shrewd.buddha

Alex's tattoos don't appear to be consistent. In last week's scenes there were parts of it that trailed up the back of his neck, to right below his ears. But this week. he was wearing a long sleeved tunic thing, which should have exposed the tattoo on the back of his neck -- but they were no-show. The politics on this show just seem boring to me, but I can't decide if it's the dialogue, acting, or general story line. Or maybe it's the fact that TPTB are so heavy-handed about every point. Maybe that's the show's biggest problem - heavy-handedness, such as having Michael's concubine ask about General Riesen's mysterious trips outside the city -- quickly followed by General Riesen travelling outside the city for the episode's 'shock' ending. At pet peeve of mine occurred during the fight between Alex and the housekeeper undercover Angel : she takes out the red-shirt guard in a half-second, slicing open his throat. But Alex, Alex's urchin, and PPP (pretty, pretty princess) get the kid glove treatment and survive. They could at least be less obvious about the red-shirt trope. And I have to agree with Alex being a weak link. The reluctant, in denial, no-one-is-safe-around-me hero has been done to death. I'm dreading the tattoos revealing cryptic, non-definitive messages during the course of the show. Let's just get the easy ones out of the way quickly: "Everything you know is wrong." "The truth is out there." "The truth takes time." "Beware the ides of March." "Outlook not so good." "Concentrate and ask again."

It seems to me that the Aliens came to Earth just to screw with the Mason family -- specifically, Tom Mason. The focus of the alien invasion follows Tom wherever he goes, from MA to SC and back again. All the alien leaders want to talk/negotiate with him. The rebel Skitter with the Red Eye, Skittacus , tries to get Tom to help. Then the Volm resistance force finds and works with Tom and his group. Like V and its ilk, that's the problem with these global invasion shows - they aren't very global. I know that Falling Skies is a "starring Noah Wyle" show and that traditional story telling says we need a central character's POV to make things easier ... but it would be nice to have some acknowledgement of a larger world. If the producers want to split the show into different groups, why not use that as an opportunity to show what is happening on the west coast, or Europe, .. or Vancouver?

It looked like someone got a new special effects budget for Christmas - - so they threw out the old, clunky alien robots and created shiny new ones. It's as if the premise of the show is humans fighting aliens and the producers don't think anyone is going to notice any minor detail changes. As others have said, it feels as if this show is just stealing unabashedly from .. everything and everyone. Breaking the story into four or five different segments and groups feels like a Game of Thrones steal to me. Or maybe it is something that makes production and shooting schedules easier. I don't know whether to be appalled or impressed that they seem to just upend everything from one season to the next. But I am tired of the "six months later" crap, where they have all the action and WtF's in the first episode so that they can have cheaper, back-fill stories up until the next phase of money shots...

If I could make a few suggestions for this show, they would be : a) Why not try to not kill characters for dramatic effect? When they killed off Jeep (seriously? Jeep?), it felt so .. perfunctory. I know these are genre shows and thus have formulas, but if they want to stand apart from the crowd, they need to switch up some of the conventions. Either avoid killing characters at the most obvious times, or kill them at the most ridiculously inconvenient times. b) Make the angels look a little more other-worldly - - sort of like Angelina Pitt in Maleficent. They are on the right track with Michael who looks slightly androgynous, but it would be better if they took their ascetically appealing features and exaggerated them to the point of slightly creepy looking. The way plastic surgeons do .. c) Don't bore the audience by using the same characters in each episode. Are we going to have the same 6 to 8 characters, but in different configurations and situations each week? Steal a page from Game of Thrones and expand your horizons. Tho I have the feeling that "the chosen one" is going to be front and center every. single. episode. Just don't.

