LeftHandedGuitarist

[3.1/10] Got word that this is considered one of the worst episodes of the show and yeah, it’s pretty awful, but frankly not significantly worse than the show usually is, so it’s hard to take the cries that this is the nadir too seriously.

But I get why this ep is so derided while at least some others are given a pass. For one thing, it leans heavy into the James/Donna/Mrs. Marsh storyline and the ensuing overwrought melodrama. It’s a plotline that’s been crap since it started and wallowing in it for three overblown scenes’ worth of nonsense does the episode no favors. Mrs. Marsh semi-remembering the whole thing in flashback at a funeral is a mildly interesting wrinkle, but it’s more bouts of bad acting and soapy ridiculousness.

Speaking of ridiculousness, we get the goofy conclusion to the “Ben Horne thinks he’s General Lee” storyline, with Dr. Jacoby, Audrey, Jerry, and Bobby doing an alternate reality recreation of Appomattox. It’s pretty dumb, and lightly offensive, but at least it’s sort of silly in the way that’s more palatable than when the show’s trying to be serious and failing miserably. Oh, and we see Audrey’s brother for the first time in forever! He’s even (in)appropriately in full Native American garb for his father’s bout of insanity.

Then we get Wyndam Earle as a third rate psychopath torturing Leo Johnson and tormenting Cooper with clues about the hypotenuse of their little love triangle. The shock collar is cartoonish, Earle himself is too outsized to have any real menace, and the whole chess angle so overdone that whole thing falls apart.

So with all that, is there anything good about “Slaves and Masters”? Well, I don’t know if I’d call it good, but there’s interesting motifs of people in uniform standing in lines. Is there a point to the symbolism or is it just some pattern for the sake of a pattern? Who knows! But it’s something. The only decent thing storyline-wise is Cooper and Alfred (who’s always a pleasure to have back) uncovering that Josey probably killed Jonathan and may have even had a hand in Cooper himself getting shot, but being hesitant to tell Sheriff Truman because of his relationship with her. There’s some emotional heft there that plays on Cooper’s relationship with Truman to decent ends.

But Josey’s actual part of the storyline is pretty terrible. Again, Joan Chen’s not a good actor so her efforts to seem disturbed or manipulative come off eyeroll-worthy. In the same way, Catherine Martell and Mr. Eckert exchanging Bond villain lines over dinner is a big stupid nothing.

We also get more with Norma and Ed, where they’re supposed to having intimate, wistful pillow talk that’s sunk by the show’s usual bad dialogue. Nadine kind of gives them her blessing, but who knows what will come of that. It’s becoming increasingly clear that it’s dangerous to have someone with super strength and mental instability roaming around unchaperoned, but whatever, it doesn’t even make the top ten most foolish things on Twin Peaks.

Otherwise, we’re just deep in the weeds on the Wyndam Earle storyline and there’s nothing, at least nothing so far, to show for it. This one is, perhaps, a little worse than usual, but only because the other episodes of the show didn’t devote as much time to garbage like the Marsh storyline. The quality of the show hasn’t gotten worse. It’s still as poorly written and acted as ever. But it’s major mystery, the only decent thing about this show story-wise for much of it’s run, is worse, with the Earle business being a paltry substitute for the Laura Palmer stuff.

[7.6/10] I’m always fascinated by accidental or hastily put together finales. Whether it’s shows like Deadwood or Firefly with final episodes that aren’t meant to be endings and yet still represent a culmination of the themes of the show, or series like Angel or Arrested Development that rush to pay off everything in just a couple of episodes, there’s something compelling about a television show’s big exit, especially when that exit isn’t exactly planned.

“Turnabout Intruder” is and isn’t that for The Original Series. There’s an animated show, a set of four (soon to be five) successor series each indebted to TOS in their own way, and a sextet of films that continue these adventures. But it is still the last outing for this particular incarnation of Trek, and while it’s not the show’s finest hour, it’s a fitting finale for this seminal series.

Just as “Operation -- Annihilate” works surprisingly well as a season finale despite, on the surface, being just another standalone episode, “Turnabout Intruder” works as an ending to The Original Series because it represents two ideas that have been central to the show.

The first is that in the found family that makes up the crew of the Enterprise, these men and woman who’ve lived through nearly eighty episodes know who James Tiberius Kirk is, how he acts and what his character is, and no one can replace, impersonate, or imitate that. I’ve tweaked Star Trek repeatedly for its continuing notion that Kirk is a Great Man™, but the show uses it to good ends here, to show that beyond saving the day or bossing other civilizations around, there is something that is recognizably and inimitably Kirk about the captain of the Enterprise, and even when they can’t prove it, the folks who’ve served with him all these years know it.

So when an old flame from Starfleet Academy pulls the good ol’ Freaky Friday on Kirk and changes places with him, Spock and Bones and eventually Scotty, Sulu, and Chekov know that there’s something amiss. It’s not like they all suspect a body switch at first, but they’ve known Captain Kirk long enough to know that he doesn’t fly off the handle like this, that he doesn’t make those sort of reckless, self-serving decisions (or at least, not in that way), and he is not the smug snake who angrily dresses down subordinates and laughs at the prospect of people dying.

Despite the multiple facets of Star Trek, one of its chief projects has been to let the audience get to know James T. Kirk, what he believes in, stands for, and acts like. It’s allowed the show to signal that something is wrong to the audience in twists like the one in “The Enterprise Incident” And here, it works as a signal to the crew that the man sitting in the captain’s chair on the bridge is not their leader.

It also speaks to the show’s other grand theme -- a recognition of the infinite possibilities of the universe. As Spock himself says, the crew of the Enterprise have witnessed their share of strange occurrences that nevertheless turned out to be real. As bizarre as a mind switch seems (though “Return to Yesterday” and “Whom Gods Destroy” ought to theoretically have prepared them for it), Spock’s words on the stand evince the ethos of the show -- an openness to new experiences and developments that may seem strange to us, but that we should still accept if the evidence points us that way. Star Trek has always been a show devoted to the unusual and unexpected and asked its audience and its characters to accept that. It’s a notion that permeates “Turnabout Intruder” and, in an odd way, brings the episode in line with The Next Generation’s series finale.

But “Turnabout Intruder” is also fitting because it fits the less-than-great parts of Star Trek as well. Its subsidiary theme is one that feels particularly backward -- the notion that women (or at least a woman) a conniving, blinded by love, and too unstable to lead. The depiction of Janice Lester here is regrettable, to say the least, and there’s an unfortunate subtext to her increasing insanity of the old “crazy woman” tropes that contributed to skepticism about their being full and equal members of society for centuries.

On a less pernicious note, “Turnabout Intruder” also offers one last great outing for another recurring feature of Star Trek -- William Shatner’s overacting. I will say this for the episode -- as much as I am apt to resist the “crazy woman” trope and the way it’s deployed here, it does give Shatner the opportunity to go full ham. He shouts and laughs maniacally and contorts his limbs with that trademark Shatner over-exuberance in a way that is fitting as a representation of the extremes of the actors’ performances that often found purchase in the show from week to week.

There’s even a few nice bits of continuity to help cement this finale as remembering (more or less) where the series started and where it’s been. When Lester-as-Kirk orders an execution, Sulu and Chekov get the number of the general order wrong, but note that there’s only one rule in Starfleet that carries the death penalty, a reference to “The Menagerie” which repurposed the show’s original pilot. When Kirk-as-Lester is pressed to prove that he is who he says it is, he brings up Spock’s actions in “The Tholian Web.” Hell, it’s subtle enough to potentially be a coincidence, but Lester-as-Kirk even uses McCoy’s little leg-press machine in sick bay just like he did in “The Corbomite Maneuver.”

But more than anything, apart from the themes, apart from the problematic elements and continuity nods and recognitions of Kirk, “Turnabout Intruder” just tells a compelling story, one with significant stakes and intriguing obstacles. One of the best parts of the episode is that all of the characters, not just Spock, act logically. They don’t instantly know that Kirk isn’t really Kirk, they just suspect something is up when he’s not acting like himself and try to figure out why. When trying to prove his identity, Kirk resorts to shared experiences (as he did in “Whom Gods Destroy”) and when that fails, remembers Spock’s psychic abilities to establish that his mind is his own.

And even when Kirk has the support of his crew, everyone on board from the second-in-command to the folks at the helm realize that their beliefs will do them no good without some objective proof to Starfleet Command. It’s a thorny problem, one where the issue is clear but the solution is elusive, and the characters work diligently to find it while facing personal challenges in how to do so, the sort of setup that creates the best episodes of The Original Series.

“Turnabout Intruder” isn’t one of the best episodes of the show. The retrograde theme and instances of Shatner shatnering drag it down, the resolution with the psychic transference simply breaking down when the time is right (albeit motivated by stress induced from the prospective mutiny) is a little too convenient. But it’s still an interesting premise, bolstered by understandable actions from the main characters on the show who are in a difficult position with their friend and their duty, and it even goes out the way Star Trek should, with Kirk delivering some wistful, mostly vapid rumination on what just happened.

It’s an episode that represents the best and worst of The Original Series and that makes it feel right as an ending to the show proper, before animated spinoffs and further cinematic adventures took shape. There is something holy about these first 79 episodes, the ones that set the stage for the five-decade (and counting) franchise that followed. TOS will never be my Star Trek. I didn’t grow up with it; much of it feels dated or hokey, and even at its best it has problems.

But as “Turnabout Intruder” demonstrates, it’s still a worthwhile, enjoyable, and occasionally transcendent series, one that forged connections between its main characters even in a show without serialization, one devoted to exploring the unusual and unanticipated and embracing the weird and wooly possibilities that promised, and most of all, one that had its missteps and blindspots and bits of ridiculousness, but often found the truth in the fantastical, in a way that made this uneven series always worth watching, just to see where it, the Enterprise, and the noble men and women who populated it, would end up next.

[3.2/10] This one was pretty rough. A boatload of idiotic plot developments, worse dialogue, and every other character giving some wistful monologue about something that happened long ago. Let’s dive-in shall we?

First, the good stuff. It wasn’t nearly as effective as the end of the last episode, but I appreciated the low-grade Michael Meyers business with Leo and Shelly. Sure, it doesn’t make much sense -- for instance why were all the doors locked from both the inside and the outside? And it’s pretty cheesy that everybody escaped that encounter essentially unscathed, but there was at least some shlocky, horror-esque fun to be had.

Speaking of shlocky fun, that seems to be what the show is going for with the Windam Earl storyline as well. Again, it feels like a proto-Hannibal Lecter and/or Dexter Morgan kind of shtick. There’s at least some intrigue in the fact that he taught Cooper everything he knows, and he’s good enough not to leave fingerprints or fibers, making him a real challenge for Coop & Co. The catch is that 1. The whole chess symbolism thing is still super corny and 2. The fact that Cooper was romantically involved with Earl’s wife and that Earl maybe killed her feels like a bridge too far.

A lot of stuff in this episode feels like a bridge too far, twists for the sake of twists. We already knew that Mrs. Marsh was likely setting James up somehow, but why the show has devoted so much time to this tedious storyline, god only knows. Mrs. Marsh seems to have some remorse, having had her husband die in a car accident (which would conveniently point the finger at James) at her “brother’s” behest, but apparently falling for stone-faced James anyway. Of course, Donna has to be shoehorned in (with the return of their little ballad), and now we’ll get a dull Bonnie and Clyde deal with the cops after the two of them, swell.

At least in terms of bonkers, so-bad-it’s-good territory, Ben Horne and Dr. Jacoby waving confederate flags and singing songs about Dixie is...striking. Truth be told, I kind of like the idea behind this -- that Ben has been defeated in the real world and so the only way for him to get his mojo and his sanity back is for him to win a war for the historical losing side. Of course, this being Twin Peaks, it’s done in a terribly cartoonish fashion, but there’s something comic about the looniness of it all.

The same can’t be said for the Andy/Dick/Lucy storyline. It’s all so broad, with Lucy in particular feeling like a bad sitcom stereotype throughout all this while the two guys play standard male dumdums. Dr. Hayward setting them straight about Little Nicky’s life of misfortunes should, at least hopefully, put a merciful end to that portion of their storyline, but I doubt it.

I doubt it if for no other reason than Lana, the Mayor’s brother’s widow, appears to be a literal succubus and I have to imagine she’s related to Nicky somehow. (In fact, I bet the child she and the Mayor want to adopt turns out to be Nicky.) The fact that the Mayor holds her at gunpoint and the crew of the sheriff’s office just leaves him alone with her is straight up nutbar. I’m not really interested in seeing where this is going, but I’m sure it’ll be some supernatural mumbo jumbo, and not in a good way.

That’s also my feeling about the dip we take into Major Briggs’s storyline here. Again, I like that he’s shaken from his experience in the White/Black Lodge and questioning his loyalty to the airforce, but this is another “when are they going to get to the fireworks factory” plotline. The show should either just keep Briggs off screen until something meaningful happens in the story, or actually advance the plot in his appearances.

Catherine revealing the fact that her brother is alive to Pete is yet another tedious scene, where Andrew delivers loads and loads of exposition that I could just as well do without. (And all this crap with the Eckerts feels just sort of tossed off conveniently to boot.) There’s lots of that in this episode for whatever reason, whether it’s that or Coop talking about what happened with Earl or Dr. Hayward giving Nicky’s backstory. None of it is natural and much of it is full of plot holes.

Otherwise, Bobby and Audrey’s story continues to be a slow moving waste, Norma and Ed’s getting together is the same, and Leo running into Windam Earl in the forest is unbelievably serendipitous and convenient, though maybe you can chalk it up to the evil woods putting a thumb on the scale or something.

Overall, this is a real dog of an episode. I have to admit, my patience with the show is starting to wear thin, but there’s only eight more episodes so I’m going to strive to see it through.

[3.2/10] Well, this was a real stinker. The one saving grace of the episode happens in the last five minutes where Major Briggs returns from his mysterious journey to embrace his wife and calm his son, in his own peculiar way. Bobby is still one of the worst actors/characters on the show, but for a split second there, when he’s comforting his worried mother and telling her that things will be okay, it felt real, like capturing the truth in this art, rather than just being a garish, cartoony bit of slop. It’s an odd place to find such a thing, in the midst of the family patriarch returning from being beamed to the white lodge or some such thing, but there’s real feeling there in a way most of this show can’t manage.

But boy, is there a lot of downright junk throughout the rest of the proceedings. Let’s start with the worst offender which is, as usual, James Hurley. Him stumbling into this weird Dallas-like world of wealth and spousal abuse and femme fatales has the benefit of keeping him away from the rest of the show, but it’s real overwrought crap. The monologuing brother of Mrs. Marsh, waxing rhapsodic about he vowed to stand up to the overbearing husband and didn’t, is painful in his awfulness, and Bobby still can’t emote to save his life.

That’s not a problem Nadine has, though again, her story still feels like something from an entirely different show. I again ask, where the hell is this storyline going? What is the point of it? Is it just supposed to be comic relief? Is it some commentary on how Ed infantilized her? Is it just to give the character something to do? I have no idea, but while the image of Nadine military-pressing Mike over her head is kind of kookily fun, it definitely feels like the show is spinning its wheels with Nadine.

