Tag Archives: Episode 4

October 11, 2010 · 7:56 pm

How I Met Your Mother – “Subway Wars”

“Subway Wars”

October 11th, 2010

This is precisely the kind of episode which is particularly dangerous for a show in How I Met Your Mother’s position. “Subway Wars” feels like a gimmick from the very beginning, and the show is at a point where it risks seeming unsubstantial. Back in the second season, something like “Subway Wars” might have seemed novel, but in the context of a sixth season it seems almost a bit desperate.

That being said, I think “Subway Wars” ends up working because it quite successfully ties the race towards Woody Allen into a personal journey for each of its characters. By grounding the journey in Robin’s belief that New York is turning on her, and Marshall and Lily’s struggles to conceive, the episode manages to make broad subject matter transition into legitimate character stories without too much difficulty.

It isn’t quite as well-oiled as it may have been four seasons ago, but I think that the risk ended up enough reward to make “Subway Wars” a solid entry.

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Tagged as Analysis, Barney, CBS, Cradle List, Episode 4, HIMYM, Lily, Marshall, Marshall versus the Machine, Maury Povich, Pregnancy, Review, Robin, Season 6, Subway Wars, Ted, Television, TV

August 21, 2010 · 1:31 am

Mad Men the Weekend After: Critics accept “The Rejected”

August 20th, 2010

I was without access to a television on Sunday evening, and in the chaos of moving I wasn’t able to get to this week’s episode of Mad Men, “The Rejected,” until yesterday. It was a bit nerve wracking to be in the dark regarding the episode, but this was a particularly strange episode to experience this with: I kept getting cryptic tweets about pears showing up in my Twitter feed, and every time I went shopping I had people asking if I had purchased pears at the store. It created an intriguing sort of mystery, a clue which I figured must be pretty important to have resonated so much with the audience.

Of course, the pears were an oddity, resonating with the audience because of how abstract that final scene seems in relation to the rest of the episode. This is actually one of the most thematically consistent episodes of the series in recent memory, leaning heavily on broad thematic material (in the form of a consideration of the value of marriage) and on our knowledge of previous events (in the form of Pete and Peggy’s divergent paths). It was an episode which rejected the series’ traditional sense that past and present relate to our own time and the nostalgic view of the 1960s, instead reclaiming past, present and future for these characters and their glimpses into the future.

And now, before I end up reviewing the episode in its entirety, let’s get onto “The Rejected” in a bit more detail and see what some critics thought about it.

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Tagged as AMC, Analysis, Direction, Episode 4, John Slattery, Joyce, Peggy, Pete, Review, Reviews, Season 4, Television, The Rejected, TV, Zosia Mamet

July 20, 2010 · 2:33 am

Huge – “Talent Night”

“Talent Night”

July 19th, 2010

Summer camp is a very small world, and a television show set at a summer camp is even smaller. If someone tells a lie, chances are that lie will come to haunt them, and if someone is keeping a secret there’s a good chance that it will bubble under the surface until emerging. Huge is a show about vulnerability, about how these campers struggle to open themselves up to the potential for change while not opening themselves up to the point where they feel like their lives are on display, and secrets and lies are one of the ways in which they shield themselves from ridicule, reprimand, or simple exposure.

“Talent Night” doesn’t reinvent the wheel when it comes to how talent shows force their participants to face their fears, but Winnie Holzman very successfully owns this particular trope, delivering two empowering moments which are in some ways polar opposites but share one important trait: neither moment is played as universal experience. For every moment of collective reflection there is one subsection of the camp which has a different interpretation, or who is busy dealing with a different crisis at the time, and “Talent Night” does a very good job of bringing those stories together without forcing them to the same conclusions.

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Burn Notice – “Breach of Faith”

“Breach of Faith”

June 25th, 2010

This review doesn’t really exist to talk that much about the Burn Notice-y “Breach of Faith” (for a review of the episode, check out Alan or Todd) so much as it exists to talk about the season as a whole. I realized after watching this episode that I haven’t actually written about the show yet this season, an oversight which I shall now rectify.

…I like it, I guess?

What, that isn’t enough for you? Okay fine: some more detailed thoughts on the season’s arc after the jump.

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Cultural Catchup Project: “Beauty and the Beasts” (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

“Beauty and the Beasts”

May 9th, 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.

