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Tag Archives: Episode Reviews
Game of Thrones Gets Mad and Throws One Hell of a Party in “The Last of the Starks”
The good guys (so far as there are any good guys in Game of Thrones) are licking their wounds and burying their dead after the Battle of Winterfell. But after a time to mourn, there’s also a time to celebrate, and to start thinking about what tomorrow looks like, now that there is a tomorrow to think about. The first half of “The Last of the Starks” builds that festive atmosphere, one that lets our heroes bask and joke and revel in the afterglow of their victory, before whatever comes next.
Game of Thrones Slays the Stakes Amidst the Darkness of “The Long Night”
It’s the battle you’ve been waiting for over the past eight years. The White Walkers are bearing down on Winterfell; the coalition of the willing in Westeros has girded themselves for war, and a battle to end all battles is in the offing. Almost everyone we know and care about is hunkered down in the North, as the combat en masse begins and a murky, grueling, near-wordless siege of our heroes’ homeland begins.
Game of Thrones Enjoys the Last Gasps of Life Before War with “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms”
It’s the night before the Battle of Winterfell, as the last few stragglers gather in the Starks’ castle before the White Walkers descend. “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” picks up where the season premiere left off, offering plenty of long-awaited reunions, closing the loop on a few longstanding relationships, and giving the audience one last chance to simply hang out with these characters before the game-changing fireworks begin and the casualties start piling up.
Posted in Game of Thrones
Tagged Episode Reviews, Game of Thrones S08E02, Game of Thrones Season 8
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Game of Thrones Picks Up the Pieces and Forges New Destinies in “Winterfell”
Game of Thrones goes back to where it all began, mirroring the series’ first episode with a royal procession into the heart of Winterfell. With that reintroduction, the show is slowly but surely assembling almost all of its major characters in one place to prepare for battle against the White Walkers. But before that can happen, these strange bedfellows have to decide who to follow, who has the right to rule them (not to mention, the temperament), and who, if anyone, they’re willing to fight and die for.
Posted in Game of Thrones
Tagged Episode Reviews, Game of Thrones S08E01, Game of Thrones Season 8
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The Simpsons Kills Off Maude, But Saves Ned in “Alone Again, Natura-Diddily”
The death of Maude Flanders on The Simpsons was a decision born of commerce, not of storytelling. A pay dispute between Fox and Maggie Roswell, who voiced Maude for the show’s first decade on the air, is the reason the series killed off Ned’s wife. And it shows.
As I discussed on The Simpsons Show Podcast, her death veers somewhere between “cartoon gag” and “afterthought.” In fairness, Maude was never one of the show’s most prominent or interesting characters. While one could fault the writers’ room for not fleshing her out more, particularly on a series where well-developed female characters are vastly outnumbered by their guy counterparts, the fact is that by the show’s eleventh year, all we really knew about Maude is that she was religious, provincial, and a bit of a stick in the mud.
Posted in Television, The Simpsons
Tagged Death, Episode Reviews, Maude Flanders, Ned Flanders, The Simpsons S11E14, The Simpsons Season 11
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Better Call Saul: In “Winner” Jimmy McGill Fakes His Grief Until It Changes Him
This whole season, Kim Wexler, and the audience, have been waiting for Jimmy McGill to truly deal with his brother’s death, to genuinely confront Chuck’s passing, rather than try to move on as though nothing had happened. From the season premiere, where Jimmy brushed off Howard’s tortured confession with an unbothered air, to last week’s tantrum over being denied his reinstatement, we’ve seen Jimmy do nothing but sublimate his feelings about his brother’s death. We’ve seen him repress them, run from them, and act out because of them, but never really face them head on.
The Walking Dead Tries to Rebuild the World with “A New Beginning”
I spent so much of The Walking Dead’s last major arc wondering “why don’t our heroes just take out Gregory?” Sure, so much of that arc was, yet again, about the battle for the soul of their community, a theme illustrated through choices about whether to spare people in order to remain good Samaritans or to hurt and harm and kill them like The Saviors, because that’s what it takes to beat The Saviors. Not executing Gregory, not sending him out to fend for himself, was meant not just as a sign of mercy, but as a sign that the good guys were morally better than the bad guys.
But good lord, surely at some point after he’s tried to sell you out to those same bad guys, after he’s tried to sow chaos and mistrust for you and your group, after he’s proven to be nothing but a unredeemable heel through and through, you rid yourself of the guy one way or another. Beyond a certain point, practicality has to win out, and someone who practically goes out of his way to cause trouble and threaten your life and the lives of the people you care about has to go.
Better Call Saul Waits for the Other Shoe to Drop in “Wiedersehen”
I miss the approach — popularized by The Wire and used by series as distinct as BoJack Horseman — of series putting their major fireworks in the penultimate episode of the season rather than the finale. It gives the show and the audience a full episode to recover and process all the major events of the season. And it helps avoid the sense in that second-to-last episode that you’re getting more setup than payoff ahead of the series pulling the trigger on its biggest developments.
That’s the problem with “Wiedersehen”, a perfectly good but not outstanding episode of Better Call Saul. It’s not as though there’s nothing happening in the episode. Lalo Salamanca makes overtures to Gus. Werner makes a daring escape from his gilded cage. And Jimmy not only faces a denial of his application reinstatement, but in his anger and disbelief, manages to sabotage his relationship with Kim, which had finally seemed to be on the mend. But all of this feels more like setting the table for bigger resolutions to come in the finale than anything full or complete in the episode itself.
Better Call Saul Still Manages to Surprise and Delight Us in “Coushatta”
Better Call Saul is a show that zigs when you expect it to zag. The series makes its bones as a tragedy, where the events are all the more sad, all the more pitiable, because (most of) the audience knows the unfortunate ends waiting for the show’s main characters. And yet, the series still has an impressive ability to surprise, to delight, to lead you down one path and make you think you know where things are headed, only to take a sudden left turn toward something you might never have expected.
Better Call Saul: The Slow Burn Threatens to Bring Down Jimmy and Kim in “Something Stupid”
I’ve known the evenings, mornings, and days alone,
I have measured out my life in Mesa Verde awards and burner phones.
With my sincerest apologies to T.S. Eliot, it’s amazing how Better Call Saul can move so slowly and then so quickly in the same season, without missing a beat. It’s hard to know exactly how much time has elapsed in the show so far, but this season picked up right where the last one left off and has, more or less, crept along in the aftermath of Chuck’s death and Hector’s “accident” ever since.
That is, until now. If the last episode stood out for how it seemed to set Jimmy and Kim on diverging trajectories, “Something Stupid” takes that idea up a notch, with a cold open set to the famed Sinatra melody that provides the episode’s title. The series taps into its unrivaled ability to craft montages, depicting the passage of time via unwrapped statuettes, filing cabinet labels, and holiday sale signs. But the show goes a step further with its formal creativity, using a well-placed split screen to show how both Kim and Jimmy are flourishing in their new lives, but also how those lives are slowly but surely pulling them further and further apart.
