LeftHandedGuitarist

[6.8/10] When I made my list of favorite Twin Peaks characters for Twitter (because it’s 2017 and apparently that’s something we do now), I realized that, save for Audrey, they were all G-Men. I don’t know why, but the agents from afar were characters I was better able to connect with than the local color. Maybe it’s just the performers, maybe it’s the fact that they tended to be more adjacent to the soap opera nonsense that dominated much of the original show than a part of it, or maybe it’s that these figures had a sense of humor apart from the “hey isn’t that kind of goofy and weird” that tended to dominate the show.

Whatever the reason, they always stood out, and so an episode like this one, essentially dominated by Cooper (in various forms), Gordon Cole, Albert, and Denise(!) was, for the most part, right up my alley. I’ve read some grousing from various fans that the revived Twin Peaks hasn’t spent enough time in Twin Peaks, but from my perspective, this is the balance the show should always have had (if not even more slanted toward the agents).

Full disclosure: I cheered out loud when Denise made her entrance, though I have mixed feelings about the scene itself. There’s something a little too self-congratulatory about it, particularly with Lynch himself playing a character in the scene. Denise is a little too grateful to Cole and a bit caricatured, and Cole a bit too self-justifying. But “fix your hearts or die” is a great turn of phrase, Duchovny is still a superb performer, and Lynch’s heart is clearly in the right place, so it gets a pass from me.

What doesn’t get a pass, however, are the scenes we do get back in Twin Peaks, which seem interminable. Lucy and Andy’s shtick was pretty tired 25 years ago, and now it just feels like a trying clownshow. That said, I love the fact that their son is Michael Cera. I laughed out loud, because his awkwardness makes perfect sense for the offspring of those two characters. I didn’t care for his performance though. He seemed to have the wrong energy for the show, and his little monologue about “paying his respects” went on forever.

(Here’s where we go on an “Andrew’s Reaching With This One” detour. My pet theory is that Wally is Lynch and Frost parodying James Hurley. Wally has the leather jacket, the motorcycle, the criss-crossing the country, and the faux-poetic but mostly painful dialogue delivered in a faux-soulful but mostly painful way. Maybe I’m giving too much credit to what would otherwise be a pretty rough performance from Cera, but maybe it’s so bad because it’s replicating/poking fun at something that was so bad in the first place.)

Really, all the scenes with the original players at the Sheriff’s office went on forever. We get to see Bobby again, and learn that rather than going into business with Ben Horne, he himself became a cop. Oh yeah, and he’s still a terrible actor. I mean, holy cow, I thought that maybe in the previous quarter-century, Dana Ashbrook would have had some life experience to draw on to make his tearing up at the picture of Laura Palmer even the slightest bit convincing, but nope. Same ol’ Bobby. Same ol’ overwrought, unconvincing shtick.

But hey, at least there’s the great Robert Forster, of Jackie Brown fame, to play Harry Truman’s brother and substitute sheriff Frank Truman. He brings a certain world-weary gravitas to the role. As much as the return visits to the sheriff’s office to see the same reheated comic stylings I disdained in original recipe Twin Peaks doesn’t do much for me, but I like the sense, mostly delivered by Forster, that there is, to be too cute about it, a new sheriff in town, who seems to be suffering these fools gladly out of a sense of obligation while the other members of the department do the real work. I’m at least curious as to what the deal with Harry is, so that’s something. Otherwise, the portions of the episode actually set in Twin Peaks are a bust.

Even the parts with Gordon, Albert, and Tammy going to meet The Bad Dale are not all that great. For one thing, I sort of revile the Tammy character. Her performance isn’t very good, the cinematography male gazes the hell out of her, and she seems to only exist to ooze sexiness, which seems churlish at best. The scene where the G-Men talk to Bad Coop is strange, but more in a stilted way than in a cool Red Room sort of way. Maybe that’s intentional, to help convey that something is off and it’s palpable to Gordon and Albert, but the scene goes on a long time without much happening.

At least we get some interesting plot hints out of the deal. The notion that Albert gave Philip Jeffries some information to pass on to Bad Coop since he thought Coop was in trouble, that it led to the death of one of their agents, and that Bad Coop is trying to get out of this jam by pretending he’s been working undercover is an interesting one. Like most things involving Twin Peaks, I don’t know where they’re going with it, but it has promise.

I’ve said before that I wish there was an easier way to distinguish between a middling grade that means “mediocre throughout” from one that means “half brilliant” and “half terrible.” That’s this episode to a tee, because while much of the material here is questionable, everything focusing on The Good Dale as “Dougie” is just amazing.

Watching the stupefied Good Dale wander around the casino, his neighborhood, his home, and have no one recognize or acknowledge that he’s in real trouble is just an amazing choice. There is something genuinely Kafkaesque about it, and the idea that you have someone who has the mind of a child at the moment, who has clearly suffered something traumatic, and yet because everyone is just worried about the effect his actions will have on them, nobody helps them.

It’s an incredibly effective commentary on human nature. The casino owner, the limo driver, the old acquaintance (Ethan Suplee) and Dougie’s wife (Naomi Watts!) don’t make any effort to get him the help he clearly needs! Everyone’s just playing their role, making threats and demands and assurances to this guileless naif of an individual who is so clearly not all there.

It’s a brilliantly constructed set of scenes, ones where The Good Dale’s ability to repeat things drives just enough of the action to get him home and move the story forward. I’m going to run out of ways to compliment MacLachlan’s performance here, but the way he crafts this persona that is so vacant and lost, but with little peaks of the old Coop rising up here and there, is just incredible. And I love the callbacks and visual echoes that help bring those about, from Cooper’s awkward thumbs up with his son (a la Senor Droolcup), his look in the mirror (a la the final moments of the original series), and of course, his damn fine cup of coffee.

But what’s really striking, and what makes the inherent critique of how everyone treats Dougie so damning, is that the only person who seems to actually see Dougie, to realize that he needs help and respond to him in a non-self serving way is a child. Unlike everyone else in Dougie’s orbit, Sonny Jim has no agenda, which means he doesn’t project worries or imagined threats or his own crap on this man who is practically a blank slate. Instead, Sonny Jim just guides his dad, puts syrup on his plate, and actually responds to the man.

It’s half a comedy sketch from something like Animaniacs, and half an existentialist short story, and I love every minute of it. Unlike in the rest of the episode, the awkwardness of this diminished individual stumbling around, nigh-mindlessly repeating whatever’s said to him, and having the world plot and proceed like he isn’t behaving like some kind of stroke victim, only heightens the tragedy and absurdity of the situation. Separate and apart from Twin Peaks, it’s just this brilliant little vignette that could absolutely work on its own and which puts Dale Cooper in the company of Gregor Samsa.

But that tends to be what Twin Peaks is for me, even at its best. Some brilliant thing at the center, surrounded by tons of corny or dull crud that blunts its impact. It’s a thrill to see the G-Men back in action again, and the Cooper-focused portions of the story are, as usual, tops, but the further the show pulls away from that, the more it devolves into the same shlocky meh-ness that put me off the show originally.

[7.2/10] Yeah, so, I’m going to stick with my tack from the prior episode and say that I have zero idea how to rate this episode. Which, I think, is good? Again, it provokes a reaction, and while I don’t know what to make of it, that’s still a good thing, especially compared to original recipe Twin Peaks which typically just left me rolling my eyes or putting my face in my hands.

The story of the episode, to the extent there is one, seems to be about The Good Dale returning to the real world, and The Bad Dale trying to stay put. Much of that is depicted in as surreal and outré a fashion as Lynch normally musters, that only really becomes enjoyable 10-15 minutes into the episode.

The opening portion of the episode, the one centered on Good Dale being stuck in some metal apartment floating in space, didn’t do much for me. Normally the symbolic and more high concept parts of the show are the ones that work for me, but this felt too inscrutable for even my tastes. There’s a certain amount of nicely disorienting style to the transparent quality of Cooper looking out from the balcony, or the stop and start movements, or the Pan’s Labyrinth-esque scare of the faceless woman gesturing to him (who’s maybe the creature that attacked the kids in the first episode?), but something about it just felt off and too opaque even for Twin Peaks.

I don’t know where Cooper was (some weigh station between the lodge and reality? Or some place cooked up by Bad Dale?). I don’t know how he got back. I don’t know who that woman that kind of looked like Audrey or Josie from the back was. And I don’t know what that giant face (Maj. Briggs?) saying “blue rose” (a la Fire Walk with Me) is all about. Maybe it’ll be explained later, but in the here and now, it was a big heap of confusing nothingness.

