The Crazy Ones 1x07: Sydney, Australia

Josh Groban, everyone.

What I Liked
-During the Priscilla, Queen of the Desert segment, they put Robin Williams in a body-covering unitard. They didn't have to do that, but I certainly appreciated it.

What I Hated
-Simon's somewhat irrational hatred for Australia may have actually been based on an experience he had in New Zealand. Notwithstanding the large distance between the countries, they're really not all that much alike.

Final Thoughts
Josh Groban's one of those guys who's been around forever and sold millions of CDs, but I couldn't name a single one of his songs if my life depended on it. I suppose I'm not really in his key demo.

TBBT 7x07: The Proton Displacement

Bob Newhart, everyone.

Bill Nye the Science Guy, everyone else.

What I Liked
-Sheldon brought Bill Nye in to "teach someone a lesson" which Bill misinterpreted as speaking to a class. Heh.

What I Hated
-Arthur's a bit of a lecher. No one wants to see that sort of thing.

Final Thoughts
I don't think they really needed to bring back Bob Newhart. Professor Proton worked perfectly well as a one-off character.

Much like Wolowitz, Bill Nye is a mechanical engineer who sometimes gets a gentle ribbing from his peers for not having a doctorate. Which makes it a bit strange that they didn't have the two of them in a scene together. Seems like a wasted opportunity.

While he's still funny and his comic timing is more-or-less there, Bob Newhart's certainly not as quick as he used to be. Which is saying something, since his delivery has never been what one would call swift. So, I would encourage anyone who hasn't seen them to check out his two successful sitcoms: The Bob Newhart Show and Newhart.

Castle 6x07: Like Father, Like Daughter

Alexis is still angry with her father, but she needs his help to clear a death row inmate.

Lanie helps, too, by getting all of the trace evidence retested.

The guy's brother is a potential suspect. The guy already knows and thinks his brother did it. But he blames himself for causing an accident that severely injured his brother, and he won't turn him in.

The real killer was this guy, though.

The inmate gets set free, and the Castles head back to New York so Alexis can thank her future stepmom for all her help.

What I Liked
-Castle wants to get married in space so he won't have to go look at wedding venues. There are worse places to get married than space. When you get married on Earth, only the prices are astronomical.
-The screen saver on Castle's computers says "You should be writing" I should probably set mine to do the same thing.
-When he accidentally lets it slip that he knows about Alexis' case, she asks him how he knows.

"Yeah... how?"

-Alexis and Castle say the same thing at the same time, which is something he normally does with Beckett. Ew.

What I Hated
-Alexis' suit.

C'mon, really? The wardrobe department needs a swat upside the head.

Final Thoughts
So they're doing that thing where there might have possibly maybe been some interpersonal conflict between Alexis and her father's new wife, but it ended before it even began. Considering that Castle and Beckett have known each other for years and dated for a whole year before they got engaged, it seems a bit strange. Fortunately, the problem lasted all of one episode. Now the stupid, made up conflict that only one of them even knew about won't trouble them anymore.

No Pi this week. He'll be back, though. They always come back. I'll never believe that we're rid of him until Castle and Beckett investigate his death.

This was a better episode than the last couple. It's possible that my intense hatred for Pi has been clouding my judgement. In fact, I'll admit that it may even be likely. I've written enough about him, though. He's a bad character by design; he's just not having the proper effect. Maybe they'll send him to a farm out in the country to live with Sully.

Now that Alexis has totally moved out, she's become a very ancillary character, and I don't expect her to be around all that much. Maybe after Pi is horribly murdered and her apartment becomes a crime scene, she'll move back into the loft, but until that happens, there really isn't much reason for her to be on the show. Most kids don't really see their parents all that often during the college school year, even when they live in the same city. She'll be home for Thanksgiving and Christmas, but other than that it doesn't really make sense for her to be around. Anyway, it was nice to see Molly Quinn get some screen time for once.

