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Apr. 28th, 2011 12:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitMostly I am about to grumble, I'm afraid. And there will be spoilers for all aired episodes.
Sanctuary 3x11-3x13
Like everyone else, I'm disappointed at the perfunctory wrap-up to the Hollow Earth storyline. I'm fairly confident we'll be revisiting some of it, but still, the showrunners spent episode after episode establishing Hollow Earth as a hugely important mystery, and then did nothing with it, left a lot of loose ends (and not in a way that suggests building towards a thorough resolution), and reset us to the status quo as soon as possible. The only upside is that for the moment we're rid of Adam Worth, whom I was heartily sick of.
Neither "Hangover" nor "One Night" did much for me. They were filler (the downside of having an expanded season?) without even any character development to give them a bit of heft. Each episode had a few good lines, but that's about it. And actually the characterization in both felt a bit off. Will getting furious in "Hangover" over what Henry did when under the influence of the bug (and when Will did the same things under the same influence)? I don't think so. Or Will calling Abby's comment "emasculating" in "One Night"? WTF, I really don't think so. Something I've always liked about Will is that he knows his competence and doesn't have that macho dick-measuring need to be the best at everything. The Big Guy's characterization also seemed a bit off to me, especially in "One Night" when he's talking about the restaurant and dates--this is someone who cooks codfish for breakfast and who has said he only mates every five years [which I've always been inclined to read as a joke, but I'm not sure it was meant that way canonically].
And then there's Abby, Will's new girlfriend. On the one hand, I'm glad she wasn't fridged like Clara. On the other, I find her unbearable. I've seen her referred to as "FBI Barbie," which is not unfair. Perhaps I'd like her better if she'd been presented to us as a naive, slightly vacuous young woman with an ordinary job whom Will happened to meet and like. But I cannot accept that someone who giggles and simpers and shows very few signs of competence is a behavioral profiler at the FBI. Sanctuary is quite capable of presenting rounded, believable women characters with brains and agency, but somehow whenever it's a woman who's written specifically to be the love interest of a male character (i.e. Clara, Erika, Abby) the show reverts to awful old tropes.
Let's hope things pick up, because at the moment I'm wishing Sanctuary had stuck to the thirteen-episode season format.
Lewis season 5
I've watched the first three episodes of S5 and a bit of the fourth, and I am not pleased. Did we really need two stories in which an "aging" (i.e., older than 25) single woman's obsession with a man she can't have leads her to commit murder? Really? Did we even need one story like that?
The show is doing a bit better than last season at Lewis and Hathaway's relationship, and even occasionally throwing us scraps of character development, although nothing's ever done with them. (Does episode 4 address the stuff in episode 1 where Hathaway was thinking of leaving the force and studying theology?) But at least they're talking to one another again, and interested in each other.
I was baffled by the handling of the Lewis/Hobson relationship, and in fact I'm half convinced that the episodes were aired out of order. At the end of last season, Lewis and Hobson were dating. Then, in the first two episodes of this one, they were pretty clearly not dating anymore; Lewis even showed interest in another woman, briefly. So I assumed the show had just decided to drop the romance, which was okay with me--I like Hobson a lot, I just preferred the show without an ongoing het romance storyline. Then, suddenly, in the third episode they're somehow at some kind of awkward stage where it's naughty of Hobson to go out to dinner with an old boyfriend, but yet she and Lewis don't exactly seem to be dating, either, and they sulk and avoid each other and behave like kids. At first I thought the scene at the end of the episode was them breaking up, and Lewis's coffee invitation was an attempt to get back on a friendship footing, but then the last shot seemed to imply romance, so . . . I'm confused, and I like the Lewis/Hobson romance less than before because it makes them idiots.
I'm not sure if I'll be able to make myself finish watching episode 4, because by 20 minutes in it showed every sign of getting sanctimonious about Wicked Irish Terrorism, and that is something I absolutely cannot tolerate in a British program. (I think any British show that talks about the IRA needs to also take a hard look at the history and legacy of British colonialism in Ireland, not depoliticize and decontextualize IRA violence into some kind of moral fable about Evil.) If any of you have watched the whole episode, feel free to tell me what happens.
