Piece of the Puzzle: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. S2 E4 - A Hen in the Wolf House

In which I review the latest episode of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

It's no small wonder why Hydra wants the Obelisk, which they were first able to recover in Shadows.  With nothing more than tissue samples from its petrified victims, they were able to weaponize it to mixed results.  With the artifact itself, they could potentially do far worse than that: creating an extinction-level event to kill all non-Hydra operatives worldwide.  When undercover S.H.I.E.L.D. agent is put on the project, her cover within Hydra is blown, resulting in a hasty extraction.  Meanwhile, a desperate Reina comes to Coulson for Skye, whose father desperately wants her back in his custody.

Skye's father - the man that she has dedicated her entire life to learning more about, who was revealed to still be alive at the end of the last season - has been just as desperately trying to find her since the day that she was taken from him.  Coupled with the implicit revelation that Skye is in fact an alien - at least part Kree, given that she did not succumb to Agents Garret's and Coulson's fugue states after taking the Kree-based serum GH-325 - A Hen in the Wolf House ultimately raises more questions about her origin than it answers.  And despite my recent frustrations with Gotham's recently reset plot, I'm 100% fine with this.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has proven over its two seasons that it is more capable of developing, uncovering and ultimately deepening the mysteries surrounding its cast and setting.  These recent developments intensify, rather than frustrate, my appreciation for the show, taking the plot into interesting and uncharted directions.  Skye's father exudes a barely contained menace and an inherent desire to be with his daughter (who he has seen refer to him as a monster) that seems bound to explode in the very near future.  Coupled with the crossover potential with Guardians of the Galaxy, which included Kree among its major demographics, and the possibility of a small-screen adaptation of the Secret Invasion story line, the series has boundless potential with its new key players and plot points.

The reinsurgence of Simmons into S.H.I.E.L.D.'s main base of operations - and her strained reunion with Fitz - was impeccably handled.  Although she was doing incredibly well each week as a double agent inside of Hydra, and her physical absence was off-set by Fitz's hallucinated interactions with her, she is back where her character has the best potential to develop.  Here, her floundered relationship with Fitz can take off or stagnate as it will, with ample dramatic possibilities for the show to explore either way.  Fitz may darken or lighten as a character as a direct result, which again is in the best interest of the series' well-formed characters.

The final highlight of the episode was the introduction of fan favorite and Lance Hunter's she-devil of an ex-wife Bobbi Morse: codename Mockingbird, agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.  When her cover within Hydra was not enough to gain access to the organization's high-priority projects, Simmons was brought in to work her way up through their scientific division.  In her short time on screen, Morse has proven to be a superior physical threat, a charismatic agent and an incredibly entertaining character.  Her future interactions with Hunter on the team - especially given how fervently he's gone off about her in previous episodes - are bound to be a highlight of the season.

The complications brought up in this episode as both substantive to the series as a whole as well as incessently entertaining to watch.  They're bound to have long-lasting implications for not just Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., but the MCU as a whole (even if it takes a while to migrate to the big screen).  Overall, I give the episode a solid 8 out of 10.

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Piece of the Puzzle: Gotham S1 E7 - Penguin's Umbrella

In which I review the most recent episode of Gotham.

Since the Penguin's dramatic coming out to the people of Gotham as being decidedly alive, hostilities between the Maroni and Falcone crime families have escalated to the breaking point.  Falcone takes out Maroni's gun running, Maroni takes out Falcone's drug operations.  If Fish gets her way, the streets of Gotham will erupt in open war over her precious little Penguin.  Fearing for his and Barbara's life, Gordan takes one defiant last stand against the criminals of Gotham, executing warrants on the mayor, Falcone, Maroni and all of their close associates.

The die is cast.  The pieces in Gotham's back-and-forth game between law and disorder have been laid bare for all to see.  And, sadly, everything's just a little less interesting as a result.  Falcone chose Gordan to kill the snitching Penguin - who he was reasonably certain wouldn't murder a man on his authority - so that Penguin could insert himself as a double agent in Maroni's organization: feeding Falcone invaluable information and guiding Maroni to making increasingly unfavorable business decisions.  Knowing all along that Fish was conspiring against him within his own organization, he allowed her to continue her disloyal scheming until he could quietly take her legs out from under her.

So there you have it.  Penguin - although still an ambitious third party who won't be satisfied until he's single-handedly running all of Gotham - is a Falcone-employed informant.  Maroni is increasingly a non-entity in Gotham's underworld politics.  Fish is a known traitor who only has the pretence of importance at this stage of the game.  Gordan, along with his newfound MCU allies, remains an uncompromising bastion of truth, justice and the American way.

Even the episode's title is a misnomer: a metaphor referring to the Penguin's spheres of influence, rather than a herald for his iconic weaponized rain gear.  For all of its promise of drawing a line in the sand and progressing the ongoing conspiracy between the mob, the police and Wayne Enterprises, nothing all that essential really happened. It ultimately feels like the series simply reset to square one: Penguin being awesomely Penguin, Gordan indebted to Falcone, Bullock entrenching himself in the moral low ground and Fish's strategic impotence prominently displayed.

That's not to say that Penguin's Umbrella was a bad episode.  It was entertaining, the female characters range from good too passably written and the Penguin satisfyingly returns to form as the character that the series' plot hinges upon.  It's just to say that the only lasting implications for the series happened during episode one and were told through flashback.  I can only hope that this marks an end to Gotham's failed attempts to keep Penguin's actions covert and stand as the death knell to Fish's supposed importance on the show (as any reasonable crime lord would have her at the bottom of the river now that her ambitions have come to light).