But it’s barreling toward some strange, supernatural stuff with, of all people, Lucy, Dick, and Andy. While the dismal slapstick comedy of Andy and Dick mentoring Little Nicky was a big misfire for me, I’m even less enamored with the idea that Nicky might be literally cursed. Now maybe this is all extrapolation and Nicky’s caseworker (Molly Shannon!) saying that Nicky’s face a lot of misfortune isn’t meant to be some kind of repeat of The Omen. But this is a show that isn’t afraid to go that direction with things, and I have to admit it strikes me as a pretty dumb thing to wrap the comic relief portion of the show in. (Though I have to admit, I cracked up when the guys imagined Nicky in a little devil costume laughing maniacally. It’s ridiculous and dumb, but funny.)

I wouldn’t think much of it beyond giving the Lucy/Andy/Dick triumvirate something to do, but then you have the titular black widow, whose elderly husband dies seemingly in the throes of passion, but perhaps something more sinister is afoot. The scene closes with her having enraptured all the young men in the sheriff’s department, in a way that feels preternatural and not just a bunch of guys fawning over a pretty young woman. The fact that she too claims to be literally cursed, in the same episode we hear that about Nicky, suggests that there’s something mystical/magical happening here, with possible malevolent purposes if the dead hubby is any indication. I can’t say I’m enamored with all of this, but maybe it’ll give the now-listless show some direction.

Speaking of which, there’s some development in what I guess has become the main storyline of the show now, namely exonerating Cooper after the setup from Hank, Jean Renault, etc. His coin-flip decision to visit the “Dead Dog Ranch” with his realtor leads him to find the place where the show’s bad guys executed their plan to set him up. It’s another instance of some supernatural force guiding him to the answer. I’d call it convenient, and it is, but I guess we’re supposed to take something from his being preternaturally guided to these places.

I’d be lying if I said I was particularly engrossed by the storyline, but it does give us more Denise, who is, surprisingly, quickly becoming one of the best characters on the show. She’s kind of no-nonsense despite having an unusual lifestyle for 1991, and it makes for an interesting balance for the character. And it gives Audrey something more to do, stealing Bobby’s pictures of the deal going down to pass on to Coop, who can then exonerate himself. Audrey seeing Denise and realizing that there can be female agents (“more or less” according to Denise) seems to open up an entire new world for Audrey, and all of a sudden, her dreams of getting out of this town seem less married (figuratively or nigh-literally) to Dale Cooper.

Of course she’s also toying with Bobby in another storyline that does nothing for me, as the now suited-up dweeb is still the annoying little chump he always was. But now he’s paired up with a gone-off-the-deep end Ben Horne whose taken feng shui to ludicrous extremes and is tracking Hank so that he doesn’t lose One-Eyed Jacks. Screw-loose Ben Horne is, perhaps, slightly more interesting that generic 80s businessman Ben Horne, but neither of them is particularly compelling.

That’s the problem with a lot of Twin Peaks post-Palmer era. While I’ve never been much of a fan of this show, the very least it had going for it was a strong central mystery that the rest of the events of the series could be built around. While often it was pretty contrived, everyone in that town had a connection to Laura, and so it made sense to trace Twin Peaks’ reaction to the death of one of the town’s stars.

But without that throughline, we’re left with a mere collection of events that are only tied together for happening in and around the same place. That means they rise and fall on the quality of the individual stories and characters, and that has just never been Twin Peaks’s strong suit. When its few distinctive and complex figures -- Cooper, Audrey, maybe even Denise -- come out to play, the show can still be compelling. And on those rare occasions when its main personalities feel like real people experiencing real emotions and not overbroad soap opera nonsense, like in the quiet moment between Bobby and his mom, there’s something worthwhile there.

But for the most part, without that mystery to tie everything together, Twin Peaks is just a big mishmash of undifferentiated cheese, and that doesn’t do anyone, in the show’s universe or for those watching at home, any good.

[4.8/10] I’ll admit, despite my tepid review, there were parts of this one I enjoyed, particularly the opening act of the episode. While I found it kind of trying at first, David Lynch himself as Cooper’s hard-of-hearing boss, offering well-intentioned encouragement turns out to be a pretty funny bit in small doses. And Cooper facing down the investigation from internal affairs seems to have some legs. In a particularly amusing moment, Cooper offers one of this metaphysical-minded aphorisms about the town and his life, and the investigator offers a laugh-worthy “what the hell was that?” in response. We’re often wondering the same thing, fella.

The investigation ends up proving to be the strongest part of the episode. That dovetails, surprisingly, with the debut of Denise (David Duchovny!) as a DEA agent assigned to the investigation. Look, it’s 1991, so the attempts at tolerance are more than a little patronizing, and the show can’t resist having Harry having a laugh at her expense, but there’s a surprising amount of empathy for Denise as a trans woman for a show that aired twenty-five years ago. The best exemplar of this is Cooper, who is initially thrown upon seeing the woman he previously knew as Dennis, but then immediately adjusts and treats Denise with the same respect and kindness he treats everyone else. It gives the “this looks like a frame job to me, but you have to prove it” direction the episode goes something more than just another major plot to occupy the show post-Laura Palmer.

The other side of the coin is that the show seems to be introducing a lot of new crap to try to fill that vacuum, and most of it is godawful. The peak of this is the reveal that Catherine’s brother Andrew (a.k.a. Josie’s husband) is still alive and this is all a part of some plot the Martells have been cooking up. Let’s nevermind the fact that this would necessarily be so baroque a plan as to lose all credibility, but even so, it’s such a soap opera move (yeah yeah, I know Twin Peaks is riffing on soap operas) that I legitimately laughed out loud when he emerged from the other room.

The show bringing Josie back into the fold wasn’t my favorite thing in the first place, just because the actress isn’t terribly good and her romance with Harry is one of the least interesting things about a pretty strait-laced character. But this is a silly direction to take her, giving her a painfully cliché backstory and making her Catherine’s maid. (Though I neglected to mention in prior write-ups that as borderline offensive as it was at times, and as goofy as it is, I kind of liked the reveal that the Japanese investor was Catherine. It’s the kind of bonkers surprise that delights in its ridiculousness rather than makes you laugh at its stupidity. It’s a fine line, I’ll admit.

The runner-up award for worst new storyline goes to, who else, James Hurley, who conveniently finds some femme fatale with a derelict husband who wants James to fix her car and stay at her house while the hubby is away. (Presumably with sexy results.) Both James and his new likely paramour are bad actors (though it’s hard to tell given how painfully bad their dialogue is) to where the most one can hope for is that they’re quarantined to this bad part of the show so that it doesn’t infect everything else.

We also continue apace with Nadine’s adventures in high school, something that is, I am ashamed to admit, is kind of winning me over in its “so bad it’s good” qualities. To be frank, this feels like something from a different show, maybe a direct-to-video live action Disney Channel movie. But it’s unbelievably silly and totally unclear as to where it’s going that I can’t help but laugh at how insane the whole thing is.

I’m much less enamored with what’s supposed to be the comic relief here, namely the interactions between Deputy Andy, Dick Trelane, and the moppet who’s Dick’s “helping hands” buddy. The hijinx that they get into at the Double R Diner are sub-Little Rascals quality, and while there’s something kind of endearing about Andy trying to “kill ‘em with kindness” the charm wears off quickly.

We also get some of what appears to be foreshadowing for Cooper. Some of it comes from Hawk, who offers a hokey and again, borderline offensive dose of indigenous people’s wisdom about the “Black Lodge” and “White Lodge.” And we also get a cheesy Hannibal Lecter routine on audio tape from Cooper’s former partner who’s playing a literal chess match via the mail and underlining that fact with ponderous, overdone metaphors about how the game mirrors their real life tete-a-tete.

There’s a bit more legitimate entertainment at the wedding between the mayor’s brother and some young (probably) golddigger. Sometimes this show does best when it’s light on its feet and just gives you quick scenes of silly stuff around the town and its cast of oddballs without having to linger on any one of them long enough to deliver a monologue. But surprise kudos to Ben Horne, whose viewing of an old movie and reciting Shakespeare was actually mildly affecting. I didn’t think the guy had it in him.

Overall, more of the usual mixed fruit tray of mostly crud with a few ripe bites here and there. Let the “bad period” of Twin Peaks continue!

At the end of S2 I was very anxious about the direction the season finale set back then.
Most of the time I felt this Season was very weak overall and confirmed my reservations more often than not. The plot is getting way too fast, way too big to stay what made iZombie so great. Just like Ravi said in the last scenes, it all started in the morgue. Now it's too big to stay there. I like that iZombie is moving the plot forward and doesn't stay for years and years in one place, story-wise. But I'm still not onboard with how fast that is achieved. Mainly because it was this "small" group of people we followed and we, as the audience, were the "selected few" to follow along. It's the same feeling Friends gave and still gives me. This season, on the other hand, broke this off without the proper care, without a good transition by focusing too much on other things like the military corps.
Now I do have my doubts whether a fourth season is going to get me this feeling back. But it did get a lot of setup this season to become even greater than it ever was. Yet I remain cautious.

While the season was overall weak and I am not too happy with it as a whole, despite some really good episodes, this second part of the season finale was by far the best episode. We got a lot of answers, a few sideplots were concluded (more or less) quickly to make room for the next season (business as usual) and new stories. All my issues here and there do not make this season bad, though, but by direct comparison with S1 and S2, S3 simply lacks on many things. Things I hope S4 will make better.
But no matter how good S4 will be, Major, as a character, was simply destroyed this season. I loved that guy at the end of S1, in S2 he was still pretty darn cool, S3 on the other hand....ughh. I don't like him anymore, can't relate to his changes, even though S3 followed him closely in how people treat him and stuff. He's this muscled, good looking and now hollow character. That's probably the biggest bummer in S3. Besides the loss of the cure sideplot. I tink that was pushed too much into the background just to resurface for tension reasons at the end.

Clive getting his girl back in a tragic way was great.
Liv getting back to her new-old self, the pale zombie, was overdue and Ravi is just being the best, like always.
I would have been so pissed if that end scene would have been exactly that for iZombie.

S4 was announced in May despite somewhat low ratings, even for iZombie.
http://tvseriesfinale.com/tv-show/izombie-season-four-renewal-cw-tv-show/
I like that iZombie started on The CW, other networks probably would have cancelled this ages ago.

Just like in Orphan Black an episode where a character says s/he's gonna leave.

In like 9 out of 10 cases it raises either a death flag or is a red herring to fill an episode.
Either way, the character isn't going to leave. In this particular case I instantly thought Natalie taking Major to Italy raised a death flag for her. It'd be weird letting Major leave the show right now and she's the reason for him to potentially leave, so she needs to go to resolve it.
And then that totally unexpected end. Damn you, iZombie.
Finally Major is reunited with Natalie and then that. Although, I am not a fan that the character Major is degraded to a guy who sleeps with every woman who's not running away because he's the chaos killer kidnapper.
But I liked the irony of Liv claiming she's wearing a wig and a ton of paint while in fact it's usally the other way around.
Then again, I don't like Liv as a human as much as I like her as a zombie.
Overall a good episode, though, even if a bit tame in terms of brain-of-the-week than I expected upon reading the synopsis.

[7.3/10] I think I owe Ray Wise an apology. Leland Palmer grief-stricken jigs were one of my least favorite parts of the first season, and certainly one of the most laughable, and I had pretty well written the character, and by extension the actor who played him, off. Coffin-surfing and show tunes and more overwrought falling to pieces just struck me as too much, verging into, at best, “so bad it’s good” territory.

But now that he can fully play up Bob’s predatory instincts, his malevolent glee, his unhinged villainy, Wise is a revelation. In his first interaction with Donna in ages, he is so unbearably creepy. “Arbitrary Law” does well to tease and taunt the audience, putting Donna in the place Maddy was two episodes ago, in the same corner, while this shark of a man starts to pen her in. From his skin-crawling touching of Donna’s hair, to his awkward dancing that quickly turns into creepy dancing, to the same lewd gestures he performed before killing Maddy, Wise’s take on Leland goes all out in seeming to come this close to striking again.

He, of course, doesn’t, and a last minute reprieve for Donna thanks to Sheriff Truman leads him back to the Roadhouse for Cooper’s last seance, or whatever you’d like to call it. That sequence, like most of the show, is a bit hokey, with lightning crashing and showy camera angles. But at the same time, the episode does a nice job of not only attempting to tie all the psychic elements together, but setting a mood to make those reveals meaningful.

So we have all, or almost all the major players in one room -- Ben, Leland, Leo, the cops, and even, by serendipity or providence, Major Briggs escorting the senile bellhop. It’s then that Twin Peaks plays its hand. Leland’s dancing connects with The Man From Another Place’s little boogie. The “gold circle” that Gerard warns Cooper about in a severe and unnerving fashion comes back in the form of The Giant returning Cooper’s ring to him. The senile bellhop offers a stick of gum to Leland, serving as the cosmic force of the universe essentially fingering him as the killer in light of the “your gum is coming back in style” comment. In the shadow of all of this, Cooper thinks back on his dream, and for once he can hear Laura’s whispered words -- “my father killed me.”

What’s noteworthy about the scene is how much we already know. We know Ben’s a red herring. We know that Leland is Bob. We know who killed Laura Palmer and to a lesser extent why. And yet, this still feels like a reveal, a momentous occasion -- Cooper not only realizing who the culprit is but deciphering all of the cryptic images and clues he’s seen up until this point. I’m sure half of it is a retcon as I doubt how much of this Lynch & Frost had planned out in the beginning, but it works well enough to feel like a satisfying, if not fully clockwork, resolution of all the mystical symbolism Cooper has been chasing throughout the series.

There’s also some cleverness from Cooper here, realizing the dangerous animal he’s about to try to nab and making Ben the temporary patsy to lure Leland to the station as his lawyer. Again, the episode leans into the shorthand and trust that Cooper and Truman have developed, and the scene where they push Leland into the cell and he begins running around like a crazed beast is both a triumph and a fright.
It’s there that Ray Wise really shines, letting the beast out of his cage and creating a truly ominous and horrific presence. The way he hoots and hollers and toys with his captors as they interrogate him about what happened to Laura and the others gives him the character of an unchained spirit, unconcerned about his current circumstances and revelling in his taunts and his terror. It’s the scariest Bob has ever seemed, and that’s saying something.

But Wise isn’t finished. As usual, things get a bit melodramatic, but he also sells Leland’s remorse, his regret, his revulsion to all that he’s been a party to after Bob pulls the “ripcord” and Leland is forced to remember all of the deeds that Bob committed in his body. The sprinklers going off from Dick’s cigarette is too convenient, but it creates worthwhile imagery of Leland leaving this mortal coil and Cooper easing him into the next world, trying to help him let go of his unimaginable pain.

The only big problem is that Twin Peaks feels the need to sum up too much, both at the conclusion of Leland’s incident and in the aftermath. The scenes speak for themselves, so having Truman wax rhapsodic about what he can or can’t believe, and having the group give their “I sure learned a lot” speeches is an unsatisfying finish to some great work. It also doesn’t help that they’re wondering what’ll happen to Bob results in a cheesy sequence of an owl flying and a freeze frame that looks like the rejected cover of a prog rock album.

There’s also a good chunk of other pretty useless junk in the episode before we get to the meat of it with Leland. The Norma’s mom storyline continues to be entirely uncompelling. The same goes for the James-Donna romance, which never ceases to include the worst dialogue in the entire show on a regular basis as they torture one another (emotionally -- something I have to specify on this show) over Maddy’s death. And Lucy’s paternity situation wears on without end. There’s an awful lot of crap to wade through before the episode really kicks into gear with Leland, and by extension Bob, being exposed.

