Grimm Review: “Lost Boys”

Kyle’s Review

Grimm channeled Peter Pan with this week’s “Lost Boys,” and the result was a disturbing story—in the best way—that had more to do with Grimm’s ongoing plot lines than meets the eye. I’m not sure if Nick is fully back on the force as Monroe came to Nick directly when Rosalee gets kidnapped. I probably said too much already for folks who haven’t seen the show. It’s difficult not to give away things in this review, so consider this warning for the rest of the write-up. Wesen kids who ran away from the foster care system kidnapped another woman, who died accidently, and that’s when Rosalee gets snatched by the same kids.

These children force Rosalee to play house and that’s where you feel sympathy for the antagonists: it’s not that they’re evil; they want to be loved and taken care of. With the help of Monroe, Nick and Hank track down Rosalee and the beast kids, and it almost felt like Grimm hit the reset button. Nick, Monroe, and Hank were the original wesen hunters. Nick would finish the detective work, Hank would add his two cents, and Monroe would track down the wesen of the week, and those things happened in “Lost Boys,” but these wesen weren’t your typical wesen of the week. Once the kids get sent to an orphanage, the headmaster reveals himself to be a wesen and he plans to recruit the kids for his army.

Yikes! I’m liking this dark turn and Grimm’s return to basics. Trubel showed up—and she’ll factor into the main story again—and we physically saw several other characters, but it was nice to trim the fat for one week. I’m even digging Adalind and Nick’s new home: empty, stark, and defensible. It’s as if they’re playing house but everything’s off just a smidge, and that smidge makes all the difference.

Arrow Review: “Lost Souls”

Jim’s Review

This week’s episode of Arrow didn’t do it for me. The things that are working on this show right now were still working in this episode, and by that I mean Damien, but this week I saw too much of what isn’t working. By that I mean Olicity, the setup for Legends of Tomorrow, and the current flashback arc.

Focusing so much on getting Ray back made this feel a bit like the last episode with Sara. Devoting an entire episode to laying groundwork for a separate one comes off as something of a middle finger to the current audience.

I’ll admit I’m not entirely sure of everything happening on the island in flashbacks right now, but part of that is it’s not holding my interest. Clearly Ollie is being set up in this episode, but too much is happening off screen here, and beyond magic being tied to Damien and HIVE, it’s not clear what the connection is between past and present.

My big gripe with this episode was the focus on romantic relationships, particularly Oliver and Felicity’s. It’s not even necessarily how it was done, but It was given far too much screen time. In conjunction with the ending showing Lance and Mama Felicity meeting, it feels like Arrow is backsliding into what hurt it last season. If the show wants to keep its comic book audience, it has to be more than a story about whose hands are in whose cookie jar.

Kyle’s Take

And Arrow started off so well. A lot of Arrow’s early success was because Flash bore the brunt of setting up Legends of Tomorrow and now it’s Arrow’s turn. Fortunately, laying the groundwork for the CW’s new show should cease to drain either Flash or Arrow by the mid-season finale. With Curtis Holt not turning into Mr. Terrific in the foreseeable future (we knew Ray was going Atom in less than a season), the major obstacle remaining for Arrow is the love rhombus. There’s more than one so should it be love rhombi?

Watch out, Arrow, love rhombi have sharp edges and you can get hurt. This may isolate me from a lot of Arrow fans, but I don’t care about Olicity. This relationship only exists because fans demanded it but I’m not sure it works. Well, at least it doesn’t work all the time. And when you have a Ray episode like “Lost Souls,” the show gets lost in Olicity. Again, this has a lot to do with Legends of Tomorrow: they had to squeeze in one last Ray episode. So maybe the show gets the gashes it earned from its love rhombi stitched up in a few weeks.

That still leaves us with the flashback and like I’ve said before, the further removed we are from Ollie’s time on the island, the harder it is to make flashbacks to the island work. I know it sounds like Jim and I are broken records, but every time Arrow improves these shortcomings, they go back to what doesn’t work.

It looks like we’ve moved on from Legends of Tomorrow and the next big Arrow-Flash crossover is upcoming. We should see another uptick in show quality over the next few weeks, so we can forgive “Lost Souls” for losing its way.

There were some Arrow Easter eggs and we have them in our Arrow secrets page. Here’s a link. Thanks for reading.