Despite the episode's definite lack of importance, it was a good episode for all of the reasons listed above.  Barbara Kean, although thoroughly misguided in doing so, found herself outside of her domestic sphere, actively participating in the plot and doing what she - not Gordan - thought was the best course of action (even if it did ultimately result in her being a damsel in distress to disarm Gordan during his moment of triumph).  I give the episode a 7.5 out of 10.

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Piece of the Puzzle: Gotham S1 E6 - Spirit of the Goat

In which I review the most recent episode of Gotham.

Things have only gotten weirder in Gotham since last week's outbreak of Viper.  After a decades old case from Bullock's past spawns a supposed copycat killer, he's forced to dredge up aspects of his past that he hadn't dealt with for a long time.  Meanwhile, Gordan and Barbara patch things up between them, and Montoya finally gets the evidence that she needs to pin Gordan for Penguin's presumed murder.

This is hands down the best episode of the series thus far: better than Pilot, better than Selina Kyle, better than Viper.    It's dark, atmospheric, has a great villain and, above all, is well-written.  It plumbs the depths of Bullock's past, exploring how GCPD's "White Knight" became the misanthropic "bad cop" that he is today, and this version of the character is both more nuanced and more interesting than what we have been lead to believe in the previous five episodes.

Most shocking of all, however, is that Spirit of the Goat actually treats its female characters as people, rather than plot devices: shoring up what has easily been the worst feature of the show since it debuted.  Although I'm sure that Fish Mooney is just as lackluster as ever, she thankfully didn't appear this week.  Cat finally intersected with Bruce (something that I've called since the second episode).  While it was admittedly just a tentative interaction (a prowling Cat nicking something valuable while Bruce sleeps on the couch), I can't help but think that they're setting up their more substantive future interactions which are bound to be entertaining to watch.

And although Montoya's vendetta against Gordan and Bullock was ultimately undermined by the Penguin's decision to dramatically come out to the police at the end of the episode, it doesn't carry with it the air of incompetence that her previous attempts were riddled with.  She found a witness that confirmed her theory (a dock-side homeless man who likely wouldn't hold up to excessive scrutiny) secured a warrant for Gordan and Bullock's arrest and secured them as prisoners.  She has proven to matter to the show, even if she is seemingly stuck as an easily dispatched obstacle: driving the plot forward in a meaningful way (there'll be no hiding from Falcone, or Fish, now for Cobblepot).

And, finally, the episode's puppeteering villain, Dr. Marks, drives home not only this episode's measured and nuanced treatment of women, but of the psychological need for a Batman that the series has been intimating since The Balloonman.  The good doctor hypnotises borderline psychopaths into believing that they have been possessed by an anthropomorphic deity and compels them to kill the firstborn children of Gotham as a form of social therapy for the city itself.  She reasons that "deep down, everybody wants to eat the rich."  She is intelligent, capable and gets results in a way that Mooney could never hope to: the female equivalent of last week's Viper peddler.

My only complaints for Spirit of the Goat are twofold.  The first is that for as well written as all of the previously disappointing characters are now, Penguin seems to be stumbling in that regard.  So much depends on his continued secrecy, which his rapid upward mobility in the Maroni crime family, culminating in his dramatic appearance at the end of the episode, completely unravels.  I understand that he feels like he owes and can trust Gordan, but he could hardly have known about his arrest that immediately preceded Penguin's arrival, nor could he have been so stupid as to think that coming out to the city was at all in his interest.

The second is that nothing substantive was done with Bruce this episode.  Yes, they're obviously teasing the potential friendship between him and Cat for later in the series.  I get that.  I'm with that program.  To have an episode where Gotham's ultra rich first borns are being ritualistically sacrificed and NOT include the most visible rich kid on the series among those lined up for the slaughter seems like a grievous misstep.  I know that I've generally called for less Bruce, but this was the perfect opportunity to feature him, and they settled on passing.

Despite my few grievances, this episode is exactly what Gotham should be.  I'm hoping that they finally found their way after meandering listlessly through their first five episodes, because this was the show that I wanted to see since day one.  This is the show that will keep me around past the first season.  Overall, I give the episode an 8.5 out of 10.

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Piece of the Puzzle: American Horror Story: Freakshow S4 E3 - Edward Moordrake Part 1

In which I review the latest episode of American Horror Story: Freakshow.

It's that time of the year again - time for the annual American Horror Story Halloween episode.  These have always been a highlight of the season for me, and I'm not 100% sure why.  It's not the horrific themes, since those are a mainstay of the show's every episode.  I'm almost tempted to say that it's because they save their best stand-alone narrative for the time when good horror is at a premium, but even that serves only to belittle the rest of the series.  For whatever reason, though, they never fail to disappoint.

Following Meep's death, Ethel Darling has received a terminal diagnosis: Cirrhosis of the liver.  Nevermind that she hasn't touched a drop of alcohol in years, she will be dead within the year.  Meanwhile, a charlatan fortune teller is hired onto the freakshow, intent on harvesting the Tattler twins for display in a failing freak museum that promises not to ask any questions about how the specimen came into their hands.  The girl's audition convinces Elsa that she's bound for a late-in-life surge of fame and success, for which she insists on rehearsing new material right away, not caring that it's Halloween night: a time that, according to Carney lore, no freakshow must perform, lest they summon the spirit of the two-headed Edward Moordrake.  Her rehearsal does exactly that, and now he scours the freakshow looking for a the perfect freak to take back to Hell with him.

