Game of Thrones 6x05: Door

The stories are merging! Soon we may make it down to less than five from the 47 we were dealing with before.

Lady Stark-Lannister-Bolton and Her Merry Band
Sansa gets a letter from Littlefinger, inviting her to a secret meeting. He tells her that he's mustered an army from the Vale and has them encamped at Moat Cailin. She's so pissed off at him for leaving her with Ramsay that she doesn't give a fuck, and comes very close to having Brienne kill him where he stands. After pointing out that he damn well knows what Ramsay did to her and making him think very hard about what he's done, she merely says she never wants to see him again. As he leaves, he tells her that the Blackfish has reformed his army and retaken Riverrun.

Back at Castle Black, Jon and Davos are figuring out how to build their own army. Sansa tells them about the Blackfish and sends Brienne to get him, while the rest of the band ride out to round up every Northern house they can get. Which leaves Edd in charge of the ten or eleven remaining members of the Watch, although even he's not sure if he's the Lord Commander or not.


Hey, remember the Ironborn?
It's kingsmoot time! Yara's the first to declare, and when Theon gives a quasi-elegant speech about how she's been leading men into battle and so forth while their father nearly led them into ruin, it looks like she's got it in the bag. But, then uncle Euron shows up, and he's a man with a plan (not a very specific plan, of course), so the local lords support him. While the high priest crowns him (which involves nearly killing him through drowning), Yara and Theon and every loyal soldier they can muster fuck off. Which was an excellent idea, since their uncle's first command as king is to find them and murder them. They're long gone, though, and they've taken most of the ships, so his second command is to build more boats.


The Adventures of Grumpy Dwarf and Baldy No Balls
The Sons of the Harpy have ceased their attacks, and it looks like the slave masters have accepted the deal, returning peace to Meereen. However, with Daenerys still away, Tyrion worries that her brand might be suffering, so he calls in a marketing guru. They get the High Priestess of R'hllor to drop by, and while Varys is skeptical of her motives and abilities -as Melisandre was backing Stannis and that didn't turn out well- she knows all about how his dick was cut off by a sorcerer, and that seems to be enough of a demonstration of her powers. Daenerys is the prince who was promised as far as she's concerned, so the word of her greatness will be spread far and wide.


The Widow Drogo
Before she can take her Dothraki horde anywhere, Daenerys has to decide what to do with Jorah. She keeps banishing him, but it never seems to stick. Before she can make up her mind, he informs her of his illness and his love, then starts to leave. However, as he had pledged to serve her until his dying day, Daenerys tells him to stop, and orders him to spend the rest of his days looking for a cure so he can be her right-hand man when she conquers Westeros.


Montage Assassin
Arya's bow-fighting still needs work as the girl with no name is able to beat her ass pretty easily. Nevertheless, it's time for her second chance at becoming a real assassin. Not Jaqen sends her to the theatre so she can kill one of the actresses. It turns out the troupe is putting on a satirical play about the politics of Westeros and Arya's supposed to assassinate the woman who plays Cersei.


What'chu Talkin' 'bout, Hodor?
The Three-Eyed Raven shows Bran the origin of the White Walkers: The Children of the Forest made them because they needed an army to fight the men who had invaded their lands. Somewhere along the line, they fucked up and lost control.

Later, while everyone else is asleep, Bran decides to do some greenseeing on his own. Unfortunately, he winds up walking amongst the undead, and when the Night's King grabs his arm, it somehow breaks the magic seal around the tree cave they've been hiding in. There's precious little time before the army of the dead arrives, but the young padawan's training is not yet complete, so they need to do some quick work back in the Winterfell of 25 years ago before they run the hell away. The army gets there really fast, and though the remaining Children mount an admirable defence, they're quickly overwhelmed. Meera manages to kill an Other and smack Bran back to reality just long enough for him to warg into a terrified Hodor so they can flee. They're still pretty fucked, though. On the way out they lose Summer, the Three-Eyed Raven, and the very last of the Children who uses a suicide bomb to slow down the wights just long enough for Hodor, Meera, and Bran to get out the door. There's still an army behind them, though, so Meera yells at Hodor to "Hold the door" while she tries to drag Bran away. Bran somehow hears this back in the past, and through a combination of things that aren't really explained, he accidentally fries past-Hodor's brain and "Hold the door" is contracted to simply "Hodor". The big man holds it with all his might as long as he can, while his young charges flee into a storm.


What I Liked
-Tormund's still making eyes at Brienne. Their giant children will conquer the world.
-The play in Braavos was fantastic. If they scrapped the current "previously on" format and instead had the troupe perform a synopsis at the start of every episode, I would not complain.
-You've got to drown before you can be King of the Iron Islands. That's pretty hardcore.