The Flash Review: “Enter Zoom”

Jim’s Review

Flash is definitely moving in the right direction. This week’s episode took a much darker turn. I think we got a little bit of a payoff for the buildup with Zoom. They didn’t give us everything, but it was a strong introduction.

Some of the scenes with Cisco and Wells were a bit rough. Specifically, I’m talking about how Cisco tried to sneak up and “vibe” the guy, even after losing the element of surprise. It had the same kind of awkward feel of the scene where Linda played Dr. Light to try and trap Zoom. The show acknowledged the awkwardness, even tried to turn it into a joke, but it didn’t work for me.

I’m not entirely sure I buy into Barry’s fixation on Zoom being motivated by Earth Prime Wells’ final message to him. I don’t know if it’s so much a gap in logic as much as it’s due to the message having been dropped from the story until now.

Some of these side stories are misfiring, but I have to say the showdown with Zoom was more than enough of a highlight to make the show a success.

Kyle’s Take

“Enter Zoom” was an uneven episode of Flash but it ended in a great place. With Zoom in the title we knew we’d get a lot of the titular villain and he bolted onto the screen. The action was stellar—that’s rarely a concern—and Barry even used science to his advantage, kinda. We got what we needed to see from Zoom in order to prove he or she is Barry’s match—actually they were Barry’s superior—and that was exciting, but several of Flash’s side stories and other choices don’t hold water.

A lot of my issues with these side stories are like Jim said, either gaps in logic or a story element getting dropped and then picked up all of the sudden. I’m not sure where any of them fall but hopefully Flash will shore up some these shortcomings (many are nit-picky but they’re still there): Wells wouldn’t have let Cisco get close enough to vibe on him after the first attempt, Linda playing up that she wasn’t Dr. Light would’ve made more sense if we’d have seen or heard from the real Dr. Light after she ran off naked and invisible (we knew it was Linda; the writers didn’t have to use the plot device of her hamming it up), and I don’t buy the Earth Prime Wells-Earth-2 Zoom team up because that came out of nowhere.

But all of these grievances don’t amount to much because “Enter Zoom” left us with a fantastic cliffhanger. I don’t want to spoil the episode’s stinger but Barry isn’t in good shape and what’s even better is that we may have seen Zoom in costume, but we don’t know who he or she is on Earth-2. Is Zoom Eobard, Eddie, Joe, Henry Allen, Barry, or someone else from this other Earth? I don’t know but I can’t wait to find out.

Want to discover more about the Flash? Check out our Flash secrets page. Thanks for reading.

Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. review: “Chaos Theory”

Kyle’s Review

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. took flight with “Chaos Theory.” It didn’t take long for the Lash story thread to be tied up—for now—and just when I thought Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. made a wrong turn dispatching an engaging antagonist, they pulled the trigger on how Rosalind Price, Agent Coulson’s government belle, factors into the larger web. You won’t get any spoilers from me but “Chaos Theory” left things a beautiful mess.

I can’t believe how different Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is in its third season, compared to its first. The creators were cut loose from the Marvel movies after Captain America: Winter Soldier and they didn’t look back. Even though Marvel doesn’t have cinematic control of most of its aliens (outside of the Kree), Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has made good use of the ones under Marvel’s umbrella. The characters have a sense of history and place and most have well-defined wants, which is always a good thing. These same characters tend to get in their own way when it comes to obtaining their wants, which is even better. And in short, the human characters and Lash are engaging. Which is why I’m still a little nervous with where Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is going.

The Fitz and Simmons team up is always good viewing and going back to Ego the Living Planet will make for a great story. There will be plenty of fallout between Coulson and Price. But Lash was the only interesting inhuman. Marvel has time to set up the movie—Inhumans isn’t due until the summer of 2019—but they’ll have to develop the current cast of inhumans. If Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. can build these characters in the same way it built Fitz, Simmons, Bobbi, May, Hunter, and even Mack, there’s no doubt in my mind that they’re up for the task.

iZombie review: “Max Wager”

Kyle’s Review

“Max Wager” was an excellent episode of iZombie. The show has a way of building up to one thing while giving us a payoff for another story thread. And there was a moment in this week’s episode that made you feel sorry for Blaine. Yes, Blaine the bastard from season one. I won’t spoil it here, but there’s a heartbreaking and disturbing scene involving Blaine and it’s a doozy.