As Freakshow begins settling into its narrative, I'm increasingly convinced that this is hands down the series' best season.  Kathy Bates is resplendent as the guilt-ridden Ethel, whose back story is finally revealed in full: a one-time celebrated freak who fell on hard times due to Dell's reckless mismanagement and exploitation of their child - including selling tickets to Ethel's "live freak birth" and letting anybody with 25 cents to burn the chance to hold "the monster baby."  Watching Ethel come to terms with the inevitability of her immediate death, turn to alcohol to help her cope and break down as the summoned Edward Moordrake delicately demands to know her story is simply incredible to watch: the perfect marriage of impeccable writing and Kathy Bates' immeasurable talent as an actress.

The character of Edward Moordrake is as unsettling of one as any American Horror Story has ever produced.  Told in an old-timey flashback, his story is as tragic as it is horrific, and his return to the world of the living even more so.  His mannerisms and speech are spot-on for a well-bred Victorian lord and the incessant whispering of his second head supremely unnerving.  His ghostly stalking of Mars' freakshow, acting as the otherworldly arbiter of the performers' sins, is the perfect secondary narrative for a Halloween-themed episode: his patient witness to the freaks testimony offering a previously unavailable window into the back stories of Elsa Mars' ghoulish menagerie.

The lead in to the episode - the pair of con artists trying to sell fraudulent bits of freak anatomy, in turn being hired to secure authentic ones - is the latest development in the series' social commentary about the exploitation of those without the civil and legal channels to defend themselves, a subject that I previously mentioned being a particular sticking point of mine.  So-called freaks, exploited and hated in life, are priceless when dead, stuffed and put on display.  That they could be poached like African game is an insufferably cruel, yet brilliantly spot-on, turn for the show.

As always, one of the show's breathtaking highlights is the freaks musical performances.  While we got the Tattler's duet of Fona Apple's "Criminal" in Massacres and Matinees, which we have not seen since she sang David Bowie's "Life on Mars" in Monsters Among Us.  This time, she takes on Lana Del Rey's perfectly apropos "Gods & Monsters," heralding Edward Moordrake's arrival in the freakshow.

And, finally Dandy Mott's newfound partnership with Twisty highlights the duality of the character: the impotent rage of him in his domestic trappings and his savage cruelty toward his helpless victims.  In a brilliant stroke of direction, they set him up directly as an inept Michael Meyers: dressing him in a clown costume, then following him with a point-of-view tracking shot as he puts on a plastic clown mask, grabs a knife and ultimately can't bring himself to kill the insufferably unimpressed servant that he professes to hate.  While his sadomasochistic turn against his victims still reeks of that petulant child in the clown mask, his sadistic actions prove more than adequate for his newfound role as Twisty's deranged sidekick.

I am immensely impressed with this episode: possibly the show's best episode overall.  And the best part is that it's a two-part narrative, meaning that there's still more to come.  The narrative is developed, nuanced and executed far better than any other on the show and I can't wait to see how it is concluded.  I give the episode a high 9.5 out of 10.

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Piece of the Puzzle - Gotham S1 E5 - Viper

In which I review the most recent episode of Gotham.

After last week's decision about the fate of Akrham, the Maroni crime family has been hoping to act on their newfound momentum against Falcone, and now they have a weapon perfect for the task: Penguin.  His connections within the Falcone organization gives him access to everything, including the vaults of their casino.  Meanwhile, a new drug, known only as Viper, has begun hitting the streets of Gotham.  It grants its users superhuman strength and the certainty of a gruesome death.  But when Gordan and Bullock find out that the distributor has a political agenda, they realize that everybody - including the young Bruce Wayne - are at risk.

This is easily the best episode of the series thus far, beating out even the incredibly well-rendered Selina Kyle.  Not only is the plot itself incredibly entertaining - watching short-lived metahumans riot in the streets, rob gas stations for milk and cheese and marvel at their own magnificence - but the episode features several loose plot strands coming together in extremely satisfying ways.

Fish Mooney's plan to train a white trash wanna-be singer into an assassin against Falcone finally bears fruit: marking the first time one of Fish's plans has substantively gotten off of the ground.  While she still reeks of over-sexualized writing and campy execution, it's hard to argue with her results: transforming trashy eye-candy into a cultured sophisticate in a much darker take on My Fair Lady.  Additionally, Bruce's research into Wayne Enterprise's under-handed dealings - especially how two crime families could become such big players in a city renovation project spear-headed by his parents - pays off in a big way.  As it turns out, Wayne Enterprises is the OsCorp of Gotham - the font from which all manner of super-powered villainy is sure to erupt in episodes to come.

While I am actually excited for what they started to do with Fish Mooney's character, I can't help but think it suffers from taking her two steps forward, one step back.  Viper brings her completely out of her club: pitting her against Falcone's other crime bosses on neutral territory - trading barbs with her peers in his organization, providing the first, tentative look into why she rose to her position in the first place.  The fact that her latest scheme against her boss actually appears to be well planned and executed gave me hope that we'd see her as something other than sexualized scenery with the thin pretense of progressing the over-arching plot.

The step back, of course, occurred when it came out that she was, in fact, only pretending to fend off the misogynist advances of one of Falcone's other mob bosses.  They are lovers, embroiled in the same coup d'etat against their superior.  Still, even some progress with Fish is better than none.  Perhaps in time we will see the same competant Fish Mooney that the writers evidently do.