What I Hated
-Summer went out like a punk. He just charged right in to a group of wights and got stabbed. They should've at least had him take out a few more before he died.
-Varys got all pissy with the red priestess. Did Tyrion not discuss his plans with the other advisers again?

Final Thoughts
While it's nice that they've been really moving the plot along in the last few episodes, the speed at which people travel has become so ridiculous that I feel I need to comment on it again this week. Littlefinger had time to muster an army, march them to Moat Cailin, and then travel nearly all the way to the Wall. Why even bother sending messages via raven when someone can ride a horse halfway across a continent in a day and a half?

Aiden Gillen and Sophie Turner put in an excellent performance for their scene together. Sansa's genuine disgust and Littlefinger's possibly genuine repentance both come across really well. It's a pity that he won't be around that much this season. He has Maze Running to do. Although, I expect him to return in episode nine or ten to rout the remaining members of the Stark loyalist army after they retake Winterfell.

Bran now has Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure style time travel powers. He can't really travel back in time, and he can't change the present, but he can set things up so that things he needs to happen will have already happened. However, I doubt he'll use his powers to do much more than steal his dad's keys or drop a trash can on his enemies. People use their magic so infrequently on this show that it's actually a little infuriating. There are several characters who basically have superpowers, but they mostly brood around like sullen Clark Kents instead of frying fools with their laser eyes.

I hope they delve into the White Walkers' motivations a bit more before the end of the series. While it appears that they were designed to kill men, and rebelled against their masters, it's been at least a thousand years since that happened, so my biggest question is: Why now?

The frequency with which they've been mentioning Stannis' death leads me to believe that he didn't actually die. I know that's antithetical, but it just seems a bit odd how people keep bringing it up. It's like how the entire cast was saying that Jon Snow was dead and not coming back. We all knew it was BS.

They've done some really good casting work this season. Rebellion age Ned Stark and Rickard Stark both look a heck of a lot like Sean Bean. The guy who plays Rickard even sounded a bit like him.

Arya really needs another training montage. The Stark children have both been trained quite poorly, and I fear it shall lead to their downfall. Bran's going to join the dark side after his wife dies, and Arya's going to become an emo kid and kill Han Solo.

It seems like they're trying to cut down on the direwolf cgi budget this season. There's only one left (that we know of) and there are still five episodes left in which to turn him into a nice coat and some mittens. It's not all bad, though, since it'll free up some money to spend on wight cgi, some of which looked just terrible.

What was the point of making it seem like Yara had any chance of prevailing at the kingsmoot? Did anyone out there expect that they would introduce Euron and then not have him take over as king? It just made it seem ludicrous that any of the lords would be on board with murdering the younger Greyjoys. If they'd laughed Yara off the island, that would have been one thing, but they were fully prepared to make her their leader just moments before Euron showed up.

Speaking of Euron, his plan to win Daenerys over with his giant cock leaves a lot to be desired. My expectation is that we're more or less done with the Ironborn for this season, and they'll only pop up again at the end of next season when their ships arrive in Meereen and Daenerys promptly steals them. The ships in Meereen were destroyed to delay the invasion of Westeros for at least another year, but the invasion still needs to happen, so a fresh fleet from Pyke is just what the doctor ordered. Why even bother with the Ironborn if that's what's going to happen? They could've just as easily had the people of Essos construct a new fleet.

Once again, there was no mention of Dorne. I'm fully on board with never mentioning it again, but it means that everything that happened there last season was just a huge waste of time. Which is funny, considering how they've been accelerating things this year.

So far this season we've lost Summer, Shaggydog, Balon, Roose, Walda, Osha, Trystane, Doran, Areo, Alliser, Olly, all the Children of the Forest, the Three-Eyed Raven, and Hodor. That's a lot of characters who've bitten the big one. My guess is they're making room for some of the other plot lines that the writers were going to completely ignore until they found out they were somehow important.

This was a better episode than last week's, although I still haven't been wowed this year. Perhaps the second half of the season will impress me a bit more.

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.

Marvel's Agents of SHIELD 1x05: Girl In the Flower Dress.

A dude in Hong Kong has fire powers that he uses to impress a girl... who then has guys in fire-resistant suits kidnap him.

SHIELD suspects the Rising Tide, so everyone suspects Skye had something to do with it. She starts trying to track whoever hacked into their data stream so she can clear her name.

Meanwhile, the fire guy is being seduced with offers of power and fame... and a new name: Scorch.

The hacker is a guy named Miles Lydon, who makes Ward right away, then bolts in his product placement Jetta. He uses some hacker trickery to cause gridlock and gets away. As it turns out, Skye used to date him, and warned him so he could escape.

