This week, we've got Fringe, Dexter, House, Sons of Anarchy, V, It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia and The Prisoner.
The Venture Brothers: "The Revenge Society" by Matthew J. Brady
This is one of those episodes where characters mock the goofy premises of their world, but still take it deadly seriously, which is kind of one of the foundations of the shows appeal. They recognize the tawdriness, unhappiness, and failure of everything around them, but hey, when your head is attached to another person's body, you gotta just keep doing whatever you can to survive, right? And that's exactly what happens here, with Phantom Limb returning to get revenge on the Guild of Calamitous Intent, having renamed himself, um, Revenge. The opening his pretty hilarious, as he breaks in and picks off several of the silhouetted members of the tribunal that we saw in last season's premiere, revealing them to be a bunch of old white guys who take themselves too seriously ("These rooms have no alarms or anything; I don't even know where you guys are!" "Are we even in the same building?"). He then dismembers a couple of them and sews one's head on another's body (with the help of a kidnapped Billy Quizboy, who he blames for helping with the experiment that originally deformed him) as part of some sort of nonsensical scheme to have them read the Guild's charter and regain leadership (also, he turns out to have gone kind of crazy). That means a showdown of sorts with David Bowie, the current Sovereign ("You! Call Iman. Tell her I'll be on tour."), as well as an anticlimactic resolution of sorts to the ORB subplot that was introduced last season.
Surprisingly, the best stuff here comes from the double-headed Guild guys, who manage to make their situation pretty hilarious, fighting over control of the body and arguing like doofuses. It seems surprisingly fresh, even though it's a concept that's been done before, whether in animation (Futurama), or in live action least as far back as the movie All of Me. In fact, Phantom Limb yells at them for becoming a vaudeville routine ("I've been piloting this bone-bag for like 73 years; I'm not giving it up to a talking pimple!" "Talking pimple that can make you...noogie yourself!"), so it's a routine that probably dates back much farther. Maybe it's that the characters are pompous old men ("I'm afraid the streets are overrun with teenage gangs." "They're cruel, and they will undoubtedly taunt us because our trousers are not in style anymore!"), or it might just be good writing and voice acting. Whatever the case, they make a good enough of a comedy duo that they had better show up again in the future. We also get some good character moments from the regular cast, as Sergeant Hatred has another bathroom-floor crying jag, this time about Hank not liking him, and Dean and Dr. Venture bond over the easy cleanability of fear-induced vomit off the super-scientist's speed suit.
So, yeah, good times as always, with that character stuff selling everything as usual, not to mention the funny details like Billy spending most of the episode tied up in a sack or the oft-hilarious dialogue ("What is this, an episode of Gilligan's Island? Everybody gets hit once, and they are instantly unconscious?"). Forward plot motion of a sort? That's cool, but it's just icing; the cake is spending more time in this world, and laughing and laughing the whole way through.
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia – “The Gang Gets Racist,” “Charlie Wants an Abortion” by Martin Brown
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s pilot episode, “The Gang Gets Racist” doesn’t quite hint at the absurdist rabbitholes that the show’s recent seasons dive down, but it does clearly outline the genius of its creators—not only as comics, but as TV business people. Sunny has become known for its irreverent treatment of hot-button issues, and the subjects of racism and homophobia approached in the first episode couldn’t be more blatant targets. White dudes’ befuddlement at black slang, someone misunderstanding advances by someone of the same sex, quotes taken out of context that sound racist—this is all tired ground, but “The Gang Gets Racist” plows it again, happily. It’s a testament to the four major performers’ chops—their willingness to underplay scenes, their perfect timing, their abilities to keep pushing the story forward while running off on tangents—make the clichéd subject matter an afterthought. It’s a testament to their acumen that they chose to kick off their series like this—even though the jokes are well worn, there’s still a thrill to watching the cast have the balls to make them.
