Tag Archives: Episode 20

May 10, 2011 · 9:12 pm

Glee – “Prom Queen”

“Prom Queen”

May 10th, 2011

Ian Brennan has always been the Glee writer most interested in embracing the series’ meta qualities, but there are two moments in this week’s episode where he goes one step too far. First, Sue’s list of most-hated songs the Glee club has performed were very clearly a bit of self-deprecating commentary rather than something Sue would actually observe – the notion of apologizing to America was particularly strange, greatly exaggerating the reach of “Run Joey Run.”

Now, note that Brennan wrote the episodes in which both “Run Joey Run” and the “Crazy in Love/Hair” remix appeared, so he’s picking away at himself more than the show itself. This was also clear when Jesse discussed the whiplash nature of his relationship with Rachel disintegrating, which was most evident in the Brennan-scripted “Funk.” In both instances, I found the commentary obnoxious, and it pulled me out of the scenes themselves and into the artifice of the series.

Of course, the show does this quite often, but it felt like “Prom Queen” had a particularly steep climb in regards to fully integrating the viewer into its world. This goes both for the episode’s climax, which was the topic of a huge spoiler controversy over Twitter a few weeks back, and the performance of a particular viral video sensation of questionable quality. I am not among those who asks that the Glee universe presents itself as cohesive or realistic, in part because the show is clearly built around their world extending into our own with concerts, downloads, and everything in between, but also because I think this meta quality has a certain charm to it…when used properly, and when used sparingly.

While it is unfortunate that the climax of “Prom Queen” had to be caught up in the online kerfuffle and thus rendered somewhat less effective, I would argue that the episode as a whole transcended Brennan’s obsession with the show itself to deliver a couple of strong moments which felt honest to Prom at McKinley High School.

And yes, that more or less includes “Friday.”

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October 12, 2010 · 12:30 am

Cultural Catchup Project: “The Gift” (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

“The Gift”

October 12th, 2010

You can follow along with the Cultural Catchup Project by following me on Twitter (@Memles), by subscribing to the category’s feed, or by bookmarking the Cultural Catchup Project page where I’ll be posting a link to each installment.

As you may well have noticed, the conclusion of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s fifth season within the Cultural Catchup Project has been a bit of an anti-climax, if only because of the long delays as we moved towards the finale. In fact, it was a good thing that the Netflix episodes had the “Previously On” segments intact, because I think there would have been some details (like, for example, the “Knights that say Key”) which would have been initially befuddling.

I think, though, that it’s also partially the fact that the fifth season doesn’t exactly follow a logical narrative pattern. I want to talk about both “Spiral” and “The Weight of the World,” but I will likely spend more time on “The Gift” due to its climactic qualities, or its somewhat sudden climactic qualities. I like Glory just fine, and think the season as a whole was quite effective, but we cannot deny that the overarching plot of the season sort of sat still for the back nine or so. Mind you, that was the period where Buffy was preoccupied with her mother’s death, so it’s not as if the show was boring or uninteresting during that period, but it sort of made the conclusion seem a bit sudden (although it does develop over the course of the last few episodes).

In other words, the challenge of “The Gift” (and the episodes before it) was bringing the seasonal arc to its conclusion in a way which ties it to the characters’ personal journeys over the course of that season, overcoming the sense that Glory’s story arc did not necessarily follow a traditional rising action pattern. And while I think that it lacks the sense of climax prevalent in “Becoming” or “Graduation Day,” I think the fifth season finale lives up to this task: it may not be the perfect conclusion to the season, or the perfect note for these characters, but it delivers a meaningful hour of television which demonstrates the complexity (or, depending on your point of view, the flaws) of the series’post-high school structure.

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May 26, 2010 · 3:12 am

Glee – “Theatricality”

“Theatricality”

May 25th, 2010

Glee is a show that needs to know the limitations of its own premise, something that I don’t know if Ryan Murphy is all that interested in. I think he’s concerned that if he limits the show in terms of the stereotypes it can fight or the type of music it can do, he will be “giving in” to the same types of negative forces that the show’s messaging speaks against.

