What We Do in the Shadows: The Night Market (4x04)

This wasn't the strongest installment, but it was by no means bad!

Cons:

The Lazlo and Young Colin stuff just didn't grip me the way I wanted it to! Nothing was particularly hilarious here. A few funny jokes, and of course good delivery as always from the actors, but the gimmick of Lazlo raising Colin has already started to wear thin. I wish this wasn't the case, but there you have it! And wasn't it kind of weird that Lazlo was trying to encourage Colin to look at the world as a more boring place? You'd think he'd want to do just the opposite.

Similarly, Nadja's subplot this week didn't really do much for me. She's dealing with labor disputes with the wraiths, which is what sends the whole gang to the eponymous "night market", looking for a way to bribe her wayward employees. I'm just not finding the stuff with the nightclub as fun as I wanted it to be either! There's a spark missing, somehow. I'm sure we'll get it back. Again, in terms of line delivery, everything Nadja says is still wonderful.

Roswell, New Mexico: Dig Me Out (4x07)

Honestly, really liked this episode!

Cons:

In some ways, I liked it so much that it shed a light on some of the pacing issues this season has had thus far. This felt like the point in which several plot threads were finally starting to find their footing, things moved forward in interesting ways, and I think if I were taking a red pen to this season, we'd want to have hit this point in the story maybe just one episode earlier? Cut away some of the sluggishness and extraneous stuff?

I was so happy to see Rosa again! This is maybe a nitpick, but I wish that the scene at the restaurant had gone a little differently. It felt super hasty for Rosa to get up and storm out after Liz and Shivani were talking science for like... forty-five seconds. It undercut Rosa's attitude in the next scene where she's being all mature and telling Liz to be herself. I would have rewritten that slightly so that Rosa stays at the restaurant but looks visibly uncomfortable/annoyed, and then afterwards when they get back to Rosa's place, says something to Liz about her behavior. That would have felt more mature and less awkwardly extreme. How many times have you actually gone out to a restaurant, sat down to eat, been annoyed by a family member for a minute, and actually got up to leave?

Westworld: Zhuangzi (4x05)

No Caleb or Maeve this week, which means my attention was wandering even more than it usually would! Oops!

Cons:

I'd say by and large, this episode didn't really give us new revelations, just showed us the impact of last week's new data. That's... fine, except that in a lot of ways the pacing seemed slow. So for example, Christina spends this episode building up to the huge reveal that she has been writing out the fates of all human beings, instead of just writing stories for video game characters. We see her also start to write the story of Dolores from the Westworld park, as it seems some spark of memory is trying to push its way through. It's with Teddy's help that she has her big "aha" moment. My issue here is one of pacing. We, the audience, had already figured this out a couple weeks ago. So watching Christina, a character who doesn't really have anything interesting about her other than the fact that she's a part of Dolores, come to the conclusion we've already reached just isn't as thrilling as I want it to be.

What We Do in the Shadows: The Grand Opening (4x03)

Sometimes I truly can't believe the shit this show actually puts out into the world. Madness, in the best way.

Cons:

I'm struggling to come up with anything I'd truly call a negative about this one! In terms of the comedy, I suppose I'll say that the scene with Lazlo and young Colin Robinson when they're robbing art from a museum was probably the least funny to me. The stuff with Colin has been surprisingly hilarious so far, but the repetition about the Legos, and Lazlo doing stunts with the lasers, it just felt slightly less inspired than most of the rest of the episode for me. Not bad by any means, though!

Pros:

But Colin's musical theatre references, and his performance at the end, saving Nadja's nightclub, was genuinely so funny. I love how Lazlo and Guillermo are essentially co-parenting this bizarre little nightmare together. Guillermo is offering him encouragement and being such a good dad, and Lazlo is trying to mold him into something he'll never be, until he learns his lesson about accepting his weird son for who he is. It's such a creepy uncanny valley sight, seeing that adult man's face on the body of a child, but it's cracking me up every second.

Roswell, New Mexico: Kiss From a Rose (4x06)

Sick Michael is kind of the most precious thing I've ever seen lol.

Cons:

I don't really know what to make of Bonnie as a character. I'm extremely torn. I was excited to find out that her kiss with Michael had ulterior motives, but now we find out that those motives were her trying to help him, not hurt him. She hits that "born sexy yesterday" trope for me, where she's this wide-eyed innocent excited for someone to teach her about the world, but she's also super dangerous. It's tired, it's lazy, and I don't like how she's just willing to follow whoever happens to be nice to her at any given time. On the other hand, I do like that they're kind of keeping us guessing with her character. So I don't know.

Everything with Eduardo and his daughter felt like a waste of time to me. As we move further and further through this season, I'm realizing how much these side characters and new characters are eating up the screen time I'd rather be spending with our core cast. Anatsa was like that, and the new trio, especially Bonnie, get so much attention, and Eduardo with his family drama, Shivani with her sick daughter and semi-estranged wife... I don't know. I wish they'd known when they were making this season that it would be their last. Maybe they would have tightened the scope and focused on the things we're already invested in.

