The Venture Brothers: "Self-Medication" by Matthew J. Brady
And here's yet another example of the writing that makes this show so great. It's not just about misplaced nostalgia, or putting an "adult" spin on characters and concepts originally meant for children. That sort of "ha ha, cartoon characters getting drunk, having sex, etc." was done to death even before Robot Chicken started fucking the corpse of its dead horse. No, Venture Brothers treats its referential characters with affection, but imbues them with the sadness and failure that should be the result of living your life focused on the past, obsessed with the way things used to be. Plus, it's hilarious.
So that brings us to this episode, which sees Dr. Venture participate in a group therapy session with several other former boy adventurers, including stand-ins for Astro Boy ("When I see a giant robot, I just get so mad I wanna beat them up, and then, and then I wanna burn them. Sometimes I wanna burn the whole world!"), Johnny Quest ("I'm only here because Action Johnny had himself a little run-in with Johnny Law, and was ordered to attend by Johnny Judge. Not my fault. Somebody else's"), the Hardy Boys (who, in a genius touch, get crossed with the Menendez brothers), and Robin ("I can't even get an erection now unless I'm tied to a chair with a time bomb taped to my chest"). Their back-and-forth mocking and anxieties about their pasts are comedy gold, and provide a good opportunity for guest stars (Patton Oswalt and John Hodgman! Yay! Seth Green! Not a "boo", surprisingly!) to voice new characters, and the dorky sincerity of the therapist ("Chemical dependence. See what I just did there?") rounds the whole scene out perfectly. Also, they all end up going on an adventure and trying to solve a mystery which should have been obvious, given the opening in which the Monarch almost kills Dr. Venture but has to back off because he as a doctor's note. And then the plot eventually shows the character development that the show has done, allowing Dr. Venture to realize that while his life is pretty pathetic, he's not as lame as he could be. There's four seasons of storytelling for you; way to show growth, Doc!
The secondary plot involves Hank, Dean, and Sgt. Hatred all going to a Lord of the Rings-ish movie, with the latter freaking out when he finds himself in a theater full of children. Because he's a pedophile, you know. Amusing, but rightly positioned as a B-plot in comparison to the sublime main portion of the episode. Good stuff all around this week, but man, how long is it going to take before Brock returns? There's stoking anticipation, and then there's just making me impatient. Come on, guys, let's get that main plot moving, since I am obviously the one whose wishes are worth catering to.
Fringe: "August" by Matthew J. Brady
You know how every so often some Marvel comic or another has a story about the Watcher and his society, and how one of them or another has interfered with the planet they're supposed to be observing or something? One of Fringe's writers must be a fan, because that's totally what this episode is all about. The guys in the show are cannily called Observers, with the hope that nobody will make the connection, and we find out here that they've been present at key moments throughout human history, which makes me hope people will start acting like fans of The DaVinci Code and start searching old paintings for images of bald guys, because they confuse fiction with reality. Apparently, they also can see all of time at once, Tralfamadorian-style, which a nerdy scientist guy illustrates in this episode by pouring water through a tube for some reason. Whoa, stop confusing me with your scientific mumbo-jumbo, maaaan!
Anyway, the plot here sees one of the Observers kidnap some girl, and nobody can figure out why, until a plane that she was supposed to be on crashes. It turns out that she was a survivor of the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, and he saw her back then and has been watching her ever since. Now he's convinced of her importance, even though his fellow bald guys disagree when they all meet at their favorite Indian restaurant, so he's gotta figure out how to make her important enough to keep them from correcting (i.e. shooting) the error he caused. Aww, how romantic. If only they had managed to have him say (preferably in a robot voice) "WHAT IS THIS THING YOU HU-MONS CALL LOVE?", this would be my favorite episode of the show ever.
As it is, it's not bad, although the stuff with the rest of the cast is boring. Olivia needs to learn to never make personal plans, because she should know by this point that in this kind of show, those always must be cancelled, because her job is IMPORTANT. And Walter should just confess to Peter already that he stole him from a parallel universe as a kid after his real son died. Come on, how awkward could that conversation really be? Hmm, maybe they just need to re-title this The Bald Guy Non-Intervention Hour, and then the show could really take off. Hop to it, Fox!
