Elementary: Over a Barrel (5x13)

A great episode of Elementary in many respects, although I do have some problems with it.

Cons:

Joan spends this episode as a hostage, trapped in a diner with twenty other people. The man holding a gun on them is a grieving father who has been trying to get Sherlock and Joan's help on finding the man who assaulted his son five years ago. Great concept, but there was very little exploration as to how our leads felt about the situation.

I praise this show for not going too melodramatic. Most of the time, the character beats between Sherlock and Joan are so small and subtle and just perfect in every way... but I'll admit that I would like to see something a bit more concrete sometimes. Joan has been kidnapped before, after all, and there's no mention of that here. Sherlock seems intensely focused on solving the case, sure, but we don't see a lot in the way of worry for Joan's life. When Joan is released from her hostage situation, she gets comforted by Gregson, but we don't so much as see Sherlock check in on her. I don't need big panicked declarations or total meltdowns, but some acknowledgement that this is a traumatic situation might have been nice.

The Vampire Diaries: Nostalgia's a Bitch (8x10)

As a person who only watches this show because the Stefan/Damon dynamic is so deliciously angsty and wonderful, I had a pretty good time watching this episode. As an objective observer who knows this show should have died seasons ago, I definitely had some complaints.

Cons:

The premise in and of itself lead to some really neat character dynamics, but it also felt really hokey. We learn that once assembled, the magic bell needs to be rung twelve times by Matt or somebody from his family line. Once that happens, it'll open, like, a Hellmouth or something, and it will destroy the Sirens... and everybody else, too. Basically, Mystic Falls is a goner if this bell gets rung. I really think this show should stay away from big destroy-the-town concepts, because it just keeps reminding the viewer that Mystic Falls hasn't existed as a concrete place in the story in forever. I've lost track of how many times all the people in that town should have been dead or evacuated forever. Why is there still a human population?

The other story that intersects with this one is that Damon has retreated into his mind, traumatized by his return to humanity. He basically needs to get people's forgiveness for what he's done wrong. Caroline and Bonnie spend some time in Damon's brain, a place where Damon died as a human. Caroline gets to see her mom, Bonnie gets to see her Grams, and then we learn how Damon's mind really works: he needs Stefan to come inside his mind so that he can forgive Stefan for turning him into a vampire.

Supernatural: First Blood (12x09)

This is one of those episodes where the objective quality of the content does not match my actual enjoyment level. In many real ways, this episode was not that great. It had some serious problems. But I, personally, with my brain turned off, really loved it. Let's talk.

Cons:

The reason this episode isn't actually that good, despite some hella awesome acting, action, and one-liners, is because all of the bells and whistles are resting on an extremely weak foundation. We all know it's stupid that Sam and Dean got taken in the first place. Why did they hang around with an unconscious POTUS, again? And then there's the fact that these top-secret government guys take these two men who they believe to have attempted the assassination of the President, and there's no urgency to figure out how they got to the president? They aren't at all concerned with how their security was breached? Their method is to just wait Sam and Dean out. They think the worst torture of all is loneliness.

This is another problem with the episode. We see Sam and Dean being left alone in tiny little rooms for six weeks, but we're not really shown what was so torturous about this to them. Did they start to lose their grip on reality? Did either of them try and talk to the guy who brought them their food? No. But apparently, in Dean's words, the torture of solitary is worse than Hell itself. Is it, though? Is it really? I find it hard to believe that these two would be broken by six weeks alone. If the show wanted to sell me on that, they needed to show, more explicitly, why it was difficult for them. Maybe being left alone with their own thoughts about their mistakes starts to make them unravel? Or maybe instead of being left completely alone, they are given glimpses of authority figures, and hints and suggestions that the other brother is being tortured as they sit there? Anything more than just a terminal case of boredom, which is what it seemed like.

Grey's Anatomy: You Can Look (But You'd Better Not Touch) (13x10)

Hmmm... what an odd choice for an episode. I don't think I hated it, or anything, but it was a little too preachy in some places, and... well, let's just take a look.