But once that happens, the show and the episode finds its way and delivers a satisfying wrap-up of the Laura Palmer saga, with enough imaginative verve and dot-connecting to make it feel like this jumble of nonsense was part of a plan after all. And you have my apologies Ray Wise -- you knocked it out of the park here, and for once, the outsized, supernatural world of Twin Peaks felt right at home for someone other than Agent Cooper. Godspeed, Leland. So long, Bob.

[7.7/10] I give Twin Peaks a lot of crap. I think it’s deserved and, frankly, that the show’s reputation is bolstered by the lack of competition when it aired. While it deserves credit for doing things that simply weren’t being done at the time, many shows have since followed that tack and far surpassed most if not all of its achievements, making them look downright quaint, if not outright bad, by comparison.

But by god, I have to give it this -- it answered the “whodunnit” in an unexpected, unnerving way, which felt at once unique, satisfying, and frightening. That is no small feat, and I have to confess that after all the hand-wringing and jumbled up nature of the clues, not to mention the show’s general propensity to make odd or ill-conceived story choices, I expected the reveal to be a letdown, if not an outright facepalm.

Instead, the twist and the answer to the big question -- Who killed Laura Palmer? -- turns out to be Leland, her father. And the episode’s closing sequence, interspersing the weird and ethereal vibe the show has tried to go for from the beginning, with a legitimately scary sequence where the truth is revealed, is without a doubt, the apotheosis of the show.

The virtuosity starts with a nice shot of the log lady, her log nudging its way into the frame, alerting Cooper and Truman that their destiny lies at the Roadhouse. David Lynch directed this one, and while some of his directorial choices have left me burying my face in my hands with this show, he does outstanding work here in shots like that which put the viewer off kilter and set the mood.

Once the trio arrives at the Roadhouse, Lynch goes full-on with his sense of a dreamworld. A singer warbles on the stage, finding the spaces between slow verve-y riffs and smooth, high pitched yawps that establish the otherworldly atmosphere. In a blink, the lighting changes, Cooper is singled out, and the singer is replaced with The Giant, there to tell Cooper that it’s happening again.

It’s then that the Leland reveal occurs. The episode communicates that well by making the reveal visual, with Leland seeing Bob’s reflection in the mirror and cutting back to the other side of the glass with Bob standing there. It’s a tack the episode puts to good use, with several moments in the ensuing incident that cut back and forth between Leland committing these horrid acts and Bob engaging in the same thing. For a show devoted to notions of duality, the grammar of the two parts of Leland Palmer come to life in these horrifying moments and do more to communicate that theme than all the overwritten dialogue the show has offered so far.

The ensuing sequence, where Leland-qua-Bob attacks and (presumably) kills Maddy, reaches peak horror in a way that even the show’s most frightening prior moments (one of the few areas in which the show has excelled) have not been able to match. The gleefulness on Leland/Bob’s face as he pursues Maddy around the room, the terrified screams from upstairs as Maddy screams, the way that Leland/Bob has her cornered and almost seems to be toying with her, are all truly chilling.

I’ve ragged on Twin Peaks for its extended sequences that drag on and on (and if fairness, there’s still plenty of that in this episode, just not in this scene) but Lynch extracts a sense of terrifying realness to making Leland/Bob’s attack of Maddy into essentially one big scene, only broken by the cuts back and forth between the visages of both halves of the persona. There is no time for the viewer to catch their breath, no time to process what they’re seeing, just this skin-crawling parade of moments where a demon possesses a man to, in turn, caress and destroy his daughter. “Lonely Souls” does not shy away from or cushion the blow of that horror, and it gives the reveal a force that much of the show, even in its investigation of the main mystery, has lacked.

The episode then cuts back to Cooper in the bar, as the Giant fades and the scene returns to normal. It’s then that “Lonely Souls” becomes a tone poem, one where Donna seems to feel the weight of all that’s happened, where even execrable Bobby seems affected by what’s going on, where the bellhop who left Cooper lying on the floor bleeding has enough sense of apologize, and the location where so many of Twin Peaks intersected feels like some supernatural weigh station, one where these lonely souls congregate and know harsh truths and strange things meld together into one, grief-fueled dreamscape. It’s the best thing the show’s ever done, and that may not be particularly high praise coming from me, but by god, it’s still something.

As I often say about these things, the episode wasn’t perfect. Maybe it’s my years of having seen one too many thrillers and mysteries, but there was no tension in how the early parts of the episode seemed to point to Ben as the killer. He seemed like an obvious red herring, just because it was too perfect, and he was already too evil, for the show to go that direction. That said, it was nice to see Audrey get to be a part of this in a meaningful way once more, and I can appreciate the show wanting to include some misdirection before the big reveal, even if the feint wasn’t especially effective for me.

In the same vein, we also wasted some time with sidestories that are hitting the same beats again. While we were mercifully spared any more Andy/Lucy drama for one installment, we’re back to Bobby and Shelly having money troubles over the insurance not covering all of Leo’s expenses plus their own. Leo mumbling about “new shows." The mystery of what that means or when he’ll recover more function doesn’t do much for me either.

And Nadine’s scenes have become formulaic now -- she blathers on about something related to high school, Ed goes along with the lie to reassure her, and then she uses her super strength in some way. Like Leo, she’s a ticking time bomb, but I wish the show would either let her tick to something interesting or just leave her in the background until it’s time for her to go off.

But hey, that doesn’t keep “Lonely Souls” or Twin Peaks from getting plenty of credit for paying off the mystery of Laura Palmer’s murderer in an eminently satisfying fashion. Leland really is the last person I would suspect, but the way his disturbed state and connections to everyone were laid out makes him fit the bill nicely (with an admission that the supernatural elements make that a little easier on Lynch and Frost than it might otherwise have been). The reveal that Laura’s killer and abuser was her own father, who was a tool of some sort for an ancient evil, has layers of disturbing qualities that make this far better than “the butler did it.” I haven’t loved every minute of Twin Peaks journey to uncovering who killed Laura Palmer, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t really appreciate and stand back impressed at the way they paid it off.

[4.2/10] Look, Twin Peaks just needs to stop trying to write romantic dialogue of any sort, but especially dialogue involving the teenagers. Maybe it’s that the younger actors on the show are not nearly as adept as the adults. Maybe it’s that Lynch & Co.’s conception of what teenagers sound like, or ought to sound like, is just so painfully off that no actor could salvage it, but my god, it is consistently one of the most painful parts of the show and that is no small feat.

Unsurprisingly, two of the worst offenders on that front are scenes involving James Hurley. His colloquy with Donna on the sidewalk after rescuing her and Maddy from an insane, vengeful Harold is the stuff that facepalms are made of. It’s not at all clear what motivated them to reconcile or feel differently than they had been (I guess Donna realizes Harold is a nut which breaks her attraction, and James realizes he cares about Donna enough to rescue her, even though he rescues Maddy first?). But regardless, the lines about how if they just put their two hearts together nothing can stop of them is the worst kind of purple prose and neither of the young actors can deliver it in anything approaching a solid fashion.

The whole sequence involving Bobby’s last minute defense of the two girls is pretty weak too. Maybe I should forgive the show it’s corny swerve, but it’s a very convenient way to get Maddy and Donna out of harm’s way just in the nick of time. There’s something that feels really cheap about that, particularly with the way the prior episode ended on a threatening cliffhanger. I’m not saying I wanted to see the girls hurt by Harold in any way, but anytime you let your characters evade the seemingly mortal peril you set them up for in a cliffhanger without a single real consequence or hardship from it, it’s hard for the conflict as a whole not to feel like a waste.

The other terrible scene involving James is his farewell to Maddy down by the water. It’s another overwritten set of lines, with Maddy talking about how it was nice to get to try Laura’s life on for size and James admitting he was trying to relive his time with her. Those sentiments aren’t bad, but the way they’re put down in the script is overly florid and unbelievable. Sure, teenager can be melodramatic and embellish their speech, but the conversation between Maddy and James never feels sincere, just overblown.

There’s also some horrid stuff with Shelley, Bobby, and Leo. Again, these are all characters who have pretty well outlived their usefulness on the show, to the extent they were useful in the first place. (Though again, it’s worth noting that nigh-lifeless vegetable is the part Eric DaRae was born to play.) Presumably, at some point , Leo is going to wake up and try to take his revenge on Bobby and Shelly, and the two of them bitching about their insurance scam going awry and making out in front of him will come back to bite them. But for now it just seems like a lot of wheel-spinning and table-setting for that seemingly inevitable conclusion.

We also get David Lynch casting himself in his own show, which is always a dicey proposition. (Though technically he was already cast in vocal form as the same character, so maybe there’s a reprieve there.) Him playing Cooper’s boss as someone hard of hearing has some odd comic value to it, so there’s that, and him delivering an avuncular attaboy to Cooper while also expressing some concern that he’s in too deep with this case has some merit in it too.

But hey, we also get some of the biggest and most meaningful progress in the Laura Palmer case we’ve had in a while. Hawk tracks down the one-armed man, and when the folks down at the police station corner him and force him to undergo his seizure without his medicine, the truth comes spilling out. The one-armed man has been possessed by Mike, some sort of supernatural creature who used to be partners with Bob. He basically reiterates the story we got from Cooper’s dream, with a few details here and there.

I’ll admit, I kind of like it. The supernatural elements to this show have often been hit or miss, but this feels well-established, or at least established well enough. The performance from the one-armed-man is a little outsized, but the actor does a good job of distinguishing the somewhat timid shoe salesman from the more self-assured, ethereal being that borrows his form. There’s some hokey parts involved, but it works about as well as it needs to, and it’s one of the few parts of this episode that can say that. I can only hope that, as the show seems to be circling ‘round the endgame for the Laura Palmer storyline, more scenes from the episode follow that tack.

Warning, Spoilers below for some predictions on who killed Laura Palmer

Mrs. Bloom’s guess is that it’s Leland, with her reasoning being that everyone who saw Bob was connected to him in some way, that he himself saw Bob when he was a kid, and that he’s in the hotel all the time, making him a good candidate to be possessed by the evil spirit.

My guess is that it’s Audrey’s brother, the one who wears the Indian headdress all the time. I’ll admit, I don’t quite have the good reasons that Mrs. Bloom does, but she and I were discussing characters we hadn’t seen in a while (what the hell happened to Donna’s original boyfriend, Mike?) and I realized that he’d been MIA for some time. Other than him obviously being at the hotel a lot, I don’t have a great rationale for why he’s the one that Bob possessed, but there’s something about the disturbed manchild who no one would suspect because what motive would he have in this town full of backstabbing and treachery that feels like the kind of faux-profound irony and out of left field answer this show would go for.

We’ll see who’s right! Or if there’s even an answer at all!

[2.8/10] Woof. After having such a rough time with the first season of the show, I blanched a bit at the suggestion that the second season was a step down. “How much further could it go off the rails?” I wondered. How could it conceivably recede from the already paltry levels it had already hit. Well, there’s my answer -- ninety minutes of television that is 90% shlock.

But, as I always try to do when talking about something I don’t particularly care for, let’s start out talking about what’s good about this one. Full disclosure, the opening scene with the senile old room service guy doddering around while Cooper lays bleeding on the floor initially annoyed the hell out of me. The scene drags and drags and is almost excruciating in its duration. But I take that to be the point, and somewhere around the second time the guy returned just to give a thumbs up, it elicited a chuckle for the sheer rake gag-esque audacity of the scene, so that’s something.

We also get the who, if not necessarily the why, of the central mystery of the show. Cooper lays out the details of what he’s pieced together, and the episode reveals, or at least seems to reveal, that Bob, the guy from Cooper’s dream and Mrs. Palmer’s vision, beat up Ronette and seemingly killed Laura. Some of the scene veers into cheese, as nearly everything here does, but the quick, spliced together clips of that grisly final scene are legitimately chilling, and add a level of fright and severity that the show has had trouble establishing outside of myna bird mimics thus far.

There’s also some nice material involving Ed and Nadine. I’ll admit, I’ve come around on this portion of Twin Peaks, which I initially found bothersome. Ed offers a sad and exaggerated but believable tale. He and Norma were longtime sweethearts; he thought Norma ran off with Hank (where presumably there’s more to the story), and Nadine was there for him in a time of need. Ed was impulsive and distraught and married her, but she was so happy and so gracious and so devoted to him (never even blaming him for accidentally shooting out her eye) that he didn’t have the heart to leave her. It’s a little melodramatic, but it’s a good performance from Ed, and the look of wistfulness in Norma’s mind when she sees the husband and wife together adds another layer of pathos to the whole thing.

That said, the theme for this episode seems to be two-fold: 1. Baffling transformation and 2. Doing a collection of really stupid stuff.

The latter assessment may sound harsh, but I don’t know how else to explain some of what seems to be trying to pass for comedy or texture throughout this episode. While the senile room service guy has a certain anti-humor charm to it, the similar attempts at weird or wooly humor are painfully bad. The numerous, extended shots of Deputy Andy’s odd little walk and wobble were dumb as all get out. Leland breaking into a little jig and Ben and Jerry following him was a baffling effort at charm. And the “hospital food is terrible” recurring gags are the hackiest kind of easy crap. I think the show means to be funny here, but it never quite makes it above moronic.

And that’s not the only place where “Giant” be with you makes no sense (in a bad, rather than merely surreal, way). When Ben chases Audrey around the bed, why in the world doesn’t he recognize his daughter’s voice, or the other features besides her face? The whole bit is creepy (which is, in fairness, what I think Lynch & Frost were going for) but it feels like a cheap way to avoid the reckoning the show set up in the prior episode.

That’s not the only nonsensical parent-child scene in the episode. Major Briggs tells his son Bobby about a dream he had where they embraced as family in a wonderful house some time in the future. It’s meant to play as some kind of reconciliation or corner-turning moment for the pair, but it plays as ridiculous as all get out. Much of that can be pinned on the horrible acting from Bobby Briggs, who seems be trying to communicate being sincerely touched, but mugs and renders the reaction implausible.

Then there’s the strange transformations in the episode. Leland Palmer’s hair turns white after he returns from strangling Jacques Renault. So...there’s that. But he’s also happy now, singing songs and passing out during them. I’ll admit, there’s something funny about Ray Wise playing so chipper (and it’s a nice change from his awful cry-dancing routine), but it’s so exaggerated and over the top that it’s hard to take anything from it beyond mild bemusement.

The same cannot be said for Donna’s transformation here, as she seems to be attempting to step into Laura’s persona. Between taking Laura’s glasses, her meals on wheels route, and toying with Bobby, we get an entire change in her personality without the slightest hint as to why or how. Maybe the glasses are cursed or the ghost of Laura is possessing her or some crap like that? It’s weak sauce from Lara Flynn Boyle, and a direction for the character that feels entirely unmotivated.

Oh yeah, and then there’s a soothsaying giant. While this struck me as odd, it’s of a piece with the “people who seem like they’re from an old circus’s freak show give Cooper vaguely-worded prophecy” shtick from the first season. It didn’t do much for me (and certainly didn’t feel as formally audacious as Cooper’s first dream), but it didn’t really bother me either.

In total though, “May the Giant Be With You” may be a new low for Twin Peaks, which had already been scraping the bottom of the barrel for a while by this point. Plodding pacing, more awful dialogue and acting (with Pete joining Bobby as a particularly bad offender on that score), dumb attempts at comedy, and nonsensical character choices. This was a slog, but hey, at least we have Alfred back to voice my thoughts on the ridiculous of this all in-universe. Yeesh.