Thankfully, once Good Coop started to come back, the episode more or less found its rhythm. I appreciated the intensity of Bad Coop driving in his sportscar through the desert, trying to ensure the black lodge can’t get a hold of him. It’s great acting from Kyle MacLachlan, showing Evil Coop’s delirium. I believe he threw up creamed corn, which, as usual, has special meaning in Twin Peaks, and I wonder if the smell that the highway patrol can’t stand is burning motor oil a la Bob. Whatever the literal interpretation of the scene, I like the way it conveys the sense of visceral revulsion and being overpowered.

By the same token, I like the advent of “Dougie.” My interpretation is that Dougie was some kind of clone or duplicate or something that Evil Cooper created so that the black lodge would take it instead of him, presumably using the ring. It’s an interesting, if confusing idea that, true to the show, raises more questions than it answers. But there too, Dougie suffering at the onset of the change (replete with arm going numb, hello again Fire Walk with Me) is a nicely intense scene.

And the coup de grace (no pun intended) is Good Coop coming back. I really like that either because of Evil Coop’s shenanigans with the Fake Coop, or because of the interference from the box and room in New York City, or some other thing we don’t know yet, the Good Cooper is in a stupor, childlike, and imitative.

Again, it’s superb acting from Kyle MacLachlan. In particular, it’s an incredible physical performance. His halting walk, his blank gaze, his childlike repetition of what he sees and hears are all just perfect. It’s a convincing portrayal of a man who’s been completely wiped and is rebuilding himself one tenuous thought at the time. I sometimes tire of Lynch’s overly long scenes, but just letting MacLachlan command the screen with his strange but sympathetic portrayal of a full grown man with the expressive abilities of a toddler really works.

I’m definitely repeating myself, but I also don’t know what to make of his incredible luck at the casino via seeing the glimpses of the lodge above certain slot machines. Maybe it’s somebody in the lodge guiding him to help? Maybe he just has an aura about him? Whatever it is, the scene works for the strangeness of it, the supernatural clicking into place as he channels this strange energy back into the real world.

And it gives us an opportunity to see Gordon Cole and Albert again! A new (to us) agent named Tammy slinks around quite a bit and also reports what happened in New York City in the last episode to them. Presumably it’s a Blue Rose case or something, but there’s no time because they get a call that Coop’s been found and they’re off to go see him! It’s definitely a tease at the end of the episode, but it’s an inviting one. It’s nice to see the pair again (though Albert, on of my favorites from the original, sounds pretty damn different), and the prospect of them reuniting with Cooper is an exciting one.

Otherwise, we get a bizarrely long scene of Dr. Jacoby spray painting shovels gold. I don’t need to know why right now necessarily, but the episode spends an awfully long time on seeing every detail of it for no apparent reason.

We also get another scene of Hawk, Lucy, and Andy trying to figure out, per the Log Lady, “what’s missing.” The pacing of the scene is very awkward and stilted, but there’s a few funny moments. In particular, Hawk seeming to consider for a brief moment whether the chocolate bunny has anything to do with his heritage got a laugh out of me. But for the most part, it was an odd, not particularly entertaining interlude. (I forgot to mention that Good Coop being whisked along in the revolving door was some of the funniest physical comedy I’ve seen in a while).

Overall, I don’t really know how to feel about this one. I find myself excited by the plot of it, which is unusual for me and Twin Peaks. The idea of Good Coop coming back and Evil Coop resisting is a compelling one, and Gordon and Albert reuniting with Coop is very promising. I also love Kyle MacLachlan here, doing something amazing and weird with the character. But there’s a lot of strange, go-nowhere or opaque portions of the episode that just didn’t click with me. Once again, I don’t know what to make of most of this stuff, or even if I liked it or not, but there’s something kind of cool about the show existing in that zone of twilight, to where I don’t even know what I think about it.

(As a personal aside, Mrs. Bloom didn’t feel the same way, and gave up on the revival about 3/4 of the way through this one, with an amusing and memorable irateness at its very existence.)

[7.8/10] It’s occasionally hard to know how to unpack an episode of Rick and Morty. The show has so many layers to it, of irony, of parody, of character, of story, of theme, that’s hard to separate each into discrete groups and consider what exactly the episode is trying to say. I consider it a feature, not a bug, but it does sometimes make the show hard to write about.

That said, there’s a few things (I think) we can take away from the episode. The first is that, as evidenced by this episode and the series finale of Community, Dan Harmon does not particularly care for The Avengers and its related films, now the baby of his old friends The Russo Brothers. “Vindicators 3” does a nice job of parodying these films with the Vindicators themselves, poking fun at oddly specific or impractical problems with convenient or unnecessary solutions, and through Rick more directly commenting on them.

The show has fun playing around with colorful superheroes and mixing them into R&M’s sad sack world where people more readily die and friends and families are more apt to turn on one another than be united by the latest adventure. Bringing in Gillian Jacobs certainly helps the proceedings, and the escalation as the heroes keep getting picked off in Drunk Rick’s amusing Saw-like series of death rooms fits the weird creativity of the show.

Now I’m a fan of the MCU movies, so I’ll admit to bristling a bit at the criticisms of the episode, but I also think that’s kind of the point. The mouthpiece of the show (and to some degree, it’s creators) is Rick, and while Rick rails away at the formulaicness and lack of complication to the Vindicators (and by extension, The Avengers), the show also acknowledges that everybody loves them and hates him, and that it’s not unfounded.

One thing I appreciate about this season of Rick and Morty is how the show’s been committed to exploring its protagonist as a bad guy, and filter it through the lens of the people around him coming to realize that. Morty is his companion through all this excitement (and his sandwich shop punch card to pick an adventure is a nice touch) and seeing Rick not only rain on his parade and excitement about working with The Vindicators, but realize that his grandfather is the one keeping him from more of these sorts of adventures, that he’s being treated as guilty by association, is a very interesting tack.

Hell, I love the fake out of this one, where the group supposes that Morty is the only thing Rick thinks is worthwhile about The Vindicators, and the episode plays up a tearful drunken confession, only to reveal that it’s Noob Noob, the Mr. Poopybutthole-esque underling at The Vindicators’ base, whom Rick was blubbering about. More and more, we’re getting indications that Morty’s questioning how much his grandfather cares about him, how much he wants this insane man to be in his life anymore, and I’m more more and intrigued by it.

Of course, the whole thing naturally (and amusingly) ends with a big party and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles style rap about the heroes, but the scars are still there. As much as Rick derides The Vindicators (and by extension the du jour superhero movies) as insignificant relative to him and what he can do, they’re something that other people appreciate, something that makes him seem less uniquely brilliant and superlative, and maybe that’s what really bothers him. Rick is the type who always has to kick over someone else’s sandcastle, and Morty’s starting to realize he’s tired of it.

WARNING: THIS REVIEW DISCUSSES EVENTS FROM BOTH PT. 1 & PT. 2. DO NOT READ UNLESS YOU’VE WATCHED BOTH EPISODES.

[7.0/10] So full disclosure, I have no idea how to rate or review this. The first two hours of the revived Twin Peaks are, for better and for worse, much like the old Twin Peaks. There are parts of it that are unbelievably scary, parts of it that are mind-numbingly boring, parts of it that are transcendent and surreal, parts of it that are stilted and dull, and parts of it that just leave you scratching your head. Is it good? Is it bad? Is it something else altogether? I don’t really know. A lot of that depends on where Lynch & Frost end up taking this over the course of the ensuing sixteen episode, much of which the first two installments of this revival season seem to be setting up.

So let’s start with the best part, and what was the best part of the original Twin Peaks -- the Red Room sequences.

There’s a very fanservice-y part of me that is just excited to see Cooper in that room again, sitting across from The Giant, being directed by MIKE, hearing the backwards talk and elegant sound design of the footsteps. It is all familiar, but less in a “hey remember this” sort of way, and more in a way that makes it cohesive (but still different) than what came before. As much as is mystifying about these first couple of episodes of Twin Peaks, I really respect Lynch and Frost for how much they commit to the continuity of their series here.

To that end, the pair sprinkle in little reminders. The episode opens with the “I’ll see you in 25 years” exchange and includes a flashback to Dale chasing his doppelganger around the Red Room. And the revival, admirably, sticks with the idea that the real dale, the “Good Dale” as Fire Walk with Me put it, has been stuck in the Black Lodge for the past 25 years, with the Evil Dale out and about and causing trouble in that time.

And in truth, as awful as it is, there’s something captivating about seeing McLachlan return to the role of Dale Cooper, but play him as a villainous badass rather than a clean cut do-gooder. The Evil Dale has shades of a Tarantino-esque character, wandering into faraway places, disabling rifle-wielding protectors with the flick of his wrist, strong-arming information out of his criminal compatriots, and all-in-all playing the disciplined but effective black hat that we never really saw with The Good Dale. Watch out for the bad fans on this one. (Is Twin Peaks the kind of show that’ll have those sorts of fans?)

