dwmarch

Gabriel was mwa-ha-ha-ing about how he had a special surprise for Chin. Chin said something like "Where do you want to meet?" and Gabriel came back with "No need, it's already at your house!" I hope the real surprise is that Gabriel upper-decked Chin while at his house. Since DNA evidence is not an issue in this case, it was a perfect opportunity.

This show is at its best when it embraces how ridiculous it can be. A Bosnian war criminal dressed as Elvis (and wearing millions in fake diamonds), blasting away at an Elvis convention with a huge box-fed machine gun? Why not? Speaking of that gun, where did he get it? I know gun laws in the US are pretty liberal but I'd assume there's a waiting period to purchase guns that can shoot light aircraft out of the sky. Perhaps he had it in his checked baggage? Let me get this straight: Jon Lovitz puts together a crew to break into the wine shop and steal the dead gangster's diamonds. They then take the diamonds to a costume shop and have them sewn into an Elvis suit. The Elvis suit gets loaned out for this convention so Lovitz's crew comes back and murders the shop owner. They also raid the morgue and steal the body. Then for some reason they hang around at the Elvis convention until the dead gangster's brother comes in and kills all of them. Somewhere in the midst of all of this, the ETA who got the diamond suit by mistake is murdered by an obsessive fan with a hearing problem. 5-0 solves all of these cases in a day. At least it wasn't boring. Chin's house doesn't have a security system? I know he doesn't really need one when he can make a phone call and have 8,000 cops show up at his door before he can even get home but still... a commercial-grade burglar alarm would have really been an asset here. Was that Papa Noshimuri in the pictures with Adam? I thought he got chopped up into little pieces by Wo Fat. I remember making a "today's secret ingredient..." joke back at TWOP. So we're blending the Gabriel plot with Adam and Kono's pending nuptials I assume? Maybe Gabriel wants Kono for himself since he already knows she has terrible taste in men.

I thought Danno had some great chemistry with Dr. Shaw. Doug Stanhope has a great bit about how intimacy is so much more than sex and what could be more intimate than being stuck in an elevator? Minor nitpicking: they weren't in the elevator for very long before it stopped. But Pua somehow manages to find them. Did he walk up the stairs to every single floor calling out their names? Or did the elevator make it all the way to the ground floor but just wouldn't open? I found very little tension in the questions about whether or not Grover's instincts were correct. This is 5-0, of course he's not going to make a mistake based on his turbulent emotions! And of course his friend did it. He had an Android phone! Android phones have the "slide to unlock" screen. The Windows phones that Grover and the rest of 5-0 carry slide up to unlock.

It would seem Reddington is responsible for every single bad thing that ever happened in Lizzie's life. Next week we'll find out he personally caused the zit she got right before prom. Good to see Mr. Kaplan again. Red's retainers are just as entertaining as he is. The FBI's super-secret high tech task force is fooled by a vengeance plot that hinges on cigarette butts dug from the trash? The FBI in this show is like the prosecutor in Idiocracy. "We got all this like... evidence and stuff." Speaking of evidence, apparently Lizzie has a key to the evidence locker and can enter and exit as she pleases, without having to sign for anything. I hope there aren't any real cops watching this show.

I've been lurking in this forum because my usual stomping grounds are Hawaii 5-0 and The Blacklist and those shows are just so easy to snark on. This show gives me nothing to nitpick and no strange motivations to question. Hamlin is a dick but maybe not as much as he seems. Kim comes in and tells him, the big name on the door, that he is wrong to have done what he did. She says this from across the room with the door open. As is his duty, Hamlin tells her off after trying to obliquely inform her of Chuck's treachery. "The partners discussed it" comes up a few times but Kim doesn't clue in that ALL the partners discussed it. Hamlin had to read her the riot act for her breach of protocol but at least he gave her a detailed explanation when he figured out she wasn't going to put two and two together. I don't agree with Chuck but I see where he was coming from. Here's our associate from Harvard, here's a fresh face from Yale and here's Jimmy from the University of American Samoa. What do you mean he looks like the type of lawyer guilty people hire? Wait, come back! Was Nacho buying meth precursors? There was a period detail I loved: Hamlin's computer was rocking Windows XP with the Luna theme. I'd recognize that Fisher-Price interface anywhere!

