Game of Thrones 6x07: The Broken Man

Guest stars! Returning characters! Tiny bear ladies! All that and more on this week's episode of Game of Thrones.

Montage Assassin
Arya, who has changed her hairstyle a bit, but is not even remotely in disguise, brazenly walks through Braavos and books passage on a ship back to Westeros with a couple sacks of cash. Moments later, a girl shows up wearing the face of an old lady and stabs her in the gut. Arya does a flip off a bridge into the water, then stays under long enough for her would-be assassin to wander away. But she's not quite dead, so she climbs out of the water and stumbles through the streets, looking for help.

The Wacky Adventures of the Lannister Family
The High Sparrow has a creepy conversation with Margaery, in which he encourages her to perform her wifely duties so that the King might have an heir. Additionally, he hopes that he might bring Lady Olenna into the fold, so that she might atone for her many, many sins. Instead, granny calls bullshit on the whole thing and threatens to have the ass-beating septa beaten up until Margaery surreptitiously gives her a drawing of a flower, which convinces her to return to Highgarden. Before she leaves, Cersei visits Olenna in an attempt to get her to stay. The old lady's not interested, though, and she reminds Cersei that everything bad that's happening is entirely her fault.

Old Man River
Bronn and Jaime arrive at Riverrun, where the Freys are ineptly laying siege to the castle. They threaten to hang Edmure, then threaten to slit his throat, but his uncle is all out of fucks and tells them to just get on with it. With their bluff successfully called, the Freys don't know what to do, so Jaime takes command. He parleys with the Blackfish, who tells him that he was born in the castle and he's willing to die there. The Tullys have enough supplies to last two years, so it could be a long siege.

Lady Stark-Lannister-Bolton and Her Merry Band
Tormund convinces the wildlings to follow Jon into battle, but there aren't nearly enough of them, so they must continue to gather men from the Houses of the North. Davos convinces young Lady Mormont to come on board, but she only has 62 men to offer, and other Houses cannot be persuaded to offer any support at all. In the end, they have a force of around 2500. Jon wants to fight right away before they get snowed in, so they plan to march on Winterfell. Sansa realizes that they don't have enough men, though, and writes to Littlefinger to ask him to bring the knights of the Vale.

Hey, remember the Ironborn?
After hightailing it out of Pyke, the Ironborn are hanging out at a brothel. Theon still has no dick, so he's a little depressed, but Yara gets him to have a drink and convinces him that life is still worth living. She explains her plan to take their ships to Meereen to forge an alliance with Daenerys. Then she goes to fuck the tits off a wench.

Only Mostly Dead
Sandor Clegane is, in fact, not dead, having been found and healed by a septon who happened to wander by. Now he hangs out with a group of hippies who are building a chapel. Three brigands from the Brotherhood Without Banners ride up one day, but leave when the septon seemingly convinces them that they don't have any money. Later, while Sandor is off gathering kindling, he hears a scream, and returns to the building site to find that everyone has been murdered and the septon has been hanged. He picks up an axe, and charges off to fuck some dudes up.

What I Liked
-Cold open. They haven't done one of those in a while.
-Jaime smacks one of the Freys with his fake hand when he won't shut up. What's the point of having a gold pimp hand if you don't get to slap someone every once in a while.
-Lady Olenna dishes out the burn sauce. I feel like the show would be a lot less interesting if Cersei realized how inept she truly is, but it's still fun to watch Diana Rigg call someone an idiot.
-Wun Wun says "Snuh". I guess Ygritte taught him how to pronounce Jon's name.

What I Hated
-Jon wants to immediately go to war with the inferior army he already has. That decision makes absolutely no sense unless he came back from the dead as some kind of moron. The Bolton army alone outnumbered them 2:1, and they've since been reinforced by the Karstarks and the Umbers.
-Exposition from Ian McShane. He tells the story of how he found Sandor to Sandor.

Final Thoughts
Was it really Arya who got stabbed, or was it someone else? It's difficult to tell when you're dealing with a group who can change their faces at will. She had a bunch of money that came out of nowhere, and she didn't have Needle, so it's quite possible that it wasn't her. Of course, it could totally be her, and she just didn't realize that the assassins would come for her so quickly.

