Category Archives: TV Review

TV Review

The Red Road 2.5 – “The Hatching”

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I’m really surprised there are no movies called The Penultimate Hour. It’s a decent title in a James Patterson sort of way, or in a Van Damme sort of way. The closest thing might be Philip K. Dick’s novel The Penultimate Truth, or the 2007 documentary on the author called The Penultimate Truth About Philip K. Dick. Those are great titles. There are a few movies called The 11th Hour — and funnily enough, there is James Patterson book by that title — and I suppose that means the same thing. “Eleven” doesn’t carry the same force as “penultimate”, though, does it?

The only thing any of this has to do with The Red Road is that “The Hatching” is the penultimate episode of season two, the literal penultimate hour, and that’s generally the hour in which…well, what happens in the penultimate episode of a season? It used to be the case that season finales were tantamount to a bunch of awesome stuff, meaning the previous episode was usually spent getting everything set up for the fireworks. That’s changed recently. Game of Thrones made a casual tradition of having the ninth episode of each season (the penultimate of each in the case of Game‘s 10-episode seasons) be far more action-packed than the ensuing finales. Breaking Bad‘s “Ozymandias” delivered finale-level intensity with two episodes still to follow, and Better Call Saul‘s penultimate hour “Pimento” was likewise the season’s best.

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TV Review

True Detective 1.3 – “The Locked Room”

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This review appeared shortly after the initial premiere of True Detective in early 2014 — slight edits have been made since the original posting.

Horror creeps ever closer in the third hour of True Detective, and Rust Cohle and Martin Hart may not be doing all they can to slow the arrival. After last week’s episode “Seeing Things” revealed more about both characters, the most recent entry in the eight-part season dug still deeper into the good and the bad inside the detectives portrayed by Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson — but mostly the bad. Spoilers follow for the third episode “The Locked Room”.

Not long ago, if you told me the hunky McConaughey and the thick-jawed slacker Harrelson would be in a show together and the latter would be the one involved in a love triangle, I probably wouldn’t have believed you. In a distinct continuation of the character arc presented in the first two episodes, Harrelson’s Hart is far from the family man he pretends to be, and his treatment of the women in his life seems increasingly self-centered. Though he is drunk, the scene where he barges in on his younger lover (Alexandra Daddario) and beats the hell out of the kid she’s with still shows Hart’s penchant for quick violence in much the way Cohle’s sudden flare of brutality with the mechanic in last week’s episode showed a similar capacity. These are men with morals but they are also bad men, inescapably, calling to mind Marlon Brando’s musings as Kurtz near the end of Apocalypse Now, seeking “men who are moral, and at the same time…without feeling…without passion…without judgment…without judgment.”

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TV Review

True Detective 1.2 – “Seeing Things”

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This review appeared shortly after the initial premiere of True Detective in early 2014 — slight edits have been made since the original posting.

After a strong, stimulating pilot episode last week, True Detective returned with a second episode that further steeped us in the characters of Rust Cohle and Martin Hart. Headway is made on the murder investigation, but True Detective continues to emphasize the characters over the plot. Spoilers follow for the second episode “Seeing Things”.

Last week, the 1995 murder of Dora Lange brought State Police Detectives Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Hart (Woody Harrelson) together for the investigation while their disproportionate attitudes kept them distanced outside of work. A connection was made between the Lange murder and the shady disappearance of the young Fontenot girl years earlier, but other than that very few pieces of the puzzle can be placed by the young detectives. The pilot episode also introduced a part of the story unfolding seventeen years after the Dora Lange murder, and in 2012 Cohle and Hart are seemingly estranged, definitely changed from the men they used to be, but somehow definitely still the same.

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TV Review

The Red Road 2.4 – “A Cure”

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While portions of “A Cure” provided promising angles on The Red Road‘s second season, the feeling persists that the direction and drive of the first season have largely evaporated. The set-up for this season was Mac’s death, with Kopus somewhat framed and thus determined to find the real killer. While threads of that are still hanging loose, “A Cure” tied off enough that Mac’s death no longer feels like the unifying catalyst for this six-episode arc.

On the plus side, Kopus and Harold find their worlds converging yet again after following disparate threads for the first three episodes of the season. The cat-and-mouse tensions of their collective past have given way to a strange kind of mutual respect that neither are comfortable with. In the season opener “Gifts“, Kopus remarks on their lying, cheating and stealing eventually resulting in a promotion for Harold and prison for Kopus. “A Cure” follows up on last week’s “Intruders” with an even more explicit version of this societal unbalance: Harold kills a suspect and gets made Captain of the force, while Kopus has as much of a hand in solving that same case and ends up with a bullet in his shoulder this week.

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TV Review

True Detective 1.1 – “The Long Bright Dark”

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This review appeared shortly after the initial premiere of True Detective in early 2014 — slight edits have been made since the original posting.

Touch darkness, says the promotional poster for HBO’s latest series True Detective, and darkness touches you back. A tagline like this is all too generic these days, paired with a moody title card or a black-and-white shot of the strong-willed protagonist of a new film or television series. True Detective’s ad campaign has all of that — but one thing to take away from the pilot episode, which aired Sunday night in the US, is that the weighty tagline is rightfully deserved. Spoilers follow for the first episode “The Long Bright Dark”.

Conceived as an anthology series (more on that in a bit), True Detective’s first season stars Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as newly-paired State Police Detectives in backwater Louisiana. The year is 1995, and the detectives are still operating in an awkward alliance as they begin an investigation into a gruesome murder. The victim’s name is Dora Lange, and it’s already clear that her case is a driving element of this season — and yet the vast majority of “The Long Bright Dark” is spent with McConaughey and Harrelson, and it’s also clear that this is a show that will focus on the character above the plot. The tension in the partnership is nothing revelatory for a cop show: McConaughey’s Rust Cohle is the unconventional but brilliant loner, Harrelson’s Martin Hart is the by-the-numbers family man looking to succeed in his position. These parts are acted perfectly, though, and McConaughey especially deserves to ride high on the wave of critical praise he’s received for recent roles such as this.