But he’s contrasted with The Good Dale still stuck in the lodge. Again, it’s a thrill to see all those familiar faces, plying their usual mysterious trade, but with enough twists not to feel like a repeat. There is a gravity that comes from seeing Laura Palmer reenact Cooper’s famous dream a quarter-century later, telling Coop that it’s time for him to go. There’s a tragedy in seeing Leland Palmer again, still appearing stricken and guilt-ridden about his actions, trapped there just as long. I don’t know what to make of the fact that The Man From Another Place has “evolved” into a tree with a bulbous orb on top of it, or the return of the white horse, but it has meaning when we see Mike once more, invoking the “past or future” aphorism froms Fire Walk with Me to suggest that Good Dale may have a way back to the real world.

The mythology of it is intentionally and effectively fuzzy. Evil Coop is or was in contact with Philip Jeffries and now someone else who knows about the lodge and offers cryptic hints about Evil Cooper’s plan to avoid being sucked back there. There’s a disruption (from the box?) that brings Good Cooper down and out. Hawk goes back to Glastonberry Grove (on a tip from The Log Lady) and sees those famed curtains, flickering like fire. Much of it is opaque, but that part of the narrative has extra weight from picking up the threads that the television series and subsequent film left off.

Unfortunately, the rest of the glimpses we get of the world beyond Twin Peaks (and even within it) are rather hit and miss at best. There’s an extended sequence where Matthew Lillard plays a local principal named Bill who seems to be implicated in a gruesome murder. This seems to be the way the show is setting up a new murder mystery in the vein of the original Twin Peaks, with Bill claiming that it was all in a dream, suggesting that some Black Lodge possession is at play a la Leland Palmer. At the same time, there’s a series of locals cheating on each other, dealing with the out of town investigator, and trying to make sense of such a dark thing happening in their otherwise calm community, making the whole thing feel like Twin Peaks attempting to replay its past with variations on a theme in North Dakota.

That’s also where we get the biggest snootfuls of Lynch and Frost’s sense of humor, between a nosy neighbor who can’t work out the process to get the key to the dead woman’s apartment and Bill’s wife who complains about her husband being arrested because they have guests coming over for dinner. It doesn’t really work for me -- coming off more like “yeah, I can see how that would be funny” than anything that actually makes me laugh, but it’s true to Lynch’s M.O. so I expect partisans will be pleased.

There’s also a big glass box, being watched by cameras and local students at all times, that has some connection to the supernatural. This is probably a reach on my part, but it feels like Lynch’s commentary on television -- people staring blankly at a large box, categorizing the nothing, seemingly captivated by it. It puts me off a bit, but I’d interpret how long Lynch’s camera lingers on Sam, the watcher, dutifully performing his duties is meant as a layered, almost meta reflection of the audience doing the exact same thing at home. The fact that Cooper gets semi-trapped in there or something works as an added dimension, that Cooper was supposed to be in the lodge forever, or at least for a long time, but that the people watching, the people who kept waiting for something new to happen, brought him back and messed with the process.

But even just taking it as text, the scenes with the box provide the most suplerative non-Red Room scenes in the first two episodes. I’ll say this for Lynch, he may not always be my cup of tea in terms of crafting characters or telling stories, but he sure knows how to do horror right. There’s something that feels almost out of a slasher flick about the young kids about to have sex on the couch, when some creature from a different plane attacks and slaughters them. There’s something terrifying about the only vaguely formed, gray phase creature coming at them again and again as blood spurts everywhere. The sound and look of the scene conveys the terror expertly, and it almost makes up for all the doldrums the audience had to suffer to get there.

Along the way there’s other cryptic glimpses as different corners of the world. Jimmy Barrett (of Mad Men fame) is under somebody’s thumb in Las Vegas. Niles Crane’s former fiancee Mel is investigating the murder in South Dakota. And somebody, somewhere, wants Evil Cooper killed. There’s enough wisps and suggestions to keep the mystery-solver contingent of the Twin Peaks fanbase happy.

That just leaves Twin Peaks itself, which appears to have been left in some state of stasis. Dr. Jacoby is doing some work with shovels that requires deliveries out to his hut that are hard to make out. (There’s a recurring visual motif in the episode of figures being shot from far away which I can make neither head nor tails of). Ben and Jerry Horne are still running things at the Great Northern, though both are practically unrecognizable, with Ben enlisting Ashley Judd as an assistant and Jerry (legally) selling pot and pot accessories. James Hurley and Shelly Johnson still hang out at the Roadhouse and weird bands still play there. And The Log Lady is still calling the sheriff’s office with strange messages from her log.

The sherrif’s office seems to have changed the least. Lucy (who’s barely aged a day) is still answering the phone in her usual manner, though she’s now married to Andy, who seems to have the same disposition he always did. They confirm both that Lucy had her baby, named Wally, who’s now 24 years old, and that they haven’t seen Cooper since before he was born. Truman is still the sheriff, but there’s two Sheriff Trumans, though neither is in. And Hawk is still the strong, silent type, not saying much but acting decisively. It’s like we never left, for better and for worse.

That’s pretty much what I have to say about the two-hour premiere for the Twin Peaks revival. The things that bugged me about the original show -- the stilted acting, the rough dialogue, the long go-nowhere scenes -- are still there (though they thankfully seem to have toned down the music a bit). The things that I liked about the original show -- the Red Room weirdness, its capacity for creating great horror, the striking performance from Kyle MacLachlan -- are there too.

You more or less get what you were promised here: a few answers, a lot more questions, and the style that Lynch and Frost delivered twenty-five years ago slickened up for the modern day. That means it’s still amazing at times, still an utter slog at times, but that with a quarter-century worth of mythmaking outside the show to contend with, Twin Peaks adds some intrigue and meaning to the events it depicts. I’m not ready to call it good yet (or at least not uniformly so) but it’s piqued my interest and provoked a response, which is more than enough for a show returning to the airwaves for the first time since 1991.

[9.5/10] So much to like about this one. The show is really moving at an impressive pace at this point, with events and aftershocks and reunions that would have taken entire seasons in prior years happening one right after another. But despite that, what I like about "Eastwatch" is that it features a lot of people reflecting and taking stock and worrying about what the future holds. For as much happens personally and in terms of setting the table for later events, this episode is kind of an inbetweener, one that moves our heroes and villains around before the next big event, but gets so much mileage out of the interactions and face-to-face meetings from the show's deep bench of characters.

In the big picture, that means that Dany and Cersei are likely to have an audience together, but for that to mean something, Jon and a motley crew of uneasy allies has to set out north of The Wall to retrieve a wight for proof of the oncoming invasion. That means that Dany and Cersei are willing to set aside hostilities, however temporarily or connivingly, and that Tyrion and Jaime get a tense but impactful reunion as well. It also means that we get a much tenderer reunion between Jorah and Dany, some tension between Arya and Sansa, and most notably, a tenuous union among Jon, Jorah, Tormund, The Hound, The Brotherhood Without Banners, and Gendry.

That's right! Gendry is back! And his repartee with Ser Davos, his instant rapport with Jon Snow, and his quick-thinking warhammer use with the Gold Cloaks makes for a fistpump-worthy return for King Robert's bastard. He's one of the last few major characters whom we haven't seen in ages, and it's a thrill of a return engagement from him.

But the thing I liked most about this episode is Tyrion's concerns about what kind of ruler he's backing. The moral and political questions involved in Dany turning the Tarlys to ash are many and thorny, but it's a very timely worry that a leader who's ready to easily threaten fiery death may very well be one who raises serious concerns. Varys's remembrance of his time serving the Mad King, and the way he left himself off the hook ethically for his complicity in the deaths of Aegon's "traitors" makes for an interesting counterpoint to the view of the bold leader we've come to appreciate over the course of the series.

On the whole, it's a stellar episode, filled with humor, character history, moral ambiguities, and the kind of high-minded reflection grounded in long-standing characterization that I really like. Best of the season so far.

[7.8/10] A lot of the first portion of the episode is a bit clunky, but I like the various reunions we get. Arya and Sansa are happy to see one another, and have common ground with long difficult journeys to get back home, but they're still very different people, and I appreciate the combination of warmth and distance between them. The same goes for Bran, who's full-blown Dr. Manhattan at his point, unable to emote or even really care about much from the present. And lord knows, Jon's reunion with Theon is, uh, tense. His business with Dany feels a little more convenient, with the cave drawings persuading her rather quickly (though there's still that whole "bending the knee thing" to contend with) and him being there just in time to give a tidy monologue about what Dany being a leader means.

