Fringe: "Grey Matters" by Matthew J. Brady
I've come to realize that this show is getting on my last nerve with its tiresome character "development" and reliance on seemingly clever but consistently stupid plots. It might have been clever and interesting at one point, but with a few exceptions here and there, it's just gotten boring and dumb. This episode sees a new bad guy (who, in a hard-to-explain development, apparently came from the evil universe, had his head removed and cryogenically frozen, and the was recapitated to pursue nefarious ends) show up at mental hospital and start doing brain surgery on patients, which renders them sane. After a bunch of running around, it turns out that these crazies all had pieces of Walter's brain implanted in their heads for safekeeping, and the bad guy has retrieved them and kidnapped Walter in order to hook up the brain bits and retrieve some nebulous information about traveling between universes. Which, considering that he and various other dudes already made the trip across dimensions, seems kind of unnecessary. Needless to say, we don't actually find out anything, but there are the types of hints and indications that this sort of show always doles out but never actually resolves to any satisfaction.
This sort of thing might be tolerable if it was surrounded by entertaining storytelling and character work, but none of the actors are up to the task. Olivia will continue to glower and act obsessed about finding "answers", Walter will whine about being crazy and act sad about the whole "kidnapping another version of his dead son from an alternate universe" thing, Joshua Jackson will emote badly and act guilty about not being a good son, Astrid will continue to have no personality (and shockingly poor training in, say, hand-to-hand combat for an FBI agent), and Broyles will be the authority figure that says things like "I'll back you up" when they get worried about the government shutting them down. Boring. Booooooring. Plots aren't any better; this episode has one of those climactic moments where Olivia has to choose between catching the bad guy or letting Walter die, and, surprising nobody, she let the bad guy go. Because we couldn't have something unexpected happen like her coming up with a third solution (shoot the guy in the knees and drag him back to the house, I say); no, we've got to wallow in guilt and worry about his evil plans until the next time he shows up. Yawn. So yeah, fuck this shit. Maybe I'll give it one more chance whenever new episodes start up again, but if I bother, this thing will be on thin fucking ice.
Dexter: "The Getaway" by Tucker Stone
Nancy Stone: I didn't think of the ending as a stunt.
I love my mom, she's totally my A1 pick in my fantasy family league. But she's wrong. It's pretty simple--if something is really dumb, all the way up until right before the end, and then something unexpected happens that's so cracked out that it causes the audience to experience a 180 degree shift from "I'm done with this terrible thing" over to "I cannot wait to find out what happens next", than yes, it's a fucking stunt. It might be a good stunt, but it's a stunt.
The final episode of Dexter was as predictable as one expected it to be, up until those final minutes counted down. Dexter continued to behave erratically, Deb finally figured out that he and her monstrous serial-killing ex-fiance were brothers, and Dexter caught up with John Lithgow. There were a couple of minor twists thrown in--Dexter got arrested for a couple of minutes, the various side characters finally got around to investigating the Trinity killer in a manner that non-idiot cops might in real life--and then the show delivered the scene where Michael C. Hall and John Lithgow reminded everybody how incredibly good they could be. Despite the little satisfaction to be found in the season as a whole, that scene was remarkable. It wasn't good enough to keep one coming back, and as the show headed towards the final minutes, with Hall heading off to see his wife, it struck me as the best I could hope for, and it felt like time to say goodbye.
And then the baby started crying, and Dexter walked into the bathroom, and there was his little baby boy, sitting in a pool of blood.
It's pretty obvious what the parallel is, but they show it anyway--like Dexter, this boy has been reborn. In his mother's blood.
Rita spent the last two seasons at the center of many of this show's worst scenes. To say that she didn't deserve to die is nice and all, and it's certainly a bit disgusting to take the opposite stance, but truthfully?
Rita had to go. She was useful in season one, but as the show accelerated her emotional growth, each episode of Dexter tilted further into absurdity, with Michael C. Hall stuck delivering line after line of voice-overed Hallmark affections, each one more cloying than the last, all in the service of meeting her incessant need for a better relationship. (The Pinocchio metaphor of the show became such a blatant tag that, if Rita had survived but for a few more episodes, it wouldn't have been surprising to watch Dexter turn to Rita and admit that he had, finally, become a real boy.)
The thing that made Dexter so compelling, the thing that the show seemed to have lost after becoming such a success, was that the show was one where the future seemed impossible to predict. Beyond the 24-ish tension of wondering if the guy was going to get caught, season two achieved much of its drama by simply asking whether or not Dexter was willing to kill an innocent cop to conceal his crimes. Over and over again, the question of those first two seasons, the question that Dexter himself was unable to answer: was he a sociopath? Was his father wrong about him? Did he, in fact, truly care for the people in his life?
Clearing Rita from the table doesn't automatically mean the show is going to get better. (Hiring new writers might.)
However, it will make the show a lot more tolerable.
-Matthew J. Brady & Tucker Stone, 2009
Dammit, I didn't get Dollhouse done in time. I did watch last week's episodes last night though, so maybe if I write something and send it in Tucker won't laugh cruelly and do whatever the electronic equivalent is of crumpling it up and throwing it in the garbage.
So just in case it never gets done: it was a decent couple episodes, if not quite as good as next week. Alan Tudyk's return was as cool as expected, but the attempts to wrap things up (or at least hit all the planned plot points) before cancellation is becoming obvious. Still, it's a damn sight better than Fringe has gotten lately.
Posted by: Matthew J. Brady | 2009.12.17 at 10:39