Grounders, Reapers, Mountain Men, Sky People - I actually find these names a bit cringe-worthy, like a little kid had to choose names for the different groups.
Yeah, baby! I'm all about crossovers. And a vintage musical crossover? Sign me the fuck up!
I love the fact that Melissa Benoist, Grant Gustin and Darren Criss all used to be on Glee. It must've been a fun little reunion for them to shoot this thing.
Well, would you look at that. Fuckboy isn't just a former slave owner, he's a former prince of slave owners. What a catch, am I right?
(Can he please just die already?)
At least Kara dumped his ass for now, but let's be real, this is the CW. She'll take him back despite the fact that he's a toxic piece of shit. Just free her from this awful relationship. What do I have to do? Cause I'd sell one of my kidneys to make that happen.
Cop Maggie! Cop Maggie! Cop Maggie! Give me more of that, please! Give me 42 minutes of that, I don't give a damn. I love her so much.
Winn is really unlucky when it comes to the ladies. But seriously, this one was his fault. Having sex in a museum? Don't you have a bed for that? Or, I don't know, a kitchen counter? Or any other flat surface in your apartment? If you want an adventure, go skydiving, not commit felonies. And fine, I understand why Lyra did what she did, but why did she even need Winn for that in the first place? She's invisible, for crying out loud. She didn't need a patsy to take the fall. The police would have never been able to prove it was her, anyway.
[6.8/10] It's not like this was a bad episode, but here's the thing. One of the things I've always liked about LWT is that Oliver feels like an honest broker. Sure, he has a certain slant, and always has, but it felt like he was spotlighting things that received too little attention to have political spin, or that he'd wade into more mainstream politics but try to approach the topics even-handedly.
That hasn't really been the case lately. Don't get me wrong, I can 100% understand not being able to keep your journalistic objectivity when you're talking about Donald Trump and the things happening in his wake, but it makes Last Week Tonight a more run of the mill program to me, just part and parcel with the scores of shows out there pointing to how terrible this stuff is with an admittedly amusing brand of snark. Sure, when Oliver talks about the new Republican health care plan, he's more informative about what's in it than most, but it comes off like doing the same thing everyone else is doing.
The best thing to say is that he does find a unique angle on it at the end, essentially saying that whatever you think of the bill, it's not the bill Trump promised, and it's likely to be the best he can do. But even that isn't a sterling or especially novel insight into it. There's some dada-ist glory to the show's "Catheter Cowboy" repeatedly asking Trump is he "gets it" but otherwise it becomes part of the din. And bits like making fun of local news anchors for their responses to International Women's Day or a MadTV level gag reel about Samsung products exploding doesn't do much to distinguish the show either.
Again, it's not bad. It's all sound enough and true enough and funny enough, but for a while there, it felt like Oliver had brought a different tack and a different energy to the political comedy show, and it's starting to feel like everything else.
The end is nigh
It's exposition time in Westworld, y'all! So Bernard was created because Ford wasn't able to recreate true emotion. Only another host could do it. Maybe this is analoge to programming we have now. In the early days of computing coders needed to code in assembly, tell the computer every operation it had to do. Nowadays we have higher level programming, in some cases we can even talk in natural language to it. So i think the way Ford works is not so far away to the way we work with computers. For me it is totally logical, that just hosts can model their own emotions, fulfill such a complicated task. My current Arnold-Theory is, that he was a host, that Ford created to do a similar task. But it got out of hand. So Bernard is Arnold 2.0.
Ford also quotes Mary Shelly's Frankenstein: One man's life or death were but a small price to pay for the acquirement of the knowledge which I sought, for the dominion I should acquire and transmit over the elemental foes of our race.
It is a bit to on the nose for my taste, but i guess this late in the season they really to tell it to the last viewer, who didn't already understand.
One gripe i had with the episode was, that apparently you can photoshop people out of surveillance footage. Who thought this was a nice feature to have? "Oh, and make sure we can edit our security tapes. You know...just in case" "Of course, that is not at all creepy and suspicious"
In the earlier episodes they could easily spot every deviation from the script (even the smallest one) and any suspicious host behaviour. But now hosts just go about they business becoming sentient unnoticed. They openly admit knowing of the outside world, use "cheat-codes". But security just doesn't care for the most part. That makes me think that the so-called "real world" is a also a park. Also, I find it suspicious that we weren't shown any of the outside world, only the park and it's staff facilities. It feels like none of the characters have any backstory or life outside of the park (except for a few, but even then those backstories are just clichés or a few compact lines of the script). Maybe it's poor writing, or perhaps it's very clever foreshadowing. And maybe this whole "hosts going sentient" thing is also just a story to make the guests feel special (hence no one from the staff noticing it).
