Category: 2020
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I’m not great at tracking the “Doom Patrol” creatives but I remembered Chris Dingess was working out and Shoshana Sachi was one of the good writers, so I had good feeling going into Finger Patrol and it does not disappoint. Maybe the most surprising part is how well things work out for Joivan Wade and…
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At some point someone working on “Doom Patrol” decided they weren’t messing around and gave Alan Mingo Jr. a truly devastating speech about transgender people’s humanity—to Joivan Wade—and it’s a wow aside in the episode. Sex Patrol goes all the way from hilarious to terrifying to, well, titillating but when Mingo delivers that monologue… everything…
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Samira Radsi directs a positively unnerving episode here, doing both social awkwardness in the extremes and then, you know, traditional inter-dimensional evil who was Jack the Ripper—is Red Jack (Roger Floyd, who looks like a cross-between Hellraiser and Stanley Kubrick’s Phantom of the Opera) a Redjac from “Star Trek” reference? Cute. The most likable thing…
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Tyme Patrol is packed; writers April Fitzsimmons and Neil Reynolds make the subplots seem just as big as the main one, which has the team trying to steal some time travel goo from an infamous time traveller (the titular Tyme, voiced by Dan Martin while Brandon Perea handles the, um, roller-disco). He ends up having…
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“Doom Patrol” starts off answering the outstanding question—who is Chief Timothy Dalton’s daughter? Her name’s Dorothy, which could be perfect but I don’t want to get ahead of myself hopefulness-wise with the character. She’s half-twentieth century human, half-20,000 century BCE human. Abi Monterey—who’s not in the opening title credit roll—plays the part, in makeup a…
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It’s unclear for a while but what The Call needs more than anything else is a great villain. It’s got its villains, starting with very bad mom Lee El, but she’s not great. She’s kind of one note too, with writer and director Lee cutting away from her when she’s going to be establishing the…
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I got really hopeful when I saw the title, At the Mountains of Madness, because they mentioned the Mountains of Madness in a previous episode and it’s the Lovecraft story with monster dinosaurs and so… monster dinosaurs are probably going to be cool. There are no monster dinosaurs in the episode. There are the Mountains…
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The Endless is the best episode of the season so far and one of the best showcases for Kiernan Shipka as an actor ever. She’s trapped in another alternate universe, only this one is where she’s an actor on a television show, seemingly “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.” She quickly discovers this alternate universe doesn’t have…
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I’ve really liked co-writer Oanh Ly’s episodes in the past, so The Returned being such a mess is a bummer. Even if it weren’t for the problematic resolve to Miranda Otto’s love affair with visiting witch Skye P. Marshall—who gets a big spotlight this episode to have it torn away twice—or how Lachlan Watson’s Romeo…
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Four episodes until the finish and “Chilling Adventures” is still bringing in new worlds—in this case, the Parliament of Worlds in Celestial Realm, where Metatron (Pollyanna McIntosh is fine but would you really recast Hans Gruber) is witnessing a crisis unfolding. Hell and Earth are having dimension-quakes because of Kiernan Shipka splitting into two, one…
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The strange thing about “Sabrina” doing an alternate universe episode is its taken them so long to get around to it. Unless I’m forgetting one. It’s also strange it’s strange, like alternate universe episodes are just the norm of most things I watch these days. Anyway, this episode’s an alternate universe because Richard Coyle strong-arms…
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I feel like “Sabrina” hasn’t known what to do with Richard Coyle forever—if not longer—but when his latest Eldritch Terror shows up and tells him he’s not a worthy vessel and they want Sabrina (Kiernan Shipka), it doesn’t really make up for him being spare parts, but it is a fairly awesome moment. Really fun.…
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This episode opens with lead Kiernan Shipka having her date with new potential beau Peter Bundic—well, wait, it actually opens with this terrifying sequence of a… okay, wait. It’s going to be hard to describe this guy. He’s not actually experiencing homelessness, but he’s an Eldritch Terror personified as a person no one will ever…
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“Sabrina,” season four… wait, season two part two, wait, part four, wait… anyway. “Sabrina” starts this series(?) with lead Kiernan Shipka bummed out everyone else has a partner and wants to do partner things instead of ghost-busting—witch-busting—things. Human ex Ross Lynch is happily dating Shipka’s best friend, Jaz Sinclair, warlock ex Gavin Leatherwood is hooking…
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This episode runs under forty minutes. The first few episodes ran over an hour. So why does “Fargo: Season Four” need a coda? I mean, besides them not finishing the story last episode so they could eek out just one more. The episode opens with a montage of all the people who have died this…
