Of Swords and Parasols

153 x World Without End

  

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Arrow1.1: Better than I expected, but still rather eyerolly. Particularly Oliver's "I am Batman with a touch of Edmond Dantes" voiceovers, and I mostly cringe at Oliver's somewhat annoying BFF and how they appear to be treating his bodyguard. I started it not expecting to like Oliver and don't particularly, but don't dislike him the way some things I'd heard made me expect I would. No idea what I think of the plot yet, but I was entertained. Dinah lance is now a lawyer and goes by Laurel. I refuse to ship her with the guy who cheated on her with her sister (especially since her sister died in the middle of the cheating. Err, because of a shipwreck, not his killing her) but they are pretty and maybe he'll work really really hard at it.* But I hope she gets to join in on the crimefighting in the literal sense before long too. Roy Harper also appears to have been genderbent into Oliver's younger sister (And, uhm, he held on to a rock for 5 years because it had an engraving that reminded him of her and it was his "beacon of hope" type thing or whatever? CW shows and siblings...) which I think I approve of. Especially if sh ever joins in on the literal crimefighting.

*There's also a scene that goes pretty much like this:

LAUREL: Well, I guess I'm glad you're alive.
OLIVER: OMG YOU STILL LOVE ME. WE ARE OTP. FOREVER.
LAUREL: I mean, my sister still died while you were cheating on me with her, so there's not going to be anything happening there, but if you ever need to talk...
OLIVER: OMG YOU TOTALLY WANT TO GET BACK TOETHER EEEEEEEE. Wait, this doesn't work well with my angst.
LAUREL: I'm not sure we're having the same conversation.
OLIVER: I LOVE YOU FOREVER AND EVER BUT WE CANNOT BE FOR I AM A DARK AND ANGSTY AVENGER. I MUST PUSH YOU AWAY FOR YOUR OWN GOOD.
LAUREL: What is going on here?
OLIVER: FOR. YOUR. OWN. GOOD. Cocky playboy time!
LAUREL: Well, you're still a jerk.

Beauty and the Beast 1.1: Very entertaining, bad dialogue, multiple POC, and soundly fails to pass the reserse Bechdel Test due to the fact that the 1 scene with 2 men and no women is the men talking about Catherine. They don't even try to make Vincent look beastly (he just has a strategically placed scar) most of the time and the beast part is that he kinda...werewolfs out? They seem to be doing a Jekyll/Hyde thing which has the unfortunate potential to head south fast but we'll see. I'm going to be watching in fear that we'll start having Catherine having to learn how to behave around him, though I don't actually get that vibe from the pilot. But, well, it's CW, and they have a certain history there when it comes to controlling/abusive men as love interests. (I also remember that in the original series, he lived in an underground city filled with "society's rejects" or however they put it-my mother loved that show so I saw a lot of it, but not since my early teens-and i think I much prefer that to being holed up in his buddy's apartment.) I feel like multiple episodes worth of Catherine and Vincent's relationship was condensed into one episode (I suppose they wanted to jump straight to the "Angsty forbidden romance" part?) and wish they'd taken their time. It's called "Beauty and the Beast," we know you're going to have lots of angsty romance, you don't have to shove as much of it into the first episode as you can to make sure we know that, ok? It's not going to win any "Best Anything" awards (well, maybe for Kristen Kreuk's hair) but I mostly enjoyed it, though I suspect that of the new shows I'm watching, it's the one most likely to get cancelled.

(Err, Both Arrow and Beauty and the Beast pretty much end with the dude watching the heroine from above without her knowing? What's with that, CW?)

Haven 3.4: I enjoyed this episode's Troubled plot, but so much of it made me think of the things I don't want to have happen (love triangles, Audrey and Duke not trusting each other, Audrey and Nathan not being buddycops anymore with Boston Cop on the scene, Boston Cop ending up evil, etc.) threatening to happen. I mostly enjoyed Claire's scenes (I'm starting to suspect she's Troubled herself.) and hope she doesn't go the way of other non-Audrey female characters on this show. I'd much rather have more of Audrey's past selves than the stuff Nathan and Duke are up to.

Once Upon A Time 2.2: Well, that was a pretty good episode despite the almost total lack of Emma and Snow.

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Revenge 2.2:

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Revolution 1.4: 

( spoilers )Scandal 2.1-2.2: I adore this show despite not caring about roughly 2/3 of the plot. (Though I think I'll much prefer the "What happened to Quinn?" plot more than the Amanda Tanner plot simply because Fitz isn't involved in it.) But then, I adore Olivia and Mellie and like and am interested in every other important character except Fitz. 2.2 makes me just want to...not talk about anything but how much I hate Fitz. He's verbally abusive to Mellie, might as well be an ornament but likes to rant about how the people who keep him afloat are the unimportant ones, andhe has no respect for Olivia's interests or boundaries in the name of their "true love" (which she seems to suffer more than reciprocate, more often than not. I mean, those phone calls are downright creepy. Try replacing "call" with "touch." Especially the one at the beginning of 2.2, when it pretty much becomes "I stayed up late and made 23 people work late so that I could impose on you in the middle of the night and touch you. Do you want me to stop touching you? Tell me, the most powerful man in the country, to stop touching you in private. No? Ok, I'll abuse my power and misuse my staff again so I can touch you again tomorrow night." WHY SHOW WHY DO YOU FIND THIS RELATIONSHIP ROMANTIC? Yet, I will endure it for the sake of watching Olivia and Mellie verbally smack people around and rule the world. (Why can't Mellie be olivia's Forbidden True Love? At least that'd be different and interesting.)

