“The Quick and the Dead” isn’t an episode of Alphas that has me concerned about the show’s future. It’s not a failure, and many of the things that the show has always done quite well reassert themselves fully now that last week’s episode went through the process of reassembling the status quo. But I can’t help but feel that this was a frustrating episode as it fumbles the case of the week in favor of spending quite a lot of time developing the arcs and mythology of the season as a whole. The best scenes of the episode are its most minor, the kind of sequences where the characters chat idly, snipe at each other playfully, or as they continue to reveal that the damage done to them over the eight months we didn’t get to see still lingers.
Alphas was one of the big surprises of last summer’s TV season. It started out as an above average, but not entirely impressive series that slowly built out its characters and worlds until it seemingly pressed the self-destruct button on that setup as Dr. Rosen revealed to the world that Alphas existed. It was basically the TV equivalent of Tony Stark’s bemused last second confession that he was Iron Man after all at the end of the first Iron Man film. Unlike that reveal though the folks behind Alphas, including new showrunner Bruce Miller had to figure out how to make that revelation work as a weekly television show. Sadly, and not unexpectedly, they don’t fully commit to completely reinventing the series. Much of the premiere is concerned with getting the band back together, and in doing so setting them up in a scenario that allows them to chase down rogue Alphas while subtly clashing with their government overseers and trying to determine just what Stanton Parish’s plan is. In other words, it’s the first season all over again just with a new coat of paint. The government has largely quieted Rosen’s attempt to spill the beans on Alphas, and while word on them is out it seems that only the fringes of society really accept that Alphas are real.
Mad Men is a show about advertising, and more than any other season, its fifth has been about the ways its characters have consistently sold themselves on the dreams they believe they want. The perfect life, the better job, the security of more money, and the illusion of happiness. Every character buys into those fantasies until they somehow achieve them, somehow come closer to realizing that what they wanted isn’t really what they want, and every time they brush up against that fact they run, terrified that all they’ve worked for is just one big lie.
Surprisingly, it’s Pete Campbell who articulates all this after he realizes that the woman he’s been having an affair with has had her memory of their time together erased due to electroshock therapy. He has a stark moment of clarity, seeing her returned to a blank slate, naively happy, that his affair and all he’s done is much the same. His life is some blank attempt to copy those he admired, most notably Don Draper, but there’s no passion or love in it. It’s no wonder then that Don was so perplexed by Pete’s indiscretion at the whore house the partners visited in their pursuit of Jaguar earlier in the season. Don’s so convinced that the “typical” lifestyle he and Pete are seeking is the way to happiness that he was confounded that anyone would throw it away, even though he did just that with his first marriage. There’s a longing in these characters that they can’t escape, they’re selling product every day, but they’ve bought into that same product for ages and they’re struggling to admit that they may not want what they’ve been sold.
The second season finale of Game of Thrones is something of a marvel and just about as perfect a season finale as I can remember. It’s a grand affair, it would have to be considering how many plot threads the season and series has in motion at this point, but it’s one that never loses track of the subtle details and small moments of all those involved in the events. Indeed, it orchestrates itself around the fundamental act of making a choice. The events of the season have weighed heavy on seemingly every character, and as things wind down to a stopping point for the year all are asked to take account of their situations and reflect on just what it is they want. It’s a perfectly apt thematic spine for a finale as it allows for both reflection on what has been and dwelling on what is to come. Every character is faced with at least one crucial decision or moment of action that will define their course forward in the series and just what it is they stand for and it’s genuinely thrilling to see those choices made, even if they come during conversation rather than at the point of a blade.
Unlike last season, which elided Robb’s first major victory in battle against the Lannisters, this season fully indulged in showing the viewer the Battle of the Blackwater. The entirety of the penultimate episode takes place at King’s Landing as Stannis’ forces finally reach the walls of the city. It’s a frequently thrilling episode, and Neil Marshall proves more than up to the task at capturing the rhythm and flow of a battle, but it’s also an episode that points out why these kind of confrontations are to be used sparingly. It works here, mostly, but there’s also a tinge of hollowness to the proceedings. Much of the episode is built around the myriad characters grousing about the horrors and indignities of battles such as these, but the focus on the carnage and Marshall’s at times overindulgence in gore effects makes the proceedings a bit too voyeuristic. It’s not like I’m thrilled to see a man’s head caved in by a falling rock, but there’s a certain perverse excitement in it all the same that the episode never quite mitigates effectively.