Getting back to how iZombie builds on itself, “Max Wager” took last week’s murder mystery and the brain affecting Liv and built on both elements. A gambling lawyer, who inadvertently got last week’s victim the basketball coach killed) gets gunned down. Now, Liv was on said basketball coach’s brains last week and breathed b-ball as a result—she even gave a hilarious and spot-on halftime pep talk to Major—and now she’s on the brains of someone who betted on basketball games. Characters make connections to the previous week, we see Clive geek out over meeting ex-Laker Rick Fox, and sinister human element gets added to the zombie underground.

And it’s the sinister human element that makes “Max Wager” shine. Liv’s BFF Peyton is investigating Stacey Boss. We hear about the crime boss for a while and even hear his voice throughout the episode. Since Liv is on gambler brains, she makes bets during the episode and one of the other characters at the barber shop in which she makes her bets has his face obscured and we know it’s Boss. I don’t know why Stacey Boss gets his haircut every day Liv drops by the barber shop, but he’s there for disturbing commentary on Liv’s case. By the time he shows his full face to Liv, Boss had just shared the most disturbing “perfect murder” scenario, just for kicks. Later, when he pays Peyton a visit, he reveals who he is in an equally unnerving way. We haven’t seen the last of Stacey Boss and that’s a great thing.

Blaine also gets some much needed face time. His father blackmails him into committing a despicable act. Again, I won’t spoil it here, but you can see how Blaine got to where he is now honestly. Blaine even laments not being a zombie anymore and that moment was believable as well.

For being a show with a humorous spin on zombies, iZombie knows how to terrorize and haunt an audience. They just do it in the most unconventional way.

Thanks for reading.

Blindspot Review: “Persecute Envoys”

Kyle’s Review

“Persecute Envoys” fell short of Blindspot’s quality thus far. It took eight episodes before we saw any kind of backstory for Director Mayfair (one of the folks pulling strings behind the scenes) and “Persecute Envoys” crammed us much of Mayfair’s backstory as it could into forty plus minutes. That would be okay if it wasn’t for Blindspot wanting to capitalize on two current topics: the NSA spying on American citizens and minorities’ mistrust of cops.

Art should imitate life but these two issues—particularly the mistrust of cops—were tacked on and used a hook to gain viewers. What’s worse is that Blindspot abandoned its formula in order to fit Mayfair, the NSA, and cop mistrust in the episode. I’m all for changing up a show’s pace and formula. Heck, I praised Blindspot for doing so a few weeks ago, but in the episode I liked, Blindspot introduced a puzzle from one of Jane’s tattoos as a teaser for the next week. There was no tattoo puzzle at all in “Persecute Envoys.”

Furthermore, the mistrust of cops and Mayfair’s backstory/NSA were too on the nose and yet I still see where Blindspot is headed in the next few weeks, when it reaches its mid-season break, and I’m glad we got Mayfair’s backstory out of the way. I would’ve liked a taste of it sooner and with a lot less bells and whistles. The NSA hook should’ve been enough.

Thanks for reading.

Bob’s Burgers Review: “Gayle Making Bob Sled”

Kyle’s Review

“Gayle Making Bob Sled” is a direct title for this week’s Bob’s Burgers but that might be one of this week’s few positives. This might be just me but Bob’s Burgers was difficult to watch this week: the kids and Linda ruin Thanksgiving dinner and Gayle was insufferable.

Gayle is like nutmeg. Spicing up a show with a little of her is okay but too much can kill you. Her name’s in the title so we got a lot of her. She keeps Bob away from his duties as Thanksgiving cook by pretending to be hurt and forcing Bob to do everything for her. You can empathize with her to a point as her beau dumped her just before the holidays, but then you find out that he didn’t, Gayle misunderstood one of their conversations and you want to throttle her. That’s bad enough but a solid second story can salvage an episode: Linda and the kids’ story didn’t.

Again, this might just be me but I’m the one who cooks in my house and I cook elaborate holiday meals, so that might explain why it hurt—physically hurt—when I saw Gene and Louise add Gummy worms to green bean casserole. Linda and Tina weren’t much better with the turkey. After noticing the turkey was cooking unevenly, Linda puts on oven mitts to rotate it, but she doesn’t grab the pan the turkey is in—that’d be too easy. She grabbed the turkey itself, mutilating the bird in the process. Everything would’ve been alright if she didn’t try to sew the turkey back together. Okay, that was kinda funny but we didn’t get that much funny in “Gayle Making Bob Sled.” We got tortured with a self-absorbed Gayle causing Bob to miss most of the holiday.