Dexter: "Hungry Man" by Tucker Stone
The Worst Scene Of This Season So Far:
LaGuerta: Turkey wraps. Icees.
Angel: And Cuervo Silver. Only the best for you. [Gets himself ready.] You know, I was thinking. Carl Haas' wife gets mugged, boom. She's dead. Carl gets hit by a bus, boom, he's a vegetable.
LaGuerta: You never know when you wake up in the morning what the day will bring--
Angel: --I love you. I love you.
LaGuerta: [Removes Angel's sunglasses, then whispers] Are you saying that because you're afraid you'll get hit by a bus?
Angel: No. Well. Yes. But. I just want you to know what I know before I don't know it anymore. And I love you. I LOVE YOU!
LaGuerta: Shhh
Angel: I LOVE MARIA ESPENZA DI ALMA LAGUER - -
LaGuerta: Shh. I'm not gonna say it.
Angel: [Confused, head cocks to left] You don't love me?
LaGuerta: I'm afraid. If I say it, something might happen. Like you'll get hit by a bus. [Friday Night Lights song begins playing softly] So watch out for moving buses. Because I love Angel Juan Marcos Batista.
[Kissing]
The Best Scene Of This Season So Far:
John Lithgow: "Shut up, cunt."
That's Lithgow, and yes, he's talking to his wife. It turns out that Lithgow's happy family only looks that way due to a tightly maintained schedule of repetitive physical and emotional abuse. The wife is a broken container of terror (willing to let Dexter fuck her daughter, as long as daddy doesn't find out), the son is a seething pail o' hate, and the daughter--well, one of the daughters--is kept upstairs in a locked-from-the-outside room, designed to prolong constant adolescence. Prior to the line above, Daddy Lithgow has already taken his son's finger and snapped it in half, and when the family sits down to Thanksgiving dinner and then neglects to express their gratitude for his finger-snapping fatherhood, the monolithic nature of his power is fully expressed. His wife, so terrified of what-is-to-come, as it's clearly what-has-come-before, tries to calm him down. He calls her a cunt, and the bite of it hits harder than a slap. As he begins to orient the family back into the natural orbit that Dexter's uninvited presence has thrown out of wack, his son--motivated by the finger, the fear, and Dexter's manipulation--attempts to assert a bit of control as well. Taking it too far, he smashes the funeral urn, and in seconds, Lithgow is on top of him, choking the life out of his son like a real-life Homer Simpson.
And then Dexter steps in.
It's worth noting that this was yet another scene where Michael C. Hall shows off the purpose behind the muscular physique he brings to the show--like Matt Damon's Jason Bourne, Dexter's body is constructed by brute necessity more than aesthetic design. He's strong and fast because he's a monster, and a monster needs to be able to dominate and destroy. Quickly removing his belt and using it to drag Lithgow into the kitchen, it's a scene that's physically accurate--unlike 24 or Sons of Anarchy, where violence doesn't completely make sense and depends on crash edits, this show just depicts it exactly as it would realistically occur. A guy drags another guy into another room by his neck and then jumps on top of him with a knife, hissing "I should have fucking killed you when I had the chance." You see him do it--unfortunately, so does the rest of the family, and like that, we're back to where we started from, with Dexter the number one suspect in what will eventually be the murder of John Lithgow.
And The Rest:
For those five minutes, Dexter hits the sorts of high that made it so compelling in previous seasons--after all, the biggest non-kill highs of the show have always been tangled up in whether or not he was going to be found out for what he was, and it's not a surprise that the trick still works. But the remainder, with the shock reveal that Deb's shooter is Lithgow's other, until-now-unknown, daughter, or the horrible scene mentioned above, continues the season's downward spiral. Rita might have an affair. Deb wants to solve the case. Angel likes LaGuerta. The funny Asian guy said something funny. It's a dead horse, and there's nothing new to say about that. But when it's as good as that family dinner scene, it makes the sting that much harder to shrug off.