Oh, and I don't think there is an Arnold. Probably Ford's name before he became a host or simply his alter-ego. Or maybe Ford is the original Bernard.
Really sick of Maeve and these idiot "Butchers". Are there no security cameras? Are they really that stupid?
"If you go looking for the truth, get the whole thing.It's like a good fuckHalf is worse than none at all."
Best quote ever
I hope Ford faked his death with a Host version of himself.
BISEXUAL CLARKE GRIFFIN IS CANON
[7.0/10] Solid episode. The opening rundown of the week's news was pretty standard stuff that all the usual suspects were doing. There's plenty of hay to be made from Spicer's slips of the tongue or Trump mentioning his resort's cake or messing up the name of the country he just bombed, but Oliver didn't bring anything particularly new or insightful to it. There's something frightening, as he pointed out, about how quickly Trump changes his mind about major things, some of which he campaigned on, but that's not a new observation. And the "Now This" segment about local newscaster doing egg puns was fine but unspectacular to boot.
The main story, on the French elections, was informative, and had some good humor in it. I don't know enough about the topic to judge the accuracy or comprehensiveness of the segment, but it was a nice entree for someone who knows little about the election. The whole appealing to French superiority like an old art film shtick was kind of hacky, but as I've said here before, the little cutesy end segments on LWT don't always do it for me.
Overall, perfectly fine episode, but nothing to write home about.
Erm, that was season finale?
That did not feel like a season finale. It was more talk and the creature grasping at conduits. Episode 4!!! Now that I really thought was the finale. Some kind of.. Shift in the amount of episodes or something.
Have these writers EVER picked up a science book?
Man, I missed this, although actually I don't know how to feel about it. I certainly expected more after this three-week hiatus. But any episode with Lena Luthor is a good episode. It was a bit light, but it had some great things. I freaking love the way Lena knocked out Beth like, listen bitch, I'm a Luthor. I love her character. I don't really want her to be bad,but I feel like we're attending to the evil turning of Lena, like the origin of evil Lena. I love this Clark and Lex vibe going with Kara and Lena. I'm assuming she doesn't know Kara is Supergirl, and that is what will drive Lena to the edge. She's gonna be so pissed and hurt and although at the end she could understand it, my spidey senses tell me she's gonna be mad at Kara and thus, her villain origin story begins.
I also loved that the intro of this episode finally makes sense. I mean, Kara hasn't been a reporter for a long while and now she turned the page. Snapper is not Cat but I like the guy. His last conversation with Kara at the end was fantastic. And his line about not starting a food truck was hilarious.
The Lyra stuff, on the other hand, was kinda boring. You already know how it is gonna end before it starts. I love seeing Winn being happy with her and the writers giving everyone who works for the DEO having a backstory. But Lyra really seems legitimately crazy. I don't go them to go full on psycho crazy girlfriend.
Kara and Mon-El were great today. He's a funny sidekick with a lot of potential and this is the right amount of screen time he needs, enough not to make me hate him again. For once, Mon-El was more than a pretty face and was actually there to help Kara, despite his adorkability and awkwardness. Non-relationship scenes are the ones I enjoy with him and Kara. "This is creepy journalism". I loved that line.
And that Jack Shpeer is a handsome motherfucker. Man, I get he's Lena's krytonite.
[4.2/10] I had essentially forgotten about this one, and on rewatch, I can only assume that it's because my brain mentally blocked it out. This is pretty much as bad as Bob's Burgers gets. A love pentagon where Tina wants Yap, Yap wants Gail, Gail wants Bob, and Linda is involved and egging the whole thing on is just weird, and there's a lot of uncomfortable sexual stuff to boot. I'm no prude, and it didn't offend me, but Bob's sister-in-law haranguing him for sex while her wife pushes him into it despite his clear discomfort is just not amusing or enjoyable for me. It's a strange episode, without many laughs (Ken Jeong finds the more annoying side of Chang from Community with Dr. Yap for most of the way), and little to recommend it.