Still, here it means her splitting the difference between trying a more humane method of conquest and just flying into King's Landing, dragons a'blazing, and melting the place down. She turns her ire onto Jaime's forces at Highgarden, blowing up his grain (and most of his men) to smithereens. It's one of the show's most thrilling action sequences, but also one of its most horrible. It's dramatic and exciting when dragon-backed Dothraki meet Lannister soldiers, but it's also something to recoil from when you see men burned to a crisp or screaming as they're consumed by flame. War is a terrible business, and as much drama and thrills as the show extracts from it, it also gives us people we care about on both sides and horrible ends for so many, that makes us, like Dickon Tarly, question how "glorious" it truly is.

[6.0/10] “The Counterclock” has all the elements of a good Star Trek episode: a clear obstacle, a funky sci-fi twist, and a personal element to anchor it. But the whole is less than the sum of its parts, mostly for some boneheaded choices in terms of how the central concept of the episode works.

The idea of a backwards universe is simple enough, and the sort of thing Star Trek has done before, whether it’s with the evil versions of our heroes in The Mirror Universe, or the anti-matter zone in “The Immunity Syndrome.” But while it works well enough to have people talking in reverse or the crew having to learn to operate the ship backwards, and neat to have to time a dying star in one universe with one being born in another, the episode gets pretty ridiculous with it.

For one thing, the notion that people are born as old folks and die as infants makes very little sense (though I want to say Voyager did this idea too). By the same token, the episode’s very inconsistent about how quickly people age and de-age for the sake of narrative convenience. It also makes no sense that the mere fact that Kirk and company are getting younger means that they lose their knowledge of how to run the ship, talk, etc. It’s the kind of lazy, “taking the concept too far” stuff that turns a neat premise into nonsense.

There is something cool about having Captain April and Dr. April, the first captain and medical officer of The Enterprise, aboard for The Animated Series’s last outing. The de-aging thing does provide a good excuse for Capt. April to take command, and again, having to line up the supernovas to get back to our universe is a solid setup.

But “The Counterclock Incident” messes up the ending pretty bad. For one thing, we have another “we can make them the right ages by using the stored transporter signal” situation, which I hate because that could solve nearly every physical problem our heroes have ever had. (It’s a shame no one thought of it when Kirk and Spock were turned into mermen.) For another, Mr. and Mrs. April decline to stay young because they’ve “already had good lives.” It’s dumb because they could still have great lives! They’d just be longer lives! It’s not like continuing to live and be young means your old life is erased! What an odd form of Ludditeism.

Anyway, if you can forget about the goofy backwards stuff and cop out ending, there’s a solid episode underneath, with some of the usual second act exposition, but an interesting setup and a straightforward, if appropriately science fiction-y problem for the good guys to solve. There’s cool ship designs, the fun of seeing the main characters as toddlers, and some of the usual space emergency action. It’s not the best note for The Animated Series to go out on, but the episode certainly has its moments.

As a whole, The Animated Series doesn’t deserve its shabby reputation. It has its high points and low points, but it has roughly the same batting average that The Original Series did, and typically feels very much of a piece with its forbear. There are some issues with the stiffness of the animation, but there were also issues with the stiffness of Shatner’s acting in the live action show, so you win some you lose some. Still, the show offered as much creativity, invention, and fun as its predecessor, and deserves its place in Star Trek canon.

(On a personal note -- so ends my journey through the episodic incarnation of the original cast’s adventures. I still have six movies to go, and plan to rewatch the episodes from later Trek series where the original castmembers show up, but this is still something of a point of demarkation. It’s been very interesting to me seeing the early incarnation of a franchise I love -- the conventions of the time and the tropes that would be solidified for the series. The watch-through has had its ups and downs, but there’s been plenty of brilliance in it, and I’m glad to be more fully versed in the iconic beginnings of this hallowed series of shows, movies, and more.)

[4.5/10] Oh Twin Peaks. If you can’t make me care, the least you can do is make me laugh, and “Miss Twin Peaks” at least gave me that. Almost nothing about the Windom Earle storyline has worked, but god help me if seeing him not only dress up like the Log Lady, but bonk Bobby Briggs on the head with his log, cracked me the hell up. (Why couldn’t you have done that sooner, Wind-y?) I’m not made of stone. Putting your uber-evil, scenery-chewing villain in the getup of your town’s oddest oddball (which is saying something) and having him cavort around and give the ol’ el kabong to nudniks tickles my fancy.

So did Donna’s story here, where by god Donna is uncovering secrets and she has feelings about that! Her overdramatic confrontation with her parents in her bow-heavy prom dress lookalike is the kind of overwrought nonsense this show delivers on a regular basis. She also confronts Ben Horne about it, and her mouth-covering gasp is the kind of reaction you look for on a telenovela. I guess they needed something to do with Donna now that the Laura stuff is finished and Bobby’s been either off the show or embroiled in his own terrible storyline, but it’s cheesy to begin with and Lara Flynn Boyle isn’t up to it.

The same goes for poor Heather Graham who, it’s increasingly clear, must have been to five acting boot camps between now and when her movie career kicked into gear, because she displays all the acting talent of teleprompter come to life in this series. That would be fine if she were one of Twin Peaks’s many picked-up-and-forgotten side characters with little to do, but she has to make a heartfelt expression of love to Cooper and an impassioned plea for the environment at the pageant, and neither land. That wouldn’t be so bad, except that (a.) the love part is supposed to seal the tragedy and threat vis-a-vis Cooper and (b.) the speech is supposed to be what wins her the Miss Twin Peaks pageant, so when two major events happen as a consequence of these things, the reaction is a great big “huh?”

That’s right! True to the title’s promise, we’ve made it to the Miss Twin Peaks competition, and Annie’s game-winning oratory seems even sillier when Audrey gives a much more convincing and compelling speech about two minutes earlier. Lana, the probable succubus, fails in her attempt to rig the contest by sleeping with Dick Tremayne in a closet (something The Mayor is oddly okay with), and by doing a contrived bit of “jazz exotica.” And we round out the talent show portion by revealing that, what do you know, Lucy is a pretty great dancer! (She also picks Andy as her baby-daddy, hopefully ending that terrible plotline forever.) Nobody else involved has much to do, which is kind of a shame since Shelly, of all people, seemed to be the most hopeful about this gig.

But mostly, it’s all a contrived setup for Annie to win and for Windom Earle to attack. I’ll admit, there’s something cool, albeit cheesy, about the strobe light effect, and Earle mugging his way through the crowd while Cooper looks on in shock, but it’s a predictable, all too neat end for everything involving Earle, this contest, and the old love triangle involving Cooper and his former partner. (The episode also has Earle clumsily deliver the information that he did, in fact, kill his wife Caroline.)

Which leads to what is probably my biggest beef with this episode -- the literalizing of Twin Peaks’s mythology. I’ll admit, it’s a very tough line for any supernatural-themed show to walk, because you want the magical elements of your story to feel like they make sense, but you also want to ensure there’s a certain degree of mystery or unknowableness to them as well, or it feels like every problem is solved by just following the recipe and baking your mundane-but-technically-magical cake.

Spelling out so many details about Bob and The Black Lodge and the cave pictogram make the whole “evil in these woods” -- one of the few elements that I liked about this show early in its run -- into run of the mill B-movie supernatural thriller material. The Black Lodge is now a literal place, and Bob comes from there, and you can only get there from a certain place and certain time. We may as well have Link assemble the seven magical amulets to open the gate. The unexplained origins and abilities of Bob and his evil and the possession that came with gave the whole thing a certain power. Making it so rote and ordinary takes a lot of that away.

It doesn’t help that the key to opening this portal (which, I imagine, will work out about as well for Windom Earle as it did for the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark), is the combination of love and fear. What do you know! Annie has both! Love for Cooper! Fear of Earle! It’s all too simplistic and convenient and contrived, and turns one of the few cool things about Twin Peaks -- its mythos -- into a bargain basement fetch quest. (One deciphered, appropriately enough, by a dolt like Deputy Andy.)

As usual, there’s other minor, mostly pointless developments along the way too. Nadine suddenly seems jealous at the news that Ed and Norma plan to get married (and crushes Mike’s arm for his troubles). Andrew Packard plus Pete and Catherine Martell continue to play The Da Vinci Code with Eckert’s box to my continuing disinterest. Leo frees Major Briggs from Earle’s cabin, apparently wanting to save Shelly despite the fact that he himself was trying to kill her pretty recently. For the effort, Leo gets put in a ridiculous contraption that threatens to drop spiders on his head and Major Briggs is too brain-scrambled to be much help to anyone.