Due to more Mother’s Day related traveling than I had anticipated, I actually ran out of time to watch enough of Buffy to make today’s piece as expansive as I wanted it to be. I watched “Beauty and the Beasts” earlier in the week when I went through the first disc of the season, but then I haven’t moved on since that point as a result of more excursions than usual. Accordingly, you’re stuck with a small capsule review rather something something a bit more substantial, but I do have a few points to make (as if running out of things to say is ever really my issue).

While not quite as momentous as “Faith, Hope & Trick,” this episode nonetheless plays an important role in starting off the season’s story arc. While it’s not the most subtle episode the show has ever done, the various parallels do a nice job of handling the reintegration of a certain character both in terms of the character himself and Buffy’s response to their return, and they have some fun with a couple of television clichés in the process.

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Tagged as Analysis, Angel, Beauty and the Beasts, Buffy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Call of the Wild, David Boreanaz, Episode 4, Faith, Joss Whedon, Marti Noxon, Mr. Platt, Oz, Pete, Review, Scott Hope, Season 3, Television, TV, Werewolf

May 3, 2010 · 4:46 pm

Treme – “At the Foot of Canal Street”

“At the Foot of Canal Street”

May 2nd, 2010

How do you solve a problem like Katrina? If Treme started out by looking at how people survived the storm and how they are struggling to bounce back personally and professionally from its immediate impact, “At the Foot of Canal Street” moves onto how it is that the myriad of problems caused by the storm are being fixed. As the nation talks about canceling Carnival or not rebuilding the city, and as the city’s public works contractor is revealed to be incompetent, characters are forced to wonder whether they should take things into their own hands and try to enact some change on their own.

There’s some broad strokes in this particular part of the episode, characters proposing political campaigns and recording profanity-laced YouTube videos, but it subtly ripples through the rest of the show’s characters and storylines. Everyone has that point where they wonder if they should take their fate into their own hands, or where they struggle to do the right thing because they know it’s bigger than they realize, and Treme is just as interested in those responses as it is the direct engagement with bureaucracy and national media. “At the Foot of Canal Street” doesn’t entirely fix some of the show’s early red flags, but George Pelecanos nicely integrates even the show’s most problematic character into a narrative that feels as genuine as the rest of the series.

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Doctor Who – “The Time of Angels”

“The Time of Angels”

April 24th, 2010

This afternoon, I spent a few hours doing what I guess I’d call “Doctor (W)Homework.” After last week’s episode, it was clear from the preview that the show would be returning to two key parts of Steven Moffat’s oeuvre, and so many suggested that I take a look back into recent seasons of the series in order to follow the continuities. Since I am not one to doubt the intelligence of my Twitter followers and blog commenters, I took this suggestion to heart, and so I sat down with Series Three’s “Blink” and Series Four’s “Silence in the Library” and “Forest of the Dead.”

Inevitably, this created quite an interesting experience going into this week’s new episode of Series Five, as both the Weeping Angels (central to the Carey Mulligan-enhanced “Blink”) and River Song (introduced in the two-parter) effectively pick up where they left off, as odd as that particular phrase may sound when considering Professor (or Doctor?) Song. “The Time of Angels,” the start of a two-parter itself, delivers on the promise of those earlier episodes, heightening the terror surrounding one of the universe’s most dangerous creatures while proving that River and her magical blue book are both just as fun and just as tragic as we imagined when reintroduced in this fashion.

Some thought on “The Time of Angels,” although probably not before I write out some thoughts on the episodes which came before, after the jump.

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Tagged as Alex Kingston, Amy Pond, BBC, Bishops, Blink, Carey Mulligan, Clerics, Cliffhanger, Episode 4, Forest of the Dead, Karen Gillan, Matt Smith, Review, River Song, Series Five, Silence in the Library, Steven Moffat, the Church, The Doctor, The Time of Angels, Timey-Wimey, Two-Parter, Weeping Angels

April 5, 2010 · 8:12 pm

The Pacific – “Part Four”

“Part Four”

April 4th, 2010

For the second straight week, the real-life events of the Pacific war have made for an interesting interlude of sorts for The Pacific. Last week’s episode used their extended shore level in Melbourne, Australia in order to demonstrate the home front without traveling back to the United States, and “Part Four” is very much designed to analyze the psychological challenges that soldiers face in these kinds of conditions. Cape Gloucester, we learn, was only very briefly a war between the Americans and the Japanese, and soon became a war of the Americans against the torrential rainfall and the psychological toll that that experience would have on them.

If “Part Two” was a fairly concentrated glimpse into the heroism of John Basilone, “Part Four” is a frank portrait of a man (Bob Leckie) who feels entirely disconnected from those notions of heroism, and struggles to maintain any sense of humanity (and masculinity) in the face of both the turmoil of war and an embarrassing medical condition.