They meet up, and she castigates him for hacking SHIELD while she's on the inside. Then they need an excuse for Chloe Bennet to take her clothes off, so they have sex. But Coulson had May follow her, and they get busted before Skye even gets her clothes back on.

Miles was paid $1 million by what he thought was an eco-research company to hack a Chinese SHIELD data stream. That got them Scorch, who they juice up with the super serum from the pilot. Then they start sucking him dry. His blood platelets are fire-resistant, so they'll help stop the soldiers from exploding in the future.

SHIELD agents manage to save him before he dies, but he's not happy to see them, since they were his former oppressors. He doses himself with super soldier serum and starts tossing fireballs.

May tries to reason with him, but he's not interested, and eventually they have to just dose him with more serum until he explodes.

Miles gets kicked out of the plane in Hong Kong with a magic bracelet that does whatever SHIELD wants on his wrist. Skye tells Coulson that she hacked into SHIELD to find out what happened to her parents. She gets a bracelet, too. Then the titular girl goes to see some guy in prison. She needs him to get in touch with "The clairvoyant" whoever that is.

What I Liked
-Giving the guy a nickname makes him more dangerous. That's true in real life, too.

What I Hated
-Fitzsimmons spouts more trolltastic technobabble. This is a show for nerds. We know what things like TCP, hyper-text and mob mean, assholes.
-As Miles is escaping, he hits something on his phone called Gridlock.mp4, which is contained in Act 1 Video Playlist.

It's a damned smart phone. It can do anything they want, and their fancy hacker thing is a goddamn video playlist. And they didn't even bother to change the name to something inconspicuous. How lazy can you get? Did the graphics department not have twenty free minutes to whip something up?

-Coulson has a flying car, and yet he goes after Miles in a regular SUV. I know the plot required it, but the plot is dumb, so that's no excuse.
-They knock Scorch out with some gas so they can restrain him, then leave him awake while they suck out his blood platelets. That seems needlessly cruel. Sure, they're an evil organization bent on world domination or something, but they don't have to be dicks about it.
-SHIELD kidnaps a guy, dumps him in Hong Kong, and robs him. I realize that he was a bad guy, and if he hadn't haxored SHIELD's Gibson, things would've been better, but it wasn't exactly his fault that Scorch went nuts. It wasn't his fault that the guy died, either: May killed him. Not even in self-defense, either. She and Coulson decided he needed to die, so they extra-judicially murdered him. SHIELD's full of assholes.
-Skye is storing the data on her parents on a mini-SIM card. That makes very little sense. An SD card is about the same size and holds far more data.

Final Thoughts
So Skye's an orphan, and the only info she has on her parents was redacted by SHIELD. I still don't care. She's a bland character with a hackneyed backstory, who seems like she was designed by committee. All the new characters on the show seem that way, in fact. They got together in a room, chose some standard character types, and then decided they didn't need to do any more character development: Super nerds, master of waif-fu, Agent Hardchin, and the oddly attractive hacker who grew up in an orphanage. That's what we got from this show, and we're not getting anything else. The really big problem is that I'm not even sure it's possible to care about most of them. Fitzsimmons are disposable scientists and Ward is a disposable agent. Based on what they've done so far, you could kill them all and replace them with with similar characters, and almost no one would give a damn. They're completely generic and have no personalities. It's like they brought three bottles of store brand cola to life and dressed them up as humans.

Which would be forgiveable if the plots were interesting. They're not, though. Some guy we've never seen before had super flame powers. He used them for fives seconds and then exploded. The end. Not exactly compelling stuff. Sure, there's a long-running plot about the CENTIPEDE people, but they've only shown up twice so far, and they seem to be comically inept. Twice now, they've had their plans messed with by a ragtag group of misfits. If the Bad News Bears were a spy agency, they'd give SHIELD a run for its money.

Still, this was better than the previous episode, which admittedly is not saying much. They fought a lower-tier super-powered guy, which is at least sort of comic booky. Of course, most of the episode was focused on the too-pretty hacker and her personal issues, but at this point I'll take what I can get.

The Crazy Ones 1x05: She's So European

Sexy, European Helena comes to the office to talk about an ad campaign for her new dating website for older people. Zach, Simon, and Sydney are all enamoured with her.

Sydney tries to be her friend, while Zach and Simon both sleep with her, leading to an awkward moment when Sydney drops by Helena's hotel room unexpectedly.

Zach is forced into the unenviable position of having to tell his boss that they're now Eskimo Brothers. Simon doesn't take the news very well, and things get so awkward in the office that they're all forced to confront Helena. She doesn't see what the big deal is.

Meanwhile, Fred Melamed is in the office to do a voiceover, and he treats Andrew like crap and calls him a hippie. After Andrew gives him some notes, Fred storms out.

Simon gets him to come back, but he flubs his lines, forcing Andrew to lay down the law. It was all a ploy by Fred to teach him not to take crap from voice actors and to be a man.