And so, Twin Peaks approaches its endgame determined to try to ruin one of the few half-decent things about the show. With any luck, there’ll still be a predictable but welcome “more than you bargained for” twist to unlocking The Black Lodge, but regardless, it reduces one of the distinctive factors of the show to a magical flowchart. At least the end is nigh.

[6.6/10] It’s appropriate that this episode opens with the face of Ted Raimi, because much of the best parts of “The Path to the Black Lodge” evokes the cinematography of him and his brother Sam in the Evil Dead movies. In several moments, the camera pulls back, or someone feels as though they’re being watched or pursued, in the same way that the demons or spirits that attacked Ash once did. There’s even a POV shot swooping through the woods for good measure.

In the episode, Twin Peaks gets literal with its demon. Several people in the episode -- a random lady, Pete Martell, and Cooper himself, start to feel their hand quiver as though it’s acting without their control. Only later, after the aforementioned swooping, do we see that it’s the product of Killer Bob, presumably trying to force his way back into the land of the living. His writhing limb is appropriately creepy (as most Bob stuff is). And while the notion that there is an actual entry point for The Black Lodge makes the show’s mythos feel a little too literal for my tastes, the whole in the ground where the infamous red-curtained room from Cooper’s dream is reflected gives the whole thing a bit of a charge.

I have to admit, as skeptical as I’ve been about Twin Peaks more supernatural side at times, it’s become one of the most interesting things about the show. The series seems to have dumbed it down a bit here -- Bob trying to break back into possessing people, the lodge having a welcome mat, and The Giant being much more clear than usual -- but it’s still a neat wrinkle to otherwise run-of-the-mill drama the show has to offer.

It doesn’t take a genius to see that the show is setting up something terrible to happen for the winner of the Miss Twin Peaks contest, but The Giant specifically warning Cooper off from letting Annie enter adds to the doomed quality of the event.

We check in with a number of potential contestants this week (presumably just to ensure there’s a wide array of possible victims). Lucy is going to enter, I guess because the baby could use the money. The probable succubus is still plotting with The Mayor to rig the contest in her favor. Ben Horne wants Audrey to enter so that she can become the spokeswoman for his cause. Shelly is practicing her speech about the environment with Bobby (the two have a gooey, disappointing reconciliation). I forget why, but Donna previously expressed a willingness to enter. And as just mentioned, former nun Annie is trading theologian quotes with Cooper offering a thin excuse for why she would enter. Who knows why exactly it will all go wrong, but surely it will, and Twin Peaks contrives ways to include every conceivable young woman in the contest.

The romance angles with these young women continue apace, only this time with a more sexual twist. Cooper and Annie are still a pretty disappointing couple. Again, I’m a fan of Heather Graham’s work, but she definitely seems stilted and overmatched here, with her line delivery seeming as though it’s being read off of cue cards without any convincing emotion to speak of. Annie and Cooper exchanging quotes feels like the show trying hard to show there’s a connection between them that the chemistry just doesn’t support. And Annie telling Cooper she wants to sleep with him feels out of nowhere and out of step with the character we’ve come to know thus far.

The same goes for Audrey and John Wheeler. The pair have a variety of missed connections in the episode, but at the last minute, Audrey manages to flag her beau down before he has to leave back to wherever it is he came from. I’ve generally enjoyed the two of them as a couple, but “The Path to the Black Lodge” really doubles down on the overwrought romantic drama, and it’s not for the better. The revelation that Audrey is a virgin kind of works -- the idea that her bark is bigger than her bite -- but it too comes out of nowhere and worse yet, feels like a thrown-in way to try to heighten the importance of her relationship with John rather than something that develops organically from the character.

In terms of other major storylines, Windom Earle continues to be an utter bore as he chews scenery in the most rote manner imaginable. The character is going for something like The Joker but comes off like an overactive toddler who hasn’t taken his medication. The cackling and faux-crazy routine still doesn’t work, and having him babble about The Black Lodge or torture Major Briggs for information does little to counteract that fact.

We do get some reasonably important plot details. Apparently the pictogram from the cave is a map to The Black Lodge. Leo is quietly (and mostly incompetently) planning a rebellion against Earle. And Cooper’s figured out that Earle has been toying with Audrey, Donna, and Shelly, and warns them to be on the lookout. It’s not much, but it’s nice to see the show at least moving the ball and bringing us closer to the endgame.

Otherwise the episode checks in with the other parts of the narrative that are rolling merrily along. Catherine Martell and Andrew Packard break through another layer of Eckert’s box and find...another box. Donna seems poised to discover that her dad is not her dad, which the show keeps dragging out. Lucy is going to “decide” who the father is soon. Some random guy who looks like Truman’s illegitimate son is working at the sheriff’s office without explanation. And Ben is seemingly committed to his “trying to be good” routine.

Again, there’s some force that comes from the fact that Twin Peaks is digging into its supernatural side once more. That latent creepiness carries the episode through some of its weaker points. But the predictability of the Miss Twin Peaks shtick, Windom Earle’s sideshow and the miscalibrated romantic stuff drags much of the rest of it down. This is still more watchable than the average episode, maybe because it seems slightly more focused than usual, but without the Bob material, it wouldn’t be much to write home about.

[8.4/10] Another quality episode in this short season, which is always welcome. I liked the apparent theme of people seeing one another in an unvarnished fashion, recognizing them for who they are, for good and for ill. Lady Tyrell recognizes that Dany is a dragon, not a sheep (or a shark, for my fellow Futurama fans. Nymeria recognizes Arya as something familiar, but also very different than what she was the last time they were together. Sam sees Jorah as more than just a plague sufferer, but as the son of a man who saved his life. Missandei sees Grey Worm for the good man she loves, regardless of the abuses, physical and mental that he's suffered. And Theon is not so lucky, when Euron and the carnage around him reminds him that part of him is still Reek, and that part cannot be so easily escaped.

I also liked the political business in the episode. It's nice that the show had Dany confront Lord Varys about his hand in her assisination attempt and his shifting loyalties, but his response -- that he truest loyalty lies with the common people, because that's where he came from, and her retort -- that she values his advice but would rather he tell her if he thinks she's stepping out of line than plot behind her back -- works really well too. By the same token, the dichotomy of "listen to your advisors and strategize to gain loyalty" or "go your own way, come in dragons blazing, and just take over" presented to Dany is an interesting one. Last but not least, Cersei appealing to her countrymen's xenophobic impulses to gin up support is an interesting tack.

Overall, it was a well-done episode of the show, that ended with some good fireworks (both figurative and nigh-literal) and had a good sense of character exploration amid the plotting and storytelling that is setting all our heroes and villains on a collision course.

[5.8/10] I’ll say this for David Lynch. I may not think much of what he’s done behind the camera on Twin Peaks, but damn if Gordon Cole hasn’t become one of my favorite parts of the show. There’s just something about his hard-of-hearing, chipper demeanor that makes him a nice compliment to Cooper (love their little joint thumbs up) and a funny addition to the show.

I wouldn’t have predicted it, but he actually has pretty great comic chemistry with Shelly. There’s something kind of neat about the fact that he can hear her, and Shelly’s bemused response to his ordering massive amounts of cherry pie and claiming to want to compose an epic poem about her is superb. And the whole exchange with Shelly playing telephone between Cole and the Log Lady is a fun exercise in farce.

The only catch is that it’s interspersed with scenes between Cooper and Annie. I have to admit, I found nothing offensive about Annie in her first appearance, but I get why she’s reputed to be hated by the fans. In this episode, the show lays the romance with Cooper on really thick and really fast, and the pair don’t have the chemistry to support that.

There’s something interesting in the premise of the character -- someone who’s had a suicide attempt, been shut off from a lot of the modern world, and is just taking her first steps back into it. (Her line about reintegrating it being like a foreign language -- knowing just enough to know she doesn’t understand -- is one of the few great bits of dialogue on this show). By the same token, the idea that she is her own brand of strange and that attracts Cooper is a solid idea. But the two of them making goo goo eyes at one another doesn’t really work, and there’s a lot of that here.

Thankfully, Annie provides some plot momentum as well, as she pieces together that the tatoos for Major Briggs and the Log Lady look like a symbol in “The Owl Cave.” Remember, they’re not what they seem! The show has started to get more literal with its mythos, losing the sort of mysterious nature and devolving into Da Vinci Code-esque symbol hunting, but it’s at least advancing the plot on the whole White Lodge/Black Lodge business, which is something.

Unfortunately, we also get Windom Earle entering the same cave, doing some Indiana Jones-style twist of the knob that emerges in the cave from Andy’s pickaxe-ing, and a seeing cave-in to end the episode. It’s another would-be cliffhanger that will no doubt be wiped away within the first five minutes of the next episode.