The B-story, with Louise and Gene having continual contests regarding a jawbreaker has some funny moments (mostly their endurance test for listening to Teddy's story) but peters out pretty quickly as well. Really, the only source of laughs is "The Prince of Persuasia." Mrs. Bloom and I will still randomly crack one another up by quoting "push her in a lake" or insisting the other push a higher floor in the elevator and "make a big deal out of it." Still, making fun of The Pickup Artist isn't enough to redeem this pretty crappy episode.
"RAAAAAAAAAMPAGE!!!!!!!!!!!"
At some point in my life, I do want to view a full, unadulterated copy of "Terms of Enrampagement".
One of the most powerful episodes Star Trek has ever produced.
6.5/10. There's a few times when I know a subject and feel like Oliver & Co. are giving the other side the short shrift, but there's also episodes like this, where I know very little about dialysis but something feels off. Little details like treating settlements as admissions of wrongdoing (90+% of cases settle) and taking individual testimonials rather than pointing to survey data or broader figures makes this feel like bending things to make a point rather than making a fair assessment. And what's particularly frustrating is that I completely believe there are problems in the commercial dialysis industry, but contrary to the show's usual M.O., Oliver doesn't really offer a solution or a proposal to how it could be improved. He just concludes with a meh riff on Taco Bell and encouragement to donate your organs after you die which, hey, I am totally on board with, but doesn't feel like a real policy answer to the problem identified.
The top of the show was just okay as well. Again, sometimes Trump is hard to make fun of because the stuff he does is so ludicrous in and of itself, but this was another instance of Oliver offering pretty much the same take as other late night commentators. His gags about New Zealand's leader were amusing enough, but as John himself pointed out, it's not like they haven't done this sort of thing before already, and the terrible pizzas was kind of an easy gag.
Overall, I'm glad to see the show doing a main story on a little-known issue again, but this didn't feel like as fulsome or fair a look at the problem as I've come to expect from LWT.
Can someone explain to me, why would lexa let die 250 of her soldiers in the bombing, and then break a deal with clarke and make another deal with the montain,just to save 10. It makes no sense to do so many sacrifices to get to the montain suposedly for revenge and rescue, then walk away almost empty handed, betraying a friend, all of that when victory was at hand. what the hell were the producers thinking? This episode sucks
finding out miller is gay was the highlight of my day
[8.1/10] Nothing so novel with this one, but it did do a very nice job of putting all the dizzying Trump related events from this week into alignment and trying to figure out what it all means. There wasn't anything particularly insightful about it, but it was well-organized and, best of all, had a certain degree of perspective that wasn't overly jubilant, overly naive about what's likely to happen, or overly normalizing of all this stuff. It's an example of Oliver doing the stuff everyone else is doing, but doing it better, which I can appreciate.
But what I really loved was the self-parody of the three-minute TSA story. Oliver noting his own show's beats, from graphics to his "to be fair" statements to the usual silly delight that this week took the form of penguins was a nice way for Last Week Tonight to recognize its own formula in a funny and creative fashion. I hope we get the real TSA story eventually, but this was a real treat to close things out.
Earth saved from the Daximite fleet by infusing the atmosphere with toxic-to-the-invaders Red Dust— er, I mean, lead particulates. Hmm. There's no way that those levels can be so quickly so high as to be so quickly fatal to Daximites and not have significant interesting effects on humans over time. We already have the term "lead poisoning" in our vocabulary for a reason.
Although I liked some aspects of the episode, some (including the savior-lead) just feel like careless sloppy writing. There's been a lot of strong potential peeking out all over this season, sometimes manifesting itself better than others. I just hope that the writing matures significantly next season, more thinking through of the connections and implications and verisimilitude of it all, and less careless contempt for the believability of fundamental plot components.
That, and more good excuses for crossovers with Earth-1. (Like Guardian getting some tactical lessons from Green Arrow. Or the Green Arrow suddenly finding himself in Earth-38's Gotham.) That'd be good, too. (Just sayin'.) ;-)
Ugh. Where to start? I'm embarrassed to admit that, as a teenager, this was one of my favourite episodes when it first aired. I though the concept of being trapped inside a board game was really cool. And yes, the idea still is pretty great, but when it's executed like this it just makes you want to turn away in shame.