The plot was kinda silly. I'd think that a team of college students, a professor, and some lawyers would be at least as good at digging through evidence as a mystery writer. Also, the identity of the real killer was very convenient. Nevertheless, I still thought it was an okay episode.

Hawaii Five-0 4x06: Kupouli 'la

Sad Cat is sad.

Zombies!

Danny and Steve ride the party bus.

Ladies and gentlemen: TV's drunk Corbin Bernsen.

Someone cut the dead girl's head off.

They remembered Max was dating Rumer Willis.

Crazy DJ Qualls. The beard makes him look extra crazy.

Evil doctor. Not Dr. Evil... that's a different guy.

Cat does some recon work.

Corbin Bernsen's lunatic son kills the evil doctor, who was injecting parasites into peoples' brains to try to make them more docile. Obviously, it didn't work.

What I Liked
-Max's dancing.

The ladies love a man who dances.

-Danny and Steve drive around in the Camaro instead of Steve's truck because it gets great gas mileage. That's some product placement that I can get behind. Subtle, but effective.
-Drunk Corbin Bernsen. How can you not love drunk Corbin Bernsen?
-The pathologist backs off and makes Chin open the morgue drawer when they find it all smoking and looking freaky. Smart move, doc.
-"Mr Demps' amygdala is covered with cysts. That's weird." Good performance by Masi Oka on that one.

What I Hated
-Danno's claustrophobic all of a sudden after having already spent a whole bunch of time in enclosed spaces over the course of the series. You can't just add new character traits like that in the middle of the fourth season. They contradict too many previous episodes.
-Corbin Bernsen's "Oh my god! What have I done?" was kinda awful. I expect better acting from him, although I'm not sure why.

Final Thoughts
I've actually heard of scopolamine, and not because I've used it to rob someone. It was used in a Castle episode last year. Unfortunately, it was a season four episode, so my review is lost to the ages.

The ending to the episode was a bit sudden and came out of nowhere. I knew that Corbin Bernsen was going to be related to the bad guy in some way since he's a high-profile guest star, but having his heretofore unseen son up and murder the guy was completely unexpected.

No Grace Park this week. Which means no Adam-Kono drama. I'm okay with that.

It's a bit strange for me to complain about this show having a girl in a bikini, since that's one of the three Bs. But it was Catherine, and we've seen that. It seems a bit degrading to her character to have her as the designated eye candy for the week. They should leave that job to random extras who they found on the beach. Besides, Michelle Borth's been super naked on TV before, so it's not anything we haven't seen before.

Anyway, this week's episode was better than the last couple, but still not very good. It started off well, and seemed like it could be a lot of fun, but then it petered out towards the end.

Castle 6x06: Get A Clue

There's a whole Da Vinci Code/National Treasure thing going on, and the secret is through this mouth.

Also, Alexis is pissed at her dad, and refuses to forget her troubles with a big bowl of strawberry ice cream.

What I Liked
-"What colour is it?" "Free" Ha!
-Castle screams when he sticks his hand in the mouth and Beckett falls for it. They always fall for it.
-The anagrams for Theodore Rose. Deer Shot Oreo was my favourite.

What I Hated
-Pi hasn't yet been spun off into a show where he lives in an apartment with two sexy ladies.
-Beckett makes a Felonius Monk pun. Boooooo.
-There are sounds of a sword fight going on and it still takes Beckett two minutes to get back to Castle. No wonder the AG fired her; she's awful.
-They never explained how the hell the guy got his dead cousin out of the church without anyone seeing. Sure, it was late, but it's not like the place was abandoned, and he would've had to drag her corpse a pretty fair distance, plus get her in the trunk of a car somehow. All without being seen and leaving no blood trail. Seems implausible, which is probably why the writers didn't even try to think of an explanation.