I had to check Bob’s Burgers schedule to see if this was the final show before Thanksgiving. It’s not and that’s a good thing. I may need something to wash the bad taste out of my mouth.

Grimm Review: “Clear and Wesen Danger”

Kyle’s Review

Grimm is in an odd but intriguing place. I find Adalind and Nick playing house bizarre and yet more believable than when Ollie and Felicity played house at the beginning of Arrow. Adalind and Nick don’t care for each other as lovers or even friends; I think that may change but for now the two are together out of necessity. They have a kid together and want to do right by the child, so they put on brave faces for their child. But Nick and Adalind’s living arrangement isn’t the only weird thing: Nick is all but suspended from his job as a cop.

The outside world thinks Nick is nuts, but not his close group of friends. I’m glad Grimm went in this direction—I’d cry foul if he didn’t gain the support of his crew—but since the outside world doesn’t believe Nick, he can’t work as a cop in the traditional sense. Further still, he doesn’t play the role of the traditional maverick cop, which I think is a nice touch. Nick is working cases behind the scenes because of the suspicion hanging over him. I guess that is a maverick cop but he’s not reckless and several of his cop friends are in his corner. “Clear and Wesen Danger” isn’t just a punny title; it works with the state of Nick’s job. Ordinarily, this case would be open and shut in five minutes or less but since Nick has to color outside the lines, it took the full hour. I would take Grimm to task if a case was this easy under normal circumstances but this easy case shines a light on how much Nick’s world has shifted.

There wasn’t much else going on in “Clear and Wesen Danger.” Grimm pressed pause on Renard’s Jack the Ripper arc; I’d be fine if they dumped it because that story played out last season. But Nick’s current situation is holding my interest more than the season Nick didn’t have his Grimm powers. There was no chance Nick would stay Grimmless but there is an outside chance—it may be the same chance I’d have of catching a snowflake with a pair of chopsticks, but there’s a chance—Nick’s hiatus as a cop has some lasting repercussions and that has me intrigued.

Arrow Review: “Haunted”

Jim’s Review

This week’s Arrow wasn’t bad. It had a sort of utilitarian feel to it. That’s to say it seemed less about moving forward long-running story arcs than resetting certain continuity points.

The first of those points would be John Constantine. I get that there’s still some of Ollie’s five-year-jaunt to cover for the show, but establishing this relationship with Constantine came off as lazy to me. In other words, they’re really running the risk of just front-loading the series with a roster full of people and tools Ollie’s supposed to have had access to all along. It screams ret-con (retroactive continuity, for the uninitiated), and it’s sloppy.

The other talking point here is Sara’s restoration. I’m pretty sure it’s safe to talk about that now without worrying about being spoiler-y. It’s good to have her back, as I was beginning to like her character a bit more just about the time she was killed, but as it looks like she’ll be resurrected to be on a different show, it’s cause to be a bit wary of how much she’ll play into Arrow going forward.

Lowering the stakes is another thing Arrow is playing a bit too fast and loose with right now. By that I mean they’ve established death as a thing that can be beaten. That’s an ongoing problem with superhero comics as it is, and I think it’s a bigger problem for a TV show to welcome in. They’ve tried to temper that by showing the drawbacks to the Lazarus Pit, but now Constantine has shown with a wave of his hands, and a magic blend of his famous herbs and spices, he can negate the effects of the pit. What they really needed in order to restore the consequences of death was for Constantine to give some hocus pocus explanation as to why what they did can’t really be done again. They didn’t give us that.

I’m glad to see the show going back to Diggle and his brother, but I’m hoping what this episode showed us isn’t the end of it. It’s just too arbitrary of a way to close out a story that’s spanned the series so far.

The scenes on the island didn’t do it for me. I get that maybe this has always been the plan, to use the island to shoehorn Constantine back into the show, but seeing a guy constantly point out that everything was fine until Ollie arrived, then two guys died under strange circumstances, only to have that waved off? That feels way too much like parody.