The poor writing of the episode was actually reserved for Penguin, of all characters.  Although he's been intelligently stalking Gotham's criminal world up until now, he took an insane gamble on Maroni sparing his life when he told them that he had 1) been lying to him since the day that they met and 2) was a fairly high-ranking member of Falcone's organization until recently.  The fact that his scheme paid off in the end actually doesn't matter: he took stupid, obvious risks that immediately backfired on him, leaving him within a hair's bredth of having his face sliced off in Maroni's kitchens.  And, given that his continued existence is owed to going unnoticed in the city, his incredibly visible position as manager in a known hangout of Falcone's main competator - coupled with the use of his previously well-known alias - seems to have all the ear-marks of a terribly thought-out plan that will inevitably fail, sooner rather than later.

While Viper is certainly a step in the right direction for the series, it is not without its aforementioned issues.  Additionally, the show needs to quickly figure out what it wants to do with both Selina Kyle and Barbara Kean, two characters that have shown a lot of promise in past episodes, but have failed to do anything with that.  Overall, I give the episode a high 7.5 out of 10.

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Piece of the Puzzle: American Horror Story: Freakshow S4 E2 - Massacres and Matinees

In which I review the latest episode of American Horror Story: Freakshow.

After Elsa Mars set up camp outside of Jupiter, Flordia in last week's "Monsters Among Us," life amongst her Freaks has only gotten harder.  With the vicious killer stalking the town still on the loose, the police have set up a curfew, meaning that Mars' evening grotesqueries will be performed for empty seats.  Her ill-tempered strongman's new position has head of security has lead him to bullying the freaks and forcing his ideas for the freakshow through despite Elsa's objections.  Meanwhile, the police continue to search for the detective that Jimmy and the other Freaks murdered for trying to take the Tattler sisters away and Dandy Mott discovered a kindred spirit in the equally-demented Twisty the Clown.

Although Massacres and Matinees is tightly packed with increasingly interwoven characters and divergent plotlines, it fails to suffer from the same claustrophobic sense of over-crowding that has plagued Gotham since its premiere.  Despite the number of moving parts in the show, there is room for every character and for every character's narrative.  Jimmy's misguided attempts at reconciling the the townsfolk with the freaks, Dell's strong armed takeover of the freakshow, the Tattler's growing rivalry as performers and Dandy's deranged new friendship with Twisty all feel fully developed and completely unrushed.

In fact, the show's myriad of tangental back stories seem to be rapidly falling into place, creating a more cohesive story rather than a more fractured one.  Dell entering the fold as Ethel's former lover and Jimmy's secret father creates as much tension within Elsa's camp as there is directed toward it from the town.  Jimmy's obvious hatred toward the tyrannical Dell results in arrest and death of Meep the Geek, further driving a wedge between not only the freaks and the town, but the freaks and their overbearing strongman.  Dandy's rejection as a performer by both his mother and the freakshow fuels his sadistic imagination, leading to his ultimate partnership with Twisty - a killer who, until this moment, seemed closer to the isolated and abused Leatherface than the intentionally menacing John Wayne Gacy.

The only head-scratching interaction in the entire episode is between Elsa and the Tattler twins.  When star-struck Bette is forced to sing backup to her more-talented twin sister, she is understandably upset: attempting to run off stage mid-performance from embarrassment, which Dot refused to allow.  More even-headed characters would have left it at that: allowing the conjoined twins to work through their differences privately, give Bette some much-needed singing lessons and let the whole matter come to rest.

But Elsa decides to play a more dangerous game - setting the two sisters against one another.  She comes to Bette in the dead of night when Dot is asleep, telling her that she - rather than Dot - is the actual talent between them, that her sister feeds off of her lack of confidence and that Bette should refuse to allow her to do so.  While it might just turn out to be her way of building up Bette's fledgling confidence so that the sisters can perform actual duets, that does not seem to be the case.  Elsa appears to be intentionally driving the two sisters apart, although to what end can only be speculated at at this point.

For the second week in a row, Twisty the Clown turns out to be the most memorable and off-putting character on the show.  Massacres and Matinees continued to explore Twisty's, well, twisted desire to make others happy: a desire for which he obviously has no talent to act on.  He murders a toy store owner and employee in order to get a wind-up toy robot to amuse his captive children with.  When that fails, he tries what can only be described as a game of peek-a-boo with the store owner's severed head.  When his "play time" with Dandy Mott results in the man-child discovering the decapitated head in his bag,

As I watched the episode unfold, I noticed something that had slipped my attention in Monsters Among Us: that Twisty's masked face is only half-flesh.  His maniacal, big-toothed grin is actually a mask, hiding his actual mouth and jaw.  Not to be disappointed, his mask was knocked aside during his captives' failed escape attempt, revealing a horrifically ruined mouth of blackened, broken and rotted teeth.

Given his distinctly freakish appearance and his proximity to Elsa Mars' freakshow, I can't help but wonder what the connection between the two is.  Is he some escaped attraction running amok like a bored child, or was he intentionally set loose to drum up a macabre interest in Mars' show?  Or is it something else entirely?  She has already proven an insatiable, desperate need to be in the spotlight and her last scene with the Tattler twins suggests that she's willing to go to any length to get what she wants.

American Horror Story: Freakshow has kept up with the grisly promise of its first episode.  The series continues to plumb the depths of the depravity of its characters and develop its increasingly morbid narrative: proving the validity of its critical praise with each week's new installment.  I give the episode an 8.5 out of 10 and anxiously await this week's Edward Mordrake Part 1.

