GR Dailies: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. – Girl in the Flower Dress

23 Wednesday Oct 2013

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by Thom Yee

Images courtesy of Disney-ABC Domestic Television

Images courtesy of Disney-ABC Domestic Television

1×05:  “Girl in the Flower Dress”

“So whoever took him knew about his power.”

That’s an innocuous enough statement, but you don’t know how much I appreciated hearing it.  You don’t know how much I really started to hate Heroes and every time they would call them abilities or gifts in an attempt to stay just this side of realistic.  Just call them what they are!  They’re f*cking powers!

I know this show isn’t Heroes.  And I know that, even at this early stage, it’s probably never going to get that bad (even if by this point in its first season I was a Heroes devotee whereas I’m mildly disappointed in Agents).  But one thing Heroes and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. have in common is that they both have Jeph Loeb in the production chair.  Comicbook fans may hold much of Loeb’s writing work in high regard (see:  Superman:  For All Seasons and Batman:  The Long Halloween), but TV watchers in the know mostly remember him for helping to ruin Lost before totally ruining Heroes before becoming Marvel’s Executive Vice President, Head of Television.  I don’t know why his name in the credits stood out to me more in this episode than any other, but I will say this about Loeb:  he’s an amazing writer (his DC work from the early 2000s)… but not usually (everything he’s done for Marvel since 2006).

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GR Dailies: How I Met Your Mother – Knight Vision

22 Tuesday Oct 2013

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by Grace Crawford

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

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

9×06: “Knight Vision”

I’ve been disappointed by this show before. You know this. I’m easily disappointed.

Tonight, though, the episode started out with references to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and it only got better from there. So I would say I was pleasantly surprised. And now I’m going to explain why, because this is a review and that’s what people do in reviews.

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GR Dailies: The Walking Dead – Infected

21 Monday Oct 2013

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by Thom Yee

Images courtesy of AMC and Fox International Channels

Images courtesy of AMC and Fox International Channels

4×02:  “Infected”

So that’s why Rick let all those Woodbury people join his group:  so more people can die.  Clearly this disease is going to take some level of centrality in the story going forward, and in some ways it’s surprising that the topic hasn’t really come up yet.  I guess the timeline isn’t really clear (unless we’re using what seems to be Carl’s apparent age as an indicator, because he does look a lot older than at the beginning of the series), and we did acknowledge disease with the CDC season one closing arc, but at some point, if “we’re all infected”, some people are just going to drop dead and come back as walkers without ever having been bit.  And now we’ve got a whole town’s worth of people to use as disease fodder.

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Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor (Seasons 2–4.5)

19 Saturday Oct 2013

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by Grace Crawford

All Doctor Who images courtesy of the BBC.

All Doctor Who images courtesy of the BBC.

The last full-length review I wrote had a pretty awesome intro, in my opinion, so I’m not going to try to replicate that. You can click the link in the last sentence if you’d like to read it. So let’s just jump in, because this is already promising to be a bit of a lengthier review.

doctor 2

The Premise

A long time ago, or possibly in the future, a Time Lord stole a box called a TARDIS and went on grand adventures through time and space (though he kept coming back to modern-day England, which prompts the question why don’t I live there). But travelling alone has a way of making him a little crazy, and ruthless, and incredibly lonely, so he picks up people off the streets of London (or Cardiff; the Doctor seems to like Cardiff) and brings them along as companions on his adventures. And every so often he dies, at which time he regenerates and gets a new face and a new personality, which is just incredibly distressing if you’ve gotten attached to the old face. Like I did with David Tennant. Literally just about every time I’ve been reduced to a sobbing mess has been because of the Tenth Doctor. Just… you’ll see.

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GR Dailies: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. – Eye-Spy

16 Wednesday Oct 2013

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by Thom Yee

All Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Images courtesy of Disney-ABC Domestic Television

Images courtesy of Disney-ABC Domestic Television

1×04:  “Eye-Spy”

Towards the beginning of “Eye-Spy”, Skye, our intrepid viewpoint character poses a question more meaningful than I think the writers originally intended:

“There are people in the world with superpowers, right?  What if this woman had esp or something?”

That’s the essential problem that our heroes should be facing every week.  They live in a world where the rules have not only changed, but many of them don’t exist anymore.  Super science, sci-fi tech, gods, and powers are all now potentially par for the course.  That makes it really hard to pin down exactly what’s going on, and it’ll make it even harder to shore up a set of working theories on whatever the case of the week is.  But what happens when all the rules are breaking around our heroes?  What happens when they run across their first truly unstoppable superhuman force?

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GR Dailies: How I Met Your Mother – The Poker Game

15 Tuesday Oct 2013

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by Grace Crawford

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

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

9×05: “The Poker Game”

Not a lot happened this week. The episode felt like half its usual length, although, as any man struggling with self-esteem will tell you, it’s not the length that matters—it’s what you do with it.

That being said, this week’s episode, the much-anticipated poker game, was a little lacking in the “doing something with it” department.

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GR Dailies: The Walking Dead – 30 Days Without an Accident

14 Monday Oct 2013

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by Thom Yee

Why I’m watching… The Walking Dead

Walking Dead-poster

All Walking Dead images courtesy of AMC and Fox International Channels

Everybody’s watching The Walking Dead.  It’s a cultural phenomenon so strong that it’s managed to attract people to the original comicbooks and is actually bringing regular people into comicbook stores, and that’s an incredibly momentous thing (and something that even Marvel’s movies generally fail to do).  What creator Robert Kirkman has managed to do is create a perfect storm of commercial success, with massive viewerships, over and above usual cable network metrics, and rapid sellouts of print material available in all fine comic and book stores.  If you want to watch The Walking Dead, there’s Sunday nights on AMC.  If you want to talk The Walking Dead, Talking Dead, a show built entirely around fans discussions follows right after (and gets better ratings than many of its timeslot competitors).  If you want to read The Walking Dead, there’s 118 issues (and counting) of comicbook.  If you want to gift The Walking Dead, the comics are conveniently reprinted in collected edition trade paperbacks and massive prestige-format hardcover collections.  And there’s just enough difference in these formats that people are compelled to watch and read all of it.  I’ve been reading the comicbook almost since the beginning (this month is the comics’ 10th anniversary), and it’s remained consistently surprising, consistently inventive, and consistently compelling.

But the show is kind of a crapfest.

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Gravity

12 Saturday Oct 2013

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by Thom Yee

All Gravity images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

All Gravity images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

“One tiny crack in the hull, and our blood boils in thirteen seconds. Solar flare might crop up, cook us in our seats.  And wait till you’re sitting pretty with a case of Andorian shingles. See if you’re still so relaxed when your eyeballs are bleeding!  Space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence.” ~ Leonard McCoy, noted physician

And perhaps truer words (except the Andorian thing) were never spoken.

It’s probably almost impossible to fully understand actually being in space without literally going there (and that’s a lot of adverbs).  We’ve read, heard, and seen (and possibly even attempted to write) science fiction stories set in space, most of which, in one way or another, ignore or bypass many of the basics of what we know.  There’s nothing to keep us, no gravity when we really might need it, our inertia carrying us endlessly forward.  There’s nothing for us to breathe, no atmosphere to protect us, just hard vacuum, so absolutely, big, bulky suits are a must.  In space no one can hear you scream, let alone hear all the explosions of the spectacular space battle of our fantasies (that we’ve no doubt imagined ourselves the rebel heroes of).

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