Somewhere

The Week In TV 06/11/2011

Community, Season 3, Episode 6: Advanced Gay

Following two slightly more left-of-the-middle episodes, “Advanced Gay” was very much “classic” Community.  Pierce becomes an unlikely gay icon when a famous transsexual releases a hit song about Hawthorne’s Moist Towelettes.  Pierce is quick to cash in on his new fanbase with the release of “Pride Wipes” and a “Gay Bash” to celebrate.  But the appearance of his judgemental, racist, homophobic father is enough to put a spanner in the works.  Jeff, no stranger to father issues, is quick to impart a thing or two, in the process of doing so provoking a heart attack that kills Pierce’s father off.  The B-storyline returns to the Good Will Hunting riff in Season 1, in which Troy is again lured away from his regular life by Greendale’s resident plumber, even to be chosen by the Vice Dean (John Goodman again on terrifyingly good form) to head up their team of air conditioner repairmen.  It’s a plot that shouldn’t work, but does not only because of how funny it is - space paninis and black Hitler will always hold a special place in my heart - but for how it touches up against this season’s emerging theme: the difficulty in growing up, moving on and - in some cases - the impossibility of doing so.  Britta’s move towards picking a major is just another aspect of a season where our characters are forced to question what keeps them together as a group and, as “Remedial Chaos Theory” proved, how many different outcomes are possible for their own lives. 

Glee, Season 3, Episode 4: Pot Of Gold

And after a three week hiatus, and following two above-average episodes, Glee came plummeting back to Earth this week with an episode that referring to as “a bit of a mess” would be putting it mildly.  Firstly, the show dumps a new character, Irish-as-they-come Rory, into the episode.  He’s a foreign exchange student staying with Brittany, whom he’s trying to impress by granting her three wishes since she assumes that he’s a leprechaun.  He is also, with dreary predictability, bullied by the other kids, meaning his entry to the Glee club is a sure-fire thing, even before he starts breaking out into “It’s Not Easy Being Green.”  But if this story had its charms (no storyline revolving around Brittany could be entirely a waste of time), check out the hot mess the writers are doing on Quinn’s character.  After rehabilitating her somewhat in the first few episodes of the season, Quinn’s attempt to win back her baby work their way up a notch here as, in a dubiously-scored “comic” sequence, she plants objects around Shelby’s flat that suggests she’s a bad parent, before calling Child Protection Services.  It’s a shame that the show didn’t see fit to give her any sort of motivation, since this is character assassination of the worst kind.  Characters on this show have been stuck with dead-end storylines before, but whereas Terri was never a character anyone was going to care about, Quinn is a character that audiences really did used to love, and who, up until the end of Season 1, was the most complex character on the show.  Seeing her reduced to this, especially since this particular storyline is dragging Puck into it as well, feels particularly unnecessary.  The rest of the episode also contained storylines that simply refuse to go away (but should).  Sue’s campaign for congress hits a roadblock when Burt decides to put himself in the running, with Will as his campaign manager!  And the rival Glee club has now not only claimed Mercedes, but also Santana and Brittany too.  The only remotely interesting storyline was Finn’s muted rivalry with Blaine, something that could bear fruit since his character has been sidelined to the point of obscurity recently.  Normally I’d be pleased to see continuity in Glee, since several of these storylines have been rumbling on for a few weeks now, but each of these are increasingly becoming a series of character assassinations.  As for the song choices, although there’s a certain pleasure seeing Darren Criss singing “Last Friday Night” given that he’s in the music video, it was a particularly crude example of the show stuffing in a song to boost its iTune sales, and since one of Glee’s strong points has always been its refreshing lack of cynicism, it felt like a particularly egregious move on the writers part.