World Without End 5-6: I thought these episodes were a lot better than the first 4. Things felt more unified in general, and it pretty much did away with the violence against women that was so pervasive in the first half. I briefly considered liking the king again, but then I remembered the "you can be my mother or you can be a whore" bit, and, nope. Sorry Blake Ritson. Hopefully the last two episodes stay on the same track as these two. Sadly, Godfrey (Godwin? I tend to be busy wishing him ill when he's on my screen and so don't pay much attention to his name.) and Alfred didn't die of the plague.

The Bletchley Circle: Like "a series about women who made bombs in WW2" and "midwives who work out of a convent in 1950s London," "a quartet of female Bletchley Park codebreakers reunite in 1952 to catch a serial killer" isn't a series I would have believed would actually be made a year ago. And yet, they all came to be in 2012. None in my own country, but still. So, Bletchley Circle. A 3 part miniseries that just aired in Britain, is about Susan, Millie, Lucy and Jean, 4 women who worked in Bletchley Park during WW2, who are reunited in 1952 when Susan, now a housewife, pieces together parts of a serial killer's pattern from a radio broadcast. Some parts reminded me a bit much of why I don't watch many procedurals (various trigger warnings regarding dead bodies, violence against women and disturbing imagery apply, though I wouldn't say that there was anything gratuitous or, except one scene in the second episode, could have really been left out) and I thought parts of the climax happened more for drama than for logic or plot consistency (it's in keeping with Susan's character in one way, but not in another) but I enjoyed it and would not remotely object to a sequel. (Also, it has Anna Maxwell Martin and Rachael Sterling as the main character and nominal second lead character, and so I kept expecting canon lesbianism, which didn't happen. But it was nicely unapologetic about completely failing to pass the Reverse Bechdel Test.)

Covert Affairs 3.7-3.10: Despite this season being rather hit-and-miss with me so far (I still haven't forgiven them for that thing they kicked the season off with, and there was that boring Auggie stuff for a while) I mostly liked these episodes a lot.

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White Collar 4.7-4.10: I will be very surprised if episode 7 isn't my favorite episode this season. And I never pegged White Collar as a show likely to have an "ovaries before brovaries" scene, and yet it did. Not necessarily surprised that it did, though.

( spoilers )World Without End 1-3 (of ?): Nominal sequel to Pillars of the Earth in that it's set in the same fictional town 100 years later. And also, has an abusive husband named Alfred Builder as a supporting character. It's somewhat mixed and while I can't speak for the book, it actually seems to be relying a lot on similar plotlines. There are more women front-and-center than in PotE, but they're also on the receiving end more violence. Most of it is realistic enough as far as that goes (but we're dealing with fictional characters in a fictional town and aren't exactly closely adhering to history here anyway...) but most of it just makes me go "Was that really necessary now?" Though the villains in general aren't quite as over-the-top as in PotE. The romances are pretty decent so far (and neither of the guys in the 2 main romances have abandoned a baby to die in the woods-mindchanging or no-or make me wonder if he's a stalker) and I highly approve of the inclusion of the nuns, but things don't seem to tie together as well as they could. I like large chunks of it and dislike others (creepy monk [and icky plot stuff surrounding him] and Alfred need to diiiiiiiieeeeeeee. Though I was thinking I might like Alfred for a while there.) and will keep watching because I like Gwenda and Carris and the Mother Superior and enjoy Petronella's Eeeevil (mostly) and Isabella's ambition. (Also, Isabella's actress bears such a striking resemblance to Claudia Black that I forgot it wasn't her a couple times, depending on the lighting.) I also suspect it's something I"ll like more once I've seen the whole thing than on an episode-by-episode basis.

Haven and Downton Abbey are both back, but I haven't watched them yet, and I'm very behind on Sinbad without meaning to be (I think I'm grumpy about something in the last episode I watched). I think the season finale of that actually airs tonight. In non-currently-airing TV news, I waatched the pilot for Justified and kinda want that hour of my life back. I was going to watch more just in case, since pilots are often weaker than subsequent episodes and handle various things differently than the pilot would make you think, but then the main character broke into his ex-wife's house in the middle of the night so he could make a man Pain-y speech in which he ponders whether or not he colud kill someone in cold blood, and I decided my time would be better spent elsewhere. I also watched Hogfather, which was apparently in my Netflix queue because it has Michelle Dockery, since I haven't read the book yet, and it was grand fun, and I enjoy how the plot can almost be boiled down to "DiscworldEquivalent!Santa gets kidnapped! Death takes over his job and annoys his granddaughter so that she'll save reality! Hijinks!" I also have a thing for Michelle Dockery in general and her voice in particular. I've also almost finished Prime Suspect (UK version) after about 2 years of watching it off and on (Netflix kept having long waits on some discs). Helen Mirren is always most excellent, but while I'm glad I watched it, it's something I more appreciate than like. It's very Serious Business all the time and the revolving cast means there are no relationships of any variety to develop a real investment in, and no character but Jane to get attached to.

And I've been rewatching Poirot the last couple weeks, and between that and all the above, it rather feels like there's been an endless stream of dead bodies on my sceen lately.