This was quite a nice surprise, considering that it is on SyFy. I had seen Legion and mostly remembered the story. It seems as if this ship is being steered by the writer(s) of that, so the ideas seem to be thought out and most of the the plot holes appear to be patched. I'm hoping we don't get a lot of retcons or dropped plot lines as the show goes on. Again, this seems like something that would be on a cable network like A&E or one that respects good material. Is Michael the only angel that wants to help preserve humanity? Too bad that most of these humans don't seem to represent the best mankind has to offer. As far as diversity in the cast goes - I wasn't distracted by the lack of it, so maybe the story was good enough for me to overlook that aspect. Honestly, I don't need every cast to be some representation of the United Colors of Benetton for me to enjoy a show. I only get irked when they cast people like Johnny Depp as a native American because, hey, it's Johnny Depp, and he can do anything. (not so much)

Ugh, this guy again .. He irritated me with Lost (especially with the podcasts , the self-congratulatory hype in general, rattlesnake in a mailbox, etc, etc). But he crossed the line with Prometheus - he made scientists behave stupidly in order to make ridiculous plot points 'work' and have OMG moments that make little sense in retrospect. DL's writing philosophy seems to be "not knowing is half the fun." (To steal from Sheldon Cooper -- maybe that was the motto of his community college.) But it ultimately doesn't work when the writers don't know the how or why of the mysteries they build their shows around. Smoke Monsters? The Frozen Donkey Wheels of Time Travel? I swear it's not Purgatory, but maybe it is? Give me a break. Does he purposely not formulate explanations because he thinks a divine idea will emerge as the series goes on? Or does he think a kick-ass premiere will give him a grace period to pull something out of out of his ass when audience frustration and dissatisfaction reaches some tipping point? He also seems to encourage online guessing games to keep the rabid, can't-get-enough segment of the audience preoccupied. It's as if he thinks he has cleverly found a means of making the fans entertain themselves while giving him the credit. Now he has source material that seems ready-made for his style of story telling. He can blame the book's author for all the logic gaps and non-answers to rapidly multiplying questions... I doubt I can be tempted to jump on the DL train again -- I will probably only follow the reviews and forums. If it generates Game of Thrones levels of positive buzz, maybe .. maybe I will catch up.. But then again, I have the same flabbergasted reaction whenever M. Night Shyamalan lands another high profile gig ..

I know this is not going to happen any time soon, but I'm already ready for a reboot of the X-Men franchise (doubtful FOX will ever let it go back to Marvel, tho). So far there have been five (five!) movies with the same basic theme : Frenemies : The Story of Xavier and Magneto. And it always comes down to four or five popular actors getting most of the screen time and dialogue. I'd like a clean slate with the X-Men mutants, too. Having read the comics, it's irritating to see the movies give characters powers that really make no sense - like Kitty Pryde's new telepathic time travel powers in DoFP. It was funny (in a sad way) seeing all the press release hype and interviews with the actors playing Colossus, Ice Man, Blink, Bishop, etc -- then watching the movie to discover they have about 2 minutes of screen time, total. At least the First Class movie gave the student mutants more to do and showed their personalities. And lastly, they need to just let Bryan Singer go, or shift him to the background. It's just icky - and yeah, there's the Woody Allen and Roman Polanski precedent -- but you can't google a crap-load of inappropriate looking pictures of them or easily find lots of stories about their 'barely-legal' naked pool parties. When your defense is that you had your people check ID's to make sure you weren't going to break the law, well, that's damning in itself. And why didn't *any* of Singer's A-List actor friends jump to his defense in the media? Did Hugh Jackman or Ian McKellen say anything? At all? It's just not a good situation, and we know that Matthew Vaughn is sort of the originator of the 'new' version of the X-Men. X-Men, like the Avengers, is now just a franchise machine that will roll along until it manages to kill itself by becoming un-watchable - like the Tim Burton Batman movies. Or the Christopher Reeves Superman movies. Or the original Star Trek movies.