Just about any type of art requires the audience to suspend their disbelief to at least some degree. TV generally asks just a little bit more of its viewers, we know that a series can’t really change, it won’t simply end Emily’s quest for revenge at the end of the first season and happily pair her off with Jack, but on some level we need to buy into that as a possibility for an episode like “Reckoning” to work. We have to believe in Emily’s joy at the possibility of being with Jack for us to be truly heartbroken at the sight of a returning Amanda whose pregnancy has crushed any hope of the pair uniting. What this finale made me realize was that I really just don’t care about almost any of the characters on this show, Nolan being the main exception. When the revelations and cliffhangers start piling up at the end of this episode I should have been left breathless and wrapped up in the emotional wringer the characters were being put through, instead everything felt like rote obstacles that needed to emerge so the series could keep moving forward. I could only see the artifice of the storytelling and was unable to get swept up in the rush towards the episode and season’s ending.
For the second season in a row it looks like Game of Thrones is going to be throwing the majority of its big, climactic moments into the penultimate episode. Just about everything in “The Prince of Winterfell” is dedicated to keeping the many plates the show has put into motion spinning. There’s some progress here and there, Robb and his lady friend Talisa finally act on their long brewing attraction, but more than anything else this is an episode filled with people contemplating just how bad things are about to get and desperately hoping that their terrible fates can somehow be avoided. If there’s one constant in nearly every storyline in Game of Thrones at this exact moment it’s that everyone seems to be utterly fucked.
I don’t quite know where to start when it comes to talking about tonight’s triple shot of Community, a review that breaks each episode out into its own separate portion doesn’t feel quite right, but a single, massive mega-review feels like it wouldn’t really do justice to them as individual episodes. That’s the thing, these are most certainly the conclusion of the season, “Digital Estate Planning” less so than the second two parts, but they’re all discrete episodes with their own stories to tell. Part of what surprised me about that was the fact that Community had seemed to be launching into a more nebulous mega-arc as it neared its third season finale. The show had become much more serialized this year, threading in smaller story beats and seemingly building to a massive conclusion that would throw the group and the status quo of the series into question. To an extent, just that happened as the study group was thrown out of Greendale, but that story got wrapped up in the middle portion of this three episode binge, leaving a season finale that was a much more sedate and “normal,” but ultimately no less moving, episode of television.
As excited as I was about Revenge rocketing forward and catching up with the season opening engagement party well before its season finale, I’ve become convinced that it probably wasn’t the best idea. I’ve come to really appreciate this series over the course of its first season, but this final stretch of episodes has displayed the limitations of the show and its writers. Revenge is a lot of fun, but it’s not the most original or inventive series around. The surprising appearance of the engagement party in episode fifteen was one of the boldest moves the writers made, but they’ve floundered to a degree in its wake. On a better show that bit of misdirection could have served as a surprising transition into the new endgame for the season, but Revenge’s writers have struggled to pin down just what the series is building to this year when they removed that built in season ending hook.
For a lot of Smash’s first season I thought the better show I had seen in the pilot was being crushed. Forgotten and marginalized by the safer, more generic soap the series was becoming. The season finale didn’t totally allay those fears, but it shows more of that series I hoped Smash would be than any other episode since the pilot. “Bombshell” doesn’t completely right the ship, indeed it has more than enough head scratchingly poor decisions and reprises of awful plots, but it also springs to life as the series is forced to reorient itself on what it has been building to all along, the musical.
I was always going to come back and at least sample season 2 of Smash, changing showrunners is pretty much a guaranteed way to make me take another look at an underachieving series, but even if Theresa Rebeck was going to stay on as showrunner this episode probably would have convinced me to give Smash one more shot at making things work. Part of that is because it clears out some loose baggage, Ellis finally gets his walking papers from Eileen after he admits to poisoning Rebecca and while he claims that he’ll be back it’s a story and character that could easily be dropped in between seasons after all the backlash against him, but it’s also because the show is extremely compelling when it gets down to watching these people work. The episode has more than a few scenes that quietly delve into the professional lives of these characters and it’s kind of genuinely thrilling to see the give and take between Tom and Julia as they struggle to conjure up a new number with only hours before the show is set to start. The pair gently bicker and poke at each other while still forging ahead. The scenes almost effortlessly evoke the familiarity bred from years of friendship and working together in ways that feel real.