Somewhere

The Week In TV 14/11/2011

Community, Season 3, Episode 7: Studies in Modern Movement

Another warmly enjoyable episode of Community this week, which again proves that it’s able to take traditional sitcom traditions and spin something new out of them.  In this particular case, it was moving house, as Annie finally moves out of her scummy apartment to live with Troy and Abed, even as Britta warns her that everything she found endearing about her friends would quickly become irritating once they shared a bathroom.  Sure enough, once she arrives at their place, she discovers that the second bedroom is a designated “Dreamatorium” for Troy and Abed’s imaginations to run wild in; Annie is left with a blanket fort.  This is the final straw, as Annie realises that she’s constantly adapting herself to other members of the study group, but that no-one ever attempts to see things from her point of view.  Since she’s Annie, this realisation still comes across as ever so slightly shrill, but there’s truth to what she’s saying, especially in an episode where she’s told how to feel by Britta and then told how she’s going to live by Troy and Abed.  Still, if adulthood and all the complications that come with it has been one of the emotional throughlines of Season 3 (compare this with Troy’s similar rumination to Britta in “Remedial Chaos Theory”), then the comedic high point came from Jeff’s pseudo-date with Dean Pelton, who discovers him at the shopping mall after he’s lied about being ill to avoid helping Annie move.  After an awkward lunch at a Mexican restaurant (complete with mariachi band!), they have a surprisingly enjoyable karaoke session to the tune of “Kiss from a Rose,” which was completely inspired.  That this segued into a musical montage whereby Pierce got high from paint fumes in Annie’s old apartment and a crazy religious hitchhiker that Britta and Shirley had picked up on the roadside made it all the better.

Fringe, Season 4, Episode 6: And Those We’ve Left Behind

One of the biggest complaints that has been levelled at Fringe this season has been that up until last week, we’ve been following a group of characters that we’ve never met before.  Sure, Olivia is still buttoned-up and all business, and Walter maintains his disposition towards strawberry milkshakes, but they’re fundamentally different people to those we’ve followed for the past three seasons of the show and therefore difficult to engage with.  “And Those We’ve Left Behind” corrects that problem, showing us things largely from Peter’s perspective, the one character who remembers everything we’ve seen.  He understands that these are not the people he once knew, which made for some especially moving scenes, as Walter fails to interact with him and Olivia quickly susses out that in Peter’s reality, she was important to him.  The episode was also helped by the fact that Peter was a lot more involved in the case this week, a series of time jumps that appear to be connected to his reappearance.  As is often the case on Fringe, they’re the unintended result of a derailed relationship, this time through Alzheimer’s, as Raymond Green attempts to build a “time bubble” transporting his brilliant, physicist wife Kate (whose research is what enabled Raymond to build the time machine in the first place) back to when she was well.  The solution, whereby the Kate of four years previous realises what her husband is doing and destroys her research, was fairly predictable, but given gravitas by real-life couple Stephen Root and Romy Rosemont.  Peter’s suspicion that Raymond’s ability to create the time bubble in the first instance is connected to his reappearance sets things up nicely for future episodes, also.  When Season 4 began, it seemed that the writers would return us to the original universe within a few episodes, but it’s becoming clearer that this isn’t going to happen – at least not yet – and whilst this does mean that the show has set itself the challenge of making us invest in what is essentially a completely new set of characters, I wonder if, now that we have Peter, his perspective makes his transition a bit easier and, hopefully, a bit more interesting.  It’s not dissimilar to all the to-ing and fro-ing between universes last year, and the show did a pretty good job of making us care about Fauxlivia, so here’s hoping that they’re able to pull off the same trick with yet another incarnation of that character.

