?  Wouldn't you...  My list is long and, rather than sharing it now, perhaps I should watch the episode - on the off chance that it provides satisfactory answers - and get back to you...

Human Target: Watch The First Two Seasons So You Can Feel My Pain

Chris likes to point out that all the shows I watch get cancelled. In my defense, everything ends eventually, and some of "my" shows - ER, Supernatural - last longer than they should.  Others are shows that I missed the first time around and didn't find until after cancellation.

Human Target doesn't fit either of these categories.  It's a show that I found at the beginning of season one that should have lasted a lot longer than it did.  The characters were interesting, there were some outstanding guest stars (Lee Majors, Armand Assante and Timothy Omundson all in the same episode!!), and the production values and writing made it feel like watching a series of short movies.

Unfortunately, Fox didn't share my enthusiasm for the show.  After premiering it as a mid-season replacement in January of 2010, they bounced it around their schedule a bit, gave it a few weeks off, and did very little to promote it or help it to succeed.

Remarkably, down to the wire, a second season was ordered.  However, the network brass apparently decided that the chemistry between - and appeal of - Mark Valley, Chi McBride and the outstanding Jackie Earle Haley wasn't enough, and two female characters were added.  They were okay, although one was regularly irritating for much of the beginning of the season and the other was so underutilized that you'd wonder why she was credited some weeks.  The writers didn't seem to be equipped to write female roles larger than damsel-in-distress-of-the-week.  Fortunately the main characters continued to be kick-ass, which kept the show from becoming sucktastic.  Also, there's something warm and fuzzy about watching two former assassins helping people and doing the right thing - especially when they have very different reasons for it.

Ignore the sad truth that there will be no more episodes and we'll never be privy to Guerrero's back story.  If you choose to watch this show that will be the only disappointment you'll have to face.

Bones: The End Of Season Cop-Out

In recent years a number of shows have taken things to a whole new level by killing off main characters and establishing the real-world mentality that no one is safe.  Think of Heroes, Lost, 24 and even Supernatural, where each of the main characters has died at least once. (Sure, they cheat and bring them back, but remember that first time when we didn't know that they would...)  These shows set the bar high, making our expectations bigger.  Hell, even Bones used this in the second season when one of the main characters - Zack - becomes a villain and is ultimately arrested and leaves the show.

I'm not a rabid Bones fan, but I do watch the show regularly and I have to admit that I was intrigued by the commercial for the most recent episode, which indicated that the team would lose one of their own and cycled through pictures of all the main characters.  Unfortunate advertising choices on the part of Fox resulted in an ad for the season finale airing prior to the episode of doom and, based on the images shown, I was able to deduce that all of the main characters were safe except Sweets (nooooooooooo!!!) and Cam.  So I settled in to watch the episode convinced that the writers would eliminate the always-interesting Sweets rather than the generally-bland and under-utilized Cam.  Turns out that my worry was misdirected.  Instead of killing off a main character, the writers built the suspense then chose to eliminate one of the squinterns - Mr. Vincent Nigel-Murray.

Now, I'm not saying that Mr. Nigel-Murray didn't have a kick-ass death scene.  I'm just pointing out the falsely-advertised, cheesy cop-out that was his death.  I'm not even sure that I can fault the writers for this - it's a solid episode.  The main issue here is that the episode didn't produce what was advertised.  Who put those previews together, anyway?

I'm also irritated because the show has been a revolving carousel of squinterns this season, and the writers chose to kill off the best one.  Bones told him - as he bled out on the floor - that he was her favorite, and I echo that sentiment.  He was better than Depressed Guy, better than Repressed Guy, better than Broke-Slept-With-Angela Guy, and certainly better than Daisy.

There were some good dramatic moments in the episode but a lot of the emotional power was lost because the actual product fell short of the expectations generated by the advertising.

Doctor Who: Everything Is Better With Pirates, Except When It Isn't

Not only was last week's episode of Doctor Who disappointing, it also disproved what I had taken to be a given in life: Everything is better with pirates. (If you don't know where I learned this important lesson, watch this. It is outstanding.)

The beginning of the episode was strong - the appearance of the Doctor and his companions on the pirate ship was amusing, and Amy Pond demonstrated that she has plenty of swash and an adequate amount of buckle. From that point, though, it was pretty much downhill.

The characters were believably in-character and the acting was - as always - very good.  Even the concept of the episode was strong.  The execution of the idea, however, was sub-par, courtesy of poor writing.

Well, okay, the writing wasn't truly horrible - the dialogue was believable, but the story itself wasn't well thought out and there were plot holes so large that I expected a shark to appear out of the ocean and swim through them while rolling his eyes in embarrassment at having any part in this debacle.

In the episode the group faces a "siren" who appears out of the water and makes people disappear if they get injured.  Cool, right?  They all hide from her in a dry room - no water, so she can't get to them.  Then the Doctor realizes that she's not using water for access, she's able to appear through reflective surfaces. At this point everything falls apart.

1.  Why not use soap or grease on the windows and particularly on the mirror?  Breaking them apart just makes smaller reflective surfaces...

2.  Why didn't the siren use the reflective medallion to get to the captain's son as soon as he was marked? We don't see her use reflections until the Doctor tells us that she can...

3.  When the Tardis disappears inexplicably, the Doctor just lets it go without explanation as to why it's better to let it go than to stay with it, fix it, and return...

4.  With only the Doctor, the Captain and Amy left, the Doctor speculates that maybe everyone else hasn't been killed, maybe they were just transported somewhere else.  His speculation seems more like wishful thinking than the sound theory that we're used to hearing from him.  So, based on his flight of fancy, they all let the siren take them...

This is Steve Thompson's first writing credit for the show, and I have to wonder if Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat went on vacation to Antarctica and forgot their satellite phone.  Seriously, did no one read this thing before the cameras started rolling?

On the bright side, the Neil Gaiman episode airs next and, in spite of my deep disappointment in this most recent offering, I have high hopes for it.