Postmortem: Glee 2×01

My word, I have been busy,  I haven’t even had time to watch The Mentalist yet!  I shall do my best to not let this blog fall by the wayside, but I’m pretty much just watching top-priority TV right now.  And most of those shows aren’t easy to predict.  Fortunately, Glee is!.

Glee is back, you guys!  You have no idea how much I’ve missed Glee.  Heck, I had no idea how much I’d missed Glee until it came back.  But I am so happy that it’s back in my life.  This week’s episode was great, from the meta-self-referencing opening (one million points if you get the reference), to Will and Sue’s short-lived alliance, to the surprisingly touching story of Coach Bieste, to Finn’s hilarious Cheerios audition.  I will say I wish the music had been better—I have no real desire to listen to any of those songs again, and I say this as a huge fan of Glee doing rap badly, the original Lady Gaga version of “Telephone”, and Lea Michelle getting to belt out showtunes.  I am forever optimistic about future songs, however.

I do have some predictions, although I have no idea how accurate they’re going to be.  Glee is a tough show to predict, because a lot of times stuff just happens to suit the immediate plot and/or joke, not because it’s been set up or makes sense.  (For example:  since when is Santana insecure enough to get a boob job?  Since they needed Sue to be mad at her for plot reasons, apparently.)  But that’s totally fine—I actually love the wacky plotting.  Just don’t hold me to any of my predictions.  Which are:

Postmortem: Covert Affairs 1×10 and 1×11

Again, sorry for the delay.  Classes have started for me now, and I’m still trying to figure out the best way to keep up with TV-watching, studying, and blogging (listed in order of importance, obviously).  I’ll try, as a general rule, to get postmortems up within a week of their airing.  If it’s not up by then, I’m not writing about that episode.  This just barely qualifies.

I have to say, I’m a bit disappointed in myself.  I didn’t strike out completely, but the finale wasn’t quite what I expected.  Partly because I expected it to be a more epic actual two-parter, rather than two unrelated episodes stuck together, and partly because I keep expecting more from this show.  Looking back over my old predictions, one theme that keeps coming up is an expectation of a shadowy organization for the CIA to work against in an overarching theme.  Clearly this hasn’t happened yet.  And frankly, I’m shocked—a shadowy organization to provide a constant antagonist is the bread and butter of spy shows.  Surely we’ll get one eventually.  Maybe the Albion Group?  That name was placed too carefully to mean nothing.  I’m really surprised it didn’t come up in the finale.  Maybe that storyline had to be dropped with the lost episode because of Piper Perabo’s knee injury?  Or maybe it’s just shitty plotting.  Anyway.  Let’s see how I did:

Postmortem: Covert Affairs 2×08

I’m sorry for the delay in writing about last week’s Covert Affairs, but honestly, it was so disappointing I just couldn’t muster up the energy to write about it until now.  Not disappointing in the psychic sense, mind you—I guessed pretty much everything correctly.  But after last week’s epic Auggie episode, I was decidedly underwhelmed with the angst of Annie and her crazy-eyed former fling.  They knew each other for THREE WEEKS.  It was TWO YEARS AGO.  In SRI LANKA.  He has CRAZY EYES.  Why does she still care about him?  Why are we supposed to care about him?  This whole plot is mystifying to me with its stupidness.

In other love interest that I don’t care about news, wtf is up with the sudden appearance of Jai as a romantic interest?  They moved from awkward, painful flirting to meeting the family awfully quickly.  I know why they did it—they needed a successful date to juxtapose with Ben’s arrival, plus Jai needed to know where Annie lives—but there needs to be more reason to put two characters together than just it being necessary for plot purposes.  At least set it up in earlier episodes.  Especially since last week’s set up the beginnings of an Annie/Auggie relationship.  There has to be SOME rhyme or reason to character pairings. For fuck’s sake.  I am getting way too angry at a USA program.  I think it’s because neither of the Tuesday shows had a shirtless dude, and that is frankly unacceptable.