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Is it sunny and nice in Kansas City in the winter? This episode presumably takes place in January 1951 and unless there was an unexpected heatwave… it’s like they forgot what month it takes place. The episode opens with a lengthy montage sequence showing the gang war in progress, along with some grim and gritty…
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East/West does not make up for the previous episode but it does call the whole shark-jumping into question. Because East/West is director Michael Uppendahl and writers Noah Hawley (I really want to know how much he does on these episodes where he’s co-credited) and Lee Edward Colston doing a big ol’ Barton Fink homage. A…
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It’s pretty obvious episode director Sylvain White has seen The Untouchables a bunch and maybe one of the Godfather movies–III probably—but there’s no evidence he’s seen, you know, Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, or even an episode of “Fargo.” Despite the episode seemingly having a bigger budget than most, it’s startlingly poorly directed. The Nadir isn’t where…
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I was really happy to see Dana Gonzales directed this episode because the direction’s bad and since I no longer have any confidence in “Fargo” anymore whatsoever I was worried it was one of the good directors this season going to pot. This episode seems to reveal the big problem—and not just co-writers (with Noah…
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So it’s another lackluster episode and it’s hard not to notice Dana Gonzales directed this one too. And Noah Hawley has three co-writers on it. Enzo Mileti, Scott Wilson, Francesca Sloane. Not sure any of them are at fault more than any of the others. Though the one who had private hospital doctor Stephen Spencer…
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Until the end of the episode—which brings in the Fargo theme fully for the first time—everything is character revelation and potentially development. Oh. And a Trump reference. The Trump reference is really bad. The most character revelation revolves around dirty cop Jack Huston. We find out from Chris Rock some of his back story—while Huston…
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It’s the end of the first act, with normal guy Andrew Bird making a big mistake and now everything afterward is never going to be the same again, which is kind of what “Fargo” stays consistent about, season to season. I think. Bird pays off he and Anji White’s debt to Chris Rock—in one of…
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I’m sad “Fargo” turns out to need Timothy Olyphant so much. I noticed him in the credits online but figured they’d cut him out so much he was barely appearing, but he gets the opening of this episode. Before disappearing. He plays a Mormon U.S. Marshal who can’t shut up about religion and eats carrot…
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So, now we get the episode about how sad it makes Daniel Mays to bring harm to people but he does it anyway. It’s the joke about Americans making movies about how sad we are we had to kill a bunch of BIPOC civilians. Only here it’s Mays forcing attempted murder victim Laurie Kynaston to…
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While David Tennant is baring his broken soul to biographer Jason Watkins, DCI Daniel Mays is trying to identify Tennant’s numerous victims so they can properly charge him. There are also more attempted murders, with people coming forward. And even though Tennant says he’s got fifteen victims—and the morgue says possibly twenty—and there are the…
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“Des” opens with contemporary news footage from 1983 with Margaret Thatcher talking about how she’s Thatchering people and then something about an influx of young men to London who find it’s not what they thought. This opening is going to have nothing to do with the story. It’s not even a good stylistic match for…
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“Death to 2020” has twenty credited writers. And its show creators aren’t among them. Twenty writers. It’s seventy minutes and the narration jokes either all flat or so many of them fall flat I can’t remember any not falling flat. Larry Fishburne is the narrator, it’s not his fault, they’re just not good jokes. They…
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The Invisible Man is surprisingly okay. I mean, once you realize it’s just going to be lead Elisabeth Moss in constant terror of an invisible abusive partner lashing out at her and Moss is good at being terrified for long periods, it seems like a bit of a gimme, but until the middle of the…
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Outside allowing Chris Pine to charmingly mug for the camera while doing an eighties men’s fashion parade, there’s not much reason for its 1984 setting. Unless they thought it would be absurd if Wonder Woman Gal Gadot pined after dead WWI love Pine for more than sixty-five years or so. No reason for the setting…
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There are enough ups and downs, twists and turns, decisions and take-backs, once it’s clear who’s going to live, who’s going to die, who’s going to marry, who’s going to not, the rest of the episode—when “Angel of Darkness” tries pretending it’s been a hangout series of Daniel Brühl, Luke Evans, and Dakota Fanning and…
The Stop Button 