Zach, Simon, and Sydney agree that mixing business with pleasure is making things too complicated, and they decide to keep their relationships Helena completely work-related. Fred doesn't work with her, though, so he uses his powerful, manly voice to seduce her.

What I Liked
-Fred's briefcase is made of Corinthian leather... which is not actually a real thing.
-Helena's impression of Zach's o-face. In my experience, it's not a real thing. But I've never had sex with a man, so maybe other guys do make weird faces and women don't.

This is a woman imitating a man's o-face, so it doesn't count.

-Andrew can't do the voiceover thing with Fred again because he has jury duty that day... and diarrhea. Hee-hee.
-When Andrew thinks Fred is going to kill him, he tells Lauren to delete his browser history. That's a way to go. Personally, I want the contents of my history read aloud at my funeral.

What I Hated
-Simon and Zach talking like southern debutantes. It was terrible, and it went on way too long.

Final Thoughts
There were two plots in this episode, but unlike on many other sitcoms, they didn't feel rushed. That's probably because there are only five characters on the show, rather than 7-10. A trio and a pair isn't so bad.

My girlfriend hates the fact that Eskimo Brothers are a thing, but that's partially because she's not a fan of The League. Your Eskimo family is the best way to get things done, though, and there's no denying that.

We're back to gags again this week, which is fine, since they're still pretty good gags. However, after five episodes, I would've expected a little bit more character development. Of course, Simon is basically just Robin Williams if he were an ad executive, so there may not be any need to really develop that character. Lauren, Zach, Andrew, and especially Sydney could use a little work.

The episode itself was relatively funny. The blooper tags over the credits aren't really providing many laughs, but they're funnier than the credits would be on their own, so I guess they're inoffensive at least. I've gotta say that this is one of the more visually interesting sitcoms I've seen. It's very bright, and there's always a lot going on in the office. I suppose that makes it one of the more visually interesting shows period, since so many dramas are drab and gray.

Anyway, I'm still enjoying The Crazy Ones after five episodes, although it's has yet to wow me. It's good enough for me to keep watching, though.

Castle 6x05: Time Will Tell

A woman is dead... and smoking.

Her step-brother is angry because he warned her that being a parole officer would get her into trouble.

The suspect is the guy who played Morgan on Chuck.

He has a PKE meter for some reason.

Castle loves the case because the guy says he's from the future.

He got sent back to stop a tragedy that would kill billions.

The dead woman's watch was stopped exactly when the future guy said it would.

A local bartender saw the dead woman getting frisky with a hooker.

The hooker doesn't know what happened. She was just supposed to steal the woman's keys and give them to a scary guy.

Meanwhile, future man has disappeared.

And scary guy has murdered Tim Russ, who turns out to be a famous physicist. His wife says the guy kept asking him where "the child" was.

Scary guy sure is scary.

Beckett and Castle track him down, but he's big and scary and nearly kills Castle before future guy shows up and scares him off.

Turns out he wasn't looking for "the child" but rather for "Deschile"

Who is a physics genius who helped foil a bombing that got scary guy locked up for five years.

Beckett interrogates him, but he refuses to say anything.

Future guy says he has to go back to the future, then disappears.

Beckett spills coffee on a letter that Deschile wrote to Tim Russ and makes it look exactly like the copy that the scary dude had.

At the Castle compound, Pi still isn't dead.

Castle wants him out, but Alexis gives him the eyes.

Then she decides to get an apartment with a guy she's known for three months.

What I Liked
-Castle gets giddy when the guy says he's from the future. Wacky cases are the best cases.
-The timeline diagram Castle draws was very BttF-esque. They should've gotten Christopher Lloyd to guest star. Or at the very least had the killer drive a Delorean.

What I Hated
-It's October 7th-ish on the show and yet Alexis hasn't gone back to school. Do New York universities work on some strange, alternate time schedule? Was the man from the future right about the past being changed?
-The dead guy's wife doesn't seem terribly broken up about her husband's death. I know people deal with death in different ways, but her husband was murdered right in front of her and she barely seemed to care.

Final Thoughts
Did Sully get fired because Beckett came back? I was just starting to not want him to die horribly.

Everything that Alexis has done in relation to Pi has been completely out of character for her. He must have magic mind control powers or something. At least he's gone now, and we won't have to see him in every episode. Although, one does wonder exactly where you can get an apartment in New York that you can pay for on a part-time work-study salary.

One also wonders how anyone in the entire Castle universe would be able to deny the existence of time travel after Beckett spilled coffee on the letter and made it look exactly like the copy the scary dude had. There's really no way around it. In the world of Castle, time travel is real.

The whole episode was just dumb. I expect better from this show.