[6.8/10] Hey! What do you know! A decent episode of Twin Peaks! I’m as shocked as you are. What helps this one out is that it divides fairly neatly into a few separate “investigations” going on with respect to Laura’s murder. Not all of them are great, but it gives the episode a coherence and direction that’s been missing in some other parts of the show.

The most interesting of these is Audrey’s. I don’t mean to keep harping on this point, but the scene with her and Cooper is well-done, showing the FBI agent to be a decent guy looking out for the Audrey and wanting the best for her, not just trying to take advantage of her like so many other folks in Twin Peaks do to one another.

But more than that, Audrey is one of the few people beyond Cooper who actually seems clever here. While her effort to infiltrate whatever ring Laura was involved in through her Dad is dangerous and suggests she’d be in over her head, the way she goes about it is pretty smart. Distracting the Dept. store employee, overhearing her coworker offered a job as a “hospitality girl” at One-Eyed Jacks, and then conning that co-worker into giving her the number for “Black Rose” is, as Mrs. Bloom noted, very Veronica Mars-esque in its guile.

One she gets to One-Eyed Jacks, things flag a bit. It feels like more of an excuse for her to slink around, and the scene where she proves to Blackie that she should be working at One-Eyed Jack’s despite her phony resume by seductively tying a cherry stem into a knot is pretty corny and even gratuitous. But thus far Audrey is one of the few people in this show advancing the mystery without resorting to magic, psychic dreams, or super-convenient look-a-likes, so she (and the writers) get credit for it.

Speaking of which, the episode also has James, Donna, and Maddy tricking Dr. Jacoby in order to get a lost tape that Laura sent him. I’m not as big a fan of this part of the episode, because the fact that Maddy is Laura’s identical twin cousin is already a pretty ridiculous element in the show, and so leaning on that fact to drive a major plot point feels like too much.

Still, the notion of using Maddy as a distraction to get Jacoby out of his office so that Donna and James can snoop around is a sound one. There’s some interesting layers of people stalking others (Mysterious POV dude who’s watching Jacoby who’s watching Maddy-as-Laura), but more than anything, it just functions as a straightforward enough way for the young Scooby Doo-esque investigators to find the macguffin and get another piece of the mystery going.

The same’s true for Cooper and the rest of the sheriff’s office. Credit where credit’s due, this show mostly elicits laughter and/or derision from me, but for the first time there was actually something unnerving. Something about Waldo, the myna bird, parroting back Laura’s name and pleas not to be hurt was rightly chilling, and while Leo shooting it at a convenient moment feels like an unnecessary tease, (though the imagery of blood on the donut buffet was striking, if nothing else) it’s another facet of the mystery that helps clear up the picture of what happened that fateful night.

Speaking of which, I appreciate that Cooper and the rest of the team are piecing things together and things are converging at One-Eyed Jacks. There’s a lot of disguises in this episode, between Maddy putting on a blonde wig to play Laura, and Cooper and Ed teeing things up themselves to blend in at One-Eyed Jack’s. (Side note: Ed’s mustache and curly wig make him look like Norm MacDonald playing Burt Reynolds.) I’m sure that’s some vaguely commentary on people being duplicitous or two-faced or hiding things in this town (lord knows we’ve belabored the matter of seeecrets over and over again here), but it’s something.

Still, the boys’ trip to One-Eyed Jack’s has a nice caper-y feel to it, between the disguises, the fake names and the patter with Blackie. It promises interesting things as a wired up Cooper and the rest of the Bookhouse Boys (which is basically the sheriff’s office...plus Ed) close in on Jacques.

That just leaves the continuing machinations around the Mill. The arrival of a life insurance policy for Catherine that leaves the proceeds to Josie reveals that Ben Horne is double crossing her whilst claiming to be double crossing Josie and so forth and so on, because, as Jerry seems to indicate, he wants to buy the land the mill is on for Ghostwood estates. It’s another wrinkle to this endlessly complicated scheme, and doesn’t add that much, but at least it’s a development in the story, a change in the status quo, rather than just tacking on more alliances and backstabbing.

To the same end, Sheriff Truman seems like an idiot for not sniffing out the fact that Josie is playing him (something that Cooper, at least, seems to acknowledge), but there’s the fig leaf that he’s blinded by love or infatuation or who knows what else and can’t see it. Still makes him seem like a dope. And on top of that, Leo figures out what Bobby’s up to with Shelly; Hank figures out what Ed’s up to with Norma, and Lucy finds out that she’s pregnant.

That’s a lot for one episode, but it feels more focused and propulsive than a lot of Twin Peaks ep that just sort of meander from one plot point to another without any real direction or purpose. It’s no great shakes, and there’s not much in the way of meaningful character development (beyond Cooper’s kind of charming “give yourself a gift every day” routine), but it’s the show feeling like it’s going somewhere, not just spinning its wheels, with minimal amounts of overdone dialogue or faux-philosophical meditations on whatever’s knocking around Lynch & Frost’s heads this week. That gives us the most watchable Twin Peaks episode yet.

[5.6/10] I unabashedly love The Room. It has this bizarre, unreplicable combination of incompetence and raw earnestness, of someone putting their soul on a platter for all the world to see with no understanding of how to actually convey that. The end result is one of the funniest and yet purest films you are ever likely to watch.

But it is not a standard that any professionally produced or written show should aspire to, and the funeral scene in “Rest Pain” feels legitimately of a piece with scenes from The Room. I want to be clear here. Sometimes I exaggerate for comic effect when talking about this show and its foibles, but that’s not what I’m doing here. My first thought when seeing the ridiculous outbursts of that graveside scene was legitimately the work of Tommy Wiseau.

Maybe it’s just the would be all-American kid (in this instance, Bobby), overacting and screaming his head off about everyone being hypocrites and to blame for Laura Palmer’s death. Bobby is one of the show’s worst actors (no mean feat) and seeing him contort himself and rant and rave in such a cartoonish fashion calls to mind Johnny’s “Fed up with this world” speech in The Room.

The silly eulogy delivered by the preacher, while the camera darts around to reaction shots of the assembled does the sequence no favors, nor does the slow-motion confrontation between Bobby and James. And by the same token, Leland Palmer leaping onto the coffin and crying out in outlandish, over the top grief, while his wife screams at him for ruining a solemn occasion feels like the loudly-broadcast mishmash of emotions that only come in movies directed by Tommy Wiseau or, failing that, Harold Zoid.

But what’s strange is that the show seems at least vaguely aware of the absurdity of this. Shelley makes fun of the sequence in the very next scene. In the same way, Laura’s identical twin cousin Madeline shows up, “Rest in Pain” seems to acknowledge how silly this is by having the show within a show, a melodramatic soap opera, include a woman playing two different parts in its opening credits. Simply owning up to one’s own ridiculous doesn’t excuse it, but it at least makes you wonder what the show was getting at, why it didn’t do better, what it hoped to achieve, in depicted such goofy scenes and story choices.

Thankfully, there’s a few things that save “Rest in Pain” from succumbing to the worst of Twin Peaks’s tendency toward ridiculum. One of them is the choice to, however briefly, pair up Agent Cooper and Audrey again. As I’ve mentioned before, the two of them are uniquely compelling in a show full of caricatures, and so matching their energies, having Audrey be clearly infatuated by Cooper and Cooper aware of what’s going on with Audrey while being smart enough to hold his place, makes for a moment that’s charged in a way that few others on this show can muster.

I’m also rather entertained by Alfred. Sure, he’s an exaggerated character as well, but he has a proto-Dr. House quality, as he drips with insults about Twin Peaks and its denizens in an amusing fashion, that at least makes his routine funny even if he feels like something out of a sitcom at times. His tension with Sherriff Truman and Cooper, and his steady stream of digs at this town and its people, make for entertaining texture as he drops more clues about what happened to Laura.

We also get clues about how Ed and Nadine got together, and how he and Norma found one another. Credit where credit is due -- I complained about how the last episode took what could be a pathos-ridden character in Nadine and turned her into an object of scorn or fun. But here, it offers a little more sympathy for her, casting her as the “brown mouse” who harbored affections for high school hero Ed, and is grateful that he “came back to her.” It’s not much, but the episode treats her more kindly than before, and suggests why Ed and Norma fell back into their old high school sweetheart habits, as the conveniently-timed threat of Norma’s husband’s parole looms on the horizon.

I even appreciated the supernatural elements hinted at here. While the notion of a secret society, “The Bookhouse Boys,” strikes me as a little hokey, I can appreciate what the show is going for with the broader material it’s aiming at with them. There’s a great deal of talk, from Cooper especially, about how Twin Peaks is an idyllic town, with slices of pie and ducks on a lake and a certain old school simplicity and sweetness that so compels Cooper that he contemplates buying land out here.

But Truman suggests that seeming tranquility comes at a price. Maybe that price is the notion that for all its shiny exterior, there is a darkside to Twin Peaks that, as Bobby butchers in a poorly-written and delivered monologue, nobody in town is willing to acknowledge. But “Rest in Pain” also suggests that there’s something more spiritually wrong with the place as well, that the protection of that paradise comes at the cost of an evil that lurks around the place. The nice down with a dark secret is an old trope, but it’s also a compelling one.

The problem is that it has to be executed correctly, and generic teen bad boys who couldn’t act their way out of a wet paper bag, bog-standard jerk husbands who have all the nuance of anthropomorphized plaque in a toothpaste commercials, good-for-nothing hoodlums who offer accents about as convincing a fratboy on St. Patrick’s Day, and manic cry-dancing dads who only achieves farce when they’re going for feeling, leave “Rest in Pain” as a kitschy mess despite the promise and mild improvement it shows.

The Room is unintentionally hilarious, and Twin Peaks often is too, but nobody wants to make you laugh by accident, especially when they want to make you think or worry or empathize. “Rest in Pain” isn’t that bad most of the time, but it comes too close to the Wiseau line than anyone, viewer or creator alike, should be comfortable with.

[8.2/10] There is no show on television that threads the needle between symbolism and literalism better than Better Call Saul. Part of the show’s success, and that of its predecessor, stem from the fact that it works equally well as an exciting story as it does a commentary on human nature and what relationships with bad or shady people do to us. No character represents that idea better in “Fall” than Kim Wexler.

The scene with her out on the Texas-New Mexico border to interface with her new client works well as foreshadowing, and as a sign that Kim is trying to take on too much by herself and coming close to suffering for it. When her car gets stuck in the dirt, she has so much going on, another tight deadline to meet to try to make up for Jimmy’s possible shortfall, that she tries to take care of it all herself. She find a nearby board, heaves and pushes on the car until it budges, and panics when it starts heading toward a nearby oil derrick. Only by racing into the driver’s seat and slamming on the breaks at the last minute does she avoid a grisly wreck.

It functions as a sign that Kim is juggling too many balls, that she’s letting small but important details slip, with her car as a particular conduit for this idea, in a way that could come back to bite her.

But it also functions as a larger metaphor for what Kim’s going through with Jimmy. She has a problem of being stuck in the muck herself -- with the threat of Chuck’s machinations to get his brother disbarred and Jimmy’s ensuing suspension putting pressure on her to carry the firm. So Kim does what she always does -- she pushes and pushes and pushes until she can get things moving again. Little does she realize that in all that pushing, she may be headed for disaster, and it’s only her frantic heroics that allow her narrowly avoid it. Sooner or later, those heroics will come up short, sooner or later, trying to expend all of her efforts to keep Jimmy out of that muck will backfire on her. It’s only so long that she can go to such lengths and avoid that crash.

Everyone’s hustling hard to avoid a crash in “Fall,” though most of the plots of the episode involve financial decisions rather than ones involving dirt and chrome. That includes Mike who, in a brief scene, does his due diligence with Lydia to make sure he’s putting his name down with the right people, but it also includes Jimmy, who is pushing hard to speed up the timing of his payment from the Sandpiper case.

To that end, he finds roundabout ways of putting pressure on Irene, the named plaintiff, in settling the case so that he gets his percentage of the common fund. That means, plying her with cookies to take a look at the latest letters advising her as to the status of the case. It means giving her a free pair of walking shoes to make her look like a big spender. And it means going so far as to rig a bingo game to make it look like fortune keeps smiling upon her at the expense of all her friends and erstwhile well-wishers.

Many of these sequences are funny. It’s amusing to see Jimmy decked out in full mall-walker gear as he puts in plan into motion. There’s something undeniably entertaining about Jimmy being ensconsced in a spirited session of chair yoga when turning Irene’s friends against her. And it’s enjoyably silly hearing him play “let’s you and him fight” while playing innocent in the Sandpiper lobby. There is a prosaic quality to Jimmy’s treachery here, and his million dollar payday requiring him to hobnob with a pack of old ladies creates a certain amount of inherent farce.

But it also brings a cruelty, a cavalier and callous quality to the story. Jimmy is not entirely without scruples – there is a moment of hesitation, a momentary wince, when he sets the rigged bingo balls into the chamber – but in the end he’s willing to turn poor, innocent Irene into an outcast, to leave her crying in a back room from the ostracism, to get what he wants. That’s who Jimmy is. When he’s in a tight spot, it doesn’t matter that this is someone who is kind to him, who trusts him, who was his key to getting the Sandpiper case in the first place – he wants what he wants and he’ll do what he needs to do to get it, regardless of how dishonest, crafty, or cruel he has to be to do it.

The same, appropriately enough, is true for Chuck in “Fall.” When the malpractice insurance providers show up and declare that they’ll double the premiums on every lawyer in the firm so long as Chuck is in practice there. Chuck vows to see them in court, and Howard, initially kindly and then more forcefully, suggests that Chuck ought to retire. Howard tells his partner that there’s a place for him at the local law school, and less gently, that he no longer trusts Chuck’s judgment.

It’s easy to see Howard as just as mercenary as anyone here (including Jimmy, whom Howard accuses of being like Golem as he tries to move a settlement along), but he’s not wrong. Chuck seems to legitimately be a great legal mind, and he genuinely appears to be getting better, but he has his vendettas, his blindspots, his irregularities that, understandable or not, have made him a liability to the firm he helped create. It’s hard to accuse Howard of any sort of altruism in this, but he’s been supportive of Chuck, stood by him, and it’s not unreasonable for him to reflect and say that Chuck is doing more harm than good to the company that bears his name.

But Chuck doesn’t care about that. He doesn’t care about outrageous premiums or putting his firm’s good name on the line as part of a byzantine plan to catch his brother in the act, or even about destroying his firm by trying to cash out his share. He puts on a show for Howard, one that sees him having turned the lights on and used an electric mixer to try to puff himself up in front of a friend-turned-adversary, to show Howard that he is not the crazy man who ranted and raved on the stand but a sharp thinker making great strides who can either be a vital asset or a one-man poison pill depending on which side Howard chooses.

That’s the thing about Chuck, and his brother for that matter. They are willing to destroy, or threaten to destroy, the lives and livelihoods of the people around them to achieve their own goals, and damn the consequences. (Those consequences may, providently enough, make Howard more likely to want to settle the Sandpiper case in order to have some liquidity and cash on hand.) Even the people close to them, who have helped them and looked out for them, are not immune from suffering in their wake.