Glee, Season 3, Episode 5: The First Time

Because Glee enjoys torturing its fans, this week’s episode was actually rather good.  The show has always been good at genuine dramatic high points like Regionals/Sectionals or Prom, so it makes sense that the staging of the Glee club’s West Side Story production would make for plenty of heightened drama.  It’s also an episode that feels remarkably tight in focus, for the most part choosing to follow two couples – Rachel and Finn and Kurt and Blaine – as they contemplate losing their virginity.  The show has been here before with its magnificent “Like A Virgin” routine from Season 1, but if that episode skewed fantasy with ugly realism, “The First Time” does things the other way around.  Whereas “The Power of Madonna” placed the emphasis on expectation and seduction, “The First Time” finds more drama from the anxieties surrounding losing one’s virginity, before opting for coy, candle-lit love-making by episode’s end.  After an ill-advised rendition of “Uptown Girl,” Blaine meets new Warbler Sebastian, a rather obvious (if amusing) love rival for Kurt who introduces the pair to the dubious delight of Scandals, the local gay bar.  The dull realisation that this glittering land of opportunity was just a dive bar like any other was nicely realised, and it gave Kurt an opportunity to have a quiet conversation with regular Karofsky, who’s moved to another school where he’s not plagued by rumours of his sexuality.  It was tacit nod to the fact that “being yourself” is never as easy or as uncomplicated as the show would have us believe at times, and that whilst both Kurt and Blaine might be comfortable in their sexuality, they’re not necessarily confident in their feelings for one another, or what the future holds.  This leads to the episode’s most charged moment, when after dancing all night with Sebastian, a drunk Blaine comes onto Kurt in the back of his car, only to have Kurt angrily push him off, appalled that his boyfriend doesn’t have the wherewithal to recognise that he’s in no mood for intimacy.  In a more conventional, though still rather sweet, storyline, Rachel has decided that she needs to lose her virginity to Finn because she wants to be able to accurately portray Maria’s sexual awakening in West Side Story.  It’s only after a talk with the other girls that she comes to realise that the reason for her doing so should be because she loves Finn rather than for her own selfish means.  It’s a narrative that Rachel has played out in one form or another several times before, but what made this different was that it dovetailed with Finn’s own failed dream of being picked out by a football scout.  His avowal to Rachel that he’s not only failed on the football field, but that he doesn’t know where to go from here, was well played by Corey Monteith, who has always been better at dramatic scenes than the writers give him credit for, and the feeling of trepidation that ran through the entire episode lent a counterbalance to Glee’s usual iTunes spectacular.  And whilst both Mike and Artie were given C-plots that were entirely shoe-horned into the narrative or even, in the case of the former, just a reiteration of a story arc we saw two episodes back, the way the show worked in the music from West Side Story was clever and on-point.  The show’s choice of songs has always been stronger when they reflect the emotions these characters are going through rather than act as money-grabbing show-stoppers in their own right, and the ridiculously expensive production of “America” was particularly rousing.  As always, a tighter focus and an almost entire lack of adult characters (namely Will and Sue) make for a stronger episode, something the writers need to realise before the show becomes a complete train wreck.

The Good Wife, Season 3, Episode 7: Executive Order 13224

Episodes where The Good Wife drags up a strange aspect of the law for its viewers are nearly always fascinating, and this was no exception.  Lockhart Gardner are tasked with suing the US government for the alleged torture of an Afghan-American, Marwat, accused of links with terrorism.  When Marwat becomes a target of the FBI, Lockhart Gardner become a target of a Bush-era ruling – the executive order 13224 of the title – that can effectively circumvent attorney client privilege.  Meeting with a seemingly homely treasury official, Alicia quickly realises that whilst Lockhart Gardner have offered representation, that they will put the firm’s interests before her own.  Hiring Elsbeth Tascioni (the ever wonderful Carrie Preston), we’re treated to an amusing series of Chinese walls, double bluffs and flimsily constructed fictions, and it’s always fun to see Alicia working well with somebody since her interactions with Kalinda have been kept to a minimum so far.  Of greater important overall is the States Attorney’s office pursuit of Will, who fifteen years ago “borrowed” money from a client’s account and which Peter believes may be a sign of greater corruption at his firm.  This led to a few charged face-offs, first between Carey and his former employee and then again between Will and Peter, the former daring him to admit what this is “really about.”  Speaking of Will, a very clever opening scene has Diane and Kalinda both finding out about his affair with Alicia due to her distinct ringtone.  It was a small, smart tell, in an episode full of them.

Gossip Girl, Season 5, Episode 6: I Am Number Nine

A pretty quiet episode this week, entertaining in its way but disappointingly gentle.  Following on from Dan giving Serena the film rights to Inside, an awful development meeting sees him leave the project, which was Jane’s goal all along since she already has Aaron Sorkin lined up to “do a Zuckerberg” on Dan.  Chuck is victim to another misunderstanding when he sees his therapist return money to Louis after he tried bribing her to push Chuck back over to the dark side, and Nate believes that Charlie might have feelings for him only to discover it was all part of an elaborate scheme to win the role of bridesmaid at the royal wedding.  Now that the show seems to be attempting to make Charlie sympathetic, she’s suddenly a whole lot less interesting, especially since she’s so cowed by Diana, and being mired in a storyline where the only people you’re acting opposite are Chase Crawford and Elizabeth Hurley doesn’t exactly make for fireworks.  There was some fun to be add in Blair’s auditions for bridesmaid, in particular the return of the Constance minions, who are always a treat.  Charlie’s win was inevitable, and unfortunate in that it only highlighted how much more fun the show could have with a more biting antihero.  Everything else was fairly by the book: Serena and Dan almost fell out but then didn’t quite, and Chuck and Blair shared another moving moment together.  It was very much a wash rinse repeat-type episode of Gossip Girl, and I’m just hoping that Diana’s promise to “take down” the Gossip Girl website results in a bit more than Serena blogging about hairstyle dos and don’ts.