What the hell happened to all the wildlings? Mance's army was ridiculously huge, and they didn't all die at the Wall or at Hardhome. There should be a good 20,000 of them left, not the piddling 2000 they supposedly have.

Where's Melisandre? Just hanging around somewhere, teaching the wildlings about the Lord of Light?

If you don't die on screen, you're not dead on this show. Everyone who watched this episode with me shouted with glee when they panned up to Sandor's face. And they certainly didn't waste much time showing that it was him. I was sure that there'd be an extended shot of the back of his head before they finally revealed his face.

I guess Yara likes the ladies. I can't blame her for that, they had some nice wenches in that brothel. But, I don't know if she's going to be able to fuck Daenerys into allying with her like her uncle Euron apparently intends to.

There were a lot of nice moments in this episode, and I can say that it's the first one this season that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Hawaii Five-0 4x07: Ua Nalohia

Deputy Cat's beating dudes up and looking for info on Adam.

Dude gets shanked on his surf board.

Mary adopted a baby. And Taryn Manning looks kinda haggard.

Dead guy was undercover with the ATF.

Mary gets salmonella poisoning, so the boys play Three Men and a Baby.

Daryl Hannah shows up to play a sexy real estate agent.

The woman who was transcribing the guy's reports gave inside info to her boyfriend and they used it to rob the bad guys. Then they killed him when it looked like they might be found out.

Fortunately, there was enough info to take the bad guys down anyway.

Kono's been gone a long time, and the guys need help, so Cat becomes a full-time member of the team.

What I Liked
-"Hey, why is there a baby attached to your chest?" Chin gets straight to the point. I like that about him.
-Baby's first wad o' cash.

Time to make it rain down at gymboree.

-The baby keeps grabbing at Scott Caan's face, but he just keeps on acting like she's not even there. That's one of the signs of a professional. Also, it's one of the signs that you should never work with kids or animals.

What I Hated
-The guy followed a woman who was dressed all sexy-like and who he didn't know down to a basement just because she whispered in his ear. He deserved to get beaten and arrested; she was either a hooker, a cop, or she was gonna roll him.
-Even though we haven't seen her since last season, apparently Chin's been dating Leilani, and she knows him well enough to know that he always eats pancakes for breakfast.

It's bad.

-Chi McBride's character. He's around solely to be a grumpy antagonist for McGarrett, much as eight years ago he was around solely to be a grumpy antagonist for House.

Final Thoughts
Charlie's still alive. I really thought they had killed him off at the end of last season.

No Kono again, and now Cat's a full member of the Five-0 team. Looks like the rumours of Grace Park leaving the show might be true.

Kind of a mediocre episode that didn't have any of the three Bs. But at least it wasn't blatantly offensive, and they brought in Daryl Hannah to sex things up bit, which was nice.

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.

Community 4x08: Herstory of Dance

To distract the student body from the fact that the CDC is confiscating Greendale's drinking fountains, the Dean decides to hold a dance. For no particular reason, he makes it a Sadie Hawkins dance, which rankles stereotypical ultra-feminist Britta to no end. As a response, she decides to throw a Sophie B. Hawkins dance in protest. Correctly deducing that she really meant Susan B. Anthony, Jeff busts Britta's lady balls and congratulates her for Brittaing things up once again.

Then he puts on his troll face.

Unwilling to admit she was wrong, Britta fully commits to the bit and so there will be duelling dances in the Greendale cafeteria on Friday.

Meanwhile, Abed's trying to grow as a character. In order to help, Annie and Shirley set him up with competing dates for the dance. Unfortunately, he sees it as a chance for some Three's Company style shenanigans, and decides to go with both girls rather than picking one. Annie's choice is Cat, a quirky girl who rides around on a kick scooter, while Shirley's is Jessica, a nice Christian girl. In typical Jack Tripper fashion, things go well at first, and Abed even gets some help from the coat check girl.

She sees what he's doing there.

With Rachel's help, he manages to make it work for a while, but eventually Annie and Shirley figure out his scheme and remind him that it's not a TV show, and he's dealing with real people with real emotions. It's then that he realizes that the girl he really wants was right in front of him the whole time. But, when he goes back to the coat check room to profess his affection, she's gone.

