Category Archives: Drama
‘The Blacklist’: Part Thrill, Part Intrigue
James Spader, everyone. James. Freaking. Spader.
Oh, I’m sorry. There was a show going on around him? It took me a bit to notice, but I must say that The Blacklist, NBC’s newest high-action drama, is pretty awesome, I went into it expecting to not be able to get through the pilot, as procedurals and I went our separate ways many years ago. Not so, it would seem.
In the opening minutes of The Blacklist, the notorious criminal Raymond “Red” Reddington, played by Spader (ohh, I will certainly get back to him), walks into FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., and promptly gets himself arrested. He doesn’t struggle, even when he’s taken a secure warehouse and shoved into a glass jail cell. Who doesn’t love a villain in a glass cell? Answer: no one. But the kicker is that his one request is to speak with Elizabeth “Liz” Keen, a brand-spankin’ new agent who has no connection to him.
Should ‘Sleepy Hollow’ Go Back to Sleep?
Warning: Many of the comments in this review are meant to be sarcastic, so put on your sarcasm detector.
Last night’s episode of Sleepy Hollow, titled “Blood Moon,” began with a dream sequence. His wife Katrina warns him of an army of evil that will rise to bring the Four Horsemen back to life. This “army of evil” hunting will certainly give Ichabod and Abbie something to do for the rest of the series. Katrina explains that the first dark spirit will rise with the blood moon and that “she [the dark spirit] is one of us.” Ichabod has no clue what she is talking about and wakes up before she can explain.
Abbie’s captain, Frank Irving, played by Orlando Jones, still doubts the whole Headless Horseman ordeal, even though two officers went on record stating that they saw the horseman. Irving informs that they recanted their statements. He then shows her security footage that proves that Andy Dunn, played by John Cho, did not die by a demon whipping his head off his neck, but running head first into a wall. This basically decapitates him, without the head actually coming off because that seems plausible. With the physical evidence of the videotape, Abbie starts to doubt what is real and what is not.
‘Breaking Bad’ Welcomes You to the “Granite State”
It turns out Saul’s vacuum cleaner repair guy is, in fact, a vacuum cleaner repair guy. He picked up Walt at the end of last week’s watershed episode. The person who got out of the van at the beginning of “Granite State,” though, was Saul, who decided he needed to get out of Albuquerque, too. The plan is to send Saul to Nebraska, but he and Walt are going to share a bedroom in the vacuum store until things die down. Saul asks how Walt’s been, and the repair guy directs him to a live feed of Walt’s room. He’s pacing back and forth.
After the opening credits, we get a quick Marie update. She’s in an SUV with men who assure her that they’re going to find Hank and Gomez. She doesn’t seem too confident. They pull up to her home, but something’s wrong. Papers are strewn all over the driveway and the door is bashed in. The inside of the house is completely torn up. This was Jack’s work – he wanted Jesse’s confession video. They skip to the part where Jesse fingers Todd as Drew Sharp’s murderer and Jack is not happy. He’s ready to get rid of Jesse. They just inherited a massive fortune. Why do they need to stay in the meth business? If they’re no longer cooking, Jesse’s life is inconsequential. Todd wants to stick with it, though, so he can stay close to Lydia. They still have a massive supply of methylamine, so they might as well finish it off and make a few more millions. “No matter how much you got, how do you turn your back on more?”
(Mostly) Spoiler Free Review of ‘Sleepy Hollow’
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is a short story written by Washington Irving. It has been around for over 200 years and it inspired many adaptations, including the 1999 Tim Burton film. There’s a pretty good chance that you’ve at least heard of it or know the story. Except the people in Sleepy Hollow, the new show that premiered last night on Fox, have no idea of the legendary tale that is coming to life. Now, I didn’t have high expectations for this show because it sounded far-fetched. Like the classic story, Ichabod Crane fights the Headless Horseman. Except, this show takes place in the 21st century and Crane and the Headless Horseman are from 1781. That must have been one hell of a pitch to get this show greenlit.