That catches up with Kim in the end. She can’t celebrate with a miffed Jimmy when he brings in a fancy bottle of booze in honor of his scheme to prompt a settlement working, because she has to do much to do to try to cover his behind. There’s been hints that her efforts to do it all herself rather than deal with her lingering concerns about Jimmy were going to hurt. There’s the five-minute naps in the car before meetings at Mesa Verde. There’s the near-miss out at the oil derrick. There’s other instances where simply being proximate to all this mess has put Kim in harm’s way.

As always, the show shoots it beautifully. There’s something quietly ominous about the silence in the car after Kim rehearses her speech. The scenery outside the window starts to fade away. Suddenly, in a blink, the accident hits. She moans in pain as she pulls herself from the wreckage. Her carefully-crafted binders blow away in the wind. Smoke billows into the austere New Mexico landscape as she surveys the tumble of metal and legal documents before her. This is, despite all her efforts, despite all her attempts to carry everything on her own back, something unavoidable.

That’s the rub of “Fall” and of Better Call Saul. Except when facing one another, the McGill brothers almost always get what they want. They know how to work the system, to tilt things in their favor, to intimidate or challenge or call the bluff of whomever is standing in their way. And because of that, they rarely suffer.

But the people around them do. The people who care about them, who try to help them, who do anything to tarnish their pride or their patience end up worse for being in the unfortunate orbit of these two men, just as Nacho’s father is worse for his son’s association with the Salamancas. It’s never Jimmy or Chuck who has to face the consequences, has to stomach the hardships of their failings or difficulties -- it’s the poor old lady made a pariah so that Jimmy can have a payday, it’s the man who stood by Chuck until it threatened to destroy his firm, and it’s the smart, decent woman who became Jimmy’s confidante, accomplice, and caretaker, straining to keep the two of them from ruin, and finding herself asleep at the wheel, surrounded by crushed chrome and the detritus of her meticulous work.

There is no escaping the McGill brothers. There is no fixing them or correcting them or saving them. There is only the doomed efforts that emerge in their wake, that inevitably end in a crash.

[4.4/10] Thank goodness for Kyle MacLachlan as Agent Cooper. That’s about all I can say for the second episode of Twin Peaks. There is such a joie de vivre, a wide-eyed, confident heap of quirk to the character and the performance, that his presence instantly elevates every scene he’s in. From the Batman-like introduction in this episode, to his meticulous evaluation of coffee, pie, and various other breakfast foods, to his ability to sniff out that the Sherriff is seeing Ms. Packard, there’s the sense that Cooper is certainly eccentric, but also scrupulous and good at what he does because of it. It doesn’t hurt that MacLachlan can make Lynch and Frost’s dialogue sound believable in a way that no one else in the cast can.

The only other character in the episode who offers anything of note is Audrey. There’s parts of that I find unpleasant, because her role seems to be to titillate as much as she’s meant to be a legitimate character. But the other side of the coin is that there is an intrigue and an unassuming pathos that cuts through the way she’s uncomfortably cast as a teenager oozing sexuality.

That comes through in her apple cart-upsetting ways. Like everything in Twin Peaks, it’s absurdly over the top, but the scene in which she pulls her pencils out of the cup she just bored into, just to see what happens when the coffee spills everywhere, represents the way in which she is something of a wildcard, willing to stir the pot for the sake of stirring the pot.

But as much as it seems like adolescent nihilism, or causing trouble for trouble’s sake, there’s also the sense that it’s a cry for attention. It’s trite to have the wealthy parents with kids who make problems because they feel neglected, but it’s at least an interesting tack to take in the scene where her dad confronts her for scaring off the Swedish investors with the news of Laura’s death. It’s all a little silly, but unlike most of the characters in Twin Peaks (Dale Cooper excepted) she at least has a presence about her that makes her stand out in a show full of thinly-drawn, stereotypical characters. (It may help that she typically doesn’t have to spit out too much of the series’s abysmal dialogue.)

And no one in the show is more of a flat, stereotypical character than Leo, the abusive husband of Shelley. But before we get into that, let’s tease out the ridiculous, lumpy, love-dodecahedron that the show has going with its teen cast members at the moment. It starts with Leo, who’s married to Shelley, who’s seeing Bobby on the side, who was also dating Laura, who was having a dalliance with James (and possibly two other guys), who is not romantically involved with Donna, who is officially dating Mike. If that weren’t enough, there is Naomi (the eye patch-wearing nut obsessed with drapes), who’s married to Ed, who’s secretly seeing Norma, who’s married to a man in jail. And just to make sure there’s enough tangled romantic webs to really make things convoluted, the Sherriff is seeing Mrs. Packard, who is flirting with Pete, who is married to Catherine, who is schtuping Audrey’s dad. Phwew. Suffice it to say, this is a show where you need a diagram to keep up with all the romantic connections, and it’s utterly, utterly ridiculous.

Anyway, we get Leo’s homecoming with Shelley, where he is viciously jealous (over unfamiliar branded cigarettes in his ashtray) and willing to beat her with soap in a sock over a missing, blood-stained shirt. I’m willing to cut some slack to a show made in 1990, but I can’t help but wince at something as serious as spousal abuse being depicted in such a cartoonish, Halmark Channel-esque fashion.
Rest-assured, there’s plenty more crap where that came from, as we dig deep into a budding relationship between expressionless James and Donna. There’s the grain of something solid there, with the idea that grief provokes strong emotional states in people that sometimes forges unexpected connections, but there’s next to no chemistry between the pair.

It doesn’t help that James has all the ability to emote of a particularly dull Rock, or that Donna is saddled with the cringiest of bad dialogue. Her little monologue about this all seeming like a wonderful dream, but also a nightmare, is a noble attempt to capture the confused feelings that emerge around grief and comfort, but it’s written with all the nuance and eloquence of an episode of G.I. Joe.

That level of depth and subtlety carries on in the scene that Donna shares with Laura’s mom. As if the over-the-top acting the mom had already shown weren’t enough, we get some poorly-done special effects to superimpose Laura’s face on Donna’s to signify that the mom is delirious or out of it in her grief and grasping in vain for her daughter. The frantic screaming when she sees a random dude peeking from behind the couch is too much too, and it’s hard not to laugh when the show at least seems to be going for sincere, grief-stricken emotion.

The thrust of the episode seems to be a dichotomy of Laura as someone who was an upstanding young student on the one hand – dating the captain of the football team, volunteering at meals on wheels, and tutoring Audrey’s mentally-challenged older brother, and a doomed ingénue on the other, two-timing her boyfriend, doing cocaine, and getting lost in dark forests with mysterious people. But it’s a rote sense of duality, the usual Madonna/whore complex without any wrinkles in the early going beyond mystery thrown on top of mystery in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, it’ll all be going somewhere.

That’s the best I can hope for this rewatch of Twin Peaks, that eventually all this over-exaggerated camp and baroque plotting turns into something decent beyond its status as an intermittent showcase for Kyle MacLachlan. We’ll just have to wait and see.

[3.4/10] Star Trek, as a franchise, is awfully fond of alternative timelines and parallel Earths and other What If-style imaginations. Well, maybe there’s some alternate universe where The Adventures of Gary Seven became a major hit for CBS, and we all look back on the fact that Gary met Kirk and Spock with the same fondness that people think of the Adam West Batman meeting the Green Hornet flanked by Bruce Lee’s Kato.

But this is not that universe. Instead, it’s one where a viewer like me is left wondering why The Original Series finished its second season by turning over the proceedings to a reasonably dull character the audience has never met before, while sidelining its two main characters from most of the action. A backdoor pilot is nothing new, but it’s odd, to say the least, as a modern viewer watching a show turn its season finale into one big advertisement for another series.

(Don’t get me started on the cheese of Kirk telling Gary and Roberta that they’ll have lots of adventures together in a line that feels proto-ripped off from The Simpsons.)

But hey, it’s not the first time Star Trek has turned significant portions of an episode over to a new character. The problem was that “Assignment: Earth” didn’t feel like an episode of Star Trek. That could just be the result of Kirk and Spock and the rest of the Enterprise crew being put on the bench for most of the episode, but I think there’s more to it. The tone is a bit different, slightly more I Dream of Jeannie than TOS.

It’s also an exceedingly dull episode of the show. Star Trek is not above having uneventful, seemingly interminable middle sections that just sag and sag. But “Assignment: Earth” spends so much time at the McKinley Base where a nuclear bomb orbiter is being launched where next to nothing happens, and it happens slowly. There were times when I seriously wondered if the episode had been running short and so the powers that be just threw in random scenes of characters restating the problem or added in more establishing shots or other wheel-spinning to pad out the time.

That’s really the biggest problem with “Assignment: Earth.” No doubt, the audience would inevitably bristle at seeing their usual heroes put on the backburner in favor of some random half-serious Get Smart ripoff. But even taking the episode as we find it, and accepting that it’s an episode-length pitch for another show, “Assignment” does nothing to make me want to watch that show.

Gary Seven is a pretty uninspired presence. While there’s some intrigue to the character when he uses his little servo pen to best Kirk and company (something done, no doubt, to sell a Trek-loving audience that this guy is awesome don’t you know) and manages to beam down and pursue his mission anyway, Robert Lansing doesn’t offer much of a presence beyond that opening act. There’s a few semi-amusing moments when he banters with his cat (though TOS had already played the “cat that turns into scantily-clad lady” card by this point) but for the most part, he’s a big block of wood proceeding through a pretty perfunctory plot without many good story beats.

The same goes for the annoying Roberta, his young would-be sidekick. I couldn’t believe it was the great Terri Garr playing the role, because Roberta is the cheesiest sort of ditzy sixties foil. The fact that she’s so flighty and throws in weird, character-establishing lines like “that’s why my generation are rebels” kind of stuff just makes her an unpleasant presence in the episode. And there’s little comic or dramatic chemistry with her erstwhile future co-star.

That’s not helped by the fact that the episode repeats a number of things Star Trek has already done. It’s contrived and laughable how blase Kirk is about going back in time to 1968. If time travel were such a casual thing, it would have solved a lot of the crew’s problems from earlier episodes and probably brought a few people back from the dead. Nevermind the fact that it’s silly as hell that they just so happened to go back in time to the year when the episode aired. That alone could be forgivable, but combined with the episode’s other problems it’s just another dent in the fender.

It’s also a pretty ham-fisted anti-nuclear weapons story. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one to look askance on a show at the dawn of the nuclear age expressing its anxieties about the threat of global annihilation from fifty years later, but the show lays the whole “terrible risk” thing on pretty thick. To add insult to injury, the mission to mess with the telemetry of the orbiter rocket is a perfectly fine goal in the episode, but there’s not enough around it, with everything basically being reduced to the usual “oh no, we got captured!” stalling for time.

The best the episode can do for Kirk and Spock (beyond having them held at gunpoint by a random security guard) is try to give Kirk some grand dilemma about whether or not to trust Gary Seven and believe him when he says what he’s doing is for the greater good. But the episode drops that for most of its run time, only picking it up at the very end after the duo have basically been background characters for 90% of the episode.

In brief, “Assignment: Episode” fails as an episode of Star Trek, which is understandable, if not exactly desirable, for what is essentially an undercover pilot for another series. But what’s not okay is that it also fails as an episode of The Adventures of Gary Seven, or at least, as any kind of enticement for people to watch this shoehorned-in spinoff. While the premise of a man raised on another planet sent to Earth to help mankind survive the nuclear age has potential, the stone-faced hero with the space-case (no pun intended) sidekick and his feline assistant make for a weak mix when stretched across forty-five uneventful minutes.

The fact that we’re not talking about this as the start of a Gary Seven series suggests that the Paramount executives were not convinced of the potential for a show based around this idea, and after watching this disappointing season finale, I don’t blame them.

[8.6/10] The opening of “Slip” is a little more direct than episodes of Better Call Saul tend to be, as it fills in some gaps Jimmy’s backstory and perspective. When pressed by Marco about Jimmy’s parents’ shop, about how they worked hard and everyone liked them, Jimmy admits it’s true, but questions the value of it. He declares that it got them nowhere, and characterizes his own dad as a sucker.

Jimmy’s philosophy becomes a little clearer, snapping into place with the flashback to his youth. His dad was someone who refused to bend the rules, who wouldn’t take even so much as a valuable coin for himself, who wouldn’t sell cigarettes to the kids from the local religious school to make ends meet, and in Jimmy’s eyes, that got him nothing. It’s a little too tidy and pat, but Jimmy sums it up nicely -- Papa McGill wasn’t willing to “do what he had to do,” and Jimmy definitely is.

That’s the thrust of “Slip,” which is as much an ensemble piece as any episode of Better Call Saul so far. Jimmy, Mike, Chuck, Kim, and Nacho are willing to go the extra mile, to do the difficult thing, not because they want to, but because they believe it needs to be done. It’s what unites those disparate individuals and their different challenges here. Each of them strains a little more, goes a little farther, in the name of biting the bullet and doing what needs doing.

For Jimmy, that means going back to his old ways. What’s interesting is that Jimmy tries to be good here. He tries to build on the success of his first ad with the owners of the music shop, and all they do is try to squeeze him. Granted, it’s Jimmy, so he’s probably inflating costs a bit, but still, the episode sets them up as jerks, and Jimmy as at the end of the rope. So hey lays out a drumstick, asks them one more time if they’re committed to not paying him what they originally agreed to, and then he intentionally takes a painful looking spill in their store to get leverage. Look out, Slippin’ Jimmy is back.

He also returns to his huckstering to get back at this community service supervisor and make a little scratch in the process. His big show of a potential lawsuit and deal with a fellow worker grow a little farfetched in terms of persuading the grumpy supervisor who eventually gives in, but the purpose of these scenes is clear. Jimmy tried doing things his parents’ way, the good way, and the only thing it got him was an empty bank account. Now, he’s back to taking the (literally) painful, less-than-savory steps that ensure he has enough money to hold up his end of the bargain with Kim.

But Kim’s willing to go the extra mile too. When Jimmy offers her the money, she obliquely hints at the idea that he might need time to regroup, that she’s willing to carry the load for the two of them for a little while. It’s not entirely clear whether she’s worried he’ll return to conning people full time and wants to alleviate the financial incentives to do so, or she’s simply concerned that whatever his assurances, unreliable Jimmy may not be able to come up with his end on a monthly basis without his legal practice. Either way, she takes on a new client, one where she already seems pretty slammed, to make sure that they’ll be able to make ends meet, with or without Jimmy’s contributions.
The Mesa Verde head honcho refers that client to her at a lunch meeting, where she just so happens to run into Howard. Howard, ever the politician, is plastically cordial, but Kim, unlike her beau, still has pangs of guilt and offers him a refund on the law school tuition he put up for her. Howard, letting the scales fall for the first time in a while, reveals that he too is working overtime, having to reassure scores of clients after the incident with Chuck gets out. Kim’s willing to take the (figuratively) painful step of handing over $14,000 dollars to assuage her conscience, and Howard is out there hustling to preserve his firm’s good name after his partner’s public breakdown.

But some good seems to have come out of it. Chuck is back with his doctor and (self-)reportedly making great progress. He may be overestimating himself a little bit, but he’s pushing through his exposure therapy and accepting that his illness is a mental not physical one. When Dr. Cruz warns him about taking it easy and not setting his expectations too high, he remains optimistic, anxious to get better.