Westworld: Generation Loss (4x04)

There's so many different timelines... so much is going on... but this was a great episode!

Cons:

I don't like having to work so hard to figure out what's going on. We get that scene at the end with Bernard, and the mystery woman who rescued him and Stubbs. Turns out, that's Frankie, Caleb's daughter all grown up. I don't need to be that confused about timelines! Why is it always Bernard, who's in the middle of all the timeline fuckery? It's kind of exhausting.

I've got to say, visually I didn't really enjoy Caleb's "oh shit" moment when he goes outside and he finds out that Hale's future dystopia has come to pass. It just looks like a generic sci-fi vision, a big creepy panopticon tower or what have you. Visually, despite how impressive a lot of the effects are, this show can have the tendency to get a little same-y.

What We Do in the Shadows: Reunited/The Lamp (4x01/02)

Ahhhh!!! I discovered this show during quarantine and I am so excited to be back with new episodes.

Cons:

Nothing really to report, here! More just a general wish list of things I hope we can explore later. There's this part of me that wishes season four had broken with the formula a bit more, and played around with the diaspora... the fact that we start with Nandor, Nadja, and Guillermo all returning home, and don't really get to see them having their adventures, is maybe a little disappointing? But that's maybe more a pie in the sky wish of what I wanted, as opposed to a judgment on what we actually got.

Pros:

Where to begin? I always find writing about comedies to be particularly challenging, because a lot of what was great about this episode were individual funny lines and moments, and it's not exactly fun for me to just list jokes and say they made me laugh. Suffice it to say, a lot of these jokes made me laugh!

Roswell, New Mexico: You Get What You Give (4x05)

I don't know, y'all. I just don't know, this one was not a super fun watch for me.

Cons:

So I have a bias, I know I do. I watch this show for Michael and Alex, and I won't pretend otherwise. So yes, part of my disenchantment with this episode is no Alex, and no mention of Alex being missing or in trouble. I really wish that by now we had at least Michael or the others starting to realize there might be a reason to be worried about him. I get that actor availability is a big factor here, but I think they could have handled this better. I guess I'm just a little bummed out. This is the last season of this show we'll ever get, and Alex Manes, at this point, is probably going to be gone for more than half of it.

I am really, really, disappointed in Jenna Cameron's story-line this season. I like Jenna. She's never been the world's most interesting or complex character, but she has some good energy, and her relationship with her sister always really warmed my heart and made me feel for her in a big way. But to have what looks like Cam's last episode end like this? To have her come back after a full season away, and to have her still be feeling regret/angst over what could have been with her and Max? God, that's just so... lazy, and lame, and not at all what I wanted to see! Why not give her a more interesting story? She's just there to give Liz and Max relationship advice and be a little moody about her own loneliness and then leave? Jeez.

Westworld: Années Folles (4x03)

Okie dokie, things are getting creepy up in here.

Cons:

We're back with Bernard and Stubbs, and god, I had to go back and remind myself how things left off last season, and even after the reminder I just so super did not care. We're talking about The Sublime, and different timelines and versions of events, and what basically amounts to robot heaven, and we've got the maze, and all this imagery from earlier seasons, and I don't know, y'all, it's just not gripping me. I remember in season two, I found Bernard's stuff wicked confusing and literally couldn't figure out where he fit into the timeline or connected with the rest of the events, and I'm nervous that the same thing will happen here.

Pros:

Thankfully, I really enjoyed the other plot threads that we got to focus on this week. First we've got Caleb's family, his wife and daughter, trying to get to safety. The utter spookiness of people not being who they look like is employed so expertly here. I loved how Frankie started picking up that something was wrong right away, and managed to solve the mystery, while her mother was still none the wiser. But then of course they're able to work together to try and get away. I'm surprising myself with how invested I feel in Caleb and his family.

Westworld: Well Enough Alone (4x02)

Ooooh we're going back to the park, hell yeah!

Cons:

Let's just get there faster, though, shall we? I'm sorry, but this show was at its best when it was a little more contained, so I'm super eager to get back into the confines of a fucked up park scenario as quickly as possible. There were a lot of things about this episode that mostly just made me yawn. The stuff with Christina in particular just seems kind of unmotivated and meandering? I want to care more, I want to move this along a little quicker, it's really just not doing much for me.

It's been a while so I feel like I'm kind of confused on the specifics here, but basically Dolores (using Charlotte's body) is controlling a host version of William, making him the face of Delos and an enforcer, along with Clementine, or a copy of the original Clementine, in order to take over the world? While keeping human William alive and in stasis? I don't know, maybe it's just me, but just typing that out kind of left me confused and exhausted and annoyed. William was such an interesting character for a while, and now this show is pretty much literally dragging his corpse around far past the time when he should have exited the proceedings. At least, that's how I feel.