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TV Review

The Red Road 2.3 – “Intruders”

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At the end of last week’s episode of The Red Road, titled “Graves“, a supporting character from the first season shuffled off his mortal coil in a somewhat predictable fashion. He speaks in absolutes and says the things a fictional character in a fictional story says before electing to leave the world. There’s a cool shot of Jean getting into her car and backing out of the driveway that’s soon wasted by an inserted shot of the guy raising a gun to his head, and had the gunshot gone off in the background of that car shot it might have been a bit easier to swallow. But as “Graves” ended the whole episode felt a bit tired, and that sequence in particular felt a bit like a writer’s room getting rid of a character they had no idea what to do with.

In “Intruders” that death takes on a bit more meaning, as does the concept of a grave. But the episode offered little in the way of real intensity or development, continuing what’s becoming a disappointing trend in Red Road‘s second season. Kopus is still on lockdown, Junior is still roaming the wilderness and shooting squirrels, and Harold is still just strutting around being boring. Here’s to hoping that there’s something lurking behind this veneer of relative tedium that we just can’t see yet, because otherwise “Intruders” is a letdown at the halfway point of season two.

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TV Review

Daredevil – Season 1

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If anyone has shown a dedication to the long game in big-budget storytelling lately, it’s Marvel. The latest addition to the ever-expanding Cinematic Universe is the Netflix series Daredevil, chronicling the early days of lawyer Matt Murdock and his crimefighting alter-ego. In many ways Daredevil is the best thing to happen to the MCU in a long time. Not only is it far superior to Marvel’s other television ventures Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Agent Carter, but it often packs more of a punch — physically and emotionally — than the majority of the MCU films. The lack of cable television limitations or MPAA ratings means the show can be as dark as it needs to be. Most importantly, though, Daredevil shies away from the typical overblown grandiosity of many MCU ventures and opts instead for a very human drama.

It’s still a hero vs. villain thing we’re dealing with here, of course, but Daredevil is at its strongest when it plays away from that (striking the super– prefix from both hero and villain). Murdock gets his ass handed to him on a regular basis, Wilson Fisk is diabolical and yet relatable, and the street-level politics of the show are far more interesting than the end-of-the-universe Avengers stories. This is true of the comics, too, and as with live-action Daredevil it took a while to get the character right. There are a whole host of comic book influences for the Netflix series — primarily the Frank Miller tales The Man Without Fear and Born Again —which we’ll dive into now. Ye be warned: spoilers abound.

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TV Review

Better Call Saul 1.10 – “Marco”

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It’s been a week since the conclusion of the first season of Better Call Saul. “Pimento“, far and away the best single episode of the season (although I loved “Hero“), made sure Jimmy’s world was flipped upside down as we headed into the finale hour. Relationships that once meant the world to our morally-challenged lawyer are now seen in a different light, and people Jimmy once thought to be the scum of the earth are suddenly something else entirely.

It’s fitting, then, that “Marco” gives a name and a history to Jimmy’s one-time best friend Marco. In “Hero” we saw a glimpse of Slippin’ Jimmy’s adeptness in the short con game, and if he’s The Sting‘s Johnny Hooker then Marco is his Luther Coleman. After the events of “Pimento” Jimmy returned to his old stomping grounds and found Marco exactly where he left him, asleep at a bar in the middle of the afternoon, scraping by on a crappy job and a handful of half-assed scams.

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TV Review

The Red Road 2.2 – “Graves”

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A relatively quiet second episode of The Red Road‘s sophomore year provided a little more clarity with regards to the direction the show might take after a cracking first season. The impetus for much of the going-ons here is the murder of Mac, elder chief of the Lenape chapter of the Ramapo Mountains, which we saw at the end of the the second season opener “Gifts“. As suspected, Phillip Kopus is now the front-and-center suspect in Mac’s demise.

A recent interview with Jason Momoa touched on the “breaking” of the Kopus from the first season; Aaron Guzikowski, creator of Red Road and scribe behind Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners, certainly seems to be heading in that direction with “Graves”. It’s interesting that Kopus more or less shuns the traditional trappings of his Lenape ancestry and yet seems to find himself cornered by it throughout the opening episodes of the second season. That disregard for the tribe led to Mac’s abandonment of him, which in turn presents a motive for people to attach to Kopus when Mac turns up dead. Even though the mountains have their own tribal police force, the method of attack on Kopus is the same as it has ever been, with a “half-assed lynch mob” (in Kopus’s disdainful estimation) beating him and covering him with tar.

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TV Review

Better Call Saul 1.9 – “Pimento”

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Sometimes we don’t get to dive into each individual episode of Better Call Saul as deeply as we’d like. We have busy lives! Important things to do! Climb that mountain! Finish that novel! Make that bed! Drink that beer! Eat those chips! If there’s anything to knock routine by the wayside and demand our full attention, though, it’s Saul‘s ninth hour “Pimento”, the penultimate episode of the first season. The mountain and the novel and the unmade bed will have to wait (the beer and chips are right here, because multitasking); in this review we aim to pick apart the incredibly dense “Pimento” and put it all back together again.

First up: some self-congratulatory horn-tooting for kinda sorta predicting the big reveal of “Pimento” in our review of the previous episode “RICO“. We’ll save our discussion of that until after the jump for the sake of spoilers, but for now let it be sufficient to state that our reputation precedes us, that we have no equal on this earth, that the tales and songs fall utterly short of our enormity. Gaze upon our magnificence. We are fire. We are death.

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