Last week I speculated that Cooper would avoid sweets to maintain his cover as a diabetic. This week, Aram brings 31 cupcakes and I don't recall seeing Cooper eat any! I guess they couldn't have mentioned the diabetes because that would have been confusing with the focus on Cooper's tumor but I still had to laugh at how predictable this show is sometimes. Tom walked into and out of a murder charge last week and this week manages to talk the neo-nazis out of torturing him. Who is he afraid of? Lance Henriksen walks away too? Jesus H. Christ, at this rate it's going to take a Xenomorph, a Predator and the Terminator to kill him! I guess Lizzie's home brewing experiment turned out okay considering how she and Ressler guzzled that bottle. Isn't there some law against government employees drinking on the clock? And did Lizzie get a new office? I don't recall seeing her in that space before. The dog is still alive? Has Paul Reubens been looking after it? It seems the producers have realized it's been a while since we've been treated to a good gory episode. Thanks guys, I wasn't hungry anyway.

I wanted to comment after watching this episode but I can't recall anything happening. Instead, I remember another hour of the same arguments they were having last week. The AG-in-waiting just shut it down. I don't even think Tom needed to be there, especially since they just let him out after he confessed to a murder. I guess we did learn a few things: Ressler's clever disguise to hide the fact that he looks like a cop? He announces that he is a cop. Just once I'd like someone to say he looks like Uncle Mike from Homeland instead. It's okay to go overseas and shoot criminals dead, as long as they are neo-nazis who also deal in drugs and guns. Cooper's cover is that he is pre-diabetic! This will lead to hilarious scenes where Aram brings a cake to work and Cooper has to pretend he can't have any! Red is only doing these things for Lizzie because he feels guilty about the past. But he is starting to wish she had died in that fire.

Well that was much better than last week. They did mention that more than one 911 call came in about the shots fired. But when it's that many shots fired you don't get a single cop in a single cruiser leisurely patrolling the neighborhood! McGarrett only gets to be Super SEAL as the script calls for I suppose. Why has he all of a sudden forgotten how to make a molotov cocktail? And why is he such a shitty shot when firing at guys who are across the street? A week after Chin almost gets busted by IA for perceived corruption he engages in some real corruption right here. Make a donation to the widow's fund and we'll ignore that pile of untaxed cash you won while illegally gambling? That would be a headline if it happened in real life. Only on TV and in Grand Theft Auto games does the case against you go away because the last witness was murdered. There was some foreshadowing that Chin's gangster relative is going to want something from him and is going to come calling for it sooner rather than later. And what exactly is to stop Chin from arresting him on the spot for murdering a cop?

I liked that the judge was a stand-in for the skeptical audience. The concept behind this series is quite frankly ridiculous and actually having someone say "You expect me to believe that?!" is a long-overdue moment. I can't recall any really specific cases but haven't several of them been newsworthy? I guess the existence of the task force isn't in doubt but I did find myself wondering why Lizzie didn't say "You remember when this or that had to be shut down?" Lizzie keeps insisting that Tom is dead even though she knows otherwise. I don't get why she would take the blame for a murder he committed though. Add me to the list of people who believes that the national security apparatus could easily overrule this overly curious judge.

What's even better is that they said they dropped the money off at an orphanage! I can fanwank that going through Bogota International with giant duffel bags full of American dollars is a bad idea but then again they got the money to Colombia so... Since this was the consequences of no consequence episode, I'd like to see some real blowback. Dropping 19 million dollars into the laps of unprepared strangers is bound to ruin a few lives despite the good intentions.

I have been hoping for a consequences episode for a long time now and this was not what I had in mind. Of course it turns out to be mwa-ha-ha-ing villains pretending to be good guys but in actual fact chasing three tons of coke. And why does the investigation against Danny go through a single person? What possible motivation could Steve's DA friend have for helping Danny get out from under a murder he's actually guilty of? I am not prepared to do the math for this but it seems as though one would not be able to burn three tons of cocaine in a bonfire in less than a day. They didn't mention recruiting Charlie Sheen and/or Lindsay Lohan. If they had, I could believe it wouldn't take that long. As is, they should have been destroying it with a large explosive rather than throwing the bricks into a fire one at a time. Also, I did not notice any gas masks or similar sensible precautions one might take while standing next to a giant mountain of burning cocaine. Eyes are the worst in Hollywood. Any trauma to them and you're dead. I am certain in real life people have had sharp objects driven into their eyes and have suffered no worse of an injury than loss of the eye. And speaking of missing eyes, weren't there supposed to be a whole bunch of cops around that IA safehouse? Did they not discuss how impossible it would be to break in? Would that not make it equally difficult to break out? I feel as though the Colombian jail suffered from some stereotyping as well. It was basically a riot with bars but there was a squad of badasses with automatic rifles keeping the peace through bribery. For some reason the full-to-capacity jail does not simply overwhelm these guards, take their weapons and uniforms and create further havoc in an environment where it wouldn't even be noticed. I hope no Colombian correctional officers watched this. Jimmy Buffett somehow got to Colombia ahead of Our Heroes, found and fixed a Sea King helicopter and was ready to fly into danger at a moment's notice? Shortcuts like this are jarring and there were far too many in this episode. I had to laugh at Grace asking Danny if he had actually killed somebody. He's been gunning mooks down for five seasons! His kill list probably ranks alongside that of Jason Voorhees or Jack Bauer. But of course they were all bad men. I'm glad they didn't draw out the mystery of who Joe's obvious source was but what an anti-climactic moment that was. You need to trust me. Okay, but who's your source. Your mom. Okay, that's cool. It would be hard for any episode to be as good as last week's but this one was bad in so many ways.