Fringe, Season 4, Episode 5: Novation

After the previous episode’s cliffhanger - Peter’s back! - “Novation” was slightly disappointing.  Held in a cell because nobody trusts him, when a new shapeshifter appears in the form of Nadine Park, they’re forced to use his expertise.  This new shapeshifter’s plan is to kidnap former Massive Dynamic employee Dr. Malcolm Truss so that he can help stabilise a technology that means they can not only shift between all the personalities that they’ve absorbed, but that their status as a shapeshifter will become practically undetectable.  What follows is fairly standard Fringe in that the writers are just as interested in the motivations behind Dr. Malcolm’s research and the unsteady amicability he forms with the shapeshifter, but I found myself itching to see more of Peter interacting with the other characters.  Whilst Broyles’ decision to lock Peter up, and Olivia’s wariness around him are realistic, I couldn’t help that the writers had sacrificed drama at the expense of realism, and if they’d only forced all of these characters to work together, that we might get something more explosive than what was on offer here.  Of course, we did get one lovely scene in which Walter explains to Peter that however wonderful it is to see how his child would have looked like as a man, Peter is not his son; even in the previous reality, this Peter Bishop wasn’t the same child he raised, and therefore any emotional release is a cheat.  The way the show has found to add new dynamics to this particular father/son relationship has been one of its many strengths, and I’d hate to see them forsake this in the pursuit of a new reality that it’s just too difficult to really connect with.

The Good Wife, Season 3, Episode 6: Affairs Of State

Building on last week’s strong episode, The Good Wife comes up with its best instalment of the season, with Alicia squaring up against Carey and, for once, coming up the loser.  When a girl is found dead on a booze cruise, two boys are under suspicion of rape and murder, one Dutch, one Taiwanese.  But only the Dutch kid has diplomatic immunity, so Alicia is left to defend his friend, with Carey mounting up the prosecution.  At first, it seems like the Dutch kid is the guilty one, but it becomes increasingly apparent that Alicia is backing the wrong horse.  Which leads to a pretty nifty showcasing of Carey Argos’ approach to the law.  I’ve always enjoyed how the show kept Carey on despite moving him to the state attorney’s office, and this episode in particular showed how much more effective the drama is when we care about both sides of the game.  Indeed, Carey seems to be having a pretty rough time of it to begin with, as he’s shunted out of his office into a cubicle and runs up against repeated obstacles both within the office and without, which made his eventual win (and promotion) all the more pleasing.  Elsewhere, Archie Panjabi and Alan Cumming prove once again that they have excellent chemistry, when Eli asks Kalinda to investigate his ex-wife Vanessa (Parker Posey, cast against type but predictably wonderful), who’s thinking of running for senate.  The discovery of a one night stand whilst they were married might not have come as a shock, but Alan Cumming and Parker Posey sell the hell out of their big emotional scene, and I sincerely hope that this isn’t the last we see of her.  Of the peripheral stuff, Anna Camp was the definition of pep as new first year associate Caitlin, and her relationship with Alicia was nicely defined (if slightly too keen to emphasise her youth), but she’s obviously about to form a major crush on Will, which I can’t see ending well.  One of The Good Wife’s strengths has always been that it’s able to show things from a variety of perspectives without losing sight of who these characters are, and this was proved particularly true this week.