Of course, the racist episode could only be followed by the abortion episode. Mac, Dennis and Dee each take sides on the controversial issue and then use their points of view to help them achieve their own selfish goals. Meanwhile, Charlie looks after a ten year old kid that may or may not be his. Paired with “The Gang Gets Racist,” “Charlie Wants an Abortion” proves that, while it took the cast a couple of seasons to develop its comic voice, the characters and the relationships between them came fully-formed out of the womb. Even before the writing has had time to catch up with the talent, it’s obvious that there’s something special about Sunny—and that mostly has to do with the rapport of the actors. In the meantime, the show hits its funniest moments when it’s unafraid to return to the comedy classics, like saying “Why?” after everything someone says and ten year-olds vomiting and dudes getting kneecapped with pool cues.
Fringe: "Of Human Action" by Matthew J. Brady
God, this show is stupid, but that's what makes it enjoyable, since it tries so hard to be smart. This episode features what seems at first to be a nice bit of misdirection, until you think about it at all and realize it was just a bunch of cheating. The plot involves the kidnapped teenage kid of a scientist at the evil Massive Dynamic corporation, and the first scene sees a standoff in which some cops confront the kidnappers, then suddenly freak out, with one of them walking off a ledge and falling to his death and another shooting everyone else and then herself. Mind control! One of the kidnappers, an actor who looks kind of like Tom Savini, does some hilarious work here, squinting and arching his eyebrows like a goofball, so he must be the mind controller. But! When a big showdown involving a bunch of FBI agents, a ransom handoff, and a ridiculous scheme of Walter's involving a bunch of headphones and a white noise-emitting teddy bear (if you're wondering, it's because he thinks the mind control is auditory, but I'm sure the FBI has some noise-cancelling audio equipment on hand) occurs, it turns out that the real kidnapper is the kid himself. Oh snap, didn't see that coming! Of course, that's because he looked terrified in every previous scene, and the camera focused on Mr. Evil Squinty-Face. Cheating! And what was going on in that first scene anyway? Did the kidnappers call up the cops for a meeting on the roof of a parking garage, just for the hell of it?
So anyway, the kid escapes, with Peter as his new hostage, and they take off on a cross-country chase that involves a lot of grimacing and grunting as Peter tries to fight his mind control (which, by the way, was brought on by him stealing experimental brain-wave-enhancing drugs from his dad, because why not?), and there's a brief bit in which the government thinks the kid is some kind of foreign agent and tries to call the FBI off the case, but that goes nowhere, then there's a big showdown in which the kid faces his long-absent mother and has Peter shoot Agent Broyles (who seems to be getting a lot more field action now that Charlie is dead) without killing him, because Peter must be an awesome brain dude to resist so well when everybody else just took themselves out without much struggle. Finally, there's a car chase with one last bit of pseudoscientific silliness as Walter uses some sort of brain EMP to knock out the kid for a few seconds so Peter can crash the car. Why Peter wasn't affected by the brain zapper, I have no idea.
But even though it's pretty ridiculous, that's kind of to be expected at this point. At least this episode did some interesting stuff, like staging that FBI showdown with nothing but white noise playing on the soundtrack, and Joshua Jackson was surprisingly good at fighting with himself (he's no Dwight Schrute, but who is?), although he probably burst a few blood vessels in his face by holding his breath to make it red. And there's a decent coda at the end that shows some real misdirection, as we learn that the kid gaining mind control was all part of a Massive Dynamic experiment, reminding us that even though they've been helpful lately, they're still an evil corporation, which should have been obvious when Leonard Nimoy threw Olivia out that skyscraper window. Live and learn, I guess.
