GR Dailies: The Walking Dead – Dead Weight

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 by Thom Yee

Images courtesy of AMC and Fox International Channels

Images courtesy of AMC and Fox International Channels

4×07:  “Dead Weight”

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:  if I ever find myself in a post-apocalyptic zombie world, I will give up almost immediately.  None of this running around, gathering supplies, forming uneasy alliances with groups that clearly have their own interests at heart until the whole thing goes belly up in a final confrontation between the good and evil that stirs within all men’s hearts (because who are the real monsters?).  Supposedly there are innate patterns of behaviour we follow given certain stimuli, instincts that tell us — right or wrong — what to do.  Instinctively, we can sense danger.  Instinctively, we’d run if a zombie were after us.  Most of us, instinctively, would reach out to help someone running from a zombie if we could do so without putting ourselves in too much danger.  I still maintain that in a world of the walking dead I would find my way to the top of a tall building and jump, my instincts having told me that survival in such a world wouldn’t be worth it.

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Once Upon A Time (Season 2)

by Grace Crawford

Disney-ABC Domestic Television

Courtesy of Disney and ABC Domestic Television

Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And some stories then have an epilogue, followed by a sequel, followed by a third sequel that’s better than the second but not as good as the first but overall forms kind of a nice story, and then they ruin it by tacking on a fourth sequel several years later that only has a couple of the same characters, and then there’s a gritty reboot that doesn’t acknowledge the previous versions but still has some in-jokes that make all the nerds wet their pants, and the point is that not every story does, in fact, have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

You may not believe it from the mad ramblings I throw at you every week, but I’m a storyteller. I was trained to be one, or at least that’s what the degree I’ll be getting in five months will say. I know the best place for a story to begin, the kinds of twists and turns it needs to take along the way, and the ideal place for it to end while leaving the audience juuuuust satisfied enough to appreciate the story and juuuuust curious enough to write fanfiction about it. This is my territory. I know it well.

And yet I don’t understand season 2 of Once Upon A Time.

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GR Dailies – Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. – The Well

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by Thom Yee

Images courtesy of Disney-ABC Domestic Television

Images courtesy of Disney-ABC Domestic Television

1×08:  “The Well”

As the various marketing outlets and channels should have made clear to you by now, this week’s episode directly ties into Thor:  The Dark World.  And just like the writers in the comics try to do with their crossover events, you don’t need to have seen one to understand the other, but your experience should be richer for having seen both.

There’s something about “The Well” that just feels different.  It’s a little off in a way that you can barely see.  Everything about the episode feels better than normal, a little more accomplished, just that bit closer to the show we had imagined than the one we’ve gotten so far.  I think it started with some of the simple banter between our agents.  Somehow, it all felt natural as our Agents discussed the Asgardian relics they’d discovered as the subject of this week’s episodes.  Maybe it’s just that we’re past a lot of the character work from earlier episodes by now and are just that much more free to head straight into the show.  We may have gotten to this point through more clumsy and banal writing than most viewers would’ve liked, but it’s still work that’s now done, and the character’s are finally starting to gel.

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GR Dailies: How I Met Your Mother – Platonish

by Grace Crawford

Images courtesy of Bay & Thomas Productions and 20th Century Fox.

Images courtesy of Bay & Thomas Productions and 20th Century Fox.

9×09: “Platonish”

Platonic, adj. “The state of a relationship between two people if there is absolutely no chance of them banging in the next twenty minutes.”

Some people seize the day, grab life by the horns, #YOLO, or whatever they call the desire to control their own lives, the course they take, and where they end up. Other people just wait for the universe to hand stuff to them. And those people, like the Washington Generals, always lose. Continue reading

GR Dailies: The Walking Dead – Live Bait

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by Thom Yee

Images courtesy of AMC and Fox International Channels

Images courtesy of AMC and Fox International Channels

4×06:  “Live Bait”

After what, in retrospect, turned out to be an exhausting series of season-opening episodes based around the comparatively invisible threat of a virus, “Live Bait” turned out to be a pretty big relief.  The show may have come back in a big way with last week’s “Internment”, a surprisingly action-packed installment, but a break away from our normal setting turned out to be a welcome respite from the normal doom and gloom of a dreary prison and an even drearier people.

“Internment” concluded with this season’s debut of the Governor, menacingly staring at the prison just outside the forestry surrounding it.  We’ll have to wait at least another week to see how that reunion goes, as this week (and next) we have the continuing adventures of the Governor, aka Philip Blake, aka Brian Heriot, aka Snake Plissken on the road.  Continue reading

Thor: The Dark World

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by Thom Yee

Thor - The Dark World poster

Thor: The Dark World images courtesy of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Looking at the core Avengers, my favourite by far is Hawkeye, though that’s entirely for his comicbook interpretation rather than what little they gave him to do in the film.  Second would be Captain America largely because of the strength of Ed Brubaker’s run on the title (much of which directly inspired the upcoming Winter Soldier) and because they got the character so right in The First Avenger.  Thor is a distant third after those two, and yet for me, his film reigns supreme in the entire Marvel Studios pantheon thus far.  I was incredibly impressed by Thor, much moreso than what I had expected, and I came out of the theatre with a true sense of the character and his world.

As with all things supehero, though, when it came time for the sequel, I felt a bit of trepidation, unsure that a new director would be able to effectively re-capture what I liked so much in the first.  When that first teaser hit, if nothing else, the thing that most excited me about Thor:  The Dark World was the suggestion of a world even bigger than the one we’ve seen and seen hinted at in all of the films so far.  What finally really made me excited though was just the image of Thor being thrown back by a punch from the film’s villain, Malekith: Continue reading

GR Dailies: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. – The Hub

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by Thom Yee

Images courtesy of Disney-ABC Domestic Television

Images courtesy of Disney-ABC Domestic Television

1×07:  “The Hub”

The way I see it, there are three base models for any given episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. to follow:

1) Freak-of-the-week procedural;
2) Superhero-oriented; and
3) Espionage.

So far, we’ve had several freak-of-the-week investigations, with some dalliances in superheroics, and we still haven’t answered the question of whether this show can establish and contain its own set of superpowered heroes and villains.  Because of this, there’s a part of me that rues and laments the fact that the show takes place so early in the Marvel cinematic universe.  Continue reading

GR Dailies: How I Met Your Mother – The Lighthouse

by Grace Crawford

Images courtesy of Bay & Thomas Productions and 20th Century Fox.

Images courtesy of Bay & Thomas Productions and 20th Century Fox.

9×08: “The Lighthouse”

Being single is discouraging. As someone who didn’t start dating until I was in my twenties, I know. It’s hard. It’s lonely. And it’s so, so easy to look for the first available person who’ll make that empty feeling go away, to fill a little bit of that hole in your heart that just won’t go away. But that person’s not right, and deep down you know it. That’s why those relationships never last long.

For Ted, it didn’t last much longer than it took him to blow chunks off a lighthouse.

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