I still don’t care about Felicity’s story, and I’ve stopped expecting that to change. Much like the story with Sara, they’re just using it to set up Legends of Tomorrow. I think they want to find the same success for that show as they did with The Flash, but I don’t think Arrow’s story suffered as much for its setup of that one.

I still think Damien is stealing the show. He’s compelling and menacing all at once, and I think putting that big baddie on a slow boil is working for this season.

Kyle’s Take

I baked some chocolate chip cookies, and the sweet smell wafted Jim’s direction, tempting him to jump to the other side of the death doesn’t mean anything in Arrow when you introduce a Lazarus Pit argument. Arrow wasn’t like this prior to Flash airing. The two shows are like Annie get your Gun and “Anything you can do I can do better.” I can go back in time and change events. Well, death doesn’t mean anything on my show. Oh, yeah. I have a multiverse, so if I lose one of my characters, I have 51 spares.

I liked Constantine well enough, but this was Constantine light. Not only do John Constantine spells work once (in both the comics and the TV show), you have to give up something in order to get something. So if someone was gaining a soul, someone else would have to lose a soul. That didn’t happen. And oh my, I had a How I Met Your Mother flashback. In one episode of How I Met Your Mother, Ted visited Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris’s character) at his bachelor pad, while a Gregorian chant played over his sound system. Ted asked Barney, Are those monks singing Bro? Yes—yes, they are, Ted. That’s right, I have a monk guy. I thought of that scene when Ollie said he had a soul guy. That’s how absurd “Haunted” got: sitcom absurd.

Anyway, let’s talk about the other elements of “Haunted.” Diggle’s thread with HIVE was dropped—for now—but I hope we haven’t heard the last of it. I don’t care about Felicity or Sara’s arcs: those are not for Arrow, they’re for Legends of Tomorrow and most folks who read our blog know my thoughts on when the CW jacks one show to promote a new one. I don’t like it. Damien is still a great character but I wonder if the Diggle thread suffered because Arrow wanted Damien to be a more accessible antagonist. We’ll have to see.

Arrow had more Easter eggs this week than in weeks past. Here’s a link to our Arrow secrets page. Thanks for reading.

iZombie review: “Love & Basketball”

Kyle’s Review

Liv Moore must be a fun character for Rose McIver to portray. The basis of the character is intact no matter what type brain Liv is under the influence of during the week, but we see the character through a different lens in each episode. This week’s “Love & Basketball” has Liv on coach brains and the results are enjoyable. Sure, there’s a little bit of convenience with the brains Liv eats. Major, Liv’s ex-fiancée, needs a friend more than ever right now and Liv could be that friend as this week, she knows and loves basketball. But that’s where the beauty of iZombie rests. On the surface you see Liv as a basketball nut but more importantly, she finds a way to be the friend Major’s needs.

I also like how iZombie never takes itself too seriously. I laughed out loud when I saw Blaine and Ravi fight over a bottle of tainted utopium. I’d describe the scene here but it loses something when it’s taken out of context. Liv always has at least one chuckle moment a show. Even Detective Babineaux who fills the role of grizzled cop can laugh at a goofy coworker at the most inopportune time (getting reamed by his boss), which can lead to a smile. I suspect romance will bloom soon enough between Babineaux and the coworker (who I can’t remember the name of right now and IMDB is no help). I trust this budding romance will be done organically, over time, as every other romance has been handled in iZombie.

When I first heard iZombie would have strong romantic elements, I groaned. Visions of Warm Bodies danced in my head; that wasn’t a good thing. Then, I thought of CW’s other programing—yes, even Arrow and The Flash—and remembered how romance gets rushed or trampled on in the those shows, and I was even less inclined to give iZombie a chance, but iZombie handles romance with more skill and grace than any other CW show I watch.

If you’ve noticed that I haven’t mentioned any of the ongoing plot elements, there’s a reason for that. They didn’t get a lot of time and space in “Love & Basketball.” We had a few moments with Blaine—and he’s part of this season’s overarching storyline—but this week, iZombie focused on the human element. Heck, the solution to this week’s mystery didn’t even depend too heavily on supernatural means, just good old-fashioned detective work. iZombie isn’t perfect, but several of things Jim and I find lacking in the other shows we cover are done right on this show. This was another solid week.