This show can be so hit and miss. I actually found last episode ("Hole Puncher") pretty decent, a bit of an upswing, kinda fun. Then this one. Some good stuff overall, and the characters themselves are their usual fun, but... lots of sloppy plot-execution bits gluing the whole story together. And supposedly taking out one guard in his cell was enough for Murdoc to slip out of the entire Supermax prison?
Sigh.
Pondering whether to tune back in next season...
Is it too much that I almost want Kirkman to designate Agent Hannah Watts's new office as "The Division"?
Now that President Tom Kirkman knows that the terrorist conspiracy wanted him in position as the Sole Survivor and new President, maybe he should hang out with Kurt Weller and compare notes. #SandstormDidIt
I was kinda wondering if we might sometime later see Persephone again. Julia's little sparks trick at the end makes me wonder that more.
I'm just hoping that Winn's new friend doesn't turn out to be some sort of evil plant. Not that that wouldn't work story-wise, but that that approach is just too overused, and that, from what little we've seen so far, she has some potential to be more interesting than that...
Feels like some turning points for Will and Katie: they're going to have some fine-line juggling to do going forward to keep themselves (and the kids) out of serious danger. And I'm not so sure how Maddie'll react if/when they do get caught, or whether Nolan'll support her at all if she tries to help them.
Meanwhile... What the heck are those pods for? And what's so big that those furtive labor camp prisoners think will "change everything"?
Always interesting to see how many threads the writers have woven together for this season, and how they'll all end up tugging each other as they unfold...
Did anyone else find the DOSA agents, in particular, to push the campiness of the show quite firmly over the top? (I know the show leans toward the slightly-goofy campiness, but even so this seems overdone.) I'm hoping that that isn't a new trend for the show -- the idea that government agencies have noticed and started to react to what's going on makes sense and should happen, but those charged with said task shouldn't come off as overdramatized morons. (And they could certainly come up with a better name.) Hoping that line improves...
Woowww.
This was definitely not the season for successfully making deals with devils.
So much thickening of plot, so much dangling over cliffs at the end, so much to look forward to next season.
IMO, in some ways, this may have been one of Supergirl's better episodes so far. So much going on -- alien parasite, J'onn J'onzz's injury and the angst over the not-quite-a-match blood-transfusion (and what that might do to him later), James's dangerous new venture, Mon-El's budding self-discovery, Alex's exploding self-discovery -- and, for the most part, all nicely woven together.
My one gripe was how quickly and easily Dr. Jones (and, BTW, I can't say that name seriously without imagining a fedora and a whip) was brought from the Antarctic outpost to the National City DEO office without any real mention of clearing him of contaminants. Not even some sort of throwaway line that he'd gone through something to medically clear him. It looked like: scary five-millennia-old disease wiped out his whole research team but him, and we'll just pop him right back into a large densely populated city and examine him there. Uhhh, no. That could have been treated better. And much of what ensued depended on that.
But other than that... wow. I think we'll be seeing much more interestingness from just about everyone in the near future.
Fun stuff overall.
Favorite moment, when Barry's talking to Jesse about a lesson, powers, and precision:
"When you enter a new environment, you got to case every inch of it. You never run in blind...."
I was immediately thinking the obvious, appreciating the back-reference to who said those same words to Barry just a couple years ago, and--
"Oh my God. I've become Oliver."
--thank you!
Mack: "Did two fire dudes just drop into a warehouse full of fireworks?"
Coulson: "You had to see that coming."
Niiiice.
Fun Legends twist on a classic sort of plotline. Though I did appreciate the Yamashiro family name-drop at the end. Niiice.
Wow. When Tom Keen goes into something, he really does go all in.
A very different sort of episode than any Blacklist has put out so far, but... wow. Redd.
Well, I suppose if Mr. Nobody was going to bolster his post-revenge-high mood-crash by getting stoned on blue Curaçao and then stumble-magic his drunken way into a doomed corner (on Danny Street in a psychoactive paintingspace with... them) and then, at his desolate lowest, get pep-talk coached into wresting back enough narrative control to guide everyone else out while forgetting to account for himself...
As I now think back over the many weirdly assorted elements of this episode, they do fit together into a chaotically odd but functional collage. And, think about it: if the seriously wacky-weird world that is Doom Patrol is going to escalate all the layers of wacky it's built thus far into an appropriately wacky and intense climax (too soon?), that does sound about right, doesn't it?
OTOH, as the credits were first rolling, I did have a minute or so of "what in Beebo's name did I just watch?!" going on there.
The improbability drive was working overtime with this one.
After all that, I now have to wonder... Did Flynn lie to Wyatt about who killed Jessica (and Gilliam was just taking an opportunity to mess with Wyatt), or was Flynn trying to show Wyatt something more insidious (and very not-yet-obvious) about Rittenhouse's machinations, or...