In a tremendous sequence, without a word of exposition, “Slip” suggests that Chuck might overexert himself in this effort. He’s using the coping techniques the doctor suggested for him when standing in front of the blaring fluorescent lights of the grocery story. He lists the colors and objects he sees, taking his focus away from the pain. Director Adam Bernstein uses the tools in his toolbox to underscore the severity of what walking through the freezer case does to Chuck, the zooms, the noise, the vertigo of it all. It seems like Chuck has pushed himself too far, that he’s about to suffer another attack

But when we see Chuck later, he has the groceries and is no worse for wear. These things are difficult for him, painful for him, but he is ready and willing to push, to take that damn step, in the same of what he wants to achieve.

The same is true of Mike, who is clearly still haunted by Anita’s story from the prior episode of her husband dying in the woods without anyone ever finding the body. He digs and digs in the New Mexico desert, metal-detector in hand, until he finds where the unfortunate Good Samaritan was buried by the cartel. He calls it in anonymously, presumably in the hopes of ensuring that another family won’t have to go through the uncertainty that Anita did.

But he’s worried about leaving his own family in a state of uncertainty too. He still has his cash from his various extra-curricular activities, but he’s worried about how he could get it to his family should something happen to him. So he goes to Gus Fring, in the hopes Gus can help him launder it. It’s a scene that shows the two men’s growing mutual respect. The meaningful handshake that closes the episode (along with Gus turning down Mike’s offer of 20% to launder it) signifies the ways that their values are the same. They are both smart, decent men who get mixed up in indecent things, and they’re willing to do what it takes to make that work.

That just leaves Nacho, who has what is possibly the most difficult task of all. What I love about this series of scenes is the way they show how meticulous, how careful, how deliberate Nacho is about all of his. There is nobility in Nacho wanting to protect his father from Hector, but he is not in any way reckless about it.

Instead, he does the legwork, he takes the extra steps that will make his operation successful. He is delicate and careful as he grinds the poison into dust and fills the lookalike pills under a magnifying glass. He practices, over and over again, the act of palming the pill bottle and depositing it into a coat pocket, so that when the moment comes, it will be second nature. And he even goes so far as to climb onto the top of the restaurant that serves as Hector’s headquarters the night before, messing up the air conditioner so that Hector will have a reason to take off his jacket.

The subsequent scene where he actually makes the switch is masterful. “Slip” holds the tension of each step in the process: from the would-be fake bill, to the probing of the wrong pocket, to the pill switcheroo, to that grand moment of truth where Nacho has to make the move he rehearsed so many times and land the pill bottle into Hector’s jacket without him realizing. It’s a great outing for Michael Mando, who conveys the way that Nacho is trying to exhibit a practiced, casual calm, but inside is anxious beyond words. His deep exhale and clenched fingers in the back after it’s all done says everything.

Each of the tasks taken up by the main characters in this episode -- planting poison pills, finding a dead body, braving the height of your illness, taking on extra work, and even breaking your own back -- require something extra, more sacrifice, more pain, more difficulty. But when something important is at stake -- your livelihood, your well-being, or your family -- the major figures of Better Call Saul are the type of people who face that head on and take whatever measures the situation requires, even if that means drastically different things for each of them. Those steps are painful, tense, and even dangerous, but for better or ill, Jimmy McGill and the people in his orbit, are the people who do what they need to do.

[3.9/10] I’ve talked about this before in my write-ups for Star Trek, but I try to hard not to impose my modern values and norms on a show made fifty years ago when watching The Original Series. I’m sure that people fifty years from now will look at the art being made by people today and have serious issues with how things are depicted or glossed over, and so I do my best to take these stories as I find them, acknowledge areas where they’re lacking in how we view morality and what’s appropriate today, but still attempt to appreciate them on their own terms.

“The Gamesters of Triskelion” is an episode that really tried my patience and tested my ability to do that. The episode is nominally focused on Kirk, Uhura, and Chekov being secretly beamed to a gladiator planet where some unseen “providers” force them to train and fight, but it centers on issues of slavery and gender dynamics that the show is ill-equipped to handle, and it makes this one pretty hard to watch at times.

First and foremost, one of the local enslaved gladiators attempts to rape Uhura (and the episode is a little cagey about what exactly happens) and “Triskelion” pretty much glosses over the aftermath, essentially forgetting about it once it’s happened. Nichelle Nichols does an amazing job, with her horrified screams being truly chilling, in a way that reinforced that this was not a subject that a colorful show like Star Trek was in any way set up to address in a meaningful fashion. The fact that it’s almost immediately forgotten, and treated like any other indignity the crew, is a pretty hard thing to get past.

But that brevity at least means the episode isn’t throwing the uncomfortable aspects in your face every five minutes. There’s something more than a little disturbing about Kirk seducing Shahna, the alien gladiator who is ostensibly training him, when at best, she is someone who has lived her whole life as a slave and has only very fuzzy notions of concepts like consent or autonomy, and at worst she seems to have the understanding and roughly the capacity of a child.

“Triskelion” tries to gloss over this by putting her in one of those costumes that leaves little to the imagination, and having Kirk try to couch his affections in ideas above freedom and love. But the reality is that Kirk makes a move on this individual who is not at all equipped to handle such things. The episode is founded on the idea that he teaches her to love, and that comes off as him grooming her rather than a free and equal concordance between the two, it makes half of the episode devoted to something that just scans as wrong.

The other problem is that even if you separate out those uncomfortable parts of “Triskelion,” you’re left with a pretty standard, dull episode. Kirk is hoodwinked by aliens with god-like powers, falls in love with a babe of the week, and uncovers the terrible secret of the new planet before concocting some plan to escape. There’s nothing wrong with the formula, but if you’re not going to do anything novel it means the execution has to be good, and the gladiator theatrics and unpleasant sexual and slavery stuff really detract from whatever the episode’s trying to do.

There’s only a couple of genuinely good things about “Triskelion” that save it from being the absolute pits. One is that the Spock-Bones-Scotty effort to try to find Kirk and company is pretty darn good. A lot of these episodes have the main action going on down on the latest planet of the week, with the business on the ship trying to rescue them feeling perfunctory. But here, there’s a legitimate conflict between the three men about what the best approach is, and a legitimate challenge in trying to track what happened to their crewmen.

As always, Spock is great here. I love the tack that even cold logical Spock is willing to act on a “hunch” when all other options are exhausted. Following a random energy trail may be a longshot, but if the transporter is working properly and their searches of the area prove fruitless, then it works with his Vulcan logic that following that path, however unlikely, is the best thing to do.

There’s also great interactions between him and Bones and Scotty, with Spock’s line about taking any suggestion “even an emotional one” about where to look, Bones responding that Spock finally asks him for something and it’s that, and the little interlude about mutiny and compromise standing out as particularly great.

The other quality part of the episode is that the action choreography is actually pretty good here. I’ve had my beef with the fights on Star Trek before, but the creative use of the weapons and the recess-like rules of staying on particular colors made for an interesting battle with Kirk versus his three aggressors, and eventually Shahna at the end there. It’s good to know the episode can do some combat even if it can’t handle the storytelling or character stuff.

Still, again, the plotting is pretty dull too. The reveal of the lit-up trio of brains and Kirk giving another one of his tedious speeches about what it means to be truly advanced and blah blah blah didn’t do much for me. (Even if it did seem to be the inspiration for the robot elders of Futurama, one of my favorite gags.) And the ploy to wager against them and free everybody seems contrived as well, even when it’s not rooted in something that’s supposed to be romantic but comes off kind of disturbing.

And yet, as cheesy as the line is, there is pathos when Kirk leaves Shahna and promises that she’ll look up to the stars and remember him. It’s a good performance from the guest actress, and it suggests that more could have been made from this -- that there’s juice in having to say goodbye to someone who opened up your world and understanding, and that if it hadn’t been wrapped up in what reads as a hasty and inappropriate relationship, the episode could have been markedly improved. It’s unfair to judge something from five decades ago according to the standards of today, but it’s also unfair to expect an audience to be able to grin and bear the sort of uncomfortable sexual politics that “The Gamesters of Triskelion” puts on display, mixed in with a weak base plot to boot.

[7.7/10] There’s a sense in “Off Brand” that many of the major figures of Better Call Saul haven’t really been doing what they’d like to be doing. Demands of family, money, and sometimes the two intertwined have kept the likes of Jimmy, Chuck, Mike, and Nacho are, at times, reluctant or bitter or scarred by the work they’ve been doing over the past few seasons. But for each of them, there is something pushing them, almost against their will, to move closer to something that might be better for their souls.

For Jimmy, that means a break from the law. At heart, Jimmy is a showman, a people-pleaser, albeit one who’s happy to use those skills to feather his nest where possible. That gives him an avenue in the law, but his references to having to go “Karloff” in his commercial for...commercials, or the dangers of stripes on screen suggest that he’s as thrilled by the art of his presentation as he is in any con.

He showed the same inclination in his meticulously-produced commercial for Davis & Main and his first big “Gimme Jimmy” ad. And the first glimpse we see of Cinnabon Gene is of a man whose world is black and white, where the only hint of color are the flashes of his famous “Better Call Saul” clips that first drew Jesse and Walt to him. As corny as it is to see Jimmy in the hat and beard and vest (and it must be said that Better Call Saul gets the lo-fi look of local ads down perfectly) there’s the sense that Jimmy is in his element when he’s on camera, and that it may be the closest thing to honest work that could sustain him.

After all, there is a sense that Jimmy became a lawyer out of a combination of admiration for his brother as a template for success and in a bid to earn his respect and perhaps even love. There’s ways in which his showmanship makes him a good fit, but as his stint at Davis & Main shows, also things that make him a liability. It does seem to pain Jimmy a bit to have to inform all of his clients of his twelve-month suspension (in another of this show’s tightly-edited and hilarious montages), and we know it won’t last, but maybe he would be happier as a commercial director and/or star than as an officer of the court. The suspension is not ideal, but it may just push Jimmy into something fulfilling after being so directed by his relationship with his brother.

As despondent as Chuck may seem having effectively lost his contest with his brother, the result seems to spur him as well. While the fallout from “Chicanery” clearly left him shaken, seeming even suicidal at times, a visit from Howard seems to snap him out of his funk. Howard, a talented advocate in his own right, appeals to Chuck’s vanity and his sense of serving the calling of the law above prosaic personal concerns.

In the shadow of those lofty ideal, Chuck begins to test the limits of his exposed psychosomatic “allergy.” He gives himself exposure therapy, gripping a battery in his hand with subtext that he’s pushing himself to move past it. And he even goes so far as to call a doctor, presumably to ask for help, to push him beyond his illness, whether he believes it to be physical or mental. As much as Chuck looks at his brother with disdain, in many ways Jimmy has been coddling him, indulging his electromagnetism “allergy” self-diagnosis rather than forcing him to confront the deeper-rooted issues that have caused it and deal with it. Oddly enough, it may be Jimmy’s final act with Chuck (if his statement to Rebecca is to be believed) that spurs his brother to get the help he needs.

Mike needs some help too. It’s not in the same way as Chuck exactly, but as he sits in that support group while his daughter-in-law recounts the difficulties of raising a daughter without her father, we know that Mike too has unresolved issues from his son’s death, issues that this sort of group might help him with.

But, like Jimmy, he’s also been pulled into a world by financial necessity and familial issues that it may do him better to be without. When his daughter-in-law asks him to help pour concrete for a neighborhood playground (possibly the one at which he’ll later be arrested) it’s the kind of labor, the kind of building something, that Mike appeared to covet in the last episode, with Gus luring him back into the world of drugs and brutality. There’s always something that feels a little less than above board about Mike’s daughter-in-law’s requests of him, a sense that she (consciously or unconsciously) uses Mike’s guilt over his son’s death to persuade him to do things for her and her daughter, but here, it may be the same sort of push that let’s him do a little of what he’d really like to be doing, like the kind Jimmy received.

And then there’s Nacho, who’s also pushed into actions he wouldn’t seem to pick without some amount of prodding. But unlike the three other men who get their share of focus in this episode, Nacho seems like he’s being pushed into something that will hurt him, that isn’t a step toward recovery or betterment and fulfillment, but something to drive him deeper into a place that isn’t comfortable.

When he’s counting dollars at the beginning of the episode, he’s apt to let the underling who’s a little light off with a warning. But all it takes is one belittling comment from Hector, who’s seemingly barely paying attention, for Nacho to drag the goon back in and brutalize him in the kitchen. When he’s upholstering in his father’s shop, a slip with the needle reflects the image of blood in his eyes, and suggests a man who is, at least in part, still carrying his grisly actions with him from that day.

But Hector prompts that sort of viciousness, that effort to take out what you need from whomever you need it from. Hector sends him to test the limits of Gus’s patience by taking six bricks from the Pollos Hermanos delivery rather than five. Push your advantage -- that’s the lesson Nacho is constantly learning from his would-be boss.

(As an aside, I don’t know that we really needed to see Gus surveying the industrial laundry facility which will eventually house Walter’s lab and conferring with Lydia. BCS has been good about not laying the Breaking Bad nods on too thick or shoehorning them in, but this felt like too much with little purpose beyond saying “Hey, remember how this becomes significant in the other series?”)

And yet, Nacho may take that lesson and turn it against the man who’s teaching it to him. Hector’s insistence on using Nacho’s dad’s shop as a front provokes real resistance in the young man. We’ve already seen Nacho’s willingness to throw his associates under the bus because they pose a threat in terms of stability or understanding. When Nacho places his foot on one of Hector’s pills, after a coughing fit prompted by Tuco earning himself some more time in jail, there’s the hint that he may have something to do with what finally fells Hector. Better Call Saul uses the the inevitability of Hector’s downfall to, ironically enough, create mystery, where Mike, Gus, and Nacho all have reasons to try to take him down.

That’s the risk of all these big events prodding our protagonists to try things that they’d otherwise been shoving to the side. We know that Jimmy’s filmmaking career is temporary, and that Mike’s handyman excursion is fleeting. These individuals will be pulled back into this world and this life despite their efforts, self-directed or not, that keep them away from it. The mixing of those worlds, the humble work at the car shop and the drug enforcer duties for Hector, may also collide for Nacho, in a way that pulls him back into that muck, into using that brutality Hector instills, without any need for further provocation.

Again a more or less cheesy episode. The synopsis for this episode gives that away already but I was pleasantly suprised that it didn't turn out to be as cringeworthy as it sounds, although, to be fair, the "acting scene" on set was cringeworthy.

I love self-irony and hoped this episode would be self-ironic and it definitely was.
Malcolm Goodwin's (Babineaux) deliverance of his line to a TWD-styled zombie extra of the show Zombie High, who said: "You know what would be fun? A zombie show where the zombie is the star." was absolutely on point and hilarious.
Just like his remark about zombies and how they affect him. Foreshadowing much?

Finally they realized that they were after Blaine, took them a while but since this is a show where the zombie is the star I can live with that. Additionally, I am glad that Clive and Liv could work their differences out quickly. Without them working together something's missing. Overall a weaker episode but as a critic once wrote even in its weaker episodes iZombie delivers (paraphrased).

Sadly it seems like The CW postponed the next episode to the 2nd Feb. Oh, well, I guess (and hope) that explains why the backorder was 6 to 19 episodes in total instead of 9 to 22 or so for season 2 because they needed the timeslot.

[7.2/10] Nothing, or at least nothing much, in Rebels Season 3 finale is bad. Thrawn’s ground assault on Attalon has moments of excitement, Ezra reconnecting with Sabine is cool, and while I have my issues with it, the wrath of Bendu creates an interesting enough wildcard in this otherwise one-on-one fight.

