I have to admit that I’m giving up on the whole thing for this season. I watch it for James Spader and Paul Reubens, and there’s just not enough of them in any given episode to make up for all of the time I sit, variously bored or irritated with how breathtakingly stupid everything else in the show is. It’s just as well; my TV schedule is a bit overbooked at the moment, so I need to do some culling.
Maybe when the show’s off the air, someone will cut together the Red and Pee-Wee Show and I can watch that.
This week’s episode with the eco terrorist was my least favorite ep so far. That weird dude in the bathtub and his crazy mama. That was just too much. This isn’t a slasher horror show.
Well, tonight the writing & story were excellent. The Iranian assassin story was very well done. Quite believable and it reminded me of the old Mission Impossible tv stories.
Reddington and Berlin’s story had a nice twist. I won’t spoil it for anyone tonight.
I’m still liking the show. Yes there are times when suspension of disbelief is difficult, but it’s still fun. Wondering if Lizzie is going to turn heel in the half-finale next week…
Dear Og, NBC.com must have the worst video playback tech in existence online. I would start to suspect that they’re using Windows Media format (I’ve discovered that even a downloaded-to-my-hard-drive WMV file wants to “stream” in the WMV player, making it virtually impossible to “skip ahead”). When I, for whatever reason, try to start watching from anywhere but the very beginning of an episode (like, maybe something went wrong and I need to reload the page and try to pick up where I left off), the video just stutters like crazy, as if it’s desperately trying to catch up. It makes watching … painful.
NBC’s video player also seems to really hate it when I switch to another browser tab during commercial breaks. The commercials will freeze up, and then everything else about playback gets screwed up when I switch back to the NBC tab. I would wonder if it was a “Mac issue”, but I’m seeing enough complaints from other viewers in the comment section that I suspect it’s a cross-platform issue. At least I haven’t seen any other complaints specifying that they’re trying to watch with the Safari browser on a Mac.
Seriously, I don’t have any of these problems when watching Arrow and The Flash on the CW site, or watching Gotham on the FOX site. Honestly, YouTube seems to have figured out how to reliably stream video without problems. I’m gobsmacked that any site still has these kinds of problems.
Just finished watching last week’s episode, “The Scimitar”. Wow. I did not see that ending coming. I kind of figured out, many episodes back, that Red was indeed telling the truth when he said that he didn’t kill Berlin’s daughter. But the show succeeded in convincing me that Red had indeed located his own daughter.
I’m kind of struck by the fact that Red, with everything he knows, is honestly baffled as to why Berlin has a mad-on for him.
The character of Reddington is what has hooked me on this show. Yes, James Spader’s acting is incredible (and I wonder why I’ve never encountered him before … it seems that the only thing I’ve seen him in previously was “Pretty in Pink”, and I don’t even remember his character. Though I own the DVD, so I guess I should watch it again. I’ve actually only watched that movie twice.) But for me, it’s not just Spader’s acting. It’s the very concept of the character. Reddington is perhaps the most reprehensible villain I’ve ever seen in a story … and at the same time he’s also possibly the most moral character I’ve ever encountered in a work of fiction (and I read a lot).
And from what I’ve seen of the character, I cannot imagine him deliberately killing a child, let alone dismembering a child piece-by-piece. Red is a villain who respects, and protects, innocence.
After the mid-season finale, my head is in about the same shape as Hawkeye’s. Tom works for Red, and always has? WTF is the fulcrum? What kind of NWO deal was Hawkeye part of? More questions than answers…and still a great episode. Long wait until after the Superbowl for the next one…
I’m surprised that Red took out Berlin. He needs allies now more than ever since Alan Alda died. I know Berlin had caused Red trouble, but his organization could have been useful to Red.
Did Liz actually see Red and Tom meet? They showed her in a car supposedly following Tom. I’m not exactly sure how she could have found him so quickly.
So far Season 2 is better written than season 1. The writing still isn’t much to shout about, but any improvement is welcome.
I just watched the Fringe Season 1 episode “Ability” (episode 14) from 2008.
It includes a scene in which a high-profile, international criminal walks into FBI headquarters, surrenders, and informs the man in charge that he will only speak with Agent Olivia Dunham (Fringe’s main character).
I found the reveal at the end with Tom and Red to be disappointingly ordinary. It felt like a twist for twisting’s sake. It’s gotten to the point, in a show like this, where the shocking thing to do is to reveal that the people who we have been led to believe are on opposite sides and want to kill each other REALLY ARE on opposite sides and REALLY DO want to kill each other.
Aaaand I finally picked it up. It was fun seeing Spader as a young actor, and fascinating to see so many of his physical mannerisms already in place 30 years ago. And watching the movie, I realized I actually had never seen that one before. I was so fucking glad that Molly Ringwald’s character ended up with the rich kid at the end. I think I might have punched my computer screen if she’d ended up with Duckie. Holy crap, was that guy textbook “nice guy” or what?
Yeah, I definitely started to feel a bit let down as this season went on. The first season seemed pretty tightly written, as if they had a clear idea of where they wanted to go, the mysteries they wanted to set up, etc. But this season seemed like they were making it up as they go along… “oh, Berlin isn’t the main bad guy, he’s just the attack dog for another, secret shadowy bad guy!” “Tom has been working for Reddington all along!” And replacing Malik with another accented, darker-skin female who hails from a different agency and is secretly working for Reddington just seemed a little lampshadey.
Sen. Hawkeye has been authorizing and running interference for Reddington and others like him to kill bad guys willie nellie for 30 years. Unless Berlin was willing to simply walk away with a “good prank, well played” attitude and not kill Sen. Hawkeye the Machiavellian, he had to be killed. And he knew it at the start of the drinking contest. Reddington understood why Berlin did it, but he couldn’t let Berlin go unpunished. Now Reddington has to deal with the committee members he does not personally know and have leverage over.
And, in a way, I now find Berlin to be a rather sympathetic character. At his root, he was a patriot, and I can’t fault a guy for loving his country, even if I disagree with his country.