When the Ark residents crash landed on Earth and Abby emerged from the wreckage to marvel at the beautiful scenery, it reminded me of one of my biggest gripes with this show: How the hell could the Ark, even with 2014-ish levels of technology, not know the conditions of the Earth?? How could they not see the Grounders moving around? We have satellites today that can see people's faces from obit. The Ark should have been able to monitor the fauna and flora with relative ease. It's like everything on Earth is a total surprise to the Spacers. Major gripe # 2: It still galls me that they see two-headed deer and glowing butterflies, but don't seem to think twice about the water they drink, the food they eat, or what the possible radiation levels may be. They don't even bother to talk about possibly measuring the radiation levels.

Yes, they are keeping me interested, despite the CW-ness of it all. I also appreciated the dirtiness and scabbiness of Octavia's and Clarke's faces. More, please. It is becoming the show's shtick now : "character appears to have died, off-screen". They've already done this with Finn, then Lincoln, and now with Bellamy and Finn. I would be very, very surprised if a main character died without a drawn-out, super-emo, close-up death scene, along with the standard death dialogue of "promise me you'll go on living", or "I should have told you how I really felt about ... urkkk " ..But I'm willing to be surprised by such an unexpected, off-screen death. Do it. C'mon. Finding myself looking forward to the next season of this.

As I said above, I really liked this movie, but it bothers me that when I am recommending it to someone I find myself referencing it as "That new Tom Cruise movie: Edge of Tomorrow." And I get that the studios know that it being called "a Tom Cruise movie" can be a selling point to certain groups and may guarantee at least ten to twenty million dollars. I find that a shame, since I'd like the movie to be thought of as its own thing -- like Lord of the Rings, or Star Wars, or The Usual Suspects, or Memento. But maybe if Tom hadn't signed on, it wouldn't have attracted the money and creative talent that made it as good as it was.... Thus, irony..

Saw it. Liked it. A lot. It nimbly bypassed or acknowledged/incorporated/inverted most of the time-travel, sci-fi tropes - and more importantly - the Tom Cruise albatross effect. (Though it attacked the Tom Cruise problem at the start by making his character initially unlikable and definitely not a swaggering bad-ass upon first appearance.) And Emily Blunt's character was written as a central figure and not just Tom Cruise's female prop. ...Although I did wonder if the character's gender was dictated by desired demographic appeal and the 'need' to have a romantic element. The inevitable attraction and ending did follow the normal formula -- but a well made formula flick still makes for a satisfying movie experience.

I will give the showrunners credit for nicely handling and switching between the three separate story lines during the episode : Clarke & Finn, The crippled Ark, and the 100 Camp of Malcontents. It moved the episode along quite effectively. What happened in those story lines, however ... Ugh. The Ark story was mostly good, but their eureka idea seems pretty awful. I can't imagine them joining the teens anytime soon - that would change everything. I guess they could land them on the other side of the planet, but keeping them in space seems better. (To me.) When Finn and Clarke took a break from running for their lives, so they could talk about their feelings ... I was hoping for one of those Grounder spears to come out of nowhere and impel one of them. Typhoid Murphy is a psycho, but he had a point with re-creating Bellamy's attempt to hang him. Bellamy is sort of a cowardly lion in terms of leadership -- he wants to control the angry teen mob, but also fears them -- like when he actually ran from them with Charlotte, the little killer girl. He has the same do-what-I-say attitude with Octavia, but it's usually hypocritical or just plain wrong. But overall, it's a train wreck I look forward to watching each week.

