“To be human is to be flawed. A real hero must struggle.” Steven Universe is in the middle of a quiet run after last month’s high-energy, high-impact slate. Including ‘Historical Friction,’ its last four episodes have dealt with daily life and the minutiae of emotional processing. ‘Historical Friction’ is a cute piece of work and a […]
“What can you do? Kids gotta express themselves.” Steven Universe, like many fantasy shows, is centered around a mystery. Over the course of two seasons that mystery has come to define the show, permeating its balletic action and complex character dynamics with a gnarled, inscrutable flavor of dread and uncertainty. I’m talking, of course, about the […]
“Not now.” ‘Keystone Motel’ is a small episode concerned with big things. It feels overfilled and sometimes unfocused, but if its look at a long-lasting queer relationship is uneven, it’s impressive that it’s happening at all. Garnet, looking for space in the wake of her fight with Pearl, rides along with Greg and Steven to […]
“Wherever we go, we go together.” ‘A Tale of Two Stans’ is an episode with a lot to live up to. The mid-season cliffhanger of ‘Not What He Seems’ left us staring at a doppleganger of the irascible and suddenly more-than-humorously-untrustworthy Grunkle Stan, a major upset to the show’s mystery of the week status quo. […]
“I’m just so excited to be here. You see, I haven’t exactly been myself lately.” ‘Cry For Help’ is a compact, emotional quarter-hour of television showcasing each of the Gems and how tentative their connections to one another remain even after a season of growth and change. Ameythst is the show’s eternal troublemaker, but in […]
“Right now there’s so many things to go about the wrong way, I’m losing my fucking vision.” ‘Down Will Come’ does exactly one thing right. When the grindingly stereotypical Mexican gangsters are dead, when the shell casing have stopped clattering, Ani and Ray don’t look like winners, they look like they want to puke and […]
“You expect us to believe that you lost yourself in the hot darkness of Hannibal Lecter’s mind?” That visceral snap as the rubber cord Bedelia is using to tie off her arm pops out of her mouth is like a short, sharp shove off a pier and into a storm-tossed sea. ‘Dolce’ is in some […]
“Pissed myself.” True Detective lifted the lid on the mystery of Ray’s maybe death after an entire week of ferocious speculation to reveal Colin Farrell’s suicidally droopy mustache, a sight which avoids occasioning disappointment only in the respect that at least you’re not seeing it in the mirror. It’s not a worse show for having chickened out […]
“To the misfortune of the snail.” “Birds eat thousands of snails every day,” Chiyo tells us at the episode’s opening. “Some of those snails survive digestion, and they emerge to find they’ve traveled the world.” It’s an unearthly image, a story of mindless astronauts propelled into a boundless unknown, and it bears similarities to Will’s symbolic […]
Captions: (Crickets chirping) After a pilot episode with little to recommend it, ‘Night Finds You’ recaptures a bit of season 1’s driving-in-cars-shooting-shit character chemistry, meanders through introducing what might shape up into a compelling setting and plot, and then ends by swerving with alarming suddenness into what might be some honest to God interesting territory. […]
“Bella’s dead. That should change the view from these windows. It’s not right if the view stays the same.” ‘Aperitivo’ was an hour of small stories, a step back from the formless horror of Hannibal’s solo adventures in Europe and the protracted seance of Will’s pursuit. Il Mostro himself makes only a few momentary appearances, […]
“I welcome judgment.” Cool, Ray. You asked for it. True Detective‘s first season seemed to have the zeitgeist firmly in its swamp-mummy claws, an unexpected pulp hit hitched to live-wire performances by Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, filmed by the thunderous Cary Fukunaga, and veined through with little rills and creeks of cosmic horror. It […]
“It’s easy. You just lie down, get nice and comfy, don’t move, and don’t think about anything…” Oops. The last time Steven Universe went this weird it was for the paranoia-driven ‘Rose’s Room,’ an episode built around the impossibility of wish fulfillment. ‘Chille Tid,’ by contrast, is as placeless and strange as its name. The Norwegian phrase “chille […]
“Get open, get honest. That’s fusion.” Most shows with fantasy conceits similar to fusion use it as part of an ongoing game of power creep, ratcheting up the stakes by combining existing characters into newer, shoutier, more powerful versions of themselves. Leave it to Steven Universe to make it an expression of connection and love, a sort-of-but-not-quite […]
“This room holds sound and motion, great snakes wrestling and heaving in the dark.” One by one the figurative dead are passing through the mouth of the cathedral at Palermo and into the vastness of Hannibal’s palace. What they seek there differs from person to person. Inspector Pazzi sees a chance to recapture glory by […]
“I wish you hadn’t seen that.” This is a dang kids’ show, y’all. ‘Keeping It Together’ takes a long, unnerving look at something Steven Universe has had on its radar since ‘Frybo,’ season 1’s early gross-out fest: voluntary and involuntary dynamics. The show has bumped up against the idea softly and repeatedly in its portrayals of imperfect people trying […]
“I’m so brave to be doing this.” ‘Rising Tides / Crashing Skies’ is that rare character study that offers insight without demanding that the audience render up sympathy. Ronaldo Fryman is a typical teenage boy in that, whether it’s acclaim or love, he believes the world owes him something. The faux-‘Loose Change’ format of his delightfully […]
“Why won’t you just let me do this for you, Rose?” After an uneven front end and a lengthy break, season 2’s first week-long Steven Bomb of new episodes starts with ‘Sworn to the Sword,’ a heartfelt success that touches on selflessness, friendship, and the relationship between “special” and “normal” people in science fiction and fantasy. […]
“…if I might beg just one drop of the Mother’s mercy.” For all that the High Sparrow likes to talk about the laws of gods and men, the truth is that no life in Westeros or the wider world of which it is a part is lived within an ordered set of rules. Whatever the […]
“God can’t save any of us, because… it’s inelegant.” After the sepulchral arthouse horror of last week’s ‘Antipasto’, viewers tuning in to ‘Primavera’ might reasonably have expected a return to form. What the episode gives us instead is, in Hannibal’s words, a rare gift: destruction and rebirth. Like the stunted, deformed stag that emerges from […]
“Sometimes a person has to choose. Sometimes the world forces his hand.” We do so much because we feel it is impossible to do otherwise. Straying from destiny’s path, we fear we’ll show the world where to find the gaps in our armor. Spare your daughter and the throne slips through your fingers. Give up […]
“This is posthumous.” The world in which Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal unfolds with dreadful inexorability is one of dreamlike, deathly unreality. Hannibal himself has been a psychopomp, a guide into the world of the dead, for many characters throughout the series’ run. His motives, to be sure, are never selfless, but on multiple occasions he has shepherded enemies, colleagues, […]