But there are a few problems at play. The first is that it never feels like much is at stake here. Attalon falling should be a big deal. The Rebel attack failing to even get off the ground should be a big deal. Instead, my reaction was ultimately pretty ho-hum.

Part of that has to do with what we know about who has to make it out of here alive. We know that Hera does; we know that General Dodanna does, we know that Chopper does, and the rules of television suggest that Ezra will make it out alive as well. That immediately lowers the stakes for Thrawn’s invasion, because we know that sooner or later the good guys will make it out of this jam.

Now that is a fact of life when you’re talking about an ongoing series like this, particularly one meant to kid-friendly. And I’m not arguing that major characters necessarily have to die in order for a finale to have meaning. But Sabine puts it best when she makes her pitch for helping to her mother -- that this group of Rebels always does the impossible. There is a sense of inevitability to all of this, to the fact that our heroes will make it out okay and fight another day. Maybe for a split second, you think the series could go Empire Strikes Back and commit to something more down or harrowing like Phoenix squadron ending up as Thrawn’s prisoners, but otherwise it becomes pretty clear that Ezra and company will prevail, or at least escape, and there’s little excitement in that when it feels like a foregone conclusion.

The other side of the coin is that Rebels has faced this before and come out okay by substituting plot-based stake for character stakes. When the story isn’t who wins or who loses, but how the journeys affect the characters at the center of them -- whether it’s Ezra’s questions about the Dark Side or Hera’s conflict with her father or Sabine’s struggles with her family and legacy -- you can overcome obstacles like necessary plot armor and known futures. “Zero Hour” is mostly devoid of that. The goal is just to survive, and despite some lipservice paid in a scene between Kanan and Ezra at the end of the episode, there’s not much development or attention devoted to building the characters through these events.

I also don’t know how I feel about Bendu as the force that, inadvertently or not, allows the Rebels to escape. It’s not like he hasn’t been set up as a force to be reckoned with before, but the show has played so coy with him, and he’s still so ensconced in doublespeak, that his rage storm seems like a weird development from the character. It’s not quite deus ex machina, but it does feel like a convenient way for our heroes to make it out of dodge in time. I appreciate the symbolism that as cold and tactical as Thrawn is, there’s things beyond his comprehension or understanding like Bendu that make him fail, or at least not fully succeed, but it’s an undercooked point delivered with cheesy laughs and typical angry god boasts.

Still, the progression of events themselves work just fine. Again, we have a clear goal with Ezra and Sabine taking out the interdictor so that the fleet can escape. Zeb and Rex working together to take down assorted walkers has hints of Ep. V, and the old warriors make for a fun pair. And as much as I find Bendu’s role here questionable, the image of his glowing eyes in the storm is a cool one.

Again, there’s nothing exactly wrong with the finale. It doesn’t necessarily bother me that everyone survives (though Kallus’s escape route is semi-improbable). There just wasn’t any oomph to it. The set dressing is there, with big explosions and perfectly acceptable plot obstacles, but there was no deeper meaning, no real character stakes, nothing that made this event much more than a collection of cool set pieces. It would take a lot to live up to last season’s amazing finale, but like Thrawn’s attack, as solid as this episode was, it didn’t even come close to greatness.

[7.3/10] While I appreciate Rebels getting to its endgame after a great deal of setup this season, the epic conclusion didn’t exactly blow me away. It’s nice to see Thrawn actually executing his plan -- confronting Kallus, locating the rebels, etc. -- but there was just something underwhelming after all the build.

I did appreciate a couple of things about this one. First and foremost, I like that there was a clear goal here. It wasn’t just a space battle for space battling stake -- there was strategy and planning. For the rebels in particular, the major objective was to get Ezra past the blockade so that he could go get reinforcements. It’s a straightforward enough plan, but it drives the rest of the efforts.

I also liked the poetry of Commander Sato’s sacrifice. There is some obvious, but still good symbolism in the contrast between the Rebel leaders and the potentates of the Empire. Sato is able to make it possible for his side to get out of this alive by sacrificing himself in the name of the greater good, while Konstantine not only meets his own end, but scuttles Thrawn’s plans by striking out for personal glory. It’s the difference between the two sides in one tremendous gesture, and it’s the strongest part of the episode.

The problem is that the rest of the episode is perfectly fine, but just a bit uninspired for a grand finale. Ezra and Kanan’s conversation about what’s been achieved for the rebels is clunky and not as meaningful as it needs to be. Kanan raising Bendu’s ire is kind of cool in the moment with Tom Baker’s stentorian tones, but gets to be too much. And Thrawn’s monologuing and taunting goes a bit too far as well.

The space battles are cool, if a bit static at some point, with cool explosions and other action. And this does have the feeling of a dry run for the rebel battle in A New Hope, but there’s just something missing here, something that should put this episode over the top and yet makes it feel a bit lacking.

[8.7/10] The natural inclination in an episode like this is to go big, to make it loud and exciting and epic. It is the Original Trilogy meeting the Prequel Trilogy meeting Rebels, and so the powers that be could be forgiven for turning that encounter into an epic confrontation, full of fireworks and piss and vinegar.

Instead, “Twin Suns” is a quiet, deliberate, almost melancholy episode. That is a bold choice, one that pays off for Rebels and delivers one of its most meditative, understated episodes in a way that does justice to the various major figures it invokes in the effort.

It opens on the holy site of Star Wars, the deserts of Tatooine. There in the swirling sands, Darth Maul wanders the arid wasteland, searching in vain for his mortal enemy. “Twin Suns” commits to the desolation of the planet. Many times, it frames its character in wide shots, often at a distance, showing how small and insignificant they are on that vast landscape between those dual radiating stars. While there are moments of action, most of the time is spent with the characters wandering through those miles of nothing, contemplating what’s calling them there.

Of course, it’s not enough to just have Maul stalking the specter of Obi Wan, so Ezra Bridger feels the call to Tatooine as well. The reasons for his being there are thin, but adequate. He is, essentially, bait. Maul uses the same visions and hallucinations to draw Ezra to the desert planet so as to put him in danger. If Obi Wan is there, Maul reasons, he’ll be unable to stop himself from emerging to save the day.

So foolhardy Ezra heeds the call, follows the visions, and gets both Chopper and himself lost and desperate amid the sands of Tatooine. Despite the half-plausible excuse, Ezra doesn’t have much of a place in this story. It gives the character a bit of nice material, with deliberately disorienting edits creating his sense of being at a loss and in peril as the amount of time he spends out there remains unclear. But on the whole, his arc, to the extent it exists, is merely a familiar epiphany that he’s turned his back on his newfound family and should return to them rather than taking things on his own.

But it’s the man who offers him that advice who matters. Rebels realizes the Ep. IV-era Obi Wan Kenobi well. The franchise has yet to address the awkward business of bridging the gap between the Ewan McGregor/James Arnold Taylor incarnation of the character, and the version that started it all. But Stephen Stanton (who also voices Tarkin and AP-5), does his best Alec Guiness and it scans as true to one of Star Wars’s founding performances.

The Obi Wan Ezra meets in the desert is of a piece with one Luke meets in A New Hope. The years have blunted the edges of the reserved but adventurous man who fought in the clone wars. In his place is this wise old monk, one who has the zen and worldly perspective that Guiness and George Lucas imbued in the role. Rebels attempts to revive characters who’ve gone unseen since Return of the Jedi have been hit or miss, but kudos belong to Stanton and writers Dave Filoni and Henry Gilroy for capturing the spirit and demeanor of the character we know from Star Wars’s first act.

It’s not, however, inter-generational crossovers and desert-worn wisdom. Obi Wan’s time with Ezra is mercifully short, just enough to give him the lesson he needs and send him on his way before Maul arrives. Maul explains his manipulation in a suitably villainous fashion, and trades insults with Obi Wan as he gears up for a confrontation greatly hyped and long in the making.

When Obi Wan faces Maul, the scene is tense. Maul is inquisitive, probing, challenging his wizened adversary. He sniffs out why Kenobi is on this backwater planet, and the Jedi Master’s eyes subtly react with concern and awareness of what he’s revealed. Only then does Obi Wan ready himself to fight. The two men hold the tension, stand their ground, letting the potential of this grand clash linger in the air before the first, tremendous blow is struck.

Instead, it simply ends before it barely began. A few swift moves is all Obi Wan needs to fell his opponent. He moves slowly but decisively. Anything more would be a betrayal of the warrior we saw in Episode IV. There is mercy in his blade and in the way he cradles Maul in his arms after the deed is done.

But the purpose of that anticlimax is not simply fidelity to the source that began it all. It is a reveal, a demonstration, that these are not the fiery young men who clashed on Naboo. They are not the hardened warriors who met in battle on Mandalore. They are broken down old men, the last of a generation, finishing the last vestiges of conflicts that were already lost before they’d even started.

These are the last gunfighters, drawing one last time, because what else is there to do? As Maul seemingly dies in Obi Wan’s arms, he asks Kenobi if his task is to protect the chosen one. Obi Wan admits it, and Maul says the most curious, revealing words as he leaves the living force – “He will avenge us.”

Maul and Kenobi have stood on opposite sides of the battle lines for decades. They have seen the fall of republics and the rise of empires. They have done this dance across the ages, each taking pounds of flesh from the other. And yet, when the final blow is struck, the clarity of the last light reveals a simple truth. They are both victims of the same tormentor, the same individual who took away all that they had and believed in.

As Star Wars has gone on, it has evolved, showing more shades of gray within the hero’s journey that started with A New Hope. Before that little boy running across the horizon could rise up and strike down the evil that took so much from so many, too many had to suffer, both the good and the bad. The distance between the two seems as small as the distance between Maul and Kenobi. They are the twin suns, intertwined, eternally circling ‘round these same events, pulled by the same force, until they are snuffed out, ready for a new light, a new beacon, to sweep the galaxy, and wipe away their shared regrets, mistakes, and pain.

8.8/10. Lightsabers are one of those holy artifacts in the Star Wars universe, the kind that are specific to the Jedi and signify their oneness with the force. So it was always a little odd, albeit cool, that when Jedi would run into Mandalorean baddies, they would have this darksaber that seemed to allow them to go to toe-to-toe with the Jedi. “Trials of the Darksaber” rectifies that, making the darksaber an even holier object by making it one of a kind and, through an impressive if brief art shift, establishing it as a holy object for the Mandaloreans as well. It is the only such lightsaber, created by the first Mandalorean Jedi master, taken from the Jedi after his death, and passed down to storied leaders from the Vizla clan through the ages.

It’s a pretty big deal for the first and only black lightsaber in Star Wars. (As an aside, I am an old man who remembers when there were only blue, green, and red lightsabers. Now we have purple, yellow, black, and white. I think that just leaves orange and indago before we complete the Roy G. Biv lightsaber rainbow.) But more importantly, it makes the darksaber something more than just a cool new toy for Sabine to play with; it makes it a symbol of the birthright she’s rejected and the pressure of being both a Mandalorean and a Rebel.

That’s what I liked the most about “Darksaber Trial” – that it used something cool, flashy, and toyetic to expand the lore, provide character backstory, and most of all, develop one of its more underserved characters a little better. Getting more insight into the history of the darksaber and the Mandalorean mythos is cool; finally getting to know why Sabine left Mandalore is interesting, if a little trite, and getting insight into what’s driving her is a vital part of making her a more well-rounded and motivated character.

What gets the episode extra points is how well it uses Kanan and Hera on top of that main story. It’s not a high bar, but the pair have quickly become the best (pseudo) married couple in all of Star Wars, seeming like mature and caring partners who have their differences but know how to get through to one another. That gives the episode added weight and dimension too.

One of the recurring threads in Rebels has been Kanan’s insecurities about being a teacher. Despite the air of authority he puts on when in teacher mode, Kanan himself has admitted that he’s unsure of himself, inexperienced and not positive how to do this. So the fact that he is hard on Sabine, starting her off very slow and not giving her a chance to go big and commit to learning the darksaber works to show his reluctance and myopia as an instructor.

The episode does a nice job at suggesting that there is something uniquely Mandalorean about Sabine and about the darksaber, and that means that Kanan is trying to fit a square peg in a round hole by trying to be slavish in teaching her the Jedi methods of lightsaber wielding. There is a hesitance from him here, a bias even (with a nice but subtle subtext of gender bias in the comments about how he didn’t treat Ezra this way) in how he will not let Sabine test her limits because he doesn’t trust her uniquely Mandalorean nature.

That leads to two of the nicer elements of the episode. The first, and another toyetic element given weight, is how Fenn Rau gives Sabine Mandalorean vambraces that help her to replicate Jedi powers like a force push or a force grab in uniquely Mandalorean way. These make the difference, and lend toward the recognition that Sabine has to forge her own path, one that is not purely dictated by her Mandalorean history, but also not dictated by Jedi tradition either. She finds a healthy middle between the two, matching Mandalorean ingenuity with Jedi principles of the blade as extension of self.

And second, it dovetails nicely into Sabine’s epiphany that she can honor both her old family, the one that rejected her on Mandalore, and the new one, who bow down to her and say that they would follow her lead. That’s where Hera comes in. I love the fact that Rebels remembered its history here, invoking that Hera is uniquely position to know what it’s like to feel spurned by your own parents to give her insight and empathy for what Sabine’s going through that makes the difference. Her being the one to convince Kanan to change his tactics is a great choice, that builds on what we know about Hera and the pair’s relationship.

That change in tactics leads to a thrilling action sequence, made all the more notable by the fact that it is, essentially, a very intense sparring session. The cinematography and art direction are both superb, with the evening sky and the desert setting creating the right mood for the heightened moment where Sabine uses the darksaber for the first time and Kanan pushes her to confront her conflicted emotions about it. Much credit also goes to the perpetually underappreciated Kevin Kiner, whose score adds tremendously to the gravitas of the scene.

The only catch is that, heaven help her, voice actress Tiya Sircar, who typically does a great job with Sabine, isn’t quite up to those charged moments. Sabine’s emotional breakthrough doesn’t quite have the impact it needs to when Sircar comes off more overwrought than convincingly distressed. That’s a real difficulty in trying to sell Sabine’s big realization and triumph here (and in fairness, stretches of clunky dialogue don’t do SIrcar any favors), but thankfully the direction and music in the scene help to make up the difference.

The result is that we get to know Sabine much better. We know that what caused her to defect and to leave Mandalore is the fact that, with her creativity and tech skills, she was a weapons-maker, and reacted with horror after learning that the Empire used the weapons she made on her own people. We know that her clan and family name are sore spots because her own parents disowned her for seemingly abandoning her people for this reason. And we learn that, like many in Star Wars and Rebels specifically she has difficulty trusting in anyone or anything for this reason.

The darksaber is the prism through which all of this information is delivered. It is a symbol, both of Sabine’s connection to her people which she is reluctant to embrace because of the bad memories it conjures, and now also of her new family, the one that, whatever Kanan’s initial hesitancy (and let’s say it, prejudice) about training Mandaloreans, is the one that trusts her with the awesome responsibility of that weapon and all the significance it carries, and the one that would follow her into battle, whether she’s wielding it or not. Lightsabers are one of the most iconic parts of the Star Wars universe, and the best works within it use them not merely as cool futuristic swords to slice and dice, but as windows into the souls of those who carry them.

6.9/10. This was a very confused episode, that was trying to do a lot of good things, but never really manages to get them off the ground due to, at times, incoherent plotting or just plain dumb logic. Let's go through them!