The Prisoner - "Arrival" by Sean WitzkeEverything looks cool, means nothing. The big difference between the original Prisoner and whatever the fuck this is so far is that the original one had the balls to use it's own ideas. Which isn't to say that this a total ripoff. No, it's just fucking stupid. These cocksuckers want to make Lost, they want to make Battlestar Galactica, they want to put a fresh spin on something outdated. The Prisoner isn't outdated, it can't be, because it's far too fucking singular for it to have a datestamp. The guy who played Jesus plays No. 6, because apparently they didn't see Frequency. Actually, Dennis Quaid would have been better, he would have just portrayed "out-of-his-element" better. The guy who played Magneto is playing No.2. That's better, but it's all kinds of fucked that they gave him a convalescent wife and a teenage kid and everyone walks around in abject fear of him. That's fucking stupid.
We find out that this No. 6 worked at a company that processes CCTV footage from around the world. He's not a spy, he's an analyst. They replaced the man who could have been Bond and the Saint with an analyst. I guess that could have worked, like that Phil Hester Timselip thing where the Punisher was an accountant and all he did was even out civilian casualty numbers with criminal deaths? That actually was pretty cool, so the idea isn't the problem. Really, this show should have taken another person who is very different from 6. As long as they remain unbreakable, you could've put any badass through the same thing. Someone like Omar Little.
Quirk has replaced surrealism, flat Lost-style harsh lighting has replaced set design, the assaultive cutting style of the pilot is now faux filmic shifty blurriness of really bleak desert and drab interiors, eerie, unsettling acting of the BBC day players is now actual sympathetic Law and Order witness rejects, fine-ass 60s nymphs replaced with limey botox victims. The constant, banging questions of "WHY DID YOU RESIGN?" and " WHO IS NO.1" they're not here. The drugs-and-brainwashing-then-more-drugs-get-in-the-operating-chair-my-dear-chap sense of menace is gone, screaming fuck you into the face of everyone and everything around you because goddamn they will not have one miserable piece of your head that's gone too. It's paranoia on xanax, all the edges sawn off of the stark existential hole that is self vs. not-self. No this show is going to have 6 trying to function IN A COMMUNITY. That's what the ultimate individualist had in mind when he spent the last dozen or so years of his life trying to get a movie of his tv show off the ground, right? And I'm sure all he wanted to do was to use post-9/11 imagery of twin towers in the distance and cafe bombings and television clips shouting at us close up and blurry like its 1985 all over again. It's not awful, it's tedious and that's fucking worse. How dare you follow something like The Prisoner with anything less than your best or your worst, mediocrity is exactly the kind of thing that McGoohan was terrified of (that and gaining power and becoming what he hated, it seems). The whole point of the Prisoner, the whole goddamn point was that there was no plot the way that any tv series had a plot. Decades later we still don't know what order the episodes go in, we just now that the first one goes first and the last one goes last. The show, unlike any show up until maybe the last 10 years, was built on ideas. The whole point of the show was to show an individual being hammered again and again by the entire world around him. It's not class, it's not power, it is society as a whole, it is the entire universe against one man. Dropping another character into that scenario, maybe someone who wasn't an unbreakable unblinking ball of hate-fuck that is McGoohan - there's a story there. Getting someone to play McGoohan's raw unchecked individual intellect against a different environment (although who? Daniel Day Lewis is the only one who could dare).
Wait... Brian Wilson? Really? A fucking lava lamp? Suck my dick, everyone who worked on this shitty show. You held a fucking boom mike? You fetch a latte? This shit is still partially your fault. You could have fucking said something, you cowards.
We find out why he resigned. It was because his bosses at the cctv company wouldn't listen to him. He tells someone this unprovoked. Fuck this garbage.