At the same time, it starts to become clear that Sophie B. Hawkins will not be attending the Sophie B. Hawkins dance, and that Britta is a failure. But, just as she's about to admit defeat, a saviour arrives:

I assume it's Sophie B. Hawkins... I honestly have no idea what she looks like.

Before Sophie can get on with singing her two songs that anyone's ever heard of, Abed grabs the mic and makes a public declaration of his feelings for Rachel. She accepts his apology, and they agree to go out on a date.

Elsewhere in the cafeteria, Jeff is flabbergasted. He has no idea how Britta managed to pull things off... until Pierce tells him that Hawthorne Wipes were the official moist towelettes of Lilith Fair back in the 1990s. He dresses Jeff down over the way he treats Britta, making fun of her and using her name as a synonym for screwing up, even after she helped him reconcile with his dad. Jeff apologizes via text, and everyone rocks out to 'As I Lay Me Down'.

It's a good thing they only had time for two songs in the episode, 'cause that's all she has.

What I Liked
-Troll face Jeff. If it's not a meme yet, it should be.
-Pierce calls Jeff out for being a prick. Despite all the flack he takes for being an old, out-of-touch racist, Pierce is the only one who has the strength to put him in his place.
-This week's best line: "According to Dean law, I must now give her my amulet." -Dean Pelton

What I Hated
-The Dean's Donna Reed costume. They've gone too far, now it's just insane.

Seriously, WTF?

-The title to Sophie B. Hawkins' song. When using the subjunctive tense, the proper word is always 'were', not 'was', so it should be Damn I Wish I Were Your Lover.
-Chang DJ's the dances. As an excuse to get him into the episode, it worked. As comedy, it failed.
-The end tag. Seeing the gang as crappy puppets did not encourage me to watch the next episode.

Final Thoughts
I need to start this section off by saying the title of this episode makes me want to punch the writers. That may have been the point, however. If so, kudos, Community writers.

Geez, where did they dig up Sophie B. Hawkins? She hasn't put out a hit album in more than 15 years now, and it's not like her records were mammoth hits to begin with.

They've actually made Pierce more of a well-rounded character over the last couple episodes, and it's kind of a bummer that Chevy flipped out and left the show. Not that he's going to be absent for very long.

This was better than the past few weeks, and actually managed to break double digits in laughs for the first time in a while. That still didn't make it good, though. Parodying long-standing TV tropes while repeating others at the same time is a bit weird.

Community 4x07: Economics of Marine Biology

Greendale needs money, so the Dean recruits the study group to help him land a whale: A student with no ambition or chance of graduating whose parents are rich and will continue paying for classes indefinitely. But to get this guy to enroll, they need to create a diversion to keep Greendale's previous whale, Pierce, occupied. That diversion is Jeff.

They're the best of friends.

While Jeff and Pierce go to the barber shop, Annie, Britta, and the Dean show the whale around campus. Unfortunately, he arrived on a brand new Vespa scooter that was given to him by City College, so the Greendale folks have to turn to bribery: Unlimited soda refills, computers, some guy's bling, and basically anything else he wants. Britta plays along until the Dean asks her to dry off the guy's shoes, at which point she bails in disgust.

Meanwhile, Jeff and Pierce are actually bonding. They talk about beer, women, dogs, and how awesome it is to not have to shave your own face.

Seriously, it's great.

The whale's tour culminates with a party in the cafeteria featuring balloons, bubbles, and all the strippers he could ever want.

Although, they arrive in bathing suits that they don't take off, so I don't know if they technically count as strippers.

Annie thinks they've gone too far when the whale likes Magnitude's catchphrase so much that he gets the Dean to give it to him. But since it's all for Greendale, she's willing to shut up about what happened. That is, of course, until the two of them get to school the next day and find a dishevelled Magnitude in the study room trying to come up with a new catchphrase. After seeing that, the Dean heads back to the cafeteria to tell the still-sleeping whale that he would love to have him and his father's money at Greendale, but they're not going to change the school just for him. The whale decides that it's cool to finally have someone who's willing to treat him like a real person and not just kiss his ass because his dad's rich, and he officially declares his intention to enroll at Greendale.