It's not the murder, it's the fact that she did it with Danny's car. Now he's got to pick eyeballs out of his radiator grille and clean guts off his exhaust. In all the years Steve has been recklessly driving Danny's car I don't think he's managed to run anyone over yet but Amber does it on her first try! And of course she's not going to get in trouble for it. She does have that marginal self-defense argument but more importantly she has that shield that association with 5-0 provides: anything is okay as long as we say so.

I was a little surprised that Danny was so cuddly and forgiving with Amber considering she straight up murdered her ex with his car. I'm guessing with the stab wounds in the walls, blood and broken furniture everywhere and a dead body on the driveway, Danny will not be getting his vacation rental deposit back. I know Steve is the Super-SEAL but I was expecting a little more tussling before he took down Randy Couture!

Well at least this episode featured bad guys who were just screwing around and were blundered into by the FBI rather than being masterminds who were six steps ahead of them the whole time. I'm assuming the weapons that were stolen will turn up elsewhere later. Or did the kids get them? They were tracked by the camera and GPS in the Hellfire missiles but what about all the other stuff? Was the father dead the whole time or did his son quickly stuff a bunch of branches down his throat and into his eyes while running away? If he had done it shortly after the kidnapping, why was the body still in such good shape? The people in the church were bludgeoned, stabbed, et cetera but by who? The kids? Speaking of the kids, where did they learn to drive? Is there some compelling reason why Lizzie isn't living in her own house? The bad guys who were stalking her are dead now. Painful memories of Tom? If she actually has any kind of psychological training she'd know to deal with it head on rather than running away from it. I got a chuckle out of Ressler's longing gaze at the shelves of opiates. Also, yeah continuity! I wish they would just come out and say what Harold is suffering from. Cancer? I hope not. I've met Walter White and you, Harold are no Walter White.

Here you go: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1viter_marvel-one-shot-agent-carter-2013_shortfilms

Well, Halloween Wars hasn't had a post since November and doesn't seem like it's an ongoing series. I don't think there would be too many howls of protest if it was moved aside for Hawaii 5-0.

I can picture the writer's room meeting for this episode: remember in Syriana how there was that plot about the oil executives all stabbing each other in the back over something no one cares about? Let's do that one! Speaking of recycled plots, the determined bureaucrat pokes his nose in a murder committed by the national security apparatus was done on 24 and was not very entertaining back then. I do wonder if they ever found Stephen Root's corpse in the air vent or if they're still trying to figure out what that smell is. I was surprised at Lizzie's weak "We'll ask the State Department to Do Something!" As if they would do anything other than write a report about how tragic it was! This is a world full of super-spies and assassins and explosions and shit. No one is afraid of the friggin' State Department! Lizzie being passive-aggressive and bitchy towards Red is going to get old fast. Actually, it's already old.

So this Roman is the big bad and no one ever happens to notice that this vicious gangster is a woman? 5-0 has the hospital's entire floor cleared and then posts two guards? And they don't even communicate when one is leaving the floor to have crappy coffee and sentimental time on her Windows Phone? Xzibit would have had a much easier time getting around if they had taken his wheelchair out of the elevator. Seriously, those things fold up for easy transport. It had to go about three feet. Did they think Roman was going to come through the ceiling of the elevator like the T-1000 in Terminator 2? Also, did Kono run out of bullets in that gunfight? She didn't even consider using her gun after they got in the elevator. Hide in a laundry basket, wait until she comes around, shoot. At the very least they could have included a line about it. Danny's back in Newark for testimony in a court case? That must be strange, considering that 5-0 executes most of their suspects. Some very strange conversations in this one. Adam and Jerry as buddies, even though Jerry later admits he doesn't really know Adam at all. Xzibit giving relationship advice to Kono, which she follows! Speaking of which, Kono taking issue with Adam's "corruption" was laughable considering how many laws 5-0 breaks in the course of an average day. Wasn't it just a few weeks ago that Kono used feminine wiles and a tight leather skirt to completely subvert due process? This show does not know when to twist the knife. Jerry should have blown up at the end of the episode, in a car bombing meant for Adam. That would raise the stakes a bit.