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Piece of the Puzzle: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. S2 E4 - Face My Enemy

In which I review the latest episode of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Since Coulson's last Fugue state, a painting has been discovered in a burned down church that bears the same symbols that Coulson has been obsessively carving at an increasingly frequent rate: some kind of text written in the same, unknown alien language.  The plan is simple: infiltrate the charity ball where it's being held, steal it, then decipher it.  Brigadier General Talbot's presence at the party complicates matters however, especially when it turns out to be a Hydra agent in disguise.  But when Agent May is similarly replaced by a Hydra agent, can Director Coulson discover the deception before it's too late?

Agent May vs Agent May.  Fight!

It's easy to forget after seeing "The Cavalry" punch, kick and generally smash her way to victory for going on two seasons that Agent May is more than just a fighter; she's a covert agent who specializes in under-cover missions.  Face My Enemy reminds us of that fact by showing her under cover for the first time in the series.  Watching her tango, laugh and monopolize a conversation with sophisticated ease is even more unnerving than Ward's defection to Hydra.  That's not to say that she was unconvincing in the role.  In fact, her transformation into a chittering, bubbly socialite was perfect.  It is simply so blatantly out of character for her that it's impossible not to respect her even more as an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.

The plot of the episode was well enough: nothing particularly good nor memorable, but nothing that didn't work on its own.  May's scenes were certainly highlights of the episode, from her schooled grace at the party and her climactic fight with her doppelganger.  Fitz's decision to try to bond with the rest of the team, despite his recent mental deficiencies, was a powerful step forward for his character.  Everything else, though, pretty stock for an action TV series: the heist, the sabotaged plane nearly exploding, Coulson's last-minute deduction that he was with an impostor rather than the real May - nothing that we haven't seen countless times before.

It's becoming increasingly obvious with every episode just how far the balance of power is tipped into Hydra's favor.  While Coulson's team barely has the resources to get by, Hydra's global intelligence network has been largely unaffected after the battle over the Triskelion.  They have perfected camouflage so absolutely that they can convincingly transform a waify, white woman into a solidly built asian one and the only thing that gives her away is that she likes coffee and talks too much.  They can even brainwash high-value assets into betraying their every core value and work for Nazis.

Face My Enemy proves that there is plenty of room left to explore the agents of Coulson's new S.H.I.E.L.D. if even a relatively blank slate like May can headline an entire episode with such entertaining ease.  Even if the episode fails to be a particularly memorable one, it is none-the-less a perfectly necessary one: progressing the overarching narrative forward and meaningfully developing its characters.  I continue to love the direction that Fitz is being taken and Simmons is just as convincing of a character whether she's a hallucination or a double agent.  Overall, I give the episode a 7 out of 10.

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Piece of the Puzzle: Gotham S1 E4 - Arkham

In which I review the latest episode of Gotham.

After thwarting the vigilantism of the diabolically-named Balloonman, Gordan is confronted by the prodigal son of Gotham: Oswald Cobblepot - a man whose continued existence threatens the life of himself and his fiance.  But when Cobblepot offers to feed Gordan information on the inner workings of Gotham's underworld, the potential rewards are simply too good to pass up.  Meanwhile, an assassin who's been targeting city officials threatens to cause a mob war as the the city decides what to make of the decrepit Arkham Asylum.

At the rate that Gotham's corrupt officials are being taken out, there won't be any need for a Batman by the time its first season comes to a close.  Not only did the last two episodes kill off a police chief, two city councilmen and an aid, but also featured a nearly-successful attempt on the mayor's life.  This escalation in high-profile assassinations parallels the seeries' hastening pace after its post-pilot lull.  Penguin's exile from Gotham and rise within the Maroni crime family were so superficially brief that he should have started his career as the Maroni's equivalent of Fish Mooney: a mid-level crime boss and mob enforcer that functions as the on-the-ground representative of his organization.

After realizing last week that Gotham's female characters inexcusably pale against its competition, I find myself conflicted about Arkham's handling of the same.  On the one hand, Fish continues to be by far the worst written character on the series, seemingly incapable of being anything other than a ravenous nymphomaniac.  While her plan is more cognizant than usual - hiring a singer who can seduce and kill Carmine Falcone - it's how the writers choose to portray that plan that's ultimately troublesome: coyly asking her would-be assassins if they liked men or women, then instructing them to seduce her as if she were a man.  Her obvious, shuddering pleasure when a white trash singer in fishnet stockings jerkily makes out with her calls into question if it's Falcone's lust or her own that ultimately informs her plan.

On the other hand, Barbara Kean actually had a few moments this week that actually resembled genuine character development.  When Montoya's previous suggestion that Gordan may not be the good cop that he appears to be on the surface - specifically telling her to ask him about Oswald Cobblepot - she brazenly defended him and refused to bring the subject up to him.  But when the Penguin mysteriously shows up on their doorstep and his rudely thrown out by an obviously rattled Gordan, she broaches the subject with him, forcing him to choose between a life with her or a life with his secrets.  When he chooses the latter, she walks out on him.  Although this sequence of events seems incredibly rushed in the forty-five minutes that it was allowed, we see her as more than a romantic object that's a simple given in Gordan's life for the first time in the series.  She makes a decision based on her own self-interest, forces a conflict by pursuing it, then acts on that in a realistic manner.  We even see her outside of her apartment for the first time!