Clare and Dr. Burstein managing to fix Luke was a fairly tense scene...that didn't make much sense. I mean, to some degree you have to go with comic book logic and accept the technobabble, but why heat was necessary to make Luke's skin more pliable, when that level of heat was what made his skin strong in the first place, is fairly puzzling. Still, the show replicated the sort of ER hecticness of a patient flatlining to keep the intensity of the scene up, so you can kind of let them get away with it.

But that's not the only piece of dumb logic in the episode. When Diamonback is trying to frame Luke, and get him tarred as copkiller, it's pretty ridiculous that he himself goes out in a hoodie and uses some superpowered punch thing to do it. The reveal of his shared biology with Luke means there's the grain of a good idea there, but the two don't really look alike, in build or in their facial structure, and Diamondback yelling out "I'm Luke Cage!" just seemed humorous. Maybe you can cut the show some slack for trying to provide a commentary on the problems with cross-racial eye-witness identification, but I'm not sure I give the show credit for such headiness, and either way, it doesn't really work within the logic of the show.

But it works flawlessly, to where Misty is the only person who seems to doubt that Luke was the one who punched that nice cop to death. What, however, is her argument beyond the fact that she just doesn't think Luke would do that (despite the fact that there's dashcam footage of him punching other cops across the block when feeling cornered)? This assailant was wearing a backpack. Luke doesn't wear a backpack! This case is airtight! It's not like Luke could have just put on a backpack for some reason! Yet again, the show tries and fails to show that Misty is a sharp detective. It knows how it wants to present her, but doesn't have the writing to actually demonstrate that she's good at her job beyond the "visualize the crime scene" ability.

Of course we jump back to Dr. Burstein's barn, where Luke uses the laptop to discover that Reva was in on the whole thing. What should be a piercing emotional reveal falls flat due to Mike Colter's acting, which continues to be not quite enough at heightened moments like these. It's an interesting story, feeling betrayed by the one person who gave you hope in a dark place, but Colter can't really sell the moment. His anger and destruction of Burstein's lab/barn feels more like a plot save than a canny narrative choice. it's supposed to be cathartic and feel like justice in Luke preventing someone else from going through what he's been through, but it's shortsighted since he may need those facilities again if he gets shot once more.

It also leads to more dull non-chemistry between Luke and Clare that doesn't really add up to anything but Luke going back to visit his dad's old church in Georgia. I really like the way the scene is shot and edited -- with smooth transitions between the past and the present as Luke stares at the dilapidated chapel and remembers what happened when he was a kid -- but the reveals are underwhelming. There's a fairly direct Isaac and Ishamel parallel going on, and I can I appreciate that as thematic subtext to the issues between Luke and Diamondback, but the show does a pretty weak job at showing how young Luke could have missed his Dad having an affair with Diamondback's mom, while adult Luke can put the pieces together. The things he remembers aren't exactly subtle, and while you can handwave it with Luke having repressed the memories until the site of his dad's church made them all flood back, it seems very strange that he wouldn't have put this together sooner.

Things get dumber still after the cops start beating around the block trying to get info on where Luke is. Again, I like what the show is trying to do here. There is a The Wire-esque quality of these scenes of cops being angry at the loss of one of their own, and taking it out on the streets, hassling corner boys and being needlessly rough. That side of things rings true and feels motivated, even if, again, everyone feels like a sucker for falling for Diamondback's ruse so easily. The cop interrogating Little Lonnie and going too far feels like a bit much, a bit too calculated to tug on your heartstrings, but it works for what the show's going for.

The problem is that since Mariah is being strongarmed by Diamondback to try to sell the public on Luke Cage and powered people generally as a threat, the show has to tie her pitch for the police department buying superpowered weapons from Diamondback to the cops beating up this kid, and it doesn't really add up. There's a strange "the cops abused their power, so we should give them really powerful weapons" logic that doesn't make any sense, but for this episode in particular, you just kind of have to go with the flow and accept that nothing makes sense and the story's just going where it needs to go regardless of the demands of basic logic.

So of course, Luke returns to Harlem (this whole thing seemed to happen very quick, how long did his trip and curing take and visit home take?) and Misty is after Diamondback at Harlem's Paradise and Luke jumps into save her as we hit a cliffhanger. Why the hell not? It's vaguely action-y, and it gives us some cool scenes of Mariah riling up the crowd and showing herself as an expert manipulator and showman even when the pitch makes no sense. With Alfre Woodard's delivery, I almost believed it.

That's the big problem though. This show wants to traffic in real life tensions between police and the black community. It wants to play in the realism of its setting and the genuine issues facing the people of Harlem and similar urban areas. But it has to marry all of that with an out there comic book storyline, involving secret brothers, magic labs in barns, and elaborate schemes to sell superguns. The result is something that often feels very stitched together and not really doing justice to either side of the equation. You can employ comic book logic the whole way through, or you can try to ascribe for something approaching realism, but finding the balance is a tricky business, and it's something that all of Marvel's Netflix shows have struggled with to some degree. Luke Cage in particular seems stuck in the middle, with no clear idea on how to reconcile its hardscrabble atmosphere and its superhero roots.

8.3/10. Best episode of the season so far. I've appreciated the show's resistance to doing a straight up origin story up t this point, but it was actually fascinating to see how Luke Cage became the superhero he is today. The dialogue was still pretty rough, especially in the scenes between he and Riva which were exchanges of either wooden exposition or silly cliches, but it's a cool story.

Also, it's the most I've liked Mike Colter in the title role. Maybe it's just the fact that he was doing the strong silent type a little better here. There's a purity to Luke Cage that can be a little annoying (Bullock on Deadwood is a good analogue) but seeing him be a little less in control, to the point where he's basically lost hope and is letting himself be sullied but slowly building himself back up, makes the character and the performance much more compelling.

There's also some fun mythology stuff. While the cuffs and the headband and the loud shirt come off a bit cheesy these days, making them be part of the magical machine that gave him his powers, in addition to a good ol' clothesline borrow, only to have him declare that he looks like a fool once he sees himself in the mirror is a nice way to nod to the source material without doubling down on it. At the same time, I appreciate the symmetry of Luke being at his wits end on his first day in prison and punching the walls, only for him to pull the same trick after recovering from the experiment and seeing the extent of his powers. The "Sweet Christmas" exclamation is corny, but ya had to do it. (That said, the explanation for how he got his name was really forced.)

In truth, there's a lot that's corny about the episode. The love story between Luke and Riva is a generic prisoner/Florence Nightingale routine. The asshole Warden is a cliche, as is the beloved friend who gets used as leverage and eventually killed because of things you've gotten mixed up in. Still, it gives us insight into Luke's psyche and how he got this way. Even little touches like his hair being wilder all around show how this was a more unrestrained, shaggy time in his life, and that he resolved to pull through.

The frame story of him helping his landlord out of the rubble was mostly just there, but worked well enough as a break between the backstory. Seeing him punch through the rubble at the same time he was punching through Seagate succeeded as a juxtaposition, showing how the things he's doing now are advanced versions of things he's been doing for a long time, and drawing a straight line between his time in prison to his time helping people now. We'll see what repercussions him announcing himself publicly have.

Overall, in the midst of all the major plot machinery that's been moved around in the first few episodes, it's nice to see Luke Cage take a step back and do what amounts to a character piece on its protagonist. There's a lot of narrative shortcuts (and I'm curious to see what role Levy from The Wire will have as the experimenting doctor), but it made the character less monolithic and more interesting, which goes a long way.

Well, again, one great scene goes a long way. The scene where Frank and Karen converse in that diner is one of the best in the show. The way that Deborah Ann Woll conveys that she's at her wits end is superb, and Frank's monologue about how feeling hurt means there's a connection to something, and he'd kill to have that connection back is a little trite, but wonderfully performed. It's a powerful, human moment at the center of all this chaos, and the performances make sure it work. The ensuing scene where Frank beats up the mooks in the diner to get the info he wants about the Blacksmith is pretty horrifying, but then again it's supposed to be, and I appreciate the show not pulling punches about how brutal Punisher is, even if it's a bit grusome to watch in practice.

I was less enamored with the whole bit with Clare Temple and Matt. It's always nice to see someone like Clare cut through Matt's martyr complex B.S., but the hospital staff covering up what happened was really vague. I get that they're presumably leaving plot threads that this show or The Defenders can pick up in later seasons, but it didn't feel well developed, and Clare quitting over it seemed like piece-moving rather than something that stemmed purely from her character.

Madame Gao was a treat, and again, I think I find Daredevil's scenes the most entertaining when someone clearly smarter than him is calling him out for not really looking at the big picture. The actress who plays Gao has a great presence about her, and that helps keep the tension up during the expository dialogue. Plus, I even enjoyed the creativity of Daredevil darting among the clothes in the dry cleaner in order to hide. It's a little silly, but it makes sense for what he's trying to do, and helped distinguish this fight from the dozens of others he's had with faceless mooks.

Speaking of which, the final scene on the boat was so-so. Thematically, I like the idea that Daredevil is offering to help Frank, and even to violate his no-killing code in order to do it, at the same time Frank is upset that Daredevil won't even allow him the false moment of peace from killing one of those henchmen. The dialogue itself is clunky, but I like the contrast, that Daredevil doesn't believe in wanton destruction, but maybe in the fact of what Karen's told him and he's learned himself about Castle's background and The Blacksmith, he's willing to make an exception given all that this guy has taken away from Castle and others. Matt crosses himself before saying this, which is another nod to the religious themes that have been floating in the background this season.

The show's pretty much reached the point to where it's mostly just enjoyable pulp with a few scenes that rise above that, but I can appreciate it as slightly heady entertainment, even if it feels like the show is aiming to be more than that at times.

Look, pairing up Fisk and Punisher, arguably the two characters who've made the biggest impression on this show, is just a recipe for success. It admittedly wasn't perfect. The plot reasons for them getting together and for Fisk releasing Punisher are vague, convenient, rushed, or all three. It's hard to keep the characterizations for the two characters consistent and still have them plausibly team up with one another, even as a marriage of convenience, and the show ties itself in a few knots trying to make that work. And Jon Bernthal's very naturalistic performance as the wounded-if-determined soldier isn't a perfect tonal match with Vincent D'onofrio's very good but much more mannered and affected take on The Kingpin.

But damn if it isn't captivating to watch the two of them react to each other in that prison. Just seeing Fisk plying his trade in the "big box" is a sight that makes me wish there could have been a mini-movie or something just focusing his Orange Is the New Black-esque adventures. Punisher's scene getting his answers from Dutton (who informs him that the crossfire that resulted in his family's deaths was the result of a police sting), was nicely intense. The ensuing scene where Frank takes out an entire cell block was uncomfortably gory, but it fit with Castle's M.O. and the gore served a solid purpose of elucidating the lengths Punisher will go to in contrast to Matt. And though things got a little overly theatrical at times, the scene where Fisk and Castle went toe-to-toe was absolutely electric, enough to where the somewhat suspect plot elements faded into the background.

Speaking of convenient plot elements, it's quite a coincidence that Karen finds herself with a de facto job at the New York Bulletin just when Matt and Foggy are so much on the outs, and the aftermath of the Castle conviction still so fresh, that Nelson & Murdock is shutting down. Still, it's nice to see Karen be able to continue her dogged investigator routine, and taking over Ben's post at the Bulletin is a nice organic way to make that work. It helps that Ben's editor (a poor man's Paul Giamatti who's endearing from the getgo), is there to be a foil and friend along the way, with Karen pushing back on him just enough to keep it interesting.

Unfortunately, Daredevil is, once again, the least interesting thing on his own show. His fight with Nobu is fine, and there's something quite creepy about the blood farm he uncovers, but his whole breaking off ties so as not to hurt the people he cares about routine is pretty cliche. That said, his is the most minor story in the episode, and since the Punisher/Kingpin stuff soars and the Karen stuff does very well too, the episode overall works quite well.

I'd like to note at the outset that I'm watching the episodes in the order outlined on Memory Alpha. As such, it will be out of sync with the order outlined here and on Netflix.

It's difficult, I think, to approach Star Trek with anything like a critical blankness as I'm trying to do throughout this project. Its cultural influence is so pervasive that watching this episode for the first time I'm already familiar with Kirk the cad, Spock the logical but trusted deputy and all the tropes that will undoubtedly play out over the course of the series. I doubt that this will dampen my enjoyment at all, but it's worth taking into consideration. The episode opens well as both Kirk and Spock's characters are established, in broad strokes, in the first two minutes or so. From there the viewer is taken through the scenario: through an encounter with a magnetic storm, crew member Gary Mitchell is changed somehow and begins to develop latent psychic powers at an accelerated rate. His concerns become less human, leading him to become a danger to the rest of the crew as he seeks to transcend humanity.

The effects are dated and the writing isn't phenomenal, but the episode does a solid job of portraying Mitchell's change while revealing more about Kirk. What was less convincing was Dehner's sudden willingness to follow him but she acts as a convenient stooge. The confrontation allows all-action Kirk to reveal himself and Mitchell is defeated accordingly. What is most important is that the Enterprise's mission has been established, Kirk and Spock and their individual traits have been introduced and emphasised and the format that I gather the show will follow is demonstrated - the ship encounters an external force and Kirk, along with Spock, uses his ingenuity and brawn to overcome it. Once I know all this I'm able to sit back and enjoy it all - the effects, the bad one-liners, the occasional lack of forward momentum. One of the things I find compelling about the Star Trek universe is the expansiveness of it, and I'm looking forward to delving into it.

6.8/10

Lincoln is one of the most boring characters on a show that has had to fight accusations that it's dull. Focusing the main story of the episode on him was a recipe for doldrums that the show lived up to. Even seeing him go all Static Shock on the power lines or bus or guards didn't do much for me. Accidentally killing a friend who's mistrustful of you should be a meaningful event, but it was constructed so haphazardly, and with such an uninteresting character, that I barely cared. The lack of chemistry between him and Skye/Daisy meant that I only groaned when they kissed. Daisy herself has had to overcome bland mary sue characterization, and pairing her with a piece of stubbly milquetoast doesn't do anything to help that.

I did appreciate Coulson's part of it. I go back and forth on his interactions with Rosalind. On the one hand, at times it feels like a dinner theater version of Hepburn and Tracy. On the other hand, when things are clicking, it makes Coulson feel like a human being and not just a delivery mechanism for exposition, high-minded ideals, and ill-fitting quips. I'm cautiously optimistic about the storyline, and especially pleased that they tied it to Coulson learning lessons from the "Real Shield" debacle.

Hunter and May's storyline worked well enough, as they're two of the better characters on the show, even if the "fight club to get into Hydra" plot felt a bit tacked on. May struggling to not just get right down to business in the pub while Hunter and his mate were Brit-ing it up was amusing, and her and Hunter feinting toward what happened during May's vacation was nice. I was surprised at how bloody they let the Hunter fight get, and it's always nice to see May kicking some ass, even if it felt shoehorned in. Again, we'll see where it goes.

And as usual, Fitz and Simmons are the best thing about the show, with Fitz doing everything he can to get things back to normal even if it's not what Simmons needs, and Simmons convincingly showing the psychological scars from her experiences. Are Fitz and Simmons's storylines any better than anyone else's? Probably not, but they're better actors than most on the show, and they sell the emotional undercurrent of all of their stories, which gives them greater weight than anyone but May can muster.

(Oh, and what was with all of the dutch angles in this episode? Seemed like a weird quirk in the way the episode was shot.)