Cons:

The episode's plot can be stated very simply: Jo, Arizona, and Bailey go to a maximum security prison to help a pregnant 16-year-old inmate. She delivers her baby, and the baby is given to her mother, who is adopting her granddaughter. The mother won't see her pregnant daughter, and we never get to know what she did to end up in maximum security. Lots of commentary about the prison system, and medical ethics, etc. etc.

Not a bad idea at all. But I have some questions. Why on earth would you choose to do an episode like this as the first back after a hiatus? It's usually not a good idea to leave a cliffhanger (Alex about to take the plea deal and go to prison) and then drop us in to a brand new story without showing anything from the one you left off with. The fact that this episode focused on only three of our cast members was fine, in theory, but the timing in the season as a whole was really off.

Like I mentioned, there was a lot of commentary in this episode, and while I don't mind it when Grey's Anatomy has that "special episode" feel, I don't like it when they sacrifice some character traits for us to get there. It makes sense that Jo would be sympathetic to a pregnant incarcerated teenager, because she knows what it's like when life screws you over. But it doesn't really make sense that Bailey would be so judgmental. They have her character arc be that eventually she comes around and comforts the sixteen-year-old girl crying for her mommy while giving birth. Yeah, we know she's violent, but is Bailey really that cold?

Suits: She's Gone (6x11)

Okay. So. I'm happy and I'm not. I don't know what's going on with this show right now, but there's this one character who's just getting... assassinated in terms of development. And no, it's not Louis. It's not Rachel. It's not even Donna...

Cons:

It's Mike. I want to start this review by discussing the one very big problem I had with this episode. That's not to say that the episode was all bad, because I actually liked everything it's setting up, and I think we've got a promising half-season ahead of us. But then there's Mike. What has this show done to him?

We see that Mike is trying to strike out on his own, and help people. He doesn't want to work for Harvey as a consultant, even when Harvey basically begs him to come back. He wants to get his own work. The trouble is, he knows that nobody is going to take him seriously in the legal field now that he's a convicted felon. I'll talk in the "Pros" section about his time as a teacher through his church, which I quite liked, but then we get to the problem. See, Harvey tries to help Mike by going to Anita Gibbs, and asking her to endorse Mike as an ethical candidate for the bar. This backfires just as badly as you'd expect, and Anita actually shows up to Mike's place to tell him off and promise that she'll do everything in her power to stop him from getting a degree. So what does Mike do? He goes to Harvey and he yells at him. He tells him that even if he does end up with a law degree somehow, Specter Litt is the last place he'd ever come to work. He tells Harvey to stop screwing up his life, and storms away angrily.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Wake Up (4x11)

Yikes. Talk about an episode with a lot of revealed secrets. There's a lot to unpack here, so let's get started.

Cons:

The subplot this week focused on Mack and Yo-Yo's relationship, which seems to be going well until Mack gets a strange text and bails on their upcoming assignment. Elena is upset that Mack won't tell her where he was, so she confronts him. Turns out, he was with his ex. A woman who he had a daughter with. A daughter who died after just four days.

So... this is straight out of a soap opera. When we started learning more about Mack, like about his little brother and all that, I was very intrigued. I liked this sort of blue-collar genius motif they had going for him. I find it a little difficult to swallow the fact that he has a traumatic past with some woman we've never heard about before. This plot thread seemed like an unnecessary way for us to look closer at Mack and Yo-Yo's relationship... did we really need to add this piece to the puzzle?

I'm a broken record here, but I'm tired of Fitz lying to Simmons about stuff. He spends the episode researching Aida, with fantastic results, but he's evasive about it. I don't really understand why: couldn't he tell her he had a bad idea about Aida and Radcliffe? There was no attempt to even explain a contrived plot reason why Simmons had to be left in the dark. That's lazy writing for the sake of an unnecessary conflict.

The Vampire Diaries: The Simple Intimacy of the Near Touch (8x09)

Rapid-fire review time.