Dexter - "Road Kill" by Tucker Stone
Watching Michael C. Hall and John Lithgow do acting exercises is fine and dandy, but it's a little obnoxious to see the whole "Dexter screwed up and killed an innocent man" subplot be treated as a mere obstacle to escape from so early after it had happened. But that's exactly what you'll see here--Dexter looked at some more of his victim's photography, claimed to be "disturbed" by it, and then he half-handedly used his supposed grief to manipulate Trinity into a road trip, never realizing that Trinity wasn't planning to kill anyone but himself. By the close of this episode--yet another ridiculously convenient scene, where Dexter ends up arriving just in time to "rescue" Lithgow from an attempted suicide, his bloody hands forced into the savior position due to the arrival of unwanted witnesses--Dexter's back to where he was before. With the season still hours from conclusion, it's difficult to figure out exactly how Dexter will pull off killing the guy--he's been seen operating under a false name in Trinity's presence roughly 800 times now--and his behavior is almost completely at odds with his previous excursions into predatory violence. While this episode presented him preparing a kill room for Lithgow, it was in the very hotel in which both men were staying and Dexter's entire behavior was completely at odds with what we know of him thus far. He was planning to kill Trinity, cut up the body, steal Trinity's car, drive the pieces all the way back to his boat, and do all of this mere minutes before the sun comes up? Crazy is one thing, but Dexter's never been portrayed as stupid, the whole marriage thing notwithstanding.
That's not to say that watching Lithgow emotionally terrorize a bewildered family in a hotel diner doesn't hold a certain amount of charm, it does, it did, yes sir. But when it's mashed up to the raft of clunky writing that bedeviled the lead actor as well as the horrifying prospect that Rita will apparently be getting more screen time with which to fend off the advances of a sleazy next door neighbor--seriously, we're coveting the wife now?--it makes for a boring ass way to spend an hour. Also, my wife has taken to making a retching noise whenever Angel & LaGuerta are onscreen in any capacity, a disgusting sound that only drives what was once a looked-forward-to portion of the week further into the make-believe obligation that it has most recently become. Five hours to go? I need to join a bridge club.
House - "Teamwork" by Tucker Stone
"Putting the team back together" episodes can be pretty entertaining, but House has gone to that particular well so many times that it can't help but be a bit mundane. Sure, there was another one of those Patient of the Week as tie-in, with a porno star raised in a Don't Take Chances household whose life-threatening illnesses stemmed from his parent's obsessive desire to keep him so fresh and so clean, clean, which is a rough approximation of the way Cameron and Chase have tried to keep their relationship safe from dirty old House, only to find that they'd gotten too crusty over the years to repair the damage done.
The problem is--well, besides the fact that it's just stupid, that believing Cameron's logic requires agreeing with Cameron's awful description of Chase as being little more than sock puppet weakling, too simple and pathetic to make decisions outside of House's domineering influence--is that none of it was necessary. The goal with the episode is a pretty easy one, and it's success is easily attainable as well. All that's wanted is for House to put together a team of doctors, solve a case, and be mean to Cuddy. See all the scenes between House and Taub--funny and smart. See the scene where House is mean to Cuddy--immature, but accurate and decently played. And while the Patient of the Week stuff is rote and lacking in inspiration, the truth is that those portions of the show are invariably rote, with dopey Dave Matthews plays a rutabaga stories far outweighing the occasional Zelkjo Ivanek hostage situations. Cameron doesn't need her hateful bile turned up a notch, she just needs to get the fuck off the team, a team she never wanted to rejoin in the first place. Simply put, it doesn't need to be this hard, it doesn't need to be this off-model. Having her recycle the old "I loved you" subplot from years ago while telling House that he's "broken" the man she spent the better part of two seasons claiming to love--none of this is fun, none of this is worth watching. (Not to mention the fact that Chase has actually become both a better doctor and person simply by hanging around and being the hot white guy that House has around based off accent fetishes.)
Admittedly, I'm not the best judge of this one. Chase has almost always been my favorite of House's Baker Street gang, and watching the show put his character through a random emotional obstacle course rivals 13-dates-Omar as my least favorite subplot of the series. And while there's definitely a part of me that's ecstatic about the possiblity of Chase being single again, as the relationship scenes with Cameron had rapidly turned into a weekly dive into a painful study of how badly these writers are at people-in-love, it's going to be a pain in the ass watching the weekly "Chase falls apart" show that the show apparently plans to create.