In some cases, especially musically, I want this show to push certain boundaries and break down misconceptions about genres of music or the role that music can play in our lives. In others, however, I wonder if the show’s format is actually capable of providing a grounded take on those issues without exaggerating them into something completely different. The show has only gotten away with its choice to confront issues of difference through some strong performances, and in “Theatricality” the eponymous quality results in a ludicrously overplayed storyline about the battle between jocks and the Glee club which has absolutely zero nuance. Other storylines, meanwhile, suffer because they do have nuance and yet often step too far into the emotional for that nuance to emerge in a satisfying fashion.

It results in a combination of stories that are fine until you actually think about them (something the show unfortunately rarely bothers to do once it’s reached its powerful statement on morality or the strength of individuality) and some which never come close to being emotionally effective because there’s not an ounce of realistic human behaviour.

And no amount of “Theatricality” can keep me from feeling like the show is ignoring some pretty glaring concerns within its so-called morality.

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May 10, 2010 · 4:21 pm

Fringe – “Northwest Passage”

“Northwest Passage”

May 6th, 2010

I didn’t necessarily need to go back to review last week’s episode of Fringe, considering that I saw it quite a few days late and it wasn’t particularly spectacular, but there was some interesting conversation about the show on Twitter that I wanted to comment on. Alan Sepinwall, having moved to his new home at HitFix was asked on Twitter about why he wasn’t writing about Fringe at the new site, and he responded by noting that the show had fallen out of his rotation before the move, and it just wasn’t compelling to him at this point. This resulted in responses begging Alan to reconsider, as the episodes since the Spring hiatus have been particularly strong and no one could understand why he remained unmoved.

I was more compelled by the show’s Spring episodes than Alan, but watching “Northwest Passage” I found myself thinking back to his commentary – while there are some fun elements of this episode, there is a manipulative quality to the episode which keeps me at a distance from the story at hand. The conclusion is big and bombastic, but it ends up having nothing to do with the episode itself, and I find the show at its most frustrating when it creates moments which seek to overpower, rather than crystallize, earlier elements in each episode. It’s the sort of crass serialization that got Abrams in trouble on Alias, and I think the show needs to be wary of it.

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May 3, 2010 · 10:48 pm

The Big Bang Theory – “The Spaghetti Catalyst”

“The Spaghetti Catalyst”

May 3rd, 2010

I was complaining earlier tonight that How I Met Your Mother never properly played out the post-relationship awkwardness for Barney and Robin, so it feels strange to be commending The Big Bang Theory for not trying to elide the consequences of Leonard and Penny’s breakup in the last original episode (which seems like it was forever ago).

However, I shouldn’t be surprised: the show loves awkwardness, especially when it is at the expense of its geeky characters, so of course they’re going to revel in Leonard’s self-pity for a while. However, the show ended their relationship because they were tired of it, so it’s no big surprise that “The Spaghetti Catalyst” isn’t actually an episode about Leonard or Penny. Instead, it becomes a Sheldon episode, giving Jim Parsons some solid material as he finds himself trapped between his best friend and someone who he has put too much effort accommodating into his life for him to stop being friends with her.

The result, eventually, is a return to the pre-relationship status quo, an eventuality that I’m okay with in the end but which I thought required one shortcut too many at the expense of the character who made the episode so watchable.

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April 19, 2010 · 10:07 pm

How I Met Your Mother – “Home Wreckers”

“Home Wreckers”

April 19th, 2010

Ted Mosby’s search for a nuclear family of his very own has always been at the heart of How I Met Your Mother, and the romanticism at the heart of this quest is one of the show’s distinguishing qualities. Ted isn’t just looking for a wife, let’s remember: he’s got a very clear picture of the sort of life he wants, and so “Home Wreckers” focuses less on the eponymous story and has Ted trying to rush his way to the end of the story in a way that some viewers tend to do on a regular basis.

While the episode as a whole feels a bit repetitive, struggling to get over the fact that it’s effectively a long conversation about a subject that the show has discussed a lot in the past, there is an emotional honesty to the conclusion of the episode which demonstrates the value of Ted’s romantic point of view to the show as a whole. If no one on this show followed their instincts and desires, willing to be reckless and go against what everyone expects them to do, Marshall and Lily may not be together, Robin and Barney may have never tried to make it work, and Ted may never have purchased a house.

By pitting reckless agency against the show’s usual focus on fate and circumstance, “Home Wreckers” manages to offer some intriguing commentary on the show’s future, even if the comedy was largely limited to the wonderful game that is “Drunk or Kid.”