I agree with most of the points in the links with regards to problems with the movie. It was a hot mess - but an action-packed, loud, extravagant mess, and so disjointed that it was hard to pinpoint an exact reason for all the messiness because it came from every direction. Peter/Spider-Man was a mess. I would have liked an awkward, shy Peter who put on a mask and the anonymity allowed him to be a jerky, wise-cracking Spider-Man. But Peter was also a jerky wise-ass. His grand entrance at the high school graduation said it all -- he acted like the class super-star. And he didn't bother to help out his poor Aunt May who was struggling to pay bills with two jobs. He was too busy playing superhero and doing experiments in the basement and wooing Gwen. And when Spider-Man was 'stopping' the hijacking at the beginning of the move : he was prolonging the capture to play games with the driver ... as if blissfully unaware that the truck and 20+ police cars were barreling through crowded intersections, pedestrians, etc. The villains were a totally different type of mess - no logical motivation or believe-able reasons for hating Spider-Man. They seemed to be there mostly because a Spider-Man movie needs two to three villains per installment. Also a mess : Peter's parents' secret science-spy life, the fight on the plane at the beginning of the movie and the desperate effort to get a message out to ..? Peter?... And then the Hogwart's subway car of science. Who built that? Who created such an elaborate Batcave-like hiding mechanism? In truth, we enjoyed watching the movie. It is only when thinking about it afterwards did I realize what a mess it was...

But one important point : the Ark Adults and the 100 don't have to worry about the survival of their species. Humanity has survived just fine without them : the Grounders. ...They just tend to be slightly homicidal and enjoy tattooing a great deal... But their fitness regimen is A++

These dodos do not seem capable of thinking of anything beyond their next hook-up or lynching. And to be somewhat fair, the 100 (minus 14) were meant to be guinea pigs, not the bright hope for survival of all humanity. Maybe the Ark Adults have such a plan - but considering they were not working on drop ships for the last 97 years, they also don't seem very far-sighted. Realistically, I would think most people are primarily concerned with their own personal survival. The survival of the species benefits from that, but is not the primary intent. (Although I could see one of the guys saying "We have to have sex for the sake of humanity!" When the space station ripped apart, I wondered if the Ark dwellers might become The 100 , and the Earth'ers could then be the 85'ers.

So, the Grounders are cut-throat killers who speak very good English but the radiation has impaired their ability to comprehend logic : "We got hurt on the way to slaughter your people -- so, your fault." I did not see Jasper this week - is there some type of actor quota per episode - though we did get more confirmation that he is some type of chemist genius (along with the previous beer brewing, or was it moonshine?). Of course Finn is not dead. No main characters die off-camera. Just ask Abbie... And no matter what the situation - impending attack by Grounders, knife in your spleen, whatever -- there must be sexy times. It's a rule. As others have mentioned, it seems very unlikely that a generation of teenagers, who were born on a space station and lived in what had to be a very confined and isolated environment, would be so good at all the rustic camping stuff. You'd think they could at least have had a bit of oxygen overload when they first landed.

IF Fitz comes back at the start of the season, I hope TPTB write for him and not just use him a device to show how sad Simmons is, or resourceful Skye is, or how regretful Ward might be. If, like the second half of the finale, Fitz is only referenced, I will take that as a bad sign for his character's future.

According to TVByTheNumbers : We watched - but there seemed to be a lot of talking and not a lot of doing. Having Sherlock exposition everything to Joan or whomever does not make for exciting television. I know the Sherlock character is supposed to be prickly, but honestly, with the added addiction baggage, he just comes off more often as an asshole with childish temper tantrums that I would avoid dealing with. I like him better when he is being upbeat - tho still irritating. And I know the actor portraying Mycroft is talented, but the casting could have been ... ummm.. fresher ? It made Joan look as if she was into (much) older guys and his thinning wispy hair was distracting.

So, did this episode establish if there is just one group of grounders or two ? : Jasper-baiting, killing, spearing Grounders and fab-abs, sexy-time Grounders? It still galls me that they see two-headed deer and glowing butterflies, but don't seem to think twice about the water they drink, the food they eat, or what the possible radiation levels may be.. Why worry about those silly details when there are love triangle dramas?

If you like Patton Oswalt and you like Ratatouille, you'll need to check this out: Billy shares his love of Ratatouille and his thoughts on Pixar with the voice of Remy the rat himself, Patton Oswalt.

