After last week's "we're barely hanging on" downer of a drudge through the back roads of post-apocalyptic America, we got a sliver of hope. His name is Aaron and he is oddly clean and quite friendly, considering, you know, The Walking Dead. With the arrival of Aaron, only one thing was absolutely certain: he's going to have a bad time. Not only was he walking in on a group of survivors who had been put through the proverbial ringer and coming off a series of tragic losses, but he's encountering a group that's been burned by every other would be savior for nearly six years. Honestly, when you roll up suddenly and say 'take me to your leader,' you have to expect to be manhandled. A lot.
Creepy incestuous religious cult with militia leanings? The Blacklist, you've done it again! Sort of. Granted the titular Blacklister this week stuffed just about every crazy cult cliche that the writers could possibly think of, but I'll be damned if it wasn't successfully executed, at least for the purposes of pure entertainment value. Heavily armed? Check. Crazy religious with a less than subtle preoccupation with doomsday? Check. Allusions to Waco? Check. Polygamy and incest? You know it. Creepy leader that's both the worst Sunday School teacher you ever had and the old guy in your childhood neighborhood that you always assumed had a body in his basement? Big check. "The Kenyon Family" may not be the most dangerous members of The Blacklist, but they do make an impression.
After two episodes and two losses for the group, it was time for another one of those episodes of The Walking Dead where the action kind of stops (kind of), and our remaining heroes take stock of recent losses. Typically, when Dead slows things down, that's when its warts tend to show, as the limited characterization can be quickly covered up in the non-stop battle for survival where a hungry walker can be hiding behind any door, tree, or car trunk. Actually, that's not quite fair. Certainly, The Walking Dead has done some compelling character work before, but only when it actually has something interesting to say about those characters and their predicament. Last season's "The Grove" comes to mind.
No one would ever accuse The Blacklist of being a sandal-wearing, granola-eating, tree-hugging endeavor, but this week's episode, and its titular Blacklister, came with a conscience. In an interesting departure, "Ruslan Denisov" wasn't some pretty criminal, or tyrant, or nut case that like to kill in freaky ways. No, Denisov had altruism on the mind as matters of oil wealth, imperialism and corporate greed were all the real Blacklisters of the week, which had Liz and Ressler deal with jurisdictional issues while having to negotiate with Red acting as Denisov's proxy.
No one's ever going to accuse The Walking Dead of being a happy-go-lucky affirmation of dignity and quality of life, especially in the face of a world slowly dying. But even for this show, the developments in the midseason premiere were kind of a downer. In a broken world, full of undead humans wandering around looking for the few live ones to snack on, every day is a struggle, and death can come bounding around the corner at any minute and bite you. No one is safe, and even after losing one of the main characters on the show just a single episode ago, the Grim Reaper came again for one of the survivors, and it might have been the one that least deserved it.
Liz's secrets are (sorta) revealed as Braxton tries to break her, and Red tries to find her in the second of this week's two episodes of The Blacklist.
Like the big game itself, any TV show following the Super Bowl has to go big or go home. For The Blacklist, which returned after a long winter's break tonight following the New England Patriots' hard fought victory over the Seattle Seahawks, not only is there the ongoing weight of expectations from fans, but the powerful need to convince enough people watching after the game to come home to the show's new timeslot on Thursdays, a gambit on the part of NBC to bolster what was once their biggest night of the week. Fortunately, the show put on a clinic, displaying all the things it does best: great action, smart casting and letting James Spader be Spader-ific!
There's was once this show called Heroes, it aired on NBC and tapped into the superhero-obsessed zeitgeist long before anyone truly understood that such a market even existed. With half-a-dozen coming book-inspired TV series on the air right now, one might suggest that Heroes was ahead of it's time, at least before the show start its long, creative Bataan-like death march to cancellation, declining in quality year after year till no one cared anymore. Last year, NBC announced that they were planning on bringing back Heroes in 2015 as Heroes Reborn, and even though only two roles have been cast, and not a frame of film has been capture, NBC has used the occasion of the Super Bowl to tease the return of Heroes.
Not only in this the time of year where we look back and remember with fondness the best that cinema had to offer, but it’s that time of the year when we also look back with dread to recall the worst. Just as every year has its share of quality flicks, there is an equal and opposite portion of terrible films from 2014 that for one reason or another turned out horribly. It might have been the acting, the directing, the script, the pacing, the special effects, or the source material, but on screen, it all ends up the same: 90 to 120 minutes you’d have much rather spent doing anything else.
For fans around the world, the Doctor Who Christmas Special is as much a holiday tradition as turkey, presents, and berating global climate change for eliminating any possibility for a white Christmas. This year's entry, "Last Christmas," is the series' tenth annual holiday adventure, and after two years and two highly consequential chapters involving the first post-Amy & Rory episode and the passing of the torch from Matt Smith to Peter Capaldi, we might be forgiven if we expected tears and not a generally pleasing and jolly episode. Not helping were rumors that current companion Jenna Coleman would take her leave of life in the TARDIS in "Last Christmas," and with such an ominous title, who could blame a Whovian for thinking the worst?