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March 30, 2010 · 4:04 pm

Season Finale: Greek – “All Children Grow Up”

“All Children Grow Up”

March 29, 2010

Despite having been in college when the show began, I have never really “related” to ABC Family’s Greek in the way that you might expect. While I certainly have met people like the characters in the show, I went to a school without a greek system, and so I was sort of like a pledge myself when the show began. One of the show’s best qualities is how they’ve managed to turn the fraternities and sororities into an integral part of not only the show’s universe, but also each individual character: while no character is solely define by their position in a fraternity or sorority, it remains an integral part of their identity that the show has given depth over the course of three seasons.

While the show has its love triangles and its relationship drama, and its fraternity drama can sometimes boil down to simple concepts of revenge or rivalry, at the core of the series is a sense of belonging, a community that is powerful enough to want Cappie to never leave college, for Casey to abandon the opportunity to go to law school, and for Dale to want to be a part of it even with his moral reservations. And while I may not have been part of a fraternity, I fully understand the characters’ anxiety about leaving all of that behind, abandoning all of that for the great unknown. While the machinations of a show working to set things up to potentially continue in the future despite lead characters graduating are apparent in “All Children Grow Up,” the drama is driven by a nuanced and subtle portrayal of the struggles which come with leaving everything you know behind for something new; that we so wholly believe their concerns demonstrates the effectiveness of the show’s world-building over the past three seasons.

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March 25, 2010 · 11:41 pm

Parks and Recreation – “Summer Catalog”

“Summer Catalog”

March 25th, 2010

For a while, I wasn’t entirely feeling “Summer Catalog.” To some degree, the show has reached a point in its season where we have a very clear understanding of where its various stories are going, and the episode very clearly laid out how things were going to go wrong and reached its predictable conclusions…with about five minutes left.

At that point, “Summer Catalog” hit a big ol’ home run, finishing off its established stories and then more or less “debriefing” for the rest of the episode. What we ended with was an emotional denouement that placed the episode so perfectly within the context of ongoing storylines that any predictability was entirely irrelevant. As I put it on my Twitter feed, if you’ll excuse the figure skating analogy, the show went for a triple axel rather than the quadruple toe loop, going with something a bit more safe and typical, but they stuck the landing so well that it was all worth it in the end.

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March 19, 2010 · 12:08 am

The Office – “New Leads”

“New Leads”

March 18th, 2010

Sometimes, a show creates a storyline that has a lot of potential, but then that show tends to choose the least interesting component to follow through with. There’s been a lot of talk about the wasted potential of the Sabre arc on The Office, and I think “New Leads” was far more interesting conceptually than anything relating to Kathy Bates’ guest arc. The idea that the Sabre arrival created new versions of the same old conflicts between Michael and management that we’ve seen in the past was pretty lifeless, while there’s plenty of potential in the new Sabre hierarchy turns the sales team into stuckup jerks and completely destabilizes the office.

While I’m not amongst those writing off this show for its recent missteps, I think it’s sad that they thought the management story was worth a number of episodes while the office hierarchy episode was treated as a wacky stand-alone story. “New Leads” doesn’t quite live up to the potential of this story, failing to earn the character moments it tries to create within the carnage, but it’s at least a sign that they did know the right stories which could emerge within the Sabre arc, even if they didn’t quite know what to do with them.

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June 4, 2009 · 6:20 pm

Greek – “Isn’t it Bro-mantic?”

GreekTitle3

“Isn’t it Bromantic?”

June 1st, 2009

I had planned to blog about this week’s episode of Greek on Monday when it aired, but as it turned out I had already written thoughts on both Chuck and Conan O’Brien’s first Tonight Show, and I didn’t want to create an overload of sorts. But then, as I moved into the next few days, I had no other material to blog about, but just never got back to this week’s episode.

To be honest, I kind of liked “Isn’t it Bro-mantic?” on a number of levels, primarily because it catered to my own opinion of these characters quite slavishly. By placing Casey at the depths of patheticness, the show portrayed as being the revolving third wheel of doom, which I totally see as a dominant character trait for her when she’s not coupled off with someone. I’d normally think this is annoying, but since the show so willingly paints a picture of Casey as selfish and close-minded in the face of the situation, it’s actually quite realistic and honest.

Don’t have a whole lot to say about the episode, but figured I’d drop a few thoughts after the jump.

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