Magnitude celebrates with a big 'Pop-Pop' all over his face.

Jeff's position as a diversion is exposed, but he apologizes and decides to spend more time with Pierce at the barber shop. Also, Abed starts a frat because the Dean tells him not to.

Elsewhere, Troy and Shirley take a class that they thought was PE, but which turns out to be PEE (get it, that spells pee!): Physical Education Education. Basically it's a class where they learn how to be gym teachers. Shirley is good at it and Troy isn't. After a number of embarrassing failures, Troy drops the class. However, when he returns to the gym to retrieve his keys, Shirley is inexplicably there, and she teaches him how to teach PE by teaching him how to teach Kevin. Cue the montage!

This isn't as sexy as it looks, they're just teaching Chang to golf.

When they're done, the professor also inexplicably arrives, and everyone learns a valuable lesson. Although, I'll be damned if I know what it is.

What I Liked
-This week's best line: "Tour sucks, bro. Ya gotta think big: Hookers, blow, hookers..."-Richie

What I Hated
-Let's potato chips had a very pronounced role in this episode and even a commercial in the tag. For fuck's sake, who thought that was a good idea?
-The PEE song and montage. It was the right idea, but the execution was just horrible.
-They screwed up the continuity on Jeff's beard. I wasn't the only one who noticed this, so why couldn't the continuity guy on the show keep track of when he was supposed to be scruffy and when he was supposed to be clean-shaven?
-The Delta Cubes. It could've been fun as the b-plot to an episode, but as a tiny subplot, Abed creating a frat was just pointless.

Final Thoughts
There were three plots this week (four if you count Abed running around like a weirdo) and none of them were any good. I'm beginning to think that there just may not be enough time in a half-hour sitcom to fully develop three separate plot lines. There wasn't even enough time to fully develop Shirley and Troy's montage.

Like most of the classes at Greendale, apparently PEE is a single-day course because Shirley and Troy managed to go through an entire semester's worth of work while Annie and Britta were showing off the campus.

For the first time in quite a while, a show delivered an episode that didn't contain a single thing that I could say I liked. The 'best line' thing is merely a holdover from when Community used to have a lot of really witty/wacky lines that made me laugh like no other show could. That hasn't been the case for quite some time now, and I'm honestly thinking of dropping it entirely. The only reason I might keep it in is that it would look really weird for the 'What I Liked' section to be completely empty.

Allowing Pierce to do something other than be a really racist old man was nice, but we already know that Chevy quits the show over that stuff, so I'm willing to bet that he'll be sliding back into his old ways soon enough.

The season's now more than half over, which is a very good thing. This episode wasn't as terrible as last week's but it still only delivered single digit laughs. This show used to be hilarious, and now it's merely mildly amusing. I'll keep watching until the end of the season, but that's more out of a need for closure than any desire to see more episodes of this crap.

Hawaii Five-0 3x07: Ohuna

Click the image to get the episode.

For once, there hasn't been a murder. Instead, a kid is released from a juvenile detention centre into the loving arms of his celebrity parents. On the way home, their GPS takes them off course, and they're intercepted by a squad of skeleton mask-wearing goons who kidnap the kid and pistol whip Alan Ruck.

Which I think is something we've all wanted to do to one of his characters at some point.

When the team arrives, the parents tell them that their kid was arrested for hacking into the White House database and getting tickets to the correspondents' dinner, and even though they wound up in the middle of nowhere, they were just following the GPS. Kono tries to talk to the couple's other child, and he's repeatedly typing out a licence plate number on his tablet.

So she looks it up using the awesome power of Windows 8

The licence plate belongs to a stolen van that's already been recovered and has just been delivered to the impound lot. Inside, they find the body of the kid, who appears to have died of a heart attack while being tortured.

Since it's now a murder case and not a kidnapping, they can slow down a bit and make jokes. Apparently a missing child is serious business, but a dead one is hilarious. Anyway, while he was in the joint, the kid got a visit from superbad hacker dude, Kong Liang, so Danny takes Steve to meet with his hacker contact, Toast.

