dwmarch

Well, I guess tonight's orgy is cancelled. Seriously, that got dark at the end. I haven't read the book so I don't know if that comes from the source material but I was not expecting things to get as violent as they did. I'm not a hundred percent sure what was going on. The ten people who were hooked up were the power behind INDRA? There was a whiteboard a couple-few episodes back that spelled out what INDRA stood for but didn't really explain it beyond that. So once you unplug or choke the people the trains stop running, planes crash, etc. However, the violence seems to de-escalate at the same time. But the forcefield holding the Savages in shut right off and they seem just as pissed off as ever. And John is out there with a virtual copy of Lenina, which should work better for him because she won't sleep around and she's always happy when he comes home with a fish and doesn't share any with her. Bernard is out in the Savage lands getting his Savage on which is weird because aside from being proud of himself for figuring out how to drive I did not see a lot of him hankering to go back there. However, he is in desperate need of a level up in badass and that would be the best place to get it. Lenina seems to have had enough bullshit from men for now and is back at work. INDRA was supposed to be a genius-level planner but forgot that there was an Epsilon out there who had the same DNA as one of the founder dudes. But they're strapped to beds so why would you even need a door that they can open from the outside? They aren't going outside! I enjoyed this show so this is meant as much more than the backhanded compliment it may come across as: this show is the story Inhumans should have had. There was class struggle in that show too and it was courtesy of a ruling class that took their servant class for granted but they basically had the good guys crush the rebellion and kill the leader. In this case, by the time the Epsilons switched out of murder mode it didn't matter because they had already pretty much run out of people to kill.

I think this is the first time we've seen one ship use a tractor beam to hurl debris at another ship and it seems to be an effective mode of attack if one has enough debris about. I liked the choo-choo party and how they didn't even try to explain what it was. The Delta shift lower deckers were funny too. Tendi and Rutherford sure have a lot of spare time on their hands. She's a medic and he's an engineer but in the middle of a crisis they're on the holodeck? I guess there is plenty of precedent for that in Trek lore. I'm also not sure why Rutherford felt the need to keep working on impressing Tendi. She already follows him everywhere he goes and they had a moment when their boots got stuck together. The crew also geeks out about the possibility of finding old Starfleet gear but is anything really rare in a society with replicators? Want an old-school clamshell communicator? Replicate one! It's not like they were hand-built in the 23rd century. Shaxs is a bit over-enthusiastic for a tactical officer, aiming right for the enemy ship's (somehow exposed) warp core. Starfleet used to be good at ship-jitsu where they would snipe the guns off of a hostile vessel and then call them up to give them a stern lecture. I guess the Dominion War really did shorten Starfleet's fuse.

I wonder why Tendi and Rutherford are always paired up together doing the same work. That doesn't really make sense considering she's Medical and he's Engineering. Yet we see them in the same Jeffries tube doing the same things and using the same equipment. That's like having a plumber and a surgeon working out of the same toolbox. "Hand me those pliers... wash 'em first." The T88s don't make sense either. There were tricorders and then there were medical tricorders and they were not established as being interchangeable. But this show is whimsical so I will take at face value that such devices are equally prized in Engineering and Medical because they are just that versatile.

It was nice to see Vancouver getting some Star Trek love! The shuttles were even named after Vancouver neighborhoods:

The thing I saw that I thought was a particularly deep dive into Star Trek lore was a hand weapon held by one of the Andorians. It was first seen in Enterprise, in the episode where Archer and Shran had to battle it out and Archer ended up cutting one of Shran's antennae off. I am not a fan of animated shows in general but I think this one is fun. I haven't seen anything so far that offends my inner Star Trek purist although I am pretty sure that particular shuttle crashed and exploded in an alternate universe back in 2009...

I loved the reference to Serenity (the movie) with Mack's knockout device being the same kind of weapon Simon used when rescuing River. The Chronicoms duct-taped to the missiles was hilarious, especially the way their hands were flapping around. I think I was a little spoiled (not in the spoiler sense) by Blindspot's finale which had an astonishing number of appearances from previous guest stars. I was hoping Samuel L. Jackson or Cobie Smulders would show up at the end. And the show never did explicitly tie back in to the MCU as a whole (although we did get the quantum realm and Fitz's device which was a scaled-down version of the time machine from Endgame) so we didn't get any answers to how these characters would deal with the Snap. Don't get me wrong though, I think this show entirely stands on its own. Regarding Sousa, I'm trying to think of other shows where a character started on one show and ended up on another. Denny Crane and Alan Shore went from The Practice to Boston Legal. Worf and Chief O'Brien went from TNG to DS9. Picard and Seven of Nine went from TNG and Voyager to Picard. In any case, Sousa is among some rare company. I liked what he brought to the show and I liked his relationship with Daisy more than any previous love interests of hers. Fitz was initially dismayed that Jiaying wasn't alive because she had some crucial role to play. I wish we had heard a little more about that. It was cool to see Victoria Hand again and poetic that she shot Garrett. While I appreciate that Garrett had somewhat of a redemption arc, I interpret his rather casual death as an indication that he would have eventually betrayed the team again.

I had low expectations going in but I was pleasantly surprised. Mariner is a lot of fun and she gets the best lines. "...and for no reason! Just because he was being a dick!" nicely sums up some of the things bad guys have done on previous Treks. As @starri mentioned, the love for Trek lore is obvious here. Lower Decks is much better in that regard than Discovery, where they just do whatever they want even if it takes a double Klingon piss on previous lore. Of course, no Star Trek show shall escape pedantic nitpicking. Why do the Medical staff wear white boots? Why is the ship's registry behind the bridge instead of in front of it like every other ship? Why does an EVA suit only have enough oxygen to cross part of the hull?