Final Thoughts
The whole 'secret treasure' thing was dumb for a number of reasons. Not the least of which is that finding a big sack of extremely rare coins isn't all that great since the relative scarcity is part of what makes them valuable. Anyway, the really stupid part boils down to two things: The handle to open the secret door was hidden inside a widely visible and easily accessible mouth, and the secret treasure room had multiple windows that led to the outside. The second one isn't that much of a big deal, since I suppose it's possible that the church hadn't had its windows cleaned in 220 years. But the first issue just completely overwhelms my ability to suspend disbelief. That mouth hole would've been filled with two centuries worth of gum wrappers and cigarette butts, and every jerk-ass teenager who visited the place on a field trip would've stuck his hand in it. The treasure would've been found about two minutes after it was hidden.

That's part of the reason why I didn't like this episode very much. They spent half of it running around the city trying to solve a series of riddles, only to end up back exactly where they started with the most obvious of clues staring them right in the face. While Castle showed off relative brilliance by figuring out that the symbols fit together...

Look! They make one big symbol!

...he still had no idea what it mean, and he and Beckett look like morons for not immediately sticking their hands in the mouth the moment they first saw it. Maybe I've seen too many movies, but even though it was sort of in the background, I could tell that it looked out of place. Either it was going to be important to the story, or the set designer did a crappy job. I chose to believe the former. But that just means Castle and Beckett are idiots. As is the guy who murdered his cousin.

It was fun to see Castle all giddy over the chance to hunt for treasure, but small bursts of giddiness from Nathan Fillion aren't enough to carry the show. There needs to be more than that, and they need to get rid of Pi already. I don't know anyone else who really watches the show, but I can't believe anyone out there -including the writers- could possibly think that Pi is an interesting or compelling, or even likeable character. He's terrible, and his very existence makes the show worse. It's all right to have a character who people hate if he's an antagonist, but Pi's just there Poochie-ing it up. Everything about him is bad, and only his horrible, horrible death could possibly redeem him.

The Crazy Ones 1x06: Hugging the Now

This week, they're using a choir to market boner pills.

Simon gets nominated for Creative of the Year and he wants to win to prove that he's still relevant.

Lauren pitches an idea for an ad campaign to help him win over the judges.

One of the other nominees is a guy named Josh who Sydney went to high school with and had a crush on. So the firm throws a party for the nominees and she gets all dolled up.

It turns out he had a crush on her, too, and they wind up going out a couple times and then binge-watching Bones.

Unfortunately, Sydney spills the beans during some pillow talk, and Josh steals the idea for her dad's campaign.

She heads over to his firm to confront him. He actually thought she might be impressed, since as ad people, they're all basically thieves. But she's an honest woman, and she doesn't play those games.

Josh wins the award, but Simon decides it's okay because his has his daughter and his team, and that's all he really needs. Which is loser talk.

What I Liked
-The boner pill executive is hard as a rock after the team's presentation.

Good for her.

-Just because Zach and Andrew high-five at the end, it doesn't make a pitch any good. That's an important lesson to learn.
-Simon needs to prove to the guys that he doesn't need a pill to get an erection, and they think he's going to pull out his dick. If it were still the 1970s, a coked-up Robin Williams probably would've done at least one take where he actually did whip it out.
-In his fake acceptance speech, Simon thanks his ex-wives, without whom he would've been able to retire years ago. Hee-hee.
-It's totally all right with Simon if Sydney accidentally gets pregnant because his grandfather clock is ticking. That's very true to life. Once you hit about 27, your parents start wondering where the hell their grandchildren are.
-Sydney can't dodge around the receptionist at Josh's firm because he used to be a ballroom dancer. Ha!

What I Hated
-Simon walks in on Sydney while she's just hammering on her keyboard... but nothing's happening on the screen. I really hate when they do that (hence its inclusion in this section). It's not like the screen was even in focus, they could've at least had her banging something out in Word.
-Robin busts out his Jack Nicholson impression. It's not bad, but it's a bit dated at this point.

Final Thoughts
Directed by Fred Savage. So many actors from shows I used to watch are directing these days.