My point with Fitz's character is that it seems, to me, that TPTB seem to be dumping on him. He certainly isn't getting the propping up that Skye gets on a weekly basis. He has been friend-zoned, and appears to be used as a prop for Simmons. His actions are talked about instead of shown. And mainly - he got no face time for the last half of the show - he was only referenced. When the new team assembled at the end of the episode, it felt as if the original plan had been to kill Fitz off, but they softened it into him being in off-camera coma-land, with no definite plans for reappearing.

I mostly liked it, but it was like a kaleidoscope - way too many moving parts - so that nothing really stood out. I believe the show could be better with fewer plotlines and better character writing. Right now there's just a lot of people doing a lot of things, but nothing resonates. Did not like the Felicity baiting on the sunset beach scene. The lingering went on and on... Having Det. Lance collapse at the end seemed like waste. That's your cliff-hanger? Oliver really doesn't give a crap about Thea. "She said she was getting on a bus and leaving town... I'm sure she's fine.. No need to try to call her cell.." It was interesting that they didn't revisit the 'son of Oliver' story line before the end of the season. Again - too much going on.

Yes, but those are not the scenes they chose to show us. We have to fanwank the extent of his resourcefulness and can-do attitude. For the most part, all I can recall are misty-eyed scenes of getting a sandwich packed for him as he went on his first big-boy mission. Scared to open the hatch door when May had a gun on him until Coulson ordered him to do so. Whining about things 'changing' when Simmons and Trip started their eye-flirting, instead of speaking up. And his almost teary defense of Ward because he found denial more comforting. It seems as if Simmons is always having sort him out or mommy him. So the PTB may be attempting to portray Fitz as naive, but it's coming off as wimpy to me. It could just be me. I'd rather him be more can-do and kick-ass. But maybe that's not the character they want in the mix. And maybe they don't want that character around anymore.. No one was standing by his bedside at the end of the episode the way they did for Skye-flake a while back. And I agree that the show is portraying Ward as victim of child soldier indoctrination. ...But I am not sure this is the type of show that can handle that type of complicated tragedy without royally screwing it up. They are better off sticking to more black and white versions of good and evil and leaving the other stuff to L&O:SVU. Ward has killed a lot of people now. If someone gunned down your loved ones, I don't think your first instinct would be to contemplate the murderer's possibly tragic backstory..

I do appreciate that the season ended without lame cliffhangers (such as Coulson "dying" or Skye being kidnapped). The stuff they did hint at with Coulson and Raina was okay .. but not exactly riveting.. Apparently when Shield was destroyed, all whiteboards and markers were also lost... I was irritated - very much - by Fitz's reaction to being stuck on the ocean floor being "We're going to die, so let's just cry and wait for death." That has been his personality for most of the season - a defeatist. You would expect a tech geek to be tearing open every container in the pod to find something that would get them out. And he still couldn't openly confess his feelings for Simmons. Use your words, dammit. The "only one of us can survive" option felt very contrived. I did laugh when Garret blew up. Thanks for not dragging that out. Let's move on to new villains and new adventures. I really hate the shows that have same villain in a never-ending cycle of confrontations. (Tomorrow People, Nikita, Once Upon a Time, etc.) And Tripplet seems just a boring as Ward was, and sort of like a forced diversification effort.

The Octavia, Lincoln scene was unintentionally amusing. "You can speak!" "Too bad I'm not going to ask you any relevant questions.." "You're filthy. Here, let me clean you , starting with your abs... I'm going to leave some of the blood around your face, 'cause that's sort of hot.." Also, wouldn't the guards notice if the guy who was tied up suddenly became clean? Never mind -- I forgot who I was talking about.. The whole situation of Bellamy keeping Octavia in time-out and away from from her noble savage seemed really silly. All these guys who survived the drop to Earth are so willing to be Bellamy's underlings? Bellamy hasn't demonstrated any real leadership skills, and I don't recall any show of physical dominance. I don't know how long this show can last, but I am curious as to how long they can stretch out keeping the adults separated from the kids. The CW begs to differ... And now they have automatic weapons .. Ugh. I was hoping for more primitive-meets-sci-fi, not a re-hash of 'Lost'.