Now, the show was not as bad as I had expected. It answered a lot of questions in the first episode, such as why Ichabod is British despite fighting the Red Coats in the opening scene and how The Headless Horseman and him aren’t dead. Although, it didn’t answer how Ichabod woke up shirtless and then came across a shirt after he was arrested for, presumably, running in the middle of the street. The latter one could be explained in a future episode, though.
Nothing Beside Remains: “Ozymandias” and the Downfall of Walter White
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
Admit it. After this promo for the final eight episodes of Breaking Bad aired, you scrambled to your old English lit textbooks and scrutinized the hell out of Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” just waiting for the episode of the same name to air. The poem’s major themes coupled with the image of the weathered, beaten-down porkpie hat in the trailer did not bode well for Walt. Vince Gilligan saying this in an interview with TV Fanatic added an extra sense of ominousness to the episode (emphasis mine):
I think these last three episodes, not to overstate it, and you could say this about the last eight, but with these last three in particular you need to install a seat belt on your sofa, you need to wear a crash helmet and a diaper. [laughs] I tell ya, this next episode (entitled “Ozymandias”), I think for my money, is the best episode we ever had had or ever will have. It was written by Moira Walley-Beckett and directed by Rian Johnson.
I think people are going to have trouble breathing after this thing airs. It’s tremendous and it’s a great, great hour of television and I’m as proud as I can be of the two episodes that air after that one and both of them are a hell of a wild ride, too. I couldn’t be more proud of these final eight episodes or these last three episodes. I think they’re going to leave us with some sleepless nights.”
Needless to say, there was a lot of hype going into this episode, maybe a little too much. To say “Ozymandias” lived up to it, though, would be a severe understatement. If by “trouble breathing” Gilligan meant “holding your breath for an hour and biting off all of your fingernails and turning your Twitter feed into a constant flow of ‘OH MY GOD HOLY SHIT’ tweets and STARING OPEN-MOUTHED AT THE TELEVISION FOR 30 MINUTES AFTER THE EPISODE ENDED,” then yes, he was right.
NBC’s ‘Ironside’ Early Preview
NBC’s latest foray into the crime-drama genre comes in the form of Ironside, a remake of a 1960s detective show. It follows Robert Ironside (Blair Underwood), a tough detective from New York City, who is confined to a wheelchair after an on the job shooting. Along with his team of hand picked detectives, he solves the toughest crimes in the city without letting his disability get in the way. Although television is no doubt over saturated with crime dramas and procedurals, ‘Ironside’ manages to infuse a bit of heart and intrigue into the all too familiar formula.
Breaking Bad: “To’Hajiilee” Comes Full Circle
Way back when the cast of Breaking Bad was doing its first read-throughs of the final eight episodes, Aaron Paul took to his Twitter to express the following about “To’Hajiilee”:
So am I, Aaron. So am I. There was a little bit of shouting at the television, a couple of incoherent texts to my brother, and way too much nail-biting. This episode lived up to and exceeded Paul’s assessment.
This week’s cold open picked up a few minutes before where last week’s episode left off – just from the other end of Walt’s phone call. Lydia is observing Todd in his lab along with his uncle and one of his men. Though the finished product is purer than it had been with Declan at the helm, it’s still only at 76%, or about 20 percentage points fewer than what Lydia and her European customers grew used to. Lydia, clad in a blue coat, expects the blue stuff, and so do her buyers. Jack suggests that they add food coloring to the mix, something Walt’s competitors used to do way back when. Todd and Lydia chat and after his weird attempt at seduction (?) and she heads out. Todd watches her go while running his finger over the lipstick stain on her mug. Again, weird. His phone rings and, as expected, it’s Walt requesting his uncle’s service.