Apparently, they've decided that Lauren is a literal crazy one since two weeks ago she was reciting poetry about murdering her ex-girlfriend, and this week she's reminiscing about how she poisoned a girl in order to win a beauty pageant and talking about her plan to murder Simon and take over the company. I like that. It's good to have someone mentally unbalanced on a David E. Kelley show. That's what made Shatner such a delight on Boston Legal. Although it's a bit weird that on a Robin Williams show, the mentally unbalanced one isn't Robin Williams. Not that he isn't crazy, but they've really toned his character down since the first couple episodes.

Zach still seems to be a bit underdeveloped, but after six episodes, the rest of the characters seem to be relatively well fleshed out.

I wonder if Josh is going to wind up being a recurring guest star. Every story need a villain, and he'd probably make a good one. He's someone Sydney can have a love-hate relationship with, and his firm would be a good rival for the LewisRoberts+Roberts team.

The show's been running a bit short for my tastes. They try to pad it out by adding some bloopers over the end credits, but even with that, there's still less than 20 minutes of actual show per half hour. That may be why they managed to keep things to a single plot this week, though. It's a conundrum: Is it better to have multiple plots and a longer show or one plot and a shorter show? The world may never know.

In any case, even though the episodes are short, they're still pretty entertaining. Unfortunately, the audience continues to slowly erode, so it may not be long for the world. Which is a shame, since Williams is still relatively funny, and the show's given Sarah Michelle Gellar an opportunity to flex her comedic muscle, which she hasn't gotten to do very often since she left All My Children.

Hawaii Five-0 4x05: Kupu'eu

What I Liked
-TV's Terry O'Quinn grew a beard.

It looks good on him.

-Danny tells Grace to break a leg at her cheerleading competition. Hee-hee.
-Joe wonders if Danny and Steve bicker while they're in the car. It's bantering, not bickering, Joe.

What I Hated
-Kono and Adam play The Fast and the Furious: Hong Kong Drift all over the city, and the local cops don't show up. That's weird.
-Billy and Catherine get out of their surveillance van and get into a gunfight. I know it's the US, but they're not government agents of any kind; they can't just open fire on someone in a residential neighbourhood. I'm glad they both got shot.
-This week's product placement: The awesome power of Bing Maps on a Microsoft Surface tablet.
That's way too blatant, even for me.

-The killer manages to live for hours after taking a pretty severe hit to the gut, but then dies 30 seconds after the team gets to his house. How conveeeeeeeeeeeeeeenient.
-The guy who hired the killer was pretty random. And how the hell does an office assistant have the money to hire a hitman, anyway?

Final Thoughts
I guess Scott Caan had a week off or something, because he was barely around, and some of his shots looked like they were done in front of a green screen.

So, they killed Billy off about five minutes into the episode.

That's certainly one way to resolve the stupid relationship drama.

It seems like a bit of a cop out, though. They built it up quite a bit over the past few episodes, what with McGarrett's jealous, lingering gazes and so forth, so it seems a bit anticlimactic to have him unceremoniously shot in the guy by the random baddie of the week. Maybe the writers realized that Hawaii Five-0 isn't Grey's Anatomy, panicked, then fixed their horrible mistake as quickly as they could. That's two stupid, dramatic relationship issues resolved in as many weeks. Hopefully in the next episode they'll finally finish whatever the hell is going on with Kono and Adam... which I still don't care about.

Anyway, despite the end to the Billy-Catherine drama, this was still a terrible episode. The killer was a random guy, the guy who hired the killer was equally random, and not even one of the three Bs was represented. I think that may very well be the first time that's happened, and it doesn't bode well for the series. What makes this show different from every other cop show on TV -and also makes it watchable- is the fact that it often doesn't take itself particularly seriously. This week it was full of gruff, serious-business military guys and Catherine's good buddy getting gut shot. That's not exactly what I'd call wild, madcap antics, and it's not why I watch this show. Even the over-the-top action was missing from this episode. If things keep going the way they have this season, I'm probably going to stop watching soon, because the show's just not fun anymore.