While this hardly makes up for the show's portrayal of lesbianism as a moral failing and a breach of trust (considering that her relationship with Montoya preceded her relationship with Gordan) - let alone for the quality of writing set aside for Fish and Montoya - it is a step in the right direction for the women of Gotham.  I have my concerns about where Barbara's character arc will lead - probably to a relapse into drug use and a rebound relationship with Montoya - but it does afford her a narrative that's not submissive to her fiance's.

While my opinion on Gotham continues to be conflicted, Arkham is a step in the right direction.  I am eager to see what Barbara Kean is going to do in her post-Gordan life, which is not something that I would have ever said about her life with him.  I give the episode a 7 out of 10.

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Piece of the Puzzle: South Park S18 E3 - The Cissy

In which I review the latest episode of South Park.

It turns out that last week, Randy did actually get Lorde to sing at the boys' party.  The seventeen-year-old New Zealand pop singer is actually a forty-five-year-old male geologist living in Colorado.  Only now he's tired of living a double life: being told by his daughter that he doesn't understand her and by his female co-workers that they're uncomfortable sharing the bathroom with him.  As he struggles with his sexual identity, Cartman has a fool proof plan of his own to use the spacious girls bathroom - claim that he is transgendered and should be allowed to use the bathroom of the sex that he self-identifies with.

In its eighteenth season, it appears that South Park is broadening their crass brand of comedy to include features praised in Archer and How I Met Your Mother: incorporating tight, continuity-driven humor in which jokes are frequently references to previous episodes.  Go Fund Yourself has the boys drop out of school to manage a startup company on Kickstarter.  Gluten Free Ebola dealt directly with their social fallout at school because of the manner in which they left, which they try to remedy by hosting a party headlined by Lorde, which actually just turns out to be Randy in drag singing "Lorde, Lorde, Lorde.  I am Lorde."  The Cissy runs with what turned out to be a terrible end-gag for that episode and makes it its narrative focus: Randy is Lorde.

The premise is beyond ridiculous, even by South Park's standards.  And yet their relentlessly straight-faced insistence that he is, in fact, the famous pop singer - combined with a surprisingly earnest foray into sexual identity politics - actually makes this not just hilarious, but honestly believable.  Whereas Cartman simply uses what he reads on the Internet as an excuse to use a better bathroom, Randy is honesty conflicted by the validation and meaning he finds in his identity as a woman.  It has nothing to do with homosexuality: it's how he chooses to identify himself, how he feels most comfortable.  Stan's ensuing confusion about where he belongs further highlights the very real questions that people face when confronting the nature of their sexuality.

While the big laughs definitely came from Cartman's bathroom shenanigans, I was surprised just how much of The Cissy's humor was self-referential.  When Cartman first enters the boys bathroom, he immediately dismisses Butters' announcement that they finally let him back into school, a subject that the faculty debated at the beginning of the last episode.  When Principle Victoria holds an assembly in the gym, it's the burned-down wreck that Butters left it in when he dropped out of school.  When Sharon, concerned about the depressive state of her husband, asks him if he's just going to sit outside all day drinking beer, he tells her that "it's okay.  It's Gluten-free," since he wound up under government quarantine for not knowing that beer contained the hyper-toxin Gluten.

While South Park has always incorporated some degree of meta-humor, it was never a show that prominantly featured it as a part of its narrative DNA.  Kanye West accepted his life as a gay fish in Fishsticks and reformed to heteronormativity in The Hobbit, it was a-typical of the show to make continuity-driven jokes.  Season 18, however, uncharacteristically bring that aspec to the forefront the series' humor.  I sincerely hope that they continue to incorporate this style of meta-humor in future episodes, since it  provides a whole new avenue of as-of-yet untapped humor for them to explore after eighteen years on the air.

Three episodes in and it's safe to say that South Park is as funny in its eighteenth season as it has ever been.  It continues to branch out into new styles of humor and can even manage to transform failed jokes from previous episodes into the incredibly memorable premise of following episodes.  Overall, I give The Cissy an 8.5 out of 10.

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Piece of the Puzzle: American Horror Story: Freakshow S4 E1 - Monsters Among Us

In which I review the latest episode of American Horror Story: Freakshow.

While investigating a woman's gruesome murder in rural Florida, police discover her shameful secret: her daughters, Siamese twins Bette and Dott Tattler.  They rapidly capture the grotesque imagination of the locals, as well as that of Elsa Mars, the owner of the new freak show located just outside of town.  Realizing that the twins murdered their mother, she convinces them to join her menagerie of freaks: the only real chance that they will ever have to fit in.  But when the police name the Tattler's the prime suspects in not just their mother's murder, but a string of killings occurring in the area, Elsa Mars and her company of aberrations will need to intervene on the twins' behalf in order to protect their new headline act.

Freakshow continues to prove that series creators' Brad Falchuk's and Ryan Murphy's decision to reinvent American Horror Story with each successive season was the perfect direction to take the series,  By doing so, each season has a distinctly unique identity : with a setting, cast of characters and narrative exclusive to that dozen or so set of episodes.  By shifting from ghosts to Nazi-created monsters to contemporary witches and now to a modern-day retelling of Tod Browning's Freaks, the series becomes a horrific experience that transcends the trappings of any one season.

American Horror Story's latest installment has what is easily the horror genre's best physical character design since Hellraiser's cenobites.  Inherently more unsettling than the fantastical extremes of the genre - phantoms, vampires, zombies and the like - real-world deformity provides a readily available source of visual discomfort for the audience: bearded women, flipper-handed carnies, conjoined twins, pygmies, amputees and other grotesques.  The visual highlight of the episode is easily Twisty the Clown - a deranged performer that's essentially a cross between Captain Spaulding and Leatherface.