Cons:

This show has a mythology and McGuffin problem, both of which I've talked about before. Sybil needs a striker that goes with the bell parts for... reasons, and Seline meanwhile wants to help Matt and that other guy from the Armory get the bell instead, ostensibly to stop Sybil. Turns out only Matt's family is able to wield the power of the bell. I remember reading something interesting in a review of the first episode of this season: The Vampire Diaries has sort of a unique problem, in that it doesn't have a lot of overarching myth arc stuff to tie together at the end of the show. It just keeps making up new bad guys. Unfortunately, this is sort of the problem. Sybil is beyond annoying, and she stopped being threatening ages ago. I don't care if she has the bell. I don't care if she lives or dies. Matt getting a part in the main plot is nice, but he's still an underutilized character, and I still wish there was a better way to integrate him into things.

Miss Mystic Falls... oh boy. The cheese is strong with this one. I don't mind that so much with this show, but Mystic Falls feels like a town that should be razed to the ground and abandoned post-haste at this point. Is there anybody who hasn't been turned into a vampire or controlled by a vampire at some point? It's ridiculous!

The Big Bang Theory: The Romance Recalibration (10x13)

I don't want to turn my nose up at this episode too hard, since I think it was actually trying to do something a bit more serious and deep. However, I can't lie... it didn't really succeed in that endeavor.

Cons:

Howard, Raj, and Bernadette are facing a dilemma: the floor in baby Halley's room is squeaky. They spend the episode trying to find a route through the room without squeaking. That's... it. Why is Raj even in this show anymore? I used to really love his character, and now he's beyond useless. And I thought that our first episode with Bernadette as a mother was surprisingly nuanced, while this episode completely sidelined her so that her husband and her husband's boyfriend could participate in some mediocre physical comedy.

Then you've got the main story: Penny is upset because Leonard never has time for her anymore, so they get into a fight about the state of their relationship. Penny goes off on a spa weekend with Amy, and Leonard later follows her, with Sheldon in tow. They realize they have some stuff to work on, and ask Sheldon to help them make a Relationship Agreement.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: The Patriot (4x10)

This episode escalated the plot quite nicely, further cementing the information we learned last week about how this whole LMD plot thread is going to go. Things are heating up. Secrets are revealed, betrayals are begun. Let's take a look.

Cons:

So, Radcliffe is the only one that knows that the real Aida is still fully functioning; Fitz has the earlier model's head. Simmons begs him to just put it behind him and let the project go, but we see that Fitz is sneaking behind her back to continue investigating it. We already did the whole Fitz-lies-to-Simmons-about-Aida plot thread, and it ended up sort of fizzling away to nothing, since the truth about Aida came out so quickly. I really don't want more deception between these two. The show is making the mistake of adding in further conflict to create drama, just to keep us interested in their relationship subplot. But we don't need that. For a while, at least, we need to see them happy and united. Fitz is a favorite of mine, and I don't like this nonsense of him keeping stuff secret from the team.

Pros:

The rest of the Aida plot is pretty cool, though. Aida and Radcliffe are still keeping the real May locked up, while the LMD is at large within S.H.I.E.L.D. We learn something new, here: The LMD doesn't know she's not really May. That adds a whole extra level of complexity, since Radcliffe is being forced to steer clear of HQ for a while, to let the whole Aida incident blow over. That means a highly advanced android is wandering around, not even knowing it's an android, and Radcliffe has no control.

Elementary: Crowned Clown, Downtown Brown (5x12)

This episode dealt with some things that should have felt like big, monumental developments, but instead ended up being smaller character-driven moments. I, for one, am not complaining.

Cons:

The main plot involved somebody poisoning New York's water supply. I actually quite liked most of the mystery, and as I mentioned, I enjoyed the fact that the smaller moments were given priority over a big city-killing super bacteria. But that being said, I feel like the resolution was a little sloppy. We learn that the bad guy is somebody who patented a water filtration system. He wants to make everybody sick so they turn to his system for clean water. I was annoyed by the fact that the bad guy was black - usually Elementary goes for the comfortable cliche of making white corporate America the baddies, and in this episode in particular, that cliche actually would have felt thematically relevant. People in positions of power willing to stomp on the little guy to make extra money? Why did this guy need to be black, again?

Oh, and it gets even worse, because Joan brings up the lead crisis in Flint, Michigan as an example of contaminated water. But she talks about it in the past tense, as if this primarily black area is not still affected by an appalling lack of response from the government.