Homeland, Season 1, Episode 5: Blind Spot

The best episode yet from the show that just keeps getting better.  After last week’s investigation into Brody’s home life, this week we get to see a bit more behind what makes Carrie tick.  When the CIA capture the sole surviving terrorist from the compound keeping Brody hostage, he’s brought in for interrogation.  Against Carrie’s wishes, David brings in Brody so that they can more effectively scare the prisoner into releasing information about his contacts back in Baghdad, including, of course, any possible whiff of Abu Nazir’s involvement.  When Brody’s request to speak to his former prison guard face-to-face is refused, he goes over Carrie’s head and is allowed access, whereupon he wastes no time in starting a scuffle.  Cut to the next night and the prisoner has killed himself with a secreted razor blade.  To Carrie, this is proof of Brody’s guilt; there’s no way he could possibly have hidden something like that, ergo it must have been Brody who passed it to him.  When Saul, who has just received devastating news from his wife, sees Carrie on his front doorstep, she pushes his buttons in the worst possible way when he suggests that her accusation has no ground.  Now, whilst I think at this point it would be fairly difficult (though not impossible) for the show to reveal that Brody has not been turned, Carrie’s complete ignorance of what has preceded her typically pushy entrance  led to one of the series’ best scenes yet, as Saul decides he’s had enough and tells her to leave.  Coupled with the fact that Carrie discovers this week that the university lecturer she cleared as innocent is in fact connected to the terrorist cell in Baghdad, and you can understand why she ends up at her sister’s, hysterical and adamant that she’s quitting.  This scene was also very effective in its depiction of the relationship between these two women, as Carrie’s sister quietly lets her get everything she needs to out before quietly talking her down.  They both know that she’s not quitting, but that doesn’t make her need to assert some sort of power over her situation any more valid.  It’s a pretty near perfect scene of familial support, and a rare one in a show where families are so fucked up.  The fact that Homeland can turn on a dime like this, and that it’s every bit as effective and compelling in its quieter moments as it is in the larger ones (the juxtaposition of the psychological torture of the Iraqi prisoner alongside the physical torture of Brody’s flashbacks was particularly hard to watch) prove that this is a show firing on all cylinders.

Revenge, Season 1, Episode 7: Charade

What’s been especially pleasing about Revenge is the way that it’s quickly broken out of its “revenge of the week” format to deliver consistent plot arcs resulting from Emily’s actions, managing to keep an increasing number of balls in the air whilst doing so.  This week, Frank makes good on his promise and discovers the real Emily Thorne, now a pole dancer at the most PG-13 strip club since Friday Night Lights’ Landing Strip, but once former cell mate to Amanda.  But before he gets an opportunity to tell Victoria anything, she knocks him out and dumps his body in a ditch before turning up on Emily’s doorstep.  It’s a fresh can of worms for Emily to deal with, especially since she leaves Tyler for Nolan to deal with, an opportunity that he clearly relishes.  A little digging is all that it takes to uncover the truth about Tyler, a former rich kid-cum-hustler who is trying to claw his family out of bankruptcy.  Believing that he can buy Nolan’s silence with sex (which the show disappointingly shies away from showing us), Tyler is unaware that the affair is being taped.  The show also continued in its campaign to make us sympathise with Victoria who, thanks to Madeleine Stowe’s ability to say a lot with a little, is working wonders.  After a disastrous silver anniversary dinner party, she finally kicks Conrad out, and he’s quick to run to Lydia’s bedside just as she’s waking up.  Whilst the romantic subplots continue to be something of a drag, everything else is really on spot, and it’s refreshing to see a soap opera embrace complex storytelling that’s aware of the repercussions of its own plotting.

Ringer, Season 1, Episode 7: Oh Gawd, There’s Two Of Them?

And so Ringer continues on its streak of ever-so-slightly above-average episodes, as Bridget finally decides not to be so passive and take some action by framing Bridget for Gemma’s disappearance whilst trying to find the real kidnapper/murderer herself.  She also, in the episode’s best sequence, decides to tell both Andrew and Henry about her twin sister since it’s likely to come up in police questioning before too long.  Flashbacks to the mirror revelations was a smart way of injecting the police interviews that a small degree of tension, and were relatively well put together and performed.  More promisingly, we saw how this unburdening played out in Andrew and Bridget’s relationship, which is providing proceedings with at least a little backbone.    Everything else was fairly predictable, if trashily enjoyable, from Bridget’s NA sponsor revealing himself to be both Gemma’s kidnapper and Siobhan’s contact in New York, to flashbacks of Bridget’s relationship with Malcolm complete with hilarious “former drug addict” wardrobe.  Ringer has now passed the point of my hoping that it’s going to get so unbelievably bad that it’s entertaining, and certainly past the point of hope for genuine quality, but it’s increasingly competent and watchable enough to make me want to tune in every week, if only for its peculiar mixture of sterling character moments and soapy villainy.

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