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Tagged as Bedwetting, Bob Leckie, Cape Gloucester, Comic Book, Enuresis, Episode 4, Eugene Sledge, Gordie, Hospital, James Badge Dale, John Basilone, Miniseries, Nate Corddry, Pacific War, Part Four, Pistol, Psychiatry, Psychological Warfare, Rain, Suicide, World War II

March 24, 2010 · 2:41 am

Parenthood – “Wassup”

“Wassup”

March 23rd, 2010

I’m curious what Jason Katims and Co. want us to take away from watching Parenthood. There are times, for example, I think it’s a subconscious argument for group parenting, as any one of the Braverman siblings, on their own, seems to be a legitimately terrible parent to the point where calling in a favour from another part of the family is like second nature to them. There are other times, however, where it tries to serve as a reminder to why parents go through the struggle of raising children, able to have those moments of maturity or peaceful sleep in which parents can awkwardly try to be funny or simply stand there creepily watching their child sleep.

I don’t necessarily think that these are two incongruous ideas, but the problem is that I don’t believe the characters on the show are actually benefitting from any of them. Rather than these stories emerging from who these characters are, “Wassup” was dominated by stories that emerge because the writers wanted to talk about them, and the lack of any sort of build-up or history to the events made it seem like the writers wanted to know how Lorelai Gilmore would deal with the “masturbation” question and what would happen if Nate Fisher had a teenage daughter who started dating.

While there are some fine moments in the episode which indicate that the writers know how to make these storylines resonate, there was nothing to make it feel consistent with the show’s trajectory thus far, making its “everyone learned a lesson” conclusion feel more problematic than in weeks past – I’m not giving up on the show, but I think that they need to find a way to merge story and character in a way which feels less like one big cliche.

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Tagged as Adam Braverman, Amber, Boyfriend, Craig T. Nelson, Drew, Episode 4, Facebook Official, Haddie, Jabar, Julia, Lauren Graham, Masturbation, NBC, Peter Krause, Review, Sarah, Season 1, Television, TV, Wassup, Zeke

February 17, 2010 · 12:21 am

Lost – “The Substitute”

“The Substitute”

February 16th, 2010

In Esquire Magazine’s fantastic feature on Roger Ebert’s struggles with cancer and the surgeries which have left him unable to speak, there are a myriad of passages which are emotional and poignant. However, the one that resonated with me most is the section where Chris Jones talks about Ebert’s dreams:

“In his dreams, his voice has never left. In his dreams, he can get out everything he didn’t get out during his waking hours: the thoughts that get trapped in paperless corners, the jokes he wanted to tell, the nuanced stories he can’t quite relate. In his dreams, he yells and chatters and whispers and exclaims. In his dreams, he’s never had cancer. In his dreams, he is whole.”

Ebert’s story is hugely powerful, and while a fictional character can’t possibly compare I feel his story offers valuable perspective on the narrative arc of John Locke. For Locke, the island was like a dream (but not actually a dream, at least we presume), a place where everything he was unable to accomplish confined to a wheelchair became possible. When John Locke woke up on that beach able to move his legs, it was his miracle, and he went forward in the rest of his life as a believer, someone who felt renewed faith towards whoever was responsible for his miraculous recovery. He was “whole” in a way that he had never experienced before, as if his kidney and his legs hadn’t been taken away by his spiteful father.

But John Locke was always scared: he was scared that it would all be taken away from him, desperate to solve the puzzles of the island so that this dream wouldn’t end. Locke became a believer not because he felt safe, but rather because he felt deathly afraid of what would happen if the dream ended, and the tension that defined his life before arriving on the island never truly left him even when he was able to move his legs.

“The Substitute” is about John Locke, who he was and who he might have been, but it is also about what John Locke was searching for. At the end of the day, he wasn’t searching for faith so much as he was searching for a purpose, and we learn in this episode that Locke was no more chosen than anyone else, which in some ways would have given the man a sense of peace before his tragic end.

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Tagged as ABC, Analysis, Answers, Benjamin Linus, Candidates, Cave, Entertainment, Episode 4, Eulogy, Helen, Iggy Pop, Ilana, Jack Shephard, Jacob, John Locke, Josh Holloway, Katey Sagal, Man in Black, Michael Emerson, Mythology, Review, Sawyer, Season 6, Smokey, Television, Terry O'Quinn, The Numbers, The Substitute, TV, Walkabout