Sherlock: The Final Problem (4x03)

I'm not going to discuss all the scandal what with the leaked episode and all that. I'm going to do my best to look at this episode on its own merits, and not get in to all the extra-diegetic aspects at work here. And... I gotta say, I was pleasantly surprised. I liked this episode way more than the first two in the season. I had a few little things that I strongly disliked, but they were minor. A few things gave me pause, but the bulk of the episode... I really loved. I'm going to go a bit off-script and break this into three sections instead of two...

Stuff I Hated:

There wasn't much, but there were a few things. So, Eurus spends the whole episode torturing Sherlock, John, and Mycroft. There are various ways she goes about doing this. One of them is by threatening to kill Molly Hooper. The way to save her is for Sherlock to call her and get her to say "I love you" to him. This will stop the bomb. This is the only scene Molly gets in the whole episode, and it's such a shame. Imagine that phone call from her perspective. She thinks Sherlock is just using her in a case, and she says "I love you" anyway, because she's just so pathetically in love with him that she wants to live in a fantasy for a moment? It's such a lame way to leave her character. I mean, come on. She's a competent scientist and a good person. I can't believe her only moment in the episode was about her unending love for Sherlock Holmes. (Apparently Moffat called this the "best scene in the episode" which is just... ugh. Another mark against that horrifically cocky and sexist man).

There was this tiny little moment at the end, when everything is happy and cheesy, where Sherlock sends a text that says "You know where to find me." It's strongly implied that he's texting Irene Adler. I don't want to repeat myself here, but... NO. Come on. Irene is GAY. She said she was GAY. And now we get this suggestion that she and Sherlock are going to hook up? For the sake of my sanity, I'm going to ignore this mercifully brief moment, since without it, the whole ending is very indicative of domestic bliss between Sherlock and John. I need that to be the truth, okay? I need it.

The Vampire Diaries: We Have History Together (8x08)

On the one hand, I'm happy about all the Salvatore snark. On the other hand, this show really needs to die. Thank God this is the last season.

Cons:

There are two main plots going on here. Both have compelling elements, but both fail in major respects.

First of all, Sybil is apparently unharmed from Damon ripping her heart out in the last episode, and she has compelled her way in to a history teaching job at Mystic Falls High School. Caroline is apparently a reporter (did we know that? This show does not do enough to keep track of its characters' vocations) and she is going undercover as a student to get the alumni angle on how things are going at the high school. Turns out, this was all Sybil's plan to get Caroline to help her find a magic bell which can control the Sirens in some way. Caroline enlists Matt and his father's help in figuring out what happened to this bell. They must act quickly, because Sybil has compelled her students to set each other on fire. In the end, Matt and Peter find the kids and save them from their fate. Sybil and Caroline fail to find the bell, which they believe to be in one of the boxes from Liz Forbes' old place.

Modern Family: Sarge & Pea (8x11)

This episode had two really solid plot lines that could have been deeply emotional and had a good payoff, but they were rushed. It's a shame, because I saw a lot of promise, here.

Cons:

Cam, Haley, and Alex had a plot thread that failed to capitalize on its potential. Basically, Cam is pissed at a woman for standing up and filming her son during a dance recital, blocking Cam's view of Lily's solo. He later sees the woman at a coffee shop where Alex works. Haley is there hanging out. Cam poses as the woman's blind date to try and get information out of her, while Haley pretends to be the woman when the actual blind date shows up. The other two plot threads in this episode were about family relationships and the difficulty of navigating a parent/child bond. But this one was played for cheap laughs, even when the woman reveals that her son is always picked on, and dance is the only time he's ever himself.

Haley going on the blind date with the random guy was not as funny as they wanted it to be, either. Alex didn't even act like Alex. She makes one disparaging comment about her own fate as a barista, but nothing other than that. Are they ever going to give her a purpose in this show again?

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Broken Promises (4x09)

Alright, then. I can dig it. Things are heating up in various ways for our cast of characters. What I admired most about this episode was the chemistry between various pairs. Some were predictable, others were not.