In addition to the visual possibilities of the Freakshow cast, they also provide the narrative tension of the show.  Monsters Among Us presents an already escalating contention between the townsfolk that both hate and fear the freaks next door and the persecuted performers' decision that they've born enough abuse.  The Tattler's killed their mother because of her authoritarian need to keep them shut inside at all times: away from anybody who would possibly see them.  Elsa's landlord tried to evict the performers because the thought of them on his land gave his wife nightmares.  Local residents even tried to buy the freaks themselves as if they were slaves being paraded on auction.

While without a doubt an exuberant opening to a promising season, the film suffers by over-using Twisty the Clown.  Establishing his parallel narrative, which will undoubtedly prove linked to Elsa's Freakshow, through his initial double-murder was easily the most memorable scene.  Bringing up his murder spree in conversations with the other characters cemented his importance to the series.  The problem is that they continue to use him beyond that point.  Showing his entire string of murders, as well as how he torments abducted children through his failed attempts at clowning, strike me as moments that would be better used in a slow reveal over the next episode or two.  The show stands to gain more in withholding this character - building the tension and mystery surrounding him - then it does to make as much use of him as it did in this episode.

Freakshow continues American Horror Story's tradition of small-screen horror in the exact manner that I had hoped that it would.  All of the characters introduced - from the trick turning Jimmy Darling to the abusive Tattler twins - have immense dramatic potential.  Elsa Mars' desperate dreams of latter-day stardom directly channel Sunset Blvd.'s Norma Desmond without being a derivative rehash of a sixty-four-year-old character.  With its stellarly seasoned cast and proven writers, this may prove to be the series' best season yet.  I give this episode an 8 out of 10.

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Piece of the Puzzle: Arrow S3 E1 - The Calm

In which I review the latest episode of Arrow.

Because of Oliver's tireless vigilantism, Starling City is a safer place than he returned to two years ago, enough so that the police have stopped their manhunt for him and Oliver feels comfortable asking Felicity to dinner.  But when a new crime boss calling himself Vertigo begins consolidating the city's criminals under his control, his first order of business is to take out the one man who can stop him: Arrow.

Despite having always been a DC-sanction Batman rip-off, Arrow perfectly embodies the reasons for its title character's enduring popularity.  Whereas Bruce Wayne is motivated by vengeance - a desire to keep the tragedy that befell his parents from happening to anybody else - Oliver Queen is motivated by redemption.  Although Starling City shares Gotham's corruption, it is the willful inaction of good, capable people that is its downfall, not their physical inability to act.  While Batman's mythos presents him as the equivalent of an abused dog that lashes back after being kicked one too many times, the Green Arrow represents every person's potential to redeem themselves through selfless acts.  In this sense, Oliver Queen is DC's moral equivalent to Tony Stark.

While the Green Arrow has always draped himself in Batman's semantic trappings - an incredibly wealthy, non-powered, masked vigilante employing the guise of a flippant playboy in order to protect his loved ones from the reprisals of his increasingly eccentric cast of street-level villains -  he's such a good embodiment of those features that his unoriginality can easily be forgiven.  It's easy enough to write off Vertigo, a villain whose primary method of attack is to inject his opponents with a weaponized hallucinogen that forces them to experience their greatest fears, as a Scarecrow rip-off.  But to do so would be to deny what a entertaining villain he makes when reimagined as a street-level drug dealer with larger criminal ambitions than he was previously able to exercise.  It's about doing something well, rather than doing it first.

Beyond its villain of the week, The Calm is an excellent addition to an already excellent series.  It manages to retain its distinct visual style - rapid editing, swift pacing, muted color scheme and low key lighting - without falling into the ocular monotony that defined its first season.  Inferior writing would have made Oliver's one episode attempt to balance his role as the Arrow with his romantic feelings for Felicity into a frustrating narrative back peddle: the same "one step forward, two steps back" character development that made me give up on Inuyasha back in the day.  Arrow, however, convincingly threads it into Oliver's quest for self-improvement.  How can he be in a relationship with her if doing so threatens her well-being?

Arrow  has come a long way from the melodramatic series that it began as.  It has an earnest , almost desperate morality that makes it unlike any other comic-based series on TV.  Its inerconnectivity with the Flash and its central position in a growing DC Television Universe has only added greater depth to the series and its characters: making their personal quests for redemption the moral compass of a rapidly expanding world in the exact manner that Man of Steel's Superman is the moral center of the growing DC Cinematic Universe.  Overall, I give the episode an 8 out of 10.

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Piece of the Puzzle: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. S2 E3 - Making Friends and Influencing People

In which I review the most recent episode of Marvel's Agens of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Agent Simmons has been busy since leaving Clouson's team: working her way up through Hydra's ranks as a double-agent an gathering what intelligence she can from inside their organization.  Since S.H.I.E.L.D.'s most recent encounter with them, Hydra has set their sights on bringing Donnie Gill - the ice-powered dropout from S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy last seen in Seeds - who has resurfaced in Casablanca.  But when Hydra orders Simmons to bring Gill into the fold, she risks losing her cover as well as her life when S.H.I.E.L.D. attempts to intervene.

Hail Hydra.

