“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 […]
Stars: Laura Prepon, Taylor Schilling, Lea DeLaria, Ruby Rose, Emma Myles, Lori Tan Chinn, Uzo Aduba, Laverne Cox | Created by Jenji Kohan Finally Orange is the New Black: Season Three has made its way onto Netflix, and I’ve binge watched it. I did this for two reasons, one so I can write this review […]
“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, […]
WWE decided, in their infinite wisdom, to hold another WWE PPV/Special Event in the month of May, meaning that in just over a month’s space there will have been three WWE supershows. Still, this has potential to be something special, so even though it is a bit of overkill, it’s interesting. With matches featuring many […]
“I’ve seen the army of the dead.” Me too, Sam. Holy hell. ‘Hardhome,’ written by showrunners Benioff and Weiss and directed by Miguel Sapochnik, could easily coast on the strength of its stupendous final quarter, but instead it delivers a melancholic and anxiety-producing hour of television that doesn’t so much scale into insanity as it does […]
“Have you ever sowed the field, Lady Olenna? Have you ever reaped the grain?” Everybody in ‘The Gift” is trying to lend a helping hand, but from the irascible Olenna to the desperate ser Jorah they’re all operating with one eye squeezed shut against the unpleasant realities of their world. As Myrcella informs her uncle/father Jaime […]
Okay, so it’s time for one of those B-shows of the annual WWE calendar, Payback, a show that, on-paper, sounds okay, but isn’t offering too much in terms of fresh or exciting new feuds in my view. We’ll see how the matches go, shall we? The opening match on the “Kick-off” show saw Stardust lose […]
“What do we do with the bodies after we clean them?” Two people are bathed in the course of ‘Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken.’ One is a corpse being laid to rest in the House of Black and White while the other is Sansa Stark, betrothed of Ramsay Bolton. Arya discovers that the bodies of those who […]
“I want to keep things as normal as possible, and you not being here is part of that.” ‘Person to Person’ is Mad Men‘s final hour, and it opens with Don driving as fast as he can through the middle of a blasted wasteland. He’s running for the sake of making distance, drawing out wild trajectories […]
Penny Dreadful‘s redeeming qualities are its sense of shlocky fun and its partially incredible cast. Its weaknesses are its lousy pacing, its uncertain characterization of several core cast members, and its pursuit of tasteless thrills disguised as, to quote creator John Logan, “pushing the boundaries.” When the show finds the balance between spectacle and humanity […]
“You think this town is bad? Wait until you can never come back here.” You can never go home again. Not because there’s a shadow on the X-ray, not because your husband broke your family, but because the past is a house that doesn’t exist. It folded up into nonbeing when the door closed behind […]
“Every time you wear something you made, you can remember her.” Myranda’s phony words of comfort to Sansa pluck uncomfortably at something every human struggles to reconcile within themselves. What claim do the dead have on us, and is it more important to honor their memory than it is to work toward a better future? […]