Cons:

The plot may have been a little all over the place. Not enough to confuse me, but enough that this story might have benefited from being broken into separate episodes. The A-plot focuses on Aida going rogue, after the Darkhold. Mack, Yo-Yo, Fitz, Coulson, and May (the secret android look-alike, rather) all try and bring her down, and then succeed, only to reveal the plot twist: That was an earlier model of Aida. The current version is safe with Radcliffe, who has been the secret baddie for a couple of weeks now.

The other plot stayed with Mace, Daisy, and Simmons as they looked for Nadeer's brother Vijay. (Sidenote: I have been spelling Nadeer incorrectly as "Nadir" up to this point. I'm not going back to fix it in previous reviews, but I'll use the correct spelling from here on out). Anyway, Simmons helps to get Nadeer's location, and our S.H.I.E.L.D. team moves in. Nadeer ends up killing her brother because she believes all Inhumans are diseased and corrupted. We see in the end credit scene that Vijay might still be alive, as his corpse re-solidifies into stone as he lands at the bottom of a body of water.

Elementary: Be My Guest (5x11)

So, since Sherlock is briefly back among us, I was hoping to get a kick-ass episode of Elementary so I could shove it in Sherlock's face that there's a more competent modern-day Sherlock Holmes adaption out there. What I got was... okay?

Cons:

The case is not a murder one at first, but a kidnapping. Young illegal immigrants, Asian, being held by a perverted rapist. Turns out that the man's accomplice is his ex-wife, which was blatantly obvious to anybody who watches procedural shows. I get uncomfortable when we have cases dealing with rape and kidnapping of women and the like, because so often they fall into the trap of being male revenge fantasies. It wasn't the worst I've ever seen, but it was definitely there: Sherlock is angry and determined to save the young women in need of his help. It's all very hero-ish and not particularly nuanced.

Pros:

But there was one saving grace in this case-of-the-week, and that's the fact that Joan is the one who noticed the key clue that implicated the ex-wife. It was a simple thing, noticing the type of milk in the house where one of the captive girls was found. I love that she figured it out, and got to explain it to Sherlock. We almost never see that, so it was quite refreshing!

Sherlock: The Lying Detective (4x02)

Okay. So. Anybody who has read ACD's short stories might be familiar with "The Dying Detective," a story wherein Holmes pretends to be grievously ill in order to catch a bad guy, and he doesn't clue Watson in on the plan. Going in to this episode, I knew that Sherlock would have a trick up his sleeve. How did it all pan out? Let's take a look.

Cons:

I have a lot of questions and complaints. To start with the briefest of plot summaries: Sherlock is in a terrible drug spiral, John is roped in to help him take down Culverton Smith, a very wealthy man who Sherlock believes to be a serial killer. In the end, John sees the video that Mary left for Sherlock, and realizes that Sherlock has "gone to Hell" in order to force John to save him, thus helping him to save himself. John shows up in time to stop Smith from killing Sherlock. John then confesses to the hallucinatory Mary that he's been seeing that he cheated on her emotionally for the last weeks of their relationship. Then there's a big giant twist, which I'll talk about in the "pros" section a bit later.

So. Problems. I have 'em.

I seriously want to punch Steven Moffat for the way he writes his female characters. It's gone beyond what I can in good conscience ignore. Molly gets like two seconds of screen time, as we see that she's been helping babysit Rosie. She also shows up to do a drug test on Sherlock and confirm that he's got weeks left to live if he keeps using at this rate. Then she's never there again. What a waste of a talented actor and a dynamic character. She has become nothing but a plot convenience, whose entire character is there to serve the emotional needs of the male leads.

The Big Bang Theory: The Holiday Summation (10x12)

There was actually a lot of creative thought and energy that went into this episode. It didn't get it right always, but the material here was actually both funny and emotionally poignant.

Cons:

This episode uses sort of an odd framing device, in that the holidays are over, and everybody is getting together to tell stories of their various adventures. I don't object to the concept, but it just wasn't utilized that well, and I kept thinking that it wouldn't really make a difference to see these stories play out normally, without adding the flashback element.