I thought the team was going to have a different reaction when Kora suggested killing Grant Ward. I was sure they were going to respond in the affirmative with enthusiasm. Kora's leather jacket is too modern if we're supposed to be in 1983 still. 80's leather jackets look like 80's leather jackets (and like nothing else on this planet). Do a Google image search if you want to be shocked by what people actually wore in public back then. Kora's is a little retro with the metal hoop details but it's too sleek to be from the 80's. Although Sousa and Daisy are cute together, I'd rather see more of Sousa as the temporal fish out of water as we've already seen him pine over a gal before and we're not going to get much if anything of him and Daisy together. I thought Deke was dead. Nathaniel knocked him over and that was sufficient revenge for Deke executing his father? That's some weaksauce right there although I'm glad Deke survived. I guess they couldn't talk Dichen Lachman into sticking around for another five seconds to play a corpse. It was weird how we never saw her face even though the whole scene was set right there.

Good finale! I was worried the action would only be in Jane's head. FWIW I don't think she died at the end because the authorities wouldn't just zip her into a body bag and leave her on the sidewalk. This whole episode was about how Jane can hallucinate vividly and it was also established that Patterson's cure, while effective, was also kinda flaky. So I'm going to go with that being Jane's consequence. She's not dying but Zip has left her able to play out her worst fears vividly, waking nightmares triggered by people who should know better (that means you, Weller!) saying "gosh, you sure could've died there!" Somebody is a fan of Gary Oldman's performance in Leon: It was cool to see all those actors come back. There were so many I couldn't even remember all of them, especially in Times Square when Jane passes a bunch of minor villains. It was a little silly that a threat in Times Square is investigated by a half-dozen deputized cops. Times Square probably has many layers of defense against this exact kind of thing although I guess they did throw a bone to it by saying one bad guy had the ability to pose as a municipal worker. But there still should have been a lot of uniformed NYPD officers helping. Maybe they went to casting for this and casting said no, you've got everyone already. There are literally no actors left. Jane got her leather jacket back! She didn't have it the whole time the team was in Europe so I'm guessing it must have been in her locker at the FBI building. I'm surprised Madeline didn't destroy it out of spite or spray-paint her initials on the back of it or something. Did anyone else get the sense at the end that Patterson, Rich and Boston were a throuple? Tasha's baby was a little lacking in the melanin department. Is that the real twist of the episode? The baby is actually Keaton's and she just let the team think it was Reade's because she knows the team hates Keaton? Did anyone actually get shot in this episode? Jane beat some dudes up, Ivy was tackled... I think it was all team-non-lethal for this one. The new Director had a team ready to replace everyone a day later. They don't need any kind of familiarization or training or anything, they're just ready to chase bad guys from the moment they step into the office. I guess they couldn't help with the search for Ivy because they were stuck in traffic?

I thought it was funny that Kathy tried to subliminally win Rich and Patterson over by dressing herself up like Jane. The leather jacket was similar but not quite the same, as was the hairstyle.

I found this to be a fun movie and the cast was great. I did find myself wondering what would happen if you cut off the head of one of these immortals. The one thing that was confusing were the flashback scenes where it looked like Chiwetel Ejiofor's character was present. I kept waiting for a reveal that he was a secret immortal but they never went there. One bit of attention to detail that I appreciated was how the process of dying and then waking up from that was difficult and painful. I have seen too many Marvel movies where characters get hit by anything from a thrown vehicle to chunks of a moon and this causes them to be a little winded while they're making quips at the bad guys. Getting shot would suck no matter who you are and having the bullet exit the way it came in times the number of bullets they soaked up... ouch. There was also that terrifying torture scene with the iron coffin being sunk although Since we have the setup for a sequel already, here's hoping we get one.

Yay! I called upon the show to deliver Patterson via conveniently-placed bullshit and there it was! A tunnel in the server room that we didn't see and somehow Patterson was able to get to it in a room where thermite was cascading down from the ceiling. Speaking of conveniently placed bullshit, there are air ducts large enough to accommodate a Rich Dot Com and they're at floor level? I'm surprised no one called Patterson by her actual first name with the disguise on. Did we get a close-up of the aliases? Was one of them a William? Did Madeline kill herself or did she use a dose of Zip on herself? If she has some lackey with an antidote somewhere she's got a ticket out of jail. Unless the lackey was her lawyer.

I can't say it surprises me because I feel like some of it crept into the show. The scene that stands out in particular was when Kono had to go undercover and Steve had an embarrassingly small bikini on standby for her to wear. As I recall, Steve and Grover had a good laugh at her expense.

Season 1 had a lot more involvement from David E. Kelly, famous for his many lawyer shows (The Practice, Ally McBeal, Boston Legal, Harry's Law, etc). Season 2 did not have as much (if any) of DEK's involvement and it is... different. Much less emphasis on the legal aspects. More of a crime drama with a lawyer in it. There are some disturbing scenes, some really twisted stuff that might make you not want to continue watching. Season 3 was better but gets straight whimsical at times. Again less law, more crime drama. Still, some powerhouse performances from all involved. And who knew water politics could be so interesting?

I was going to make a joke last week about being glad no one on the team had a puppy for Madeline to kick. And then this week because she's not already evil enough, they have her being responsible for killing Patterson, my favorite character! Also, I know this show does enjoy pulling a fast one on us but I don't see how she could have survived. But I will accept total bullshit at face value if it brings her back!