At the same time, this could begin the advent of multiple years of the Taub-en-House hour. That's the sort of stuff I wake up wishing for, so fuck it. Bring it on.
V - "A Bright New Day " by Tucker Stone
Yeah, so this isn't very good. It doesn't seem like it's going to get much better, either. They've got some okay moments, here and there, but one of them was killing Alan Tudyk a second time, and considering that the best part of the pilot was when they killed Alan Tudyk the first time--look, this isn't a fucking Radiohead song, where the repetition of various "raindrop" phrases on multiple albums speaks to some kind of tangled obsession. This is just a stunt based around the small portion of the audience that looks at Tudyk and goes "hey, I like that guy a lot", and while it was a decent stunt the first time, the kind of stunt where Whedon fans could share a couch with the don't-give-a-fuck-bout-writers crew and enjoy the shock on their own special levels, repeating it almost immediately--that's just fucking lame. Even lamer is that the second go around of the shock-kill-Tudyk stands out as the best part of the entire episode. (Is there a reason we couldn't see Morris Chestnut shoot his old revolutionary pal in the face? That would've been great, especially considering that Morris has already shown himself to be a fine killler-of-others type.) Instead, there's one of those terrible Transformers scenes where a boy and a girl use the threat of hormones to trick their mom and a horribly telegraphed scene where the lead actor finds the magic surveillance room that the aliens just happened to leave empty right at the moment when she shows up to try the passcode she just so happened to see somebody use earlier.
Yeah, I'm out. You see that puff of smoke? That's when I hit the ground. Tell my mom I wasted my life.
Sons of Anarchy - "Service " by Tucker Stone
Although this episode opens like the necessary epilogue that last week's "Gemma reveals all" requires, there turned out to be something quite different in store after the requisite "tell the club about my wife's gang-rape incident." Following in the same footsteps as shows like The Wire or the Soprano's, the scene began simply enough--Tieg (the man originally tasked with murdering Opie who ended up accidently murdering Opie's wife) walked up to Opie, talked to him briefly about his bike, and then, after a moment of strange confusion, blurted out the question he'd been holding back on for months. "Why was Donna in the truck?" Within seconds, he'd gone much, much further, and Opie had already ripped open his face with one of those many rings that all the Sons wear. No music cues, no dramatic lighting, nothing more than a moment of wearied confession followed by instantaneous brutality. Tieg confessed, he blamed the ATF, but before he was finished talking, Opie had torn off a part of his face.
I'm not sure what it is I'm missing about Sons that keeps me from joining it's more vocal supporters--smart, clever critics are fully behind it, pointing to it as one of the best shows on television--but it's hard to deny its nasty appeal when given episodes like this one. Watching an actor like Ryan Hurst obsessively track down and dominate each of the people responsible for Donna's death while believably choosing not to kill them, seeing Katey Segal turn a wretched and manipulative plot twist into some kind of long-form treatise on the stunted immaturity of the men around her, all of whom she clearly loves, and, as always, the raw enjoyment to be found when a bunch of hard men definitively say "We kill all of them"--no, this isn't the The Wire, it isn't Breaking Bad, and it isn't The Shield. It's a pulpy melodrama that gets most of its kicks out of a bunch of character actors who could probably play these roles in their sleep, and it's yet another chapter in the decades-plus story of how successful television can be when it focuses on a bunch of criminals. Sets are cheap, the cinematography is the 800th version of anti-art you've seen on any of these types of shows, and the "relatable" leads are played by a couple of pretty-faced chumps who lack the charisma required to seal an envelope. At the same time, it's a catchy, addictive show that I find myself looking forward to as much as any of the other crap I love. Whatever it is, the scenes from next week implied that the Sons are going to instigate an actual race war. If it were anybody else, I'd think they were joking. These guys though?
Doubt it.
-Sean Witzke, Matthew J. Brady, Martin Brown & Tucker Stone, 2009
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