“Love is a battlefield.”

Here’s a couple of things you might need to know, or maybe just forgot: Chuck originally got at 13-episode order, and it wasn’t extended to 19 until all 13 of those episodes were in some stage of production. So tonight’s episode was orig… Read full post »

“For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.”

Remember Dominic Monaghan’s Dr. Evil chair-spin in A561984? Remember him staring at a laptop and muttering ‘Annabel’? Well, the writers have figured out what’s going on with his heretofore am… Read full post »

“How did you find us?”

“You called me.”

Lots of answers. Lots of questions. A little bit of ret-conning. A few missteps. And the best use of a take-out menu I’ve ever seen. FlashForward’s return lived up to my expectations by doing something I didn’… Read full post »

“I guess that folks with that kind of deformity don’t tend to leave home.”

This episode was supposed to have been about freaks pulling together. Walter, Peter, Olivia, and Astrid forming a tight little bond of society’s outcasts, and the people of Edina doing the same. But, ins… Read full post »

“There’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.”

My expectations for this episode were rather absurdly ambivalent. On the one hand, I’ve been ecstatic since I first heard that Joss was coming back to TV (and the wait felt like it was killing me). On the other, I knew tha… Read full post »

“We are of peace. Always.”

This was good. Not great, but good.

This review is full of spoilers, so don’t read it until you’ve seen the episode, please. For the sake of mankind.

This premiere did its job: establishing characters and the arc of the show. Erica, played by Elizabeth… Read full post »

"The game's not over."

I know we've all been underwhelmed by FlashForward lately. ShowRunners being replaced like Spinal Tap drummers. Bizarre, emotional one-offs that do nothing to further the deepening mystery. Darling Dominic Monaghan only popping in to boost ratings. Poor Joseph Fiennes struggli… Read full post »

"Love crazy."

I've been thinking a lot about DrNanaMom's V review: we've been spoiled by so much great science fiction lately, and it's hard to deal with some shows that are just good, but not stellar. This idea kept occurring and re-occurring as I watched this week's FlashForward -- and… Read full post »

"What you call cheating, I call finding a way to change the game."

How do you win a game when the only rule is fate and the only outcome is foreordained? You change the players. We got our first glimpse of the possibility of hope -- that is, the possibility… Read full post »

"It sounds like we consulted the Psychic Network for clues."

Episode Five seems like a good time to sit back and take stock. Compelling pseudo-scientific puzzle? Check. Attractive international cast? Check. Willingness to play with standard narrative flow? Check. Dominic Monaghan? Check back next we… Read full post »

"The future's what all of us are living for now. It's what we're living by."

Wow! 59 minutes into this episode, I was debating giving it a meager two Boogie Shoes. The last minute actually made me yelp. What just happened?

Most of this episode was really about emotional reactions… Read full post »

"You're worried your future is going to come true. I'm worried mine won't."

Everyone in the world blacks out for 2 minutes and 17 seconds. Only they don't all black out: they experience themselves six months in the future. When they wake up, chaos: drivers lost control of their cars,… Read full post »

"We didn't get any answers."

Those are Olivia's words to Broyles, and they felt like a shout-out to some of the fan frustration about the lack of solid answers to the many mysteries of Fringe. But as Broyles said, we did get some answers, although maybe not the ones we… Read full post »

"I didn't know."

Fringe hasn't really been doing it for me lately. The individual episodes have been solid, but I don't feel an "Oooh! Fringe is on tonight! What will happen this week?" twinge on Thursdays. It looks like this season is structured sandwich-style: mythology bread at the beginning and e… Read full post »

"Who are these people?"

Fox was marketing this episode as, if not life-changing, at least show-changing. The Observer! More information! Answers, answers, answers! [Say that last bit like an announcer at a monster-truck rally.] What we got was a pretty standard stand-alone: guy does something weird,… Read full post »

"Massive Dynamic. It was just a name, until now."

Massive Dynamic and Fringe Division teamed up this week to solve a kidnapping: at first blush, it looks like two used car salesmen kidnapped an innocent teenager. But, surprisingly, there's more to the story: the kid is the kidnapper, and he's… Read full post »

"I just wanted to make the world a safer place."

As though the traditional threats of MRSA and staph infections, and the new threat of swine flu, weren't enough, now we've got a shadowy Russian radiation-craving night nurse cosmonaut to worry about at the hospital. We also have the even… Read full post »

"You're gonna be fine."

If I've learned nothing else from this show, I've learned one thing: never trust a research scientist. Walter, William Bell, a few of the baddies from last season, and now our Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde of sleep studies -- all evil. In this case, it turns out… Read full post »

"In any search for knowledge, there are unintended consequences. Victims, you might say."

William Bell says that "a storm is coming." A Katrina-scale metaphor-storm of interdimensional proportions. On one side we have the super-soliders or shape-changers, part human, part machine, all evil. On the o… Read full post »

"We go through our lives unaware. The enemy is among us."

Bodies turned into bombs. A government divided into warring factions. Olivia's continued injuries, and Peter's continued transformation. Even the watermelon didn't make it. This week's Fringe is titled 'Fracture,' and it's all about things th… Read full post »

Walter: "We're all mutants. What's remarkable is how many of us appear to be normal."

Bucolic Lansdale, Pennsylvania has experienced a rash of disappearances lately. Peter discovers the case in a routine trawl of the FBI database, and hopes it might shed light on Olivia's late arrival on the scene… Read full post »

"There really isn't a point where things just can't get weirder, is there?"

This episode was quite discombobulating for me, the same way that Olivia's car accident threw her completely off. As Peter summarized when talking to Broyles in The Irish Heather, Fringe Division's job is to jump in when… Read full post »

"Do you recognize this?"

In the philosophy of this show, déjà vu (as we discussed last week) is a window into another world -- it's the experience we have when our alterna-selves have already undergone what we're undergoing. But I'm not actually sure this makes sense. If we have altern… Read full post »

"The potential for destruction in each of us is infinite."

In 1935, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger hypothesized a now-infamous cat experiment. Imagine if you put a cat in a sealed box with a vial of chemicals that has even odds of breaking or not breaking within 24 hours. The next… Read full post »

"Alone in a darkened room."
"I wanna tear you apart."

We've only got two episodes left of this, our first season in the Fringe Division. Some major answers seem to be coming, and many of them appear to revolve around William Bell and the role of Massive Dynamics in the… Read full post »