Penny and Leonard's story of the week was fine, but it was just comic relief: apparently they got into a big fight over Penny watching Luke Cage without Leonard, even though they were watching it together. This fight was apparently also started by the adventure of going to get their Christmas Tree, which went terribly wrong in various ways. I actually wanted to see the two of them fight over the TV show, because the physical gags with the Christmas Tree didn't really add up. The fact that they talked about this fight and then we didn't see it was sort of confusing and felt like lazy writing.

Modern Family: Ringmaster Keifth (8x10)

Back from hiatus, Modern Family delivers a modestly successful episode. Nothing to write home about, but enough to write about here. Let's take a look.

Cons:

It's New Years, and the family is all over at Jay and Gloria's place for a party. All of our characters are undergoing separate story lines, and most of them are successes. However, I'm disappointed that we didn't get more of an ensemble feel from this setup. This show often soars the highest when it finds creative reasons to bring all of the characters together, and in this particular installment it didn't even really matter that they were all at the same house. It felt like there may have been some missed opportunities floating around.

One of the plot threads packed less of a punch than I think it was meant to: Gloria and Jay decide to write a will, just in case something happens to them. They spend the episode debating who should take care of Joe if they die. Also, Gloria is horrified to realize that she's lost her "disappear bag," containing $40,000. Turns out, Haley and Alex had brought it to a '90's music festival. Scared, they rush home with the large sum of cash. I'm putting this plot thread in the "cons" section because I felt that it didn't capitalize on its presence whatsoever. The idea of Gloria having a getaway plan is hilarious, but they didn't really do much with it. And Haley and Alex having that much money on them? That could have been so funny! But instead, they just freaked out and came home, and nothing bad happened. I don't know... didn't anybody else want to see the two of them get into shenanigans while trying to hide the absurd amount of cash they had hidden in Haley's purse? That would have been hilarious!

Sherlock: The Six Thatchers (4x01)

Rarely have I been so conflicted about an episode of a TV show. I feel like a mixed reaction is inevitable when you wait three years for something. This show has the problem that while it was busy hiatus-ing and making all of its key players into superstars, another modern-day Sherlock Holmes adaption came along that is arguably better in almost every way. But we're not here to talk about Elementary, or about living in Sherlock's prolonged hiatus hell. We're here to talk about "The Six Thatchers," an episode with some great moments and phenomenal acting, but some off-putting developments to say the least.

Cons:

Okay, so let's start with the big one: Mary dies. On the one hand, this isn't a surprise, for many reasons. Mary dies in ACD's canon, and the story of Sherlock Holmes is, at its core, a story about Holmes and Watson. There's also the fact that Moffat has never successfully pulled off a character arc for a female character, or at least not that I'm aware of. So yeah, I guess I'm not surprised. But I'm still disappointed. The shifting dynamics between Mary, John, and Sherlock were really, really interesting. I think Mary got let off the hook for shooting Sherlock just a little too quickly last season, but that could have been explored here. We have John ostensibly engaging in an affair, which is despicable, but is this a manifestation of lingering resentment because Mary lied to him? Or, even more interestingly, a manifestation of his jealousy, since Sherlock openly remarks that Mary is better at working cases than John is? He should be thrilled that his best friend and his wife get along so well, but is he really? Or is John being forced to choose between a life of thrill and a life of convention, represented by two people he really loves? Or is Sherlock forced to learn to share his best friend, the only person he's ever really let in, with somebody just as clever and engaging as himself?

I could go on. All of those elements made for this trio being a really compelling one to explore. But what did we get? Mary is killed off as the result of a standard revenge plot. Mary's past catches up with her, she tries to run, Sherlock brings her back to London, Sherlock mouths off to the secret baddie, Mary jumps in front of a bullet meant for Sherlock, and dies in John's arms. What I think is so frustrating about this is that, on its surface, this could have been a fulfilling arc for Mary. And yet somehow, even in the instant of her death, this becomes about Sherlock and John. Why did Mary die for Sherlock? Well, they're friends, and I get the sense that she felt like a violent end was inevitable for her. All great things that could have been explored more. Instead, we get John blaming Sherlock, and pushing him away.