Speaking of which, this episode opens with an attempt on Sheriff Truman’s life from Eckert’s mistress. Cooper chalks the whole thing up to sexual jealousy from Eckhert, but it’s an odd thing, and the woman’s method of trying to strangle him is pretty odd. I guess she’s trying to make it look like S&M gone wrong or something? Feels like more weird for the sake of weird, but what the hell do I know?

We also get some minor progression, or really lack thereof, with Audrey and John Wheeler. They’re all flirty and have a big date planned, but Ben inadvertently messes it up by recognizing Audrey’s potential and sending her off to Seattle to do some business. I enjoy the back and forth between Audrey and John, but it needs to be going somewhere, and right now it feels pretty rudderless.

Speaking of which, Windom Earle also gets a face-to-face with Audrey, where he creeps her out doing his master of disguise routine in the library. I suppose it’s a fine scene, but why we need him interacting with all his “queens” ahead of time is beyond me. I suppose it’s supposed to be creepy, but instead it feels like an overacting version of dress-up. We also get another painful game-related metaphor, as Earle’s taken the time to affix the women’s faces (plus Cooper’s) to playing cards. The law of conservation of major characters suggests Annie will be his fourth “queen” so yipee.

Twin Peaks is also pulling a Veronica Mars here (which, in many ways, is a better done take on this same sort of mystery show set in a quirky town with a dark underbelly), as Donna discovers that her mom and Ben Horne had a thing back in the day, and the episode hints that Ben might be her real father. It’s a pretty dumb, soapy twist to pull out, and the show seems like it just needs something for Donna to do. God only knows where the show is going with Ben’s “I’m a changed man” routine, but it’s not promising.

Otherwise, we get a weird button to the story where, you know, Nadine statutorily rapes Mike and no one seems to be bothered by this in the slightest. We get a San Francisco postcard from James Hurley, which provides the nice reminder that we don’t have to see him on a weekly basis anymore. And there’s some an amusing running gag where the G-men trying to help Truman’s hangover by describing sickening dishes to make him puke.

Overall, it’s a better episode than usual, if only because there’s some legitimate plot progression and the worst storylines are kept to a minimum, and the addition of Gordon Cole is a shot in the arm for the episode’s comedy quotient. Only four episodes to go!

[3.4/10] Here’s the weird thing about Twin Peaks for me. I feel like, after twenty-five episodes, I pretty fully understand why it’s bad. (What is still a mystery, granted, is why people not only thought it was good, but so good.) It’s easy to point to the terrible dialogue, the convoluted plotting, the awful performances, and oh man that ridiculous music that sucks the ability to take the show even slightly seriously.

But then, the show will do something different, show a performer in a different light, and I start to question my diagnosis of the pathology. Sometimes, that’s good. Take Shelly for instance. Shelly has basically been a human prop on the show. She’s there for Leo to abuse, Bobby to fawn over then ignore, and occasionally do something sexy. The show’s never really developed the character beyond that, and so she pretty squarely falls into the unfortunate “sexy lamp” category.

But for literally 15-20 seconds, Mädchen Amick shows that she has at least a modicum of talent and personality. Her little routine pretending to do a Q&A session for a beauty pageant has her doing amusing character voices, creative facial impressions, and overall just seeming like she’s a person and not a prop. It’s a tiny thing, but it’s more than Shelly usually gets to do and it makes me wonder if someone I’d written off as a mediocre actress on the show just wasn’t getting material commensurate with or at least well-suited to what she can do.

The flipside of that is Michael Ontkean as Sheriff Truman. For the most part, I’ve found Truman to serviceable at worst. He spits out his fair share of the show’s bad lines, but he’s one of the more normal seeming people in Twin Peaks (not much of an achievement) and he’s one of the few performers on the show who generally delivers a believable, not overly exaggerated performance. It’s not exactly naturalism, and sometimes it tends toward the bland, but Truman seems like a regular enough guy which is what you’d expect for the sheriff of a small northwestern town.

But then you hit an episode like “Wounds and Scars” where, rather than playing the strait-laced lawman, Ontkean has to yell and weep and be an emotional wreck and god help him, he’s just not up to it. Again, the script doesn’t do him any favors, making him a generic mourner spouting the usual clichés. But when he’s supposed to be angry or suicidal or just despondent, the emotions feel insincere.

Giving him the benefit of the doubt, I was never invested in Josey as a character, so maybe it would mean more if the loss of her was something I really cared about, but still. It’s a sign that every performer has their strengths and weaknesses, and maybe there’s a version of Twin Peaks that asks different things of its actors: allows Shelly to have more personality, lets Truman remain the even-keeled normal dude, doesn’t try to hang so much on the emotional turmoil of James “I’ve never felt an actual feeling” Hurley.

One of the show’s strongest performers has always been Audrey, and Billy Zane isn’t bad either, which is why what should be another bog standard banality of a story -- young rich guy swoops in to save a local business and falls in love with the daughter of the business owner -- feels more vibrant than most of what “Wounds and Scars” churns out. Audrey and Zane’s character have chemistry, and it plays on Audrey’s sense of feeling lost and not understood in a nice way. There’s still as much cheese in their plot as anyone’s (and there’s an Attack of the Clones vibe to their picnic, of all things), but the talents of the performers make it work better than it has any right to.

What doesn’t work is the entire rigamarol around the charity fashion show. My lord, that scene just stretches on and on into eternity, jumping from dull story to dull story. Ben Horn and Catherine Martell taunting and being lusty with one another hasn’t been interesting for a long time, and it’s just interminable here. By the same token, I was naive enough to think the show had actually minimized Andy, Lucy, and Dick. But here they are doing a sub-Full House level comedy routine about a lumberjack fashion show and Dick getting bit on the nose with a weasel. It’s the broadest of broad shlock and just a bear of a scene to get through.

Windom Earle is also back to playing master of disguise. He’s such a bond villain type that I can’t really be invested in his story. I’ll admit, there was some juice to him pretending to be one of Donna’s dad’s old friends from medical school, and a bit from him seeming to sense Cooper’s presence, but for the most part it’s just cornball monologues and groaners.

Speaking of Cooper’s presence, we see him lock eyes with Heather Graham! She had to be super young here, right? Mrs. Bloom tells me that people hate her character, but thus far she’s unobjectionable, if a bit wooden in her delivery. Though again, like I’ve been saying, that’s not unusual for this show, and the lines the script feeds are no great shakes.

Otherwise, it’s business as usual on Twin Peaks. We get some hint at the supernatural stuff with Major Briggs and the Log Lady revealing that they have similar scars from similar white light encounters. Ed gets Dr. Jacoby to try to get him help explain divorce to Nadine but she’s still deluded. (Her “I think I’ve gone blind in my left eye” line is a big laugh, I’ll admit.) And Pete is freaking out trying to figure out the right stalemate moves for a game of chess in the world’s most belabored ongoing metaphor.

None of it’s terribly compelling, and none of it is especially well done, but as scenes like Shelly’s and Truman’s show us, there’s an alternate world where this show could have been much better, or, god help us, much much worse.

[7.3/10] I have to say, it’s nice to see Uhura get to be the driver of an episode for once. TOS was pretty exclusively the Kirk, Spock, and Bones show, with Scotty occasionally getting to be the main character for an episode, so it’s pleasant to get to see one where Uhura takes command of the ship, uses her wits, and saves the day.

The premise of the episode is somewhat silly, but nicely sci-fi. The Enterprise is in the intergalactic Bermuda Triangle (after coordinating with the Klingons!) just in time for the mysterious event that happens every twenty-seven years to happen. It turns out to be a planet of sirens, who lure men to their planet and suck their life force away after tempting them and plying them with this or that.

I’d almost call it a sexist metaphor if it weren’t for the fact that this is probably the most capable and sharp the franchise has ever made Uhura seem. Kirk, Bones, and even Spock get suckered in by their enchantments. (And Scotty sings an old Scottish air, seemingly just to pass the time). The episode drags a bit in places as this whole thing is obviously a trap and none of the men can seem to resist it, but that’s pretty much the point.

(I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that there’s some more great design work for the palace and grounds of the women on the planet. For all the stiltedness of the animation, the show does know how to make the most of the cartoon setting to create some nicely elaborate and beautiful “sets.”)

The only thing that really keeps this episode from being higher is that there’s a lot of extraneous, silly stuff in it. The women’s technology being operated by tones made me laugh out loud. The entire end bit with the men of the Enterprise being de-aged using the transporter was unnecessary (just have the women reverse the process or something) and opens up a big can of worms. And the whole belaboring the resettlement of the women on the planet felt like more than we needed.