The concept of the episode isn't the problem, it's the poor writing and absolutely horrendous acting involved, from both guest stars and the main cast. Alexander Siddig again comes off the worst here, I can only assume that it's a mixture of him following direction and having very little experience. Falow is way too over the top, and the Wadi in general are a stupid design in all aspects. The less said about the hopscotch scene the better, you can almost feel the embarrassment the cast members were experiencing.
The only ones who come off well here are Quark and Odo. Odo gets a fantastic scene with Lt. Primmin (we won't be seeing him again), mocking him about Starfleet procedures. Quark has a funny grovelling scene in which Armin Shimmerman doesn't hold back chewing up the scenery. And the writing of the episode itself isn't a total loss, the opening scene with Sisko and Jake is just a beautiful father/son piece.
To make matters worse, the episode drags. The final sections in the cave just seem to go on endlessly. This is a really weak moment for the show, but for all that I think I still prefer it to the terrible previous episode ('The Passenger'). There's at least an element of silly fun to be found, but for God's sake don't show this to anyone you want to introduce to the show or sci-fi TV in general.
The finale to season 1 may be low key, but it's a very strong episode. The religious aspects that the show will come to be known for are fully introduced here, and they're handled maturely. I've always found the Bajoran faith to be fascinating and one of my favourite parts of this show, even though I consider myself agnostic and have a low opinion of organised religion. DS9 manages to successfully intertwine the beliefs of science and faith, and figure out how its characters can learn to keep those two points of view while still respecting each other. It's not an easy journey, as this episode demonstrates.
It's worth noting that this is the first time since the pilot that Sisko's role as the Emissary has been referred to in any significant way. The episode introduces a couple of major recurring characters in Vedek Bareil and Vedek Winn - the latter being played wonderfully by Louise Fletcher and managing to inspire an incredible amount of hate in the viewer! If you despise her, as most do, that only means that she did her job extremely well. And it's going to get much, much more intense from here on!
I like the O'Brien subplot, it's just a shame that Neela hadn't had more of a presence throughout the season up to this point. That would have made her reveal much more powerful. It's also great to see Odo being the excellent investigator that he is. Dax is still relegated to not much more than a background science person at this point, I hadn't realised just how little the first season had used her.
An overall great episode and powerful end to the first season, really showing that Sisko and Kira have worked through things to find common ground and respect for each other. The only real weak point for me was the slow motion "noooooooo!" at the end which was a bit cheesy. It is redeemed somewhat by - for once - a gorgeous accompanying musical score.
Ouch, my heart! I'm really going to miss this cast and show! :(
[8.2/10] When I saw that Oliver & Co. were covering Alex Jones, I rolled my eyes a bit, expecting this to be yanking at the low-hanging fruit. But I actually really liked the direct LWT went with this. The best LWT episodes typically have a strong thesis, and that helped this episode become more than just a series of easy digs against a televised nut. Oliver didn't just point to Jones's more outlandish statements to paint him as a loon; he took Jones at his word to put the show in its larger context and paint him as a shill. It's easy to laugh or shake your head at Jones's out there claims, but it's more troubling that he's not only puffing up these imagined problem, but claiming that he can offer solutions. There's something far more corrosive and despicable about that, and looking at him through that lens gave the episode a focus and impact that a more scattered dig-fest wouldn't have.
Otherwise this was business as usual. The opening rundown was entertaining; watching news anchors try to avoid saying the most vulgar parts of Scaramucci's statement was entertaining; and it's always a treat to have Jack McBrayer around. But on the whole this one succeeds on the strength of its main segment, which had a nice throughline to attacking Jones beyond just spotlighting him as a crazy man.
What makes me happy is to live in a world where I can have my Dutch & eat my Pawter too - Johnny
I have no problem with killing off characters if it's necessary and unavoidable and internally logical. But this was none of the above, given the presence of Art at the party and his access to the entire police force, plus the fact that it was over. Rather, it was simply done for dramatic effect, and that's rarely enough for me. Having said that, it was done well, so I'll give 'em that. I just would have preferred a dozen bullet holes in Ferdinand with Mrs. S. standing over him like a badass.
It was good, but after seeing the expanse, it's like comparing water and wine
I'm happy that John is back with the crew but at the same time a bit sad that that's how the search for Clara ended. My preference for Stephanie Leonidas notwithstanding, the character brought flair to the story. Even though it's probably not the last we've seeen of her, it's a shame this arc was so small. I hope their new assistants will provide good stories as well.