Diagnosis: ‘Do No Harm’ Dead on Arrival
You may be familiar with the NBC series Do No Harm as the show that premiered to dismal ratings (the lowest in primetime history, in fact) and was mercilessly ridiculed through every form of social media imaginable. As I sat down to actually watch the pilot it was hard to force the negativity out of my mind and watch the show objectively, but I gave it my best effort and what I discovered was a show that maybe wasn’t deserving of such vehement hate. However, it was admittedly deeply flawed.
Dr. Jason Cole (Steven Pasquale) is a successful neurosurgeon who has spent the last five years keeping his evil alter-ego, Ian Price, dormant through self-medicating with a strong cocktail that puts him in a coma every night. Like volcanoes are apt to do, Ian eventually erupts and begins wreaking havoc on Cole’s life. I can appreciate a good Jekyll and Hyde story as much as the next person but what I can’t appreciate is a story that is basically implausible from the very beginning. The split personality is attributed to Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), which is a real medical condition.
“Breaking Bad’s” ‘Rabid Dog’ Is All Over The Place
When has Jesse versus Walt not had a presence in Breaking Bad? Sure, it hasn’t always been at the magnitude it’s at now – it feels like it’s been forever since the worst thing we saw Walt do was call Jesse an idiot – but it’s always been there. It’s been growing in severity as each season has passed, from some verbal disagreements to several physical fights, all hopefully building up to one last confrontation. “Rabid Dog” set the scene for the final showdown; it just took awhile for it to get there. The last few episodes have flown by. I find myself looking at the clock and thinking, “No way an hour has already passed. It just started!” This episode, though, was a little slower, starting with Walt’s faulty gas pump lie.
Before I get to that, the opening scene needs a little love. I’m pretty sure I gnawed off all of my fingernails as Walt moved through his gasoline-soaked house searching for Jesse and discovered he was gone. Walt’s cover-up for the gasoline smell kind of undid all of that. It wasn’t poor writing or a bad transition. It’s that Walt’s elaborate lies have become so tiresome that they’re disrupting the course of the show. The bigger the lie, the more he exaggerates this sense of earnestness, and even Walt Jr. picked up on it. I have to admit, I gasped when he asked his dad to tell the truth for once. I thought for sure this was going to be the moment he started to figure everything out. My hopes were dashed when he started talking about Walt’s cancer, which he gladly played into. Skyler seemed to know almost immediately and confronted him about it once the family settled in at its temporary hotel home.
‘Breaking Bad’: These Are My ‘Confessions’
With every new episode of Breaking Bad comes seriously heightened anxiety levels. We’ve all endured some pretty panicky moments over the course of the show, but no episode has ever come close to the tension “Confessions” created. Let’s start from the beginning.
The opening scene brought us to a diner with Todd, his uncle, and a cohort, all of whom were just returning from laying a smackdown on Declan and his subpar meth lab. Todd let Walt know what went down via a voicemail and then, after sitting down at the table, gloats about his involvement with the train heist in what felt like an attempt to convince the older, hardened criminals that he was ready to head up his own lab. We don’t hear about Todd again or the rest of the episode, so it’s unclear whether or not Walt actually heard the message.
In the next scene, Walt seems to be focusing on more important things than his cell phone. He’s trying to cover up his black eyes with concealer while also talking to Walt Jr. He’s not totally engrossed in the conversation until Jr. mentions that Marie invited him over for dinner. Walt perks up mid-makeup application and, just as his son is walking out the door, he pulls him back in. He has to think fast, so he does the one thing he knows will keep Walt Jr. in the house: he drops the “C” bomb. He was clearly not ready for the news and decides to stay home, just like Walt, the expert manipulator who chose to go after his own son, knew he would. When Hank gets home sans his nephew, Marie panics. She becomes more on-edge once she realizes Hank hasn’t revealed his secret to anyone at work. The scene cuts to the White residence, and Walt recites and records the beginning of what sounds a confession, which starts out almost identically to the one in the pilot.
Wait! What's A Dial? 