Still, seeing Uhura and Nurse Chapel not only avoid befalling the latest alien wizards’ spells, but then taking control and winning the day, is a real treat. (And for a Spock-Nurse Chapel shipper like me, it was nice to hear a dying Spock call her Christine and implore her for help.) Another fun outing from the show.

[8.6/10] Game of Thrones, as a series, is always going to exist in the shadow of The Red Wedding. More than Ned’s beheading, more than Joffrey’s demise, more than the battles of Blackwater Bay or The Wall or Hardhome or The Bastards, it is the event that defined this show in the popular consciousness. For a long time, it felt like everything up to that point was building to that moment, and everything that came after was a consequence of it. The third season of this show was a focal point, with that mortal bit of matrimony at its center.

Season 6 of the series has felt more like a sequel to that one than the extension of the work that the show did in Seasons 4 and 5. It is the season of resurrection, one where we’ve witnessed the returns (and often demises) of those we knew long ago: The Brothers Without Banners, The Blackfish, Osha and Rickon, Benjen, Walder Frey, and more. Whether it’s the freedom of no longer being constrained by George R.R. Martin’s novels, or the knowledge that the end is nigh, Game of Thrones spent much of its sixth year tying off loose ends, often in typically lethal fashion.

That culminates in “The Winds of Winter” a season finale of beginnings and endings. It is the close of one epoch of the show, one that spun out from that Red Wedding and scattered our heroes across oceans, as more and more characters were introduced. All the monarchs of the War of the Five Kings are dead. Winter is here, but now the future is coming.

Before it can though, the last of the old guard must be washed away. The wildfire of the Sept of Balon does not match The Red Wedding for shock value, but it is still one of the show’s most superlative sequences. There is something slow and measured about it. It unspools over twenty minutes, and never feels rushed, lingering on the impending horror.

It’s one of the series’ most beautifully shot and edited sequences as well. It’s a series of contrasts: the light, meticulous braiding of Margaery’s hair and dress, the soot black finery of Cersei as she prepares for darkness, the sleeve of the High Sparrow and that of the King, spliced together at opposite angle. Adherents file into the Sept in symmetry, Grand Maester Pycelle is led into darkness below, Lancel Lannister follows a little bird into the catacombs below where lucid green liquid pools and portends beneath those who stand opposed.

It is not The Red Wedding. It is the end of The Godfather, the final attempt by the individual attempting to maintain her family’s power and position in the face of those who would take it in one fell swoop. The burst of neon flame takes with it the daughter-in-law who threatened to replace her, the zealot who humiliated her, the relations that turned on her. This is her moment, her last move to triumph, the willingness to leave the enemies bathed in fire like The Mad King once did.

It is to be a cleansing fire, one that clears away the brush that has stood in Cersei’s way and clears a path to the end of all these machinations and threats. She taunts the erstwhile nun who tortured her and sees that the favor is returned. This is her moment of glory, her revenge, her ultimate victory.
But everything in Westeros comes at a price. For all that may be said about Tommen, his suggestibility, his weak will, his propensity to be manipulated, he is a young man who felt the weight of that crown, who never seemed comfortable carrying it. When he sees that smoking crater, smells the stench of the lives lost under his watch, the sensitive young man can take it no more. His end is swift, balletic as he plummets from his vantage point. Cersei has what she wanted. The throne is hers. But as the witch prophesied, it has cost her the things in her life she loved most.

But it is the end of the last external threat, the last separate obstacle the show threw in its characters’ paths until the main figures of this story were set to collide. The Sparrow is no more. The young Tyrells are gone for. The Baratheons have fallen. Ramsey is dogfood. Slaver’s Bay is settled. The Freys are derided and neutered. The Three-Eyed raven has died and lives again. All that is left is to settle the great game once and for all.

In one corner is Cersei. When Jamie returns from the Freys, he sees his lover sitting on the throne, wearing clothes of mourning and of battle. Gone is the woman who smiled in victory in the flaming perdition she unleashed upon her tormentors; gone is the woman who crumbled almost imperceptibly to see her last child with each ounce of life stricken from him. In their place is a dark-visaged queen with a ten-thousand yard stare, one with nothing more that can be taken from her. All she has now is the throne, and a heart that’s been bled dry drop by drop.

On another shore is Daenerys Stormborn. She sets sail with painted ships and her dragons overhead. But she doesn’t not travel with Daario, knowing the opportunity cost of bringing a lover to the Seven Kingdoms when political marriages are expedient. Instead, she travels with Grey Worm and Missandei, she travels with Theon and Yara, she travels with Spider (who apparently knows how to book it from Dorne). And she travels with Tyrion Lannister.

The moment she and Tyrion share is one of those that points the series toward its endgame. After traveling the Dothraki Sea, after being stranded in Qarth, after what seems like an interminable amount of time learning to rule Dragons (née Slavers) Bay, she is finally setting on the path to retake Westeros. It is scary, and she confides her anxiousness to Tyrion. Tyrion affirms her, the way she cuts through his cynicism, and validates her unease at the grave and great task that lay before her. In return, she makes him the hand of the queen. It’s a meaningful gesture, after Tyrion gave his all to defend King’s Landing and was branded an outcast and traitor for it. For once, the things he can do, the gifts he can offer, are valued and have placed him at the side of a champion.

But in the way of that champion sits the man we learn is, thanks to the Three-Eyed Raven, Daenerys’s nephew. Jon Snow is not the child of Ned Stark and an unknown mother, but of Lyanna Stark and Rhaegar Targaryen. The cut between the face of the child in Bran’s visit to the past and Jon Standing before the great houses of Winterfell confirms the connection between those who may rule.

But Jon is not alone. He and Sansa have retaken The North and the lords and the Free Folk have pledged fealty to the White Wolf, the new King in the North (thanks to the irrepressible fireplug known as Lady Mormont). The Starks have been prepared for this moment from the beginning. The two of them have fought and suffered for this moment. Jon is uneasy in his father’s chair. Sansa has been through enough not to fall for Littlefinger’s pleasantries and manipulations. This is as much denouement from The Battle of the Bastards as it is a moment in its own right, but it is hard not to see these two young people who have seen so much, bracing for what’s to come, in front of raised swords and cheers that the North remembers, and not think them ready for whatever lurks in a murky future.

Amid all of this, Melisandre is banished for her hand Shireen’s demise. Lady Tyrell and the Sand Snakes form an alliance brokered by the Spider. Sam stands agape at the font of knowledge where he, like Tyrion, starts to believe that maybe the talents that seemed wasted in a hard world have a place somewhere. And there still lurks The Night King beyond the wall, the real battle that threatens to overtake any contest for the Iron Throne.

For once, Game of Thrones seems to narrow. While there will no doubt be more detours along the way, more unexpected turns and daggers in the back and marauders at the gates, the days of expanding this world are over. The Red Wedding is past. Its victims and perpetrators now a part of the same scorched earth. Too many have fallen since then. Those who survive now face the series’ end. The witch’s prediction comes to fruition; the Khaleesi sets sail for Westeros, and a pair of Starks preside over Winterfell once more.

After years of promises, seasons of teases, episodes and episodes of a telescoping world, winter has come; the board is set, and the last chapter of this story, the climax of it all, is about to begin.

[9.1/10] I sang the praises of D.C. Fontana in my writeups for The Original Series, so I won’t spend much time rehashing them here, but I’ll say this much -- she is such a boon to Star Treks of all shapes and sizes. I don’t think there’s a writer, particularly from the TOS-era of the show, who better understood that for all the science fiction wizardry at play, you have to nail the characters and their experience of all that futuristic brick-a-brack to turn out the best Star Trek episodes.

That’s what’s great about “Yesteryear.” It has a fantastic sci-fi premise that involves our heroes returning to The Guardian from “City on the Edge of Forever” and having more back-in-time adventures. I find it amusing that despite the kind of ominous threat and danger The Guardian posed in its first appearance, now Starfleet is using it to casually explore the past and employing it as a historical DVR. Naturally, this goes wrong, and when Kirk and Spock return from visiting the dawn of the society on Orion, nobody remembers who Spock is.

The explanation is a little headache-inducing, but also elegant. In this timeline, Spock died when he was seven-years-old. Kirk and Spock, who are sure that they didn’t interfere with the past in any way in their trip to ancient Orion (“I swear I didn’t touch that slave girl!”), try to piece together what happened. In a neat bit of clockwork time travel plots, Spock recalls that an older cousin, Selek, helped the young Spock when he was going through the Vulcan trials in the desert at the time of his death in this timeline. Though the memory is vague, the adult Spock realizes that he was Selek, and he has to go back through The Guardian now to complete the stable time loop.

