DVR: 2013 Catching up

Clearing off the DVR.




Walking Dead: This Sorrowful Life

Reaching a fine end with Darryl forced to kill (and kill, and kill; the head-stabbing just goes on and on) his now undead brother does not remotely justify the means of the laughable idea that selling out all authority by giving Michonne up for the empty promise of a Governor truce would ever happen, much less happen without obvious blowback from team Prison.  That not one of them even voices "Hey Rick, which of us will you sell out next?" deepens the extreme stupid of this plot.  Oh, and then it's even predicated on both an off-camera change of heart and yet another Six Lori hallucination.  At this point in the series, Rick is completely unsuited for command yet the writers treat it as the single element of the series to leave damagingly understated.


Walking Dead: Welcome to the Tombs

Well, that happened.   Once the Governor began wearing out his welcome and particularly after Merle almost single-handedly (...) wiped out the Woodbury militia, signs pointed toward an anticlimax leaving the regular cast intact with the villain deposed at something less than a high cost (but taking Merle's place as a dangling adversary).  The hinted-at moral issues introduced this season all melted away: Rick's flirtation with selling out Michonne, his manner of dealing with Tyrese (who received so little development I still call him Cutty when he's in a scene), and the Woodbury approach of feigned normalcy versus Team Prison's siege mentality.   When Carl unapologetically shoots a Woodburian bent on surrender -- right next to Hershel who reports the incident to Rick immediately, rather than have Carl's increasingly hardline simmer in the background -- it's the closest approximation to subtext in the finale.

Though even in the foreground, this was a real trial to sit through. Our heroes' trap/ambush seemed excellently planned, except once the bullets began flying against the trapped Team Woodbury, what seemed a shooting gallery becomes a bloodless fight from G.I. Joe.    Until the Guv is indeterminately down the road, stops the retreat and then shoots all nearly all of his surviving conscripts for failing to rally after their ass-kicking.  He leaves one alive to conveniently inform Rick and the folks back in Woodbury, and then drives off his last two loyal retainers, doubtless to emerge late in season five as a reconstituted threat.

Yet worse was the intercut with of Andrea,  tied to a chair with a dying Milton in the room; both know Milton will turn and attempt to kill her, both know there are a pair of pliers on the floor near Andrea, and neither can be ignorant it's going to be a groaningly long time retrieving them -- yet they idly chit-chat for a couple of scenes with no sense of urgency.  If it's true Andrea survived in the ending as written, it had to have been changed for a rare appeal to the audience's intelligence; there is no justifiable reason she live through such stupidity.



Revolution: The Stand

The larger the "oh shit!" at the cliffhanger, the typically weaker the escape.  So it is here as our intrepid band of Mathesons escape two gunships by hiding in the walk-in fridge of an abandoned diner.  Their further adventures are poor efforts at maintaining the series' previous tone as Rachel plays coy yet again about her role in the blackout and Monroe idiotically sends his presumably very limited air force against every resistance cell in the northeast.  Shockingly, none of their respectable if smaller arsenals manage to drop either chopper, but then Miles and Rachel arrive with a rocket launcher.  And thus comes to pass one genuinely surprising turn of events: Danny, the catalyst for the series to date, scoops up the rocket launcher when Miles is momentary knocked out by a near-miss, shoots down the amplifier-equipped chopper, and then -- and here's the good part -- takes a line of minigun rounds across his chest, dying!

If Charlie's up next week, this series went from embarrassing to promising.




Game of Thrones: Valar Dohaeris

Having read the series, I find the first time through any particular episode of GoT more fraught with nitpicky criticism as I judge the show directly against the book events it depicts.  Then when the DVDs are released, I watch again with arguably a better suspension of disbelief; at the least I am able to judge the TV series more on its own merits.

All that said, the tv show often ends up in positions where the micro-scale, intra-scene changes tend to annoy me by rewriting great but very long book talks like this week's much-abridged version of Mance and Jon meeting; though in its credit it hit all the points of the Tyrion/Tywin throwdown. Sad to lose the "mummers and monkeys" alliteration, though.  Nitpicky!

On the other hand, the macro-scale, plot-point streamlining to get the series on the air at all generally tend to work.  This week for example Sam is saved in part from the Others by Ghost, who in the book spends most of Jon's third-season arc present with him in Mance's camp.  It's an elegant change; Ghost's presence helps Sam's ongoing survival during his flight back to the wall a bit more plausible and it changes virtually nothing from the book -- I'm going to bet there is little resistance from Jon on the subject of Ygritte's sleeping situation in the show.

Likewise, reintroducing Barristan Selmy after a year off works fine for the show. It's far easier to have a disguised character show up with an alternate name in the text, less practical with recognizable actors -- though the robe and beard helped.   I also wasn't expecting the manticore*, so that was a bonus.

With several parties excluded from the first episode, I expect this week and next to be table-setting, with Cool Stuff occurring after episode three.

* or the giant, for that matter.