S04.E01: Fallout

[Tabbyclaw]

Duke is ejected from the barn to find that six months have passed and a lot has changed in Haven. His sudden appearance suggests that the barn may not have killed Audrey as they thought, and new friend Jennifer has information that supports this conclusion. But can Audrey be found and returned to Haven?

 

[Elsinore]

Liked

 

Duke and Jennifer meeting.

 

Nathan comforting Marion.

 

Poor Conrad.

 

And the song that they played at the end.

 

"I don't like it here" and pretty much everything Jennifer said in this episode.

 

Disliked

 

That first scene with Lexie. Can and will not ever take grown ass women named Lexie seriously.

 

Nathan getting beat up for money. WTF? How does he still have all his teeth? That and the Audrey pining made me seriously want to throttle him in the first half of this episode. I'm all for the Naudrey ship, don't get me wrong. But Nathan without her is just painfully stupid to watch.

Edited August 31, 2014 by Elsinore

[Tabbyclaw]

I've only seen season 4 the once, so I think I'm going to have a lot more "knowing what we know now" thoughts going forward.

 

This is my favorite season opener thus far, made more so by the fact that my expectations were kinda low. I was leery of the time skip and the new characters, and I tend to be wary of season premieres in general, but wow was this an engaging episode. The callback to the first solved Trouble and its solution failing really sets the tone for the season to come: Nothing and no one is safe. And it's hard to completely dislike the new characters when one of them is Jennifer, possibly the cutest human being ever to walk the planet. I think there are baby pandas less adorable than this woman. She would be my favorite thing about this episode were it not for the long-overdue Duke/Nathan hug.

 

I only have one problem with Lexie. Well, two, but one is a nitpick about her getting so nervous in the mere presence of a gun when

in a later episode she claims to be from Tucson. It's not Texas here, but we're a pretty gun-friendly city and you do get people just casually walking around armed from time to time

. The significant one is that they've got her done up as some kind of "tough chick" stereotype, and Emily Rose cannot pull it off.  She's just got too sweet a face and demeanor to not look like it's a costume.

[Shanna Marie]

I happen to love the name Lexie. I've had a character with that name living in my head for decades and I just haven't found the right story for her. However, my Lexie is nothing like this one, and mine is at least a decade younger.

 

The hug is probably the highlight of the episode, and I notice that it's featured in the DVD menu, so it plays on a loop if you leave the menu running for a while between episodes. I don't think we've ever seen Nathan look quite that happy about seeing Duke.

 

I rather liked the arc of them having to work without a net, doing the Trouble Whispering thing without any immunity to the Troubles, just using Nathan's lack of pain instead. However my quibble here is him walking out of that house after passing out from hypothermia. Even if Marian stopped freezing the place, he wouldn't bounce back that quickly. The others should have had to go in after him once they saw that the storm had passed. They kept talking about how he wasn't immune to whatever danger just because he couldn't feel it, and even brought it up again here in this episode, then promptly forgot about it.

 

While I liked the way they were able to use the time jump as a reboot of sorts, I still wish we'd learned a little about the immediate aftermath of the previous season. Did the meteor storm just stop? Was it a regular storm or was it someone's Trouble? Nathan was shot in the back multiple times, so how did he manage to carry Jordan to safety and still apparently keep going? The comic book included in the DVD set didn't even answer all that. It just seemed like again they forgot that not feeling pain isn't the same thing as not being injured.