Martin Starr's been eating a lot of beef.

Despite his protestations, Steve and Danny wire up toast and send him into Kong's hacker den. He's not terribly happy about it, though, and yells at Steve and Danny over the wire. When the first thing he sees on the inside is Kong breaking a dude's hand with a mallet, he does the smart thing and runs the hell away. Fortunately, Kong only has two guards and his office has easily accessible windows, so they apprehend him without much difficulty. He's not the killer, though.

Kono finds out what the kid's killers were looking for: an encrypted file on his personal storage site. They can't access it though, because the password is 309 digits long and will take infinity billion years to hack. She goes to the kid's house to see if his family knows anything. His parents aren't much help, but his younger brother has memorized a series of elements that apparently correspond to the digits of the password.

I think he's supposed to be a high-functioning autistic.

Before she can relay the number back to headquarters, Kono's phone suddenly cuts out and the house is invaded by the guys in the skeleton masks. Chin sends a uniformed cop over to check things out and he's promptly shot in the leg and then executed.

They get a print off a stolen car and it leads to a private military company called WhiteFire (which is a pretty blatant parody of BlackWater) led by Carlo Rota. Inside the house, Carlo finds Kono and agrees to trade the hostages for an armoured vehicle and the password. It doesn't go well for him as Steve hides on the underside of the vehicle, Chin shoots his men, and Kono beats him up.

Being beaten up by a girl doesn't go over well in prison.

They decrypt the file and it leads them to a mobster who WhiteFire helped break out of prison. Conveniently, he's in Hawaii, so they arrest him. Case closed.

On the home front, Steve finally gets Mary to come back to Hawaii so he can tell her their mother is alive. She brings along an old man in a wheelchair named Morty whose caregiver she is. When Steve tells her, rather than go home, she goes to visit their father's grave and talk about how sad they both were when they thought her mother was dead. Eventually Morty convinces her that getting a second chance is a rare gift, and she goes home to see her mom.

Case closed.

What I Liked
-Steve needs to talk to Mary in private, so she gets Morty to take out his hearing aid. That's a pretty good gag.
-A newly caneless Max struts his way into the examination room. I like Masi Oka, and I wish they'd find a way to use him more.
-Toast reacts the way a normal person would when he's wired up. Regular people should not be totally cool with being sent into dangerous situations with no weapons and no training. Also, it's really kind of a dick move to do that to a guy. Steve and Danny are jerks.
-Shelley Berman as Morty. Even at 87 he seems to be relatively cogent in real life, but he still plays the befuddled old man really well.

What I Hated
-Toast says there's nothing free about free porn. Any real computer expert would know that's completely untrue. Hell, any moderate internet user would know that's completely untrue. In fact, the whole hacking section of the plot seems like it was written by someone whose sole knowledge of computers comes from the movies Hackers and The Net. Did he use a typewriter to write this episode or something?
-The brother recites like ten elements, when in reality he'd have to say more than 100. Also, the last one sounds like Ununtrium, which isn't listed in the book Kono uses to look up the atomic numbers. Everything about that part of the episode is stupid beyond belief.
-Carlo Rota's ludicrous accent. I've seen him play a paramilitary guy before, and he used a stupid accent that time, too. I guess they really like it when he does that.

Final Thoughts
The kids in the episode are clearly not the spawn of blue-eyed Alan Ruck and Melinda McGraw.

He has brown eyes, his parents both have blue eyes. Somebody's got some 'splainin to do.

I looked it up, and this seems like it's the writer's first writing job, so I highly doubt that he's a 90-year-old man. So, that makes me wonder why all the technical stuff is such gibberish. Computers are not magic boxes, and anyone under the age of 60 should know that. I really tried to get past it, but it's as if the episode was written by someone whose knowledge of computers has all been gleaned from comic books and bad movies. Or maybe there's an edict at CBS that says all computer-related writing needs to be goddamn stupid.

The last few episodes have been pretty dark and serious, so I was hoping for something a little bit more fun. This episode almost delivered, but it was still kinda serious and the parts that were supposed to be fun were way too stupid.