Sanctuary 3x11-3x13
Like everyone else, I'm disappointed at the perfunctory wrap-up to the Hollow Earth storyline. I'm fairly confident we'll be revisiting some of it, but still, the showrunners spent episode after episode establishing Hollow Earth as a hugely important mystery, and then did nothing with it, left a lot of loose ends (and not in a way that suggests building towards a thorough resolution), and reset us to the status quo as soon as possible. The only upside is that for the moment we're rid of Adam Worth, whom I was heartily sick of.
Neither "Hangover" nor "One Night" did much for me. They were filler (the downside of having an expanded season?) without even any character development to give them a bit of heft. Each episode had a few good lines, but that's about it. And actually the characterization in both felt a bit off. Will getting furious in "Hangover" over what Henry did when under the influence of the bug (and when Will did the same things under the same influence)? I don't think so. Or Will calling Abby's comment "emasculating" in "One Night"? WTF, I really don't think so. Something I've always liked about Will is that he knows his competence and doesn't have that macho dick-measuring need to be the best at everything. The Big Guy's characterization also seemed a bit off to me, especially in "One Night" when he's talking about the restaurant and dates--this is someone who cooks codfish for breakfast and who has said he only mates every five years [which I've always been inclined to read as a joke, but I'm not sure it was meant that way canonically].
And then there's Abby, Will's new girlfriend. On the one hand, I'm glad she wasn't fridged like Clara. On the other, I find her unbearable. I've seen her referred to as "FBI Barbie," which is not unfair. Perhaps I'd like her better if she'd been presented to us as a naive, slightly vacuous young woman with an ordinary job whom Will happened to meet and like. But I cannot accept that someone who giggles and simpers and shows very few signs of competence is a behavioral profiler at the FBI. Sanctuary is quite capable of presenting rounded, believable women characters with brains and agency, but somehow whenever it's a woman who's written specifically to be the love interest of a male character (i.e. Clara, Erika, Abby) the show reverts to awful old tropes.
Let's hope things pick up, because at the moment I'm wishing Sanctuary had stuck to the thirteen-episode season format.
Lewis season 5
I've watched the first three episodes of S5 and a bit of the fourth, and I am not pleased. Did we really need two stories in which an "aging" (i.e., older than 25) single woman's obsession with a man she can't have leads her to commit murder? Really? Did we even need one story like that?
The show is doing a bit better than last season at Lewis and Hathaway's relationship, and even occasionally throwing us scraps of character development, although nothing's ever done with them. (Does episode 4 address the stuff in episode 1 where Hathaway was thinking of leaving the force and studying theology?) But at least they're talking to one another again, and interested in each other.
I was baffled by the handling of the Lewis/Hobson relationship, and in fact I'm half convinced that the episodes were aired out of order. At the end of last season, Lewis and Hobson were dating. Then, in the first two episodes of this one, they were pretty clearly not dating anymore; Lewis even showed interest in another woman, briefly. So I assumed the show had just decided to drop the romance, which was okay with me--I like Hobson a lot, I just preferred the show without an ongoing het romance storyline. Then, suddenly, in the third episode they're somehow at some kind of awkward stage where it's naughty of Hobson to go out to dinner with an old boyfriend, but yet she and Lewis don't exactly seem to be dating, either, and they sulk and avoid each other and behave like kids. At first I thought the scene at the end of the episode was them breaking up, and Lewis's coffee invitation was an attempt to get back on a friendship footing, but then the last shot seemed to imply romance, so . . . I'm confused, and I like the Lewis/Hobson romance less than before because it makes them idiots.
I'm not sure if I'll be able to make myself finish watching episode 4, because by 20 minutes in it showed every sign of getting sanctimonious about Wicked Irish Terrorism, and that is something I absolutely cannot tolerate in a British program. (I think any British show that talks about the IRA needs to also take a hard look at the history and legacy of British colonialism in Ireland, not depoliticize and decontextualize IRA violence into some kind of moral fable about Evil.) If any of you have watched the whole episode, feel free to tell me what happens.