 After teasing Simmons' defection for the first two episodes, Making Friends and Influencing People delivers everything that Shadows and Heavy Is the Head promised.  While I never believed that Simmons' move to Hydra was earnest, I did believe that it was done without Coulson's (nor the rest of the team's) knowledge of her deception and because she needed to tap into Hydra's considerable scientific resources in an attempt to hasten Fitz's recovery.  The actual reasons for it - that Coulson needed a double agent within Hydra specifically because of their considerable scientific resources - was far better than my over-complicated predictions

Simmons was without a doubt the perfect character to throw into this scenario, specifically because her inability to convincingly lie has been addressed throughout the series' first season.  The Hub showed a normally eloquent Simmons hopelessly bumbling through Agent Sitwell's questions about why she's in a particular hallway accessing a particular wall panel.  Her obvious lies drew his suspicion and, panicking, she shot him with an Icer.  She is by far the least likely spy that Coulson could have implanted into Hydra, and yet her intelligence, personability and dedication to her true cause makes her deception work and her role in it convincing.

Agent Simmons shoots Agent Sitwell in The Hub.

A second highlight of this episode was Fitz discovering that Agent Ward was being kept prisoner in S.H.I.E.L.D.'s new base: right underneath his feet.  Fitz defended Ward long after everyone else had resigned themselves to his allegiance to Hydra.  He had to be a triple agent working for S.H.I.E.L.D. or have a retinal bomb like in Eye Spy or something.  He believed in him up until Ward threw him and Simmons into the ocean, resulting in the brain damage that Fitz has struggled with all season.

His reaction to finally confronting the man that he had thought was his friend - the man who shattered his confidence and destroyed his capacity to contribute to the team - is utterly devastating.  His decision to take the oxygen out of Ward's cell - to show him what he had to endure because of him - as he rattles off what happens to the human body when deprived of oxygen is easily the darkest direction that the character was ever taken in.  His inability to go through with it, though, proves to be his greatest personal triumph: one worthy of an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.

"You need to accept the truth, Fitz.  He doesn't care about us or about anything."

More than anything else, Making Friend and Influencing People proves how to write female characters well, something that I recently complained about Gotham being incapable of doing.  It's not about making them over-the-top warrior women, reformed lesbians nor former (possibly current) junkies.  It's about making them people: convincingly human, whose presence and actions matter.  It's not enough to just give them some screen time and a back story.

With Making Friends and Influencing People, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. continues to prove why they are without a doubt the best comic-inspired show on television.  And yes, it's even better than Arrow.  Fitz and Simmons turn out to be equally engaging apart from one another as they have proven to be together and Ward's interrogation are fast becoming my favorite part of the new season.  I give the episode a solid 8.5 out of 10.

We may have just found out.

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Piece of the Puzzle: Gotham S1 E3 - The Balloonman

In which I review the latest episode of Gotham.

After last week's child trafficking case, 'Cat' has been helping Gordan with his investigation of the Wayne murders.  His sleuthing is interrupted, though, when a vigilante that the press name the Balloonman begins executing Gotham's corrupt elite by handcuffing them to weather balloons and releasing them into the atmosphere.  Convinced that justice only exists with law and order, Gordan sets out to stop the Balloonman before he can kill another public official.

The Balloonman strikes again.

The Balloonman is further proof that Gotham has finally found its footing as a series.  Bullock and Gordan have finally eased into their begrudging good cop / bad cop partnership: a union that works precisely because Bullock can get the information that Gordan can't and Gordan can keep Bullock from crossing that crucial line between upholding the law and taking it into his own hands.  I don't think that Cat's short lived turn as Gordan's star witness has quite come to an end yet, and her escape frees her to go look in on Bruce and Alfred (a character dynamic that, as I mentioned last week, has innumerable interesting possibilities to explore).  Barbara Kean's rocky relationship with Renee Montoya is finally revealed - a serious lesbian entanglement that dissolved over drugs.

While the overarching story seems to be progressing nicely after three episodes, it's starting to become apparent just how inept the show's writers are at handling their female characters.  Between Barbara, Renee, Fish and Cat, only the latter is doing any real legwork.  Barbara exists only as a counterpoint to Gordan: as a domestic end-game.  For all of her huffing and puffing, Renee has functionally done nothing over the first three episodes; she threatens, investigates and even manages to sneak in a few cloak-and-dagger conversations with Barbara, but she doesn't actually do anything substantial.  Having Renee and Barbara as ex-lesbian, ex-junky lovers only gives the semblance of character development, when it seems more likely that it's a way for Fox to sex-up the show while giving ultimately minor characters something to do when the men go out to commit and solve crimes.

Fish Mooney is easily the worst-written of the lot.  She is petty, conniving and shockingly ineffective as a leader: always shut in her club, never getting directly involved in her own criminal works.  When her pride is wounded by Falcone - who beat up "her latest boy toy" to keep her in line - she pettily orders an underling to mug his girlfriend and fires her broken-spirited lover for "bringing down the mood."  Falcone foiled her attempt to kill Gordan and Bullock, Gordan foiled her attempt to kill the Penguin and seemingly everybody has seen through her blundering job of killing off the Waynes - all in just three episodes.  She has essentially become the pre-Gotham Penguin: so boring and inept a villain that it makes us wish they'd just used somebody else in her place.

Despite the stupidly named vigilante that was the episode's focus and the continually disappointing use of the show's female characters, The Balloonman delivers an ultimately decent, if easily forgotten, case for Gordan and Bullock to solve.  Its direct connection to Selina Kyle prevents the series as a whole from feeling overly episodic.  While it's great that the best part of the show - Robin Lord Taylor's Penguin -is back in focus, I would have much preferred to watch him scheme his way ahead on the streets for a few more episodes.  Overall, I would give the episode a 6.5.

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