Red and Lizzie are not Ross and Rachel; I don't care how many times they break up and get back together. I think the best moment of this episode was Aram's super-awkward hug of Samar, which he then extends to Ressler.

Let's not forget the vial. How can Capt. America save the life of someone she cares about from beyond his icy grave? With a vial of miraculous cure-all blood, of course! So at this point it could be Thompson or anyone else still left.

Good action but definitely some silliness with the Blacklist's return. Where to begin? Okay, first and foremost, the CIA has a prison in which the worst of the worst are kept but their intel is so important and sensitive that it requires a real-time two way link to every other secret the US holds. Because that's how the US got Osama Bin Laden, right? They got him by hurrying. Didn't they? Television jails all have the same weakness. There's always some panels to pry off, some easily accessed wire and some corrupt guards. Come on now! This is the prison in which the CIA holds the world's most brutal terrorists etc and there's guards on the take?!?! In true Die Hard tradition, Keen is actually decently dirty by the time she finishes her air shaft crawl. But again, is a super-secret CIA prison going to have air ducts that a person could crawl through? The actual air ducts should be just big enough for a small person to get stuck in. True CPR fact: if you call the person you are trying to resuscitate a son of a bitch they will come back to life a few minutes later. However, they might be angry and might go on a killing spree if there is a handy shotgun nearby. I am very glad this episode got straight to the point about what the Fulcrum was. Hawaii 5-0 spent a couple of seasons drawing out a mystery that turned out to be stupid shenanigans so I am happy this show stepped on the gas. Hopefully next week we'll get some real answers about the actual connection between Lizzie and Red.

One thing in particular jumped out at me in this episode: Grover should not have to deal with his daughter's trauma through heartwarming talks. 5-0 has access to psychiatric services. They even mentioned it this very episode! And since every single member of the team has been targeted in their personal lives one would think their (surviving) families would have access too! Trauma counseling should be part and parcel of the job. I must have missed something about the neurosurgeon. She wouldn't leave it alone? How is this now? Was she calling the murderer and bugging him? How did he even know what was going on? I'll give them a pass on that homeless kid having such toned arms. They did say he had only been on the street a short time. It's great that he has a job now but where is he going to live? And how many dudes does it take to run a shrimp truck anyway? How many even fit once Kamekona gets in there? But let's suppose last week's shrimp contest has caused a surge in Kamekona's popularity. Danno told the killer he would die in jail unloved but I think if he really wanted to twist the knife he would have mentioned the grandson.

I've been waiting five seasons and a hundred-some episodes for this show to put Kono in a leather skirt and wow did they ever put her in a nice one! Interesting implication there too. McGarrett says "he's a perv" and then looks to Kono to say she's going undercover. She's got a perfectly fitted leather skirt on standby. Well, as long as she finds occasion to wear it again, I can't worry too much about where she got it. I didn't think I'd like the Kamekona plot (especially when they cut away from leather-clad Kono so we could see a Karate Kid homage) but it turned out pretty good in the end. I loved the whole cooking on a hot plate powered by a car battery. But I would imagine a hot plate and car battery would be both prohibited items in a prison. Maybe Kamekona was in minimum security. Jerry crashed into that ambulance not knowing who was in it. The others were right, he is turning into McGarrett with that kind of recklessness. Otherwise if Jerry saw the bad guys escaping, figured out which vehicle they were going to go for, let his passenger out, gunned the engine and successfully rammed the vehicle to disable it, he damn well deserves that badge he asked for!

I have read the same thing regarding Amber. Very mild spoilers: There are a few other plots coming back around later in the season as well: As for this episode, it's a rare one in which I don't even remember what happened. I don't recall anyone getting arrested at the end, although I'm sure it did happen. I feel like random extra characters were just tacked on at the end so they'd have someone to chase. Telegraphed plot line: Dr. Shaw had a friend who was murdered and the case remains unsolved to this day? I wonder if we'll be seeing that again.

Futher to this, there are two kinds of spies: declared and undeclared. Carrie, as CIA Station Chief for Islamabad, would be a declared spy with diplomatic cover. That means if the host government catches her in an act of espionage all they can do is declare her Persona Non Grata and kick her out of the country. Carrie tried to claim that Quinn had diplomatic cover by calling him her "Chief of Support". Khan made it clear that the diplomatic ship had already sailed and sank and Quinn was to be treated as an undeclared spy.