Some of the chronological tricks used to get there feel a little contrived. Apparently the fact that Kirk and Spock were using The Guardian to travel back in time to Orion at the same time some other Starfleet dignitaries (including some wild pterodactyl man!) were reviewing the history of Vulcan at that time meant that Spock “couldn’t be a two places at once” and messed up the time loop. It’s kind of hard to wrap your head around, but makes enough surface-level sense to pass the smell test.

But what’s great about “Yesteryear,” and Fontana’s scripts generally is that the episode doesn’t just coast on the “hey, isn’t it cool to go back in time!” novelty of The Guardian. It uses Spock returning to his childhood home and visiting with the moppet version of himself as a means to elucidate the struggle Spock had growing up between honoring his Vulcan side and his Human side. It spotlights Spock’s difficult relationship with his father. It lets Leonard Nimoy shine as a voice actor as the elder Spock speaks knowingly with his younger self.

The best feature of the episode is how it presents the audience with the elder Spock we know and love -- stoic, measured, and disciplined -- and a young Spock we’ve never seen before -- headstrong, uncertain, and emotional -- and naturally makes the viewer wonder how he got from A-to-B. “Yesteryear” doesn’t give every detail (it doesn’t have the time afterall), but it presents a seminal moment in young Spock’s life that set him on the course to being the noble Vulcan man he is today.
That moment hinges on I-Chaya, Spock’s childhood pet sehlat. (Think of a cross between a dog and a saber toothed tiger.) It’s clear that the I-Chaya is very important to young Spock. His mother mentioned it in “Journey to Babel,” and this episode takes care to mention that it first belonged to Sarek so it’s a family pet and part of his legacy. At the same time, it’s clear from young Spock being derided by his peers as an “Earther,” warned by his father about the difficulties of their way of life, and speaking with a mother who wants to honor the Vulcan ways she’s adopted, that I-Chaya is Spock’s dearest friend and closest confidante.

That’s why it’s meaningful when I-Chaya saves young Spock from a wild le-matya (think of a cross between a dragon and a wolf), young Spock has to try to repay his friend. “Selek” helps young Spock figure that he needs to run to town to fetch a healer if he has any hope, disclaiming his prior practical jokes in the process. When the healer explains that I-Chaya is fatally wounded, young Spock has to choose between extending his furry friend’s life, which would be painful for it, or “releasing” him. It’s a choice between emotion -- wanting to preserve someone young Spock loves, and between maturity -- understanding that all things end and that the right thing to do is grant I-Chaya that one last kindness.

There is something poetic about elder Spock, in his guise as a distant cousin, teaching his younger self about Vulcan philosophy. It’s one of the most beautiful accounts of the Vulcan perspective Star Trek has ever presented. Spock speaks of Vulcans still experiencing emotions, but not letting themselves be controlled by them, of feeling grief, but only when a life is wasted, of accepting that everything ends but appreciating the time shared before that inevitability. The young Spock is clearly in conflict, struggling with whether he can be what his father wants him to be, whether he can find the center of himself. The act of the elder Spock giving him gentle guidance serve as a tremendous character-building moment for Spocks old and new.

There is something wistful about the elder Spock here, where recognizes the difficulties of those times but clearly appreciates his chance to revisit them from a different vantage point. His words to his father about trying to understand his son are about as sentimental as the Vulcan gets, and his half-joking admonition to Bones that, had things been different, the doctor might have had to calibrate his devices for an Andorian, show that there’s still a part of that playful little boy within the older Spock. (And as an aside, it’s a nice beat where the Andorian first officer gives Spock his blessing and goodbye.)

Time travel stories are often fun because they often take the shape of what-ifs. It’s exciting to imagine what might have been if some detail were changed, or gawk at the precursors and causes to the present day effects. But Fontana uses that to explore the distance between a child and an adult, those life-changing moments where we choose who we are, and the reflections on what we became and what we lost in the process. There is great poetry in that, a sort of it hardly possible outside of the science fiction context, and “Yesteryear” embraces it to the fullest.

[7.1/10] Hey! Most of this was pretty good! At least by Twin Peaks standards. This seems like a good time to mention that my ratings (not just for this show, but everywhere) are sort of series-perspective. That is to say, a 7/10 for The Sopranos might be a 10/10 for Agents of Shield and vice versa. I try to judge all shows against themselves, with some measures for absolute quality.

And yeah, if this were any other show, it’d probably be a 5/10 at best, but most of this was coherent, decently acted, and even went somewhere with most of its storyline, which puts it in rarified air among Twin Peaks episodes.

Let’s start with a sort of odd but pretty effective storyline. The show has seemingly paid off the Nadine/Ed/Norma/Hank love quadrangle, and in a pretty decent fashion too. I have to admit, as frequently as I lose patience with her storyline, I have something of a soft spot for Nadine. There’s something about the way she tries to be straight with Ed and “let him down” that has an air of wistfulness to it, the sense that maybe Ed should have just been direct with Nadine when she was sane, and that she’s far more concerned with his feelings than he’s necessarily been with hers. I’m probably reading too much into a cheesy storyline, but there was something melancholy about her breaking up with him, even amid the weird superpower and reverting to high school insanity of it all.

The payoffs with just Norma and Ed were not quite as potent, but still good. Maybe it’s just because the show has spun its wheels on Norma and Ed for so long, but the episode got something out of me when Ed bursts being the counter of the diner, declares that it’s their turn for happiness, proposes to Norma, and kisses her. By the same token, Norma’s encounter with Hank is too over the top for my tastes (“I’d rather be his whore than your wife” is such a hokey line), but I like the idea that Hank tries his usual tricks and puts on an air of contrition, and even goes to the point of threats, but Norma stays steely throughout. Maybe we’ll finally be rid of the albatross that is Hank on this show.

We also get Billy Zane debuting as some mogul whom Ben Horne helped give his start, returned to help a rejuvenated Ben get out of trouble by standing in the way of Catherine’s development of Ghostwood via environmental crusading. They’re clearly setting up some romantic tension between him and Audrey, and while it’s a little belabored (what isn’t on this show?), I can get behind it. Zane has a reserved quality about him which, despite the generic pretty boy love interest material the show feeds him, immediately makes him stand out on the show.

Hell, there’s even some amusing stuff here. Something about Pete and Andrew Martell laughing about smiley-faced breakfast while Catherine glours made me chuckle. I like the Martells better when they’re a little gleeful and chuckly about their evilness than when they’re dour plotters.

Speaking of which, the major fireworks around the episode center on the Martells setting Josie and Thomas Eckert against one another, convincing both sides that the other has betrayed and is ready to kill them. It’s more convoluted machinations, but again, there’s some joie de vivre in it that livens it.

That said, the real meat of the episode, as usual, hinges on Cooper. Him and Alfred trying to keep the info that Josey shot him (which makes no sense...I think) and lots of other from Harry has some weight to it. It shows the depth of their friendship that Cooper wants to be absolutely sure before he’ll move on Josey, and even then he tries to get her to confess first to spare Harry. Harry, of course, finds out in his own way and has his big dramatic moments, which he’s not quite up to. His shouting is pretty ridiculous and he doesn’t do emotional anguish well. Oh yeah, and Joan Chen cannot convincingly faint or die from poisoning or whatever (hopefully) killed her character to save her life.

Still, it’s a payoff to some long-running storylines, including the Josey-Harry relationship, Josey’s tete-a-tete with Catherine, and the newly ginned up feud between the Martells and the Eckerts. But we get a return appearance from Bob and the Man from Another Place, for reasons that are beyond me. Is the implication that he was possessing Josey too? Is he just appearing to taunt Cooper? And what the hell is the deal with the janky 90s special effects with Josey and the knob on the drawer? Maybe there’s some kind of explanation, but it felt like weird for the sake of weird.

Speaking of things that are hopefully gone forever, Donna seems to send James on his way, tying a bow on the whole Mrs Marsh storyline. But we couldn’t lose James without one more painfully overwrought rumination on love and what they’ve both been through. Feh and good riddance.

The last major storyline to get any juice in the episode is Cooper’s continuing dance with Wyndam Earle. The three young ladies in the town getting mysterious invites and all actually attending this cryptically-described get-together seems beyond reason, but whatever. Earle is back to monologuing with Leo (who is thankfully mostly mute once more), and sending Cooper tapes full of double-speak. It continues to be a weaker part of the show, but I suspect it’s going to carry us through to the finale.

Still, this one was, by Twin Peaks standards at least, a keeper. James and Josey still deliver terrible performances, but maybe they’re gone! Everybody else seems on their game in the acting department; the show closes the book on a number of persistent story threads in a satisfying enough fashion, and the truly awful plotlines and scenes are kept to a minimum. Maybe there’s hope yet! (Not holding my breath though.)

[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!

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.