Postmortem: White Collar 2×08

Last week’s White Collar didn’t give me a whole lot to work with, to be honest.  I appreciate the focus on Neal and Peter’s bromance, but I would like to focus on Neal’s abs more.  However, it did exhibit a classic rule of TV—one so classic, it predates TV.  I’m talking, of course, of Chekhov’s Gun, or in this case,

Postmortem: White Collar 2×07

This is gonna be quick, partly because I have to leave for a thing and I’m running late after writing a million words on my Covert Affairs theories, let me show you them, but mostly because there’s only so many times I can explain this rule (under the cut, if you haven’t seen the episode yet): 

Postmortem: Covert Affairs 1×07

YOU GUYS. I AM AWESOME YOU GUYS.  Or more likely, last night’s Covert Affairs was predictable as fuck.  Not that I’m complaining, really—I thought it was the best episode so far.  But it proved not one, not two, but seven! (and a half)! of my predictions correct.  There are a few reasons for this—there are quite a few tropes associated with disabled characters that were bound to pop up one day, and since this was the Auggie episode they all popped up here; a lot more stuff happened this week than in previous weeks (seriously, that was a lot of plot); and finally, I’m super awesome.  But before we get to why, let’s talk about the episode itself.

Sometimes when shows premiere and a secondary character is a lot more popular with the fans than the lead, when focus switches to the side character it becomes clear that they were best in small doses (Urkel on Family Matters, inevitably Brittany next season on Glee).  This is clearly not the case on Covert Affairs.  A lot of people have been saying that last night’s episode felt really filmic, which is true.  In fact, I felt like we got gypped out of an entire movie about Auggie.  I would so much rather be watching a series about him.

And it seems like, just to underscore that, Annie got so much worse this week.  Spies sometimes use sex or relationships to obtain information? What?!  NO.  You can’t have everyone every week keep saying “that Annie Walker is good” and then have her be so dumb.  (Also dumb:  thinking it’s ok for her to have pictures of herself all over the internet.  They don’t teach a class on internet security at The Farm?)  She’s way too Pollyanna-ish to be interesting right now.  Far more intriguing is the ethical gray area that Auggie’s in, in my opinion.  More of that, please.

I also noticed that Covert Affairs has taken the old White Collar strategy of, when something in the plot doesn’t make sense, deploy hot shirtless guy so no one will care.  I’m certainly fine with that.  There was a lot in last night’s episode that didn’t make sense—for example, after the gun shot, Auggie had time to beat up two bad guys, get dressed, find an exit, talk to his ex, yell at her after she jumped off the train, and head back inside before Annie and Jai, who were in the middle of the train running in his direction, found him?  That must be the longest train EVER.  But yet, I do not care, because:

Homina.

But enough of the drooling, on to my awesomeness.

Postmortem: Covert Affairs 1×06

Covert Affairs continues to be both fun to watch and completely predictable, which is to say, a USA show.  It’s quickly rising near to the top of the pack for me (except for Psych, which I will love forever for the nicknames alone, and White Collar when Bomer’s shirtless).  This week’s episode was pretty fun, with a nice fight scene, a solid b-plot, and Annie getting to do some honest-to-goodness spying (although I would hope that it’s significantly harder to spy on the US Senate than just hanging around a bit).  And, again, we got a super easy to guess baddie.

Postmortem: Psych 5×05

I’m shocked that this is the first time I’m writing about Psych, because it’s usually where my powers are strongest.  Unfortunately, every episode up to now hasn’t had much in the way of guesswork, except for last week, about which I was shockingly wrong (I was visiting my brother!  I was out of my element!  He did get it right, so perhaps I can persuade him to write a guest post).  But this week, I not only called the killer (which was obvious), but the red herring.

Postmortem: Sherlock 1×03

Sorry for the delay, guys, busy with work and travel out of town.  Now, I have to admit, I didn’t guess outright the identity of Moriarty in last week’s Sherlock, but I totally should have, and I was a lot less shocked at the reveal than it seems like most others were.  Reasons why under the cut:

Postmortem: Covert Affairs 1×03

I feel like it usually takes about three episodes for any TV series to make itself clear, so by that token, Covert Affairs last night established itself as a USA summer show par excellence:  not necessarily good, but watchable and fun.  Since I eat that shit up, I’ll be sticking with it all summer.  Unfortunately, last night’s episode didn’t have much in the way of plot twists to guess (they pretty much showed us the baddie in the first scene—not hard to guess), but it did furnish me with a few further predictions.