Or perhaps Time just doesn't like to be forced into a paradox -- such as Wyatt going back in time to erase the event that formed his motivation to go back in time -- and so has a tendency to Nudge Things in ways that will keep paradoxes from forming, like the barrage of occurrences repeatedly getting in Wyatt's way of distracting Claire and Joel, something else killing Jessica that night to take the place of Gilliam doing so, etc..
And Lucy getting over her own personal "Nooooo! That's not True! That's impossible!" moment and confronting her father like that...
Redd just keeps unfolding new ways to mess up his own world, doesn't he?
(Knew that was coming back to him in some form; looks like it ain't gonna be a small one.)
So much depth of portrayal, all to support and frame the core realizations of the episode which can be summed up with:
"We fucked up with Nora.
and
"Take this thing out of me." "Why?" So that we can never come back to this place again."
This seemed more like a final redemption and righting of Kevin himself than it did of the world-threat Dad believed was coming. (I suppose the implication afterwards is that there was no eventful significance to the seven-year anniversary after all.)
In that sense, this episode also bookends very nicely with the next...
[after watching a short film depicting the newly supercharged I'm-a-real-girl-now Aida learning that Fitz still isn't that into her and having the mother of all meltdown tantrums turning her onto her new everyone-will-burn path]
And this, kids, is why we never allow inhuman children to go through the Terrigen Mist process before they have accumulated significant formative experience learning to deal with the ups and downs of life. Ever. Right, Agent May?
Oh, and, after Cat's rousing fight-back speech to the whole of National City, did anyone else feel flashes of last year's fight-back speech in Star City that led to the taking down of Damien Darhk?
There were definitely some weak plot-connectors in this one, arguably sloppily pasted together bits that felt like someone belatedly realized that the season is almost over and we're running out of time and we have to jam the President in there and this and that and...
The whole Air Force One sequence, the duh-what-did-you-think-was-going-to-happen shooting down of its escorts and then it. Sigh.
I appreciate that Kara wants to give Mon-El's mother a chance to surrender rather than die, but... This is Rhea. Stop seeing her as Mon-El's mother. She's not going to surrender or fight fair or do anything but Evil her Evillest Evil, more like a humanity-threatening disease than anything else, and reeaaally needs to be treated accordingly.
On the other hand...
Note to self: Whenever telling Alex Danvers to meet me outside, be sure to be very clear about what I mean by that. (And that parting shot... #like.)
And... "Do your thing, Artoo." Niiice.
"Uh, anyway, listen, if you'll excuse me, I gotta go find Rene and remove his head from his ass." —Quentin Lance
It would seem that one calls Oswald a "freak" very much at one's own risk.
Why do I feel that Sylvia is going to exemplify why the Poison Room is so carefully guarded?
We all thought we'd seen and understood so much about Oliver and his darkenss, but this episode delved deeper than ever into Oliver's dark relationship with his Капюшон. Something else, indeed. One hood, two shadows.
I did like almost everything about this episode -- except maybe for the "I built the control-Z gun, even though I have no idea why I did or what it does" enormo plot-shortcut. I get that they'd written themselves into a spot from which the Legends had an awful lot to recover from in two mere episodes, but... really?
And... even the pre-Legends Leonard, roguish thief that he was, happy to mess you up any number of ways while he's stealing from you, was never a killer. He actually specifically avoided killing. So I, of course, found myself rather disappointed in this new depth of cold. Makes me wonder what sort of madness Eobard fed Leonard while recruiting him -- or if the writers just forgot who Leonard was while shoehorning him in here.
But, other than those... lots of packed-in fun, from Mad Baking Chef Hunter to Unappreciated Savior Rory. And I even find myself agreeing with Malcolm: Damien is always good for pretty entertaining bad-guy monologue,
Wow. So much in this one. So much already well-said. I'll just add that...
Up 'til now, I was actually almost convinced that Adrian, after basically steering Mayor Queen into the cornered position of declaring The Green Arrow to be shoot-on-sight Public Enemy #1, was trying to get Oliver to confess publicly that he is The Green Arrow. A sort of long and twisted version of making him dig his own grave.
But, now, it seems that Adrian doesn't care about that at all. It was all more about breaking Oliver and his Monster. At least... it seems so... so far...
Wow. Quentin driving home that vanquishing the big bad Beast doesn't necessarily make everybody's everything go right back to happily-ever-after normal.
Well, Quentin, and what's floating in the Wellspring, that is.
Wally starts having taunting Savitar visions, so the team thinks Savitar might be able to spy on them through Wally, so the team cuts Wally out of the planning loop, so Wally doesn't know that the team has figured out that the remaining Stone sliver is the last piece that Savitar needs, so Wally tries to get rid of it by throwing it into the Speed Force (where Savitar is), so... oops.
Savitar's detailed planning around his deep knowledge of his enemies is not only freaky, but a little too very much like Prometheus's. If Savitar turns out to be Adrian Chase...
Gypsy's "Are you trying to Luke Starkiller me?" was such a little throwaway line, but I guess that's part of why I had to flail for the pause button while I was laughing so hard at it.
"Well, take care of yourself Gypsy. I guess that's what your best as, isn't it?" ;-)