Homeland, Season 1, Episode 6: The Good Soldier

After a few episodes that proved Homeland didn’t need big plot mechanics to remain interesting, suddenly we had a lot of stuff all happening at once.  In an effort to prove Brody’s guilt, Carrie insists on polygraph tests for everyone that came into contact with last week’s captured terrorist.  Whilst this helps set up an unfortunate “is Saul a spy” subplot, it’s also the catalyst for the hook-up we all knew was coming ever since Brody and Carrie spoke in the parking lot.  After a particularly difficult (and belated) funeral for his fellow officer, Brody returns home to the wake, where one of his crippled soldier buddies rails against him for his continued and, he claims, hypocritical patriotism towards a country that’s just sending more young men and women out to the Middle East to lose their lives.  When said buddy also makes explicit reference to Jessica’s affair with Mike (a fact that he’s been aware of for some time), it’s the excuse he needs to let loose.  Ending up alone in a bar downtown, he calls Carrie, whereupon the pair of them get monumentally pissed, she lets slip the reason behind the polygraphs, and they have sex in her car.  As always on this show, sex is used to reveal character, and Brody is notably different with Carrie than he is with his wife.  The following day, after Brody passes the polygraph, Carrie shoehorns in a question as to his unfaithfulness, which he lies about even as the machine claims that he’s telling the truth.  As Brody looks through the two-way mirror at Carrie, it’s the most chilling moment yet and the most concrete tell the show has given us so far as to Brody’s true intentions.  There were a few elements of “The Good Soldier” that didn’t work quite so well, however.  I’m prepared to forgive the hints that Saul might be a mole.  As long as this doesn’t actually happen, it adds another layer of intrigue to proceedings, and it’s unclear how self-conscious the show is being about this particular stereotype of the mentor/pupil relationship.  We also got to spend more time with Faisel and Aileen this week, discovering that she is in fact the one that persuaded him to join her rather than vice versa.  Although it was nice to give some flesh to these two characters, I wasn’t terribly convinced by the idea that another cell would be hunting them down.  It felt like a twist reminiscent of 24, a show on which the creators of Homeland used to work on, rather than the more character-driven ensemble that we’ve seen up to this point.  That isn’t to say that “The Good Soldier” was anything other than top notch viewing – it’s still easily the best thing on the air right now – but this is the first time I’ve had a few niggles.

Pan Am, Season 1, Episode 7: Truth or Dare

To call Pan Am a slightly more rubbish version of Mad Men isn’t quite the insult it first appears to be, and “Truth And Dare” was the strongest the show has been since its robust Berlin-set episode.  Friday Night Lights alum Gaius Charles plays Joe, a navy man who forms an instant rapport with Laura over controlling mothers and an ugly-ass crystal swan that fairly obviously represents their need for freedom.  Whilst Pan Am isn’t quite the forum to discuss race relations in 60s America, it makes a fairly decent stab of it, primarily by confessing that Laura might not be as lily white as she appears, when it becomes clear that her reaction to Joe’s attempt to kiss her upon landing is one stemming from her own prejudices.  And whilst the story was entirely told from the point of view of Laura – her struggle to overcome prejudice having more importance in this world than Joe’s own, more significant problems – its relative complexity and sweetness was surprising, again proving that the show can do ambiguity when required.  This week also wrapped up Kate’s relationship with Niko, who’s carted off by some shady g-men and whose defection, as he explains to Kate, would mean him returning to Yugoslavia and almost certain death once his true allegiances are discovered.  The theme of “Truth And Dare” appeared to be crushed naïveté, as both Laura and Kate discover their own stupidity in the face of larger problems, and even if Pan Am is ultimately too flighty to really engage with social issues in the same way that a more serious drama could do, it’s ability to balance broad social commentary with ambiguous characters and frothy comedy make this one of the season’s sturdiest, if not necessarily most exciting or innovative, new shows.

Ringer, Season 1, Episode 8: Maybe We Can Get A Dog Instead?

Ringer continues to be grimly compelling, even if it’s clear by this stage that it’s never going to be good, or so bad that it’s good.  Usually, this kind of middle ground spells death for any shows, but there’s something about Ringer that keeps drawing me back in.  Bridget finally seems to have a bit more agency in her life this week, as she “grieves” over her non-existent miscarriage and handily fakes her way through a meeting with Malcolm, newly arrived in New York, for Agent Muchado’s benefit.  Not a great deal happened this week, with most of the action revolving around Malcolm’s return into Bridget’s life and a plot twist you could see a mile away as Bridget has him move in with noted evil-doer, Charlie.  It did, however, give us a few decent scenes between Bridget and Andrew, the strongest aspect of the show by quite some margin, and really the only part that I care about.  I’m sure that Siobhan losing her funding in Paris will have repercussions down the line, but right now the show needs to give us a bit more, since we’re still not aware what her motives are and, even if Gellar’s performances have become better differentiated, there’s precious little on the screen to suggest why we should invest in either of these characters.

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