House: "Ignorance Is Bliss" by Tucker Stone
Although shows like House--procedural, designed for syndication, dramedies--aren't really built for the long range story or shifting narrative styles that have become so popular in the last decade, that doesn't stop them trying. Even Law & Order--which I'm keeping up with pretty much solely because it's what my mom watches, and that gives us a non are-you-following-the-treatment-regimen conversation to have--continues to dip its toe in the water of the season-long tale, as we see Ernie Hudson earning (or destroying) karma credits with his epic succession of minute-long scenes where he tells a weed-smoking S. Epetha Merkson that cancer hasn't stolen her looks. House has always played with including that sort of multi-episode padding--his war with David Morse, his war with Sela Ward, his war with his fucking leg, etc. Thankfully, the House writers keep the long term stories contained, with most of them wrapping up after six episodes. After all, nothing has really changed about the appeal-of-House formula--it's the Watch Hugh Laurie Show, and the show's writers primary job is to come up with little pegs for Hugh Laurie to bounce off of. That, more than anything else, is why it's a good thing to lose Cameron, and it's also why Olivia Wilde is so consistently uninteresting to watch. It's unfortunate that they're the primary non-Cuddy females on the show, and it's plausible that the show's writers might just suck eggs when it comes to writing women, but the cause doesn't make that much of a difference. There's been no good watching between Cameron and Laurie in years, and watching Laurie make jokes about 13's bisexuality only worked a couple of times. (It's disappointing to toe the party line, but it has to be said: unless you're willing to go offensive, dick n' pussy jokes get old really fast.)
Of course, that runs up right into the current problem, which is that an episode like this one, where Laurie is given his strongest groups of comic foils ever (Olivia Wilde notwithstanding), should be really good, or at least, as good as House can get. At moments, it certainly was--Taub and House talking is apparently a concept that always wins, and seeing Chase get a chance to steal a page from the Book of Manipulation isn't too shabby either--but it collapsed at the lighthouse of the subplot that never dies, the subplot that consistently threatens to steal the entire focus of the show, the subplot of "Will House bang Cuddy".
Enough. I'll admit that I did want them to get together--mostly because I can think of a certain guy named Martin who enjoys reminding me of that sad fact constantly--but the show has spent the last year making it clear how little they have for the Cuddy character to do. It's odd, and possibly more evidence of a fucked up notion of women in general on the writers part, but Lisa Edelstein was actually a lot more interesting as a character back when all she did was wear low-cut tops that showed off her cans. Now that she's been shoved into the spotlight, stuck in the horrible position of playing unreadable dialog games with Hugh Laurie, the mere sight of her is like a flashing sign that the upcoming bridge is out. Gone is the sense that she was a woman of intelligence who House viewed as a worthy opponent--now he just responds to her with mindless juvenilia and plastic manipulation. She's boring, and she didn't used to be boring.
But what does one expect from something like House, or really, any procedural hybrid show? Even a successful one--and despite the round table of complaints lashed against it, House remains an incredibly successful show, one of the few big network ones left--is comfort food when it's at its best, and only one episode--"Three Stories"--ever broke free from the inherent limitations of this type of product. Having the luxury of a DVR permits an all-in approach to these shows that was formerly the purview of the lonely or obsessive, to their detriment. (Old ad campaigns about water-cooler conversations aside, didn't puberty and the ability to drive pretty much break everyone of the habit of appointment television?) House, for all of its implied innovations, is an old time television show, a sarcastic sequel to Nick At Nite, and when actual old time television shows almost invariably hold little but the promise of nostalgic masturbation, new versions can only rut on a stained mattress for so long.
And yet, the further down that road of rationalization one goes, the closer one gets to this: apology. Television--all entertainment products, actually--don't deserve the apology of an audience any more than they deserve audience scrutiny. They don't "deserve" anything at all, it's merely an exchange--financial, temporal--and the pros and cons are determined on a completely individual basis. On an individual basis, a viewer of one, House might--and probably has--lost almost all of its luster.
You know what though? I watch it with my wife. And I still enjoy hiding my eyes behind her back during the really embarrassing scenes, and I still like the way she rolls her eyes at Olivia Wilde, and I still, for now at least, like that when I get home from work on Mondays, she pokes her head out of her little office and says "Hey. When you get finished in there, you wanna watch House?" Until gay marriage brings about the end of the world, I'm good with that.
Sons of Anarchy: "Culling" by Tucker Stone
Is two music montages one too many? Sons of Anarchy says no, I kind of say--well, okay, whatever, it keeps the actors I don't like from talking. And while those montages weren't backed up by the bloodshed I was hoping for, that's my fault for thinking they'd kill the bad guys that gang raped the main character's mother before the season finale.
No such luck. This episode wasn't a complete placeholder--hell, Henry Rollins took time off from pinching his mouth into his best old-lady-face to shoot a couple of women in the back, and then he blew some guy's brains all over the wall. (Like--meat on wall brains, FX don't give a fuck. I'd bet money there's somebody who works for FX corporate who "just doesn't give a fuck", you know what I mean? He's one of those guys who says "Gonna go Ballz Deep tonight", but without any irony, you know? Like, his favorite author is Chuck Palahniuk, and he bought a motorcycle because of this show, and he still hides the fact that he masturbates from his wife? You know what I mean. I do it too sometimes, I'll eat a whole fucking Sara Lee Pecan Coffee Cake at four in the afternoon when I'm on vacation, but you know, I'm on fucking vacation. I don't live my life by vacation rules.)
Besides Henry Rollins and his grandma face, there was also a really over the top scene where Jax's girlfriend choked her boss and threatened her with a loaded handgun. It was as viscerally entertaining as those sort of scenes always are--well, unless you've never had a boss you truly fucking hated, in that case, the scene is probably "offensive" or "immature"--but it was also as stupid as those scenes always are, because seriously, people who physically attack their boss, at their job...that's just crazy stupid shit to do, and no amount of writing can change that little truism. And meanwhile, the show's just playing tease-the-fight, with all of the main characters acting all "get the squad together, we got some retribution a-brewing", and then, when the time comes...yeah, nothing happens. Sure, there's a big fight, but Henry Rollins gets arrested before Jax can kill him. And then there's a big gun-to-head scene with Adam Arkin and his Nazi daughter, but they both get arrested before Ron Perlman can kill Arkin. (There was a really primo moment though, with one of the Sons placing his hand on Nazi daughter's face, shoving it away so she would have to watch her father die through his splayed, blood-covered fingers. I'm a big believer that they should use more camera tricks on this show, and that would have been a great opportunity to do something really fucking twisted.)
But no dice. Everybody still has to die, but they have to cross the t's first, and I guess that'll happen next week. I'd like to say I'm not looking forward to it, but why lie? I can't wait.
-Matthew J. Brady & Tucker Stone, 2009
A regiment is a military group (consisting of two or more battalions.) A regimen is a regulated course, as of exercise or medication.
Your error has decimated me. I am now 10% eliminated.
Posted by: John Pontoon | 2009.11.26 at 12:11
One doesn't "tow" a line, as lines are unmovable. One minds one's toes as they approach said line.
I'm going to do this all day. Then I'm going to kill Buckwheat. Do we understand each other?
Posted by: John Pontoon | 2009.11.26 at 12:16
David Fucking Morse was on House? At the same time as Andre Bruagher?
Was that the episode with Stephen Fry where they all did body shots off each other and exchanged Build-A-Bears?
this erection won't go away.
Posted by: seth hurley | 2009.11.26 at 14:40
CALL A DOCTOR IF PRIAPISM OCCURS, HURLEY. THAT SHIT IS DANGEROUS.
Posted by: Sean Witzke | 2009.11.26 at 18:14
David Morse was..two seasons ago? All I know is his character got fucking annoying real damn quick...
Posted by: LurkerWithout | 2009.11.27 at 02:22
Man, being married is nice, isn't it? Take that, singles, with your sexual promiscuity and rampant free time!
Posted by: Matthew J. Brady | 2009.11.27 at 09:03
I never said it was my erection.
Posted by: seth hurley | 2009.11.27 at 11:41
Also, everyone who reads this stuff on this here site here has GOT to buy "The Winter Men" trade paperback. It's amazing. The way that it's awesomely Russian is pure genius. Our hero pseudo-cop walks into the office of the mayor of Moscow - "Mayor Boss" - who says to him, "AH--MY FAVORITE REFORMER! Where have you been, boy? --Knocking pears out of trees with your dick?!"
It's better than "Incognito." It's as good as "The Sword" (Luna Bros, not Fartvel). Please buy it!
Posted by: John Pontoon | 2009.11.27 at 16:22
Fixed those two. Agreed on Winter Men.
Morse's storyline and character were pretty tired, but the initial war was great shit. And as weak as it got, it's the Morse.
Posted by: Tucker Stone | 2009.11.29 at 01:49