An interesting affair, Dexter nearly forgives, Will might get disbarred, best kiss of the year, Taylor's son, and hoarders.

Homeland - “The Good Soldiers”
Brody finally punches his best friend for sleeping with his wife. Then he goes right off and sleeps with Carrie. Can you believe it? The encounter lets Carrie know that Brody is really good at taking polygraphs. Did Saul slip the terrorist the razor blade? THAT would be interesting. On any other show, the new affair would be tawdry and silly. On this show, it’s intense and psychologically sick. We love it.

Episode grade: A-

Dexter - “Just Let Go”
Who knew this Brother Sam thing would actually push Dexter even further to the darkness? He has a new person sitting on his shoulder, like his ghost dad. It’s his amoral serial killer brother. Dexter now believes that his dark passenger runs the show after he took revenge on Brother Sam’s killer. Brother Sam’s death made one of us tear up. When he told Dexter that he could see Dexter’s darkness, but he could see his light too, we got choked up. We kind of feel like that’s what God says to people. Brother Sam was the real deal. He had wanted Dexter to deliver a message of forgiveness. Dexter tried, but when the killer wasn't contrite, Dexter decided to off him. It's Dexter, so we'd really have it no other way. Anyway, it’s going to really rev this season up to see Dexter go off the rails and fight his established rules. His snapping and drowning of the murderer in the same lake where the murderer was baptized was amazing. We’re glad Travis let the girl go, but we are even more glad that Travis and Gellar aren’t the only big bads in town, because they aren’t that scary. The Ice Truck Killer is better.

Episode grade: A-

The Good Wife - “Executive Order 13224”
Peter goes after Will for a past indiscretion that could really hurt his firm and cause him to lose his license. Client trust accounts are no joke. Alicia is almost prosecuted for protecting attorney/client privilege, but she gets a good lawyer of her own. This episode wasn’t the show’s best. We had a hard time getting into it, it felt fragmented, and we didn’t feel like the case got enough attention. However, we liked the guy who investigated Alicia. That was an interesting, fun little character. There wasn't enough Eli Gold either.
Episode grade: B-

How I Met Your Mother - “Disaster Averted”
The gang tells Kevin the fun story about how they survived the August hurricane together. Marshall delivered two slaps to Barney and got two more, in exchange for Barney being allowed to remove the ducky tie. He is about to meet Nora’s parents, after all. But the real news of the night is that Barney and Robin totally kissed! More than kissed! Made out. And it was gorgeous. It wasn’t a flashback either. We kind of feel bad for Kevin but not Nora. It’s half because she’s too pretty and half because she keeps trying to change Barney, and Robin likes Barney for who he is. We are huge Barney/Robin shippers, so we were squealing last night. The Marshall and Lily stuff was funny too. It’s been a while since that happened!
Episode grade: A-

Terra Nova - “Nightfall”
This was a B episode of a C+ show, meaning that it was better than usual, but it was still crappy compared to most of the things we watch. It started out slowly, even though there was a lot of action. Action isn’t necessarily interesting. There need to be high stakes and characters we care about. A meteor crashes and wipes out all the power and technology. Jim and Zoe get stuck underground and are out of the action. We get to hear Jim sing a song about spiders to Zoe. Maddy and Reynolds have their first date. Hunter gets operated on and tells Skye that he has feelings for her. Taylor forces Boylan to get the tech up and running. Mira and the Sixers heard dinosaurs into attacking Terra Nova and steal Mira’s box. Mira gives it to Taylor's son! The Taylor’s son stuff is the only reason to stick around, at this point
Episode grade: B

2 Broke Girls - “And Hoarder Culture”
Aww, Johnny. Say it ain’t so. He wronged our girl, Max, but he made up for it in the end. He needs to dump his hot, black, British girlfriend and get with Max, ASAP, but we understand and appreciate that he doesn’t want to be a jerk. Just because he likes Max doesn’t mean that he has to leave his current relationship. Meanwhile, Caroline gets paid to organize the apartment of a hoarder. Max is enthused by this. We like seeing Max that happy every once-in-a-while. The too-mean, depressing Max hasn’t been seen in weeks! We love it. We are also sighing with relief that the show has gotten better in the past couple of weeks. We predicted that it had potential, and we are glad that we weren’t wrong. And not just because we hate to be wrong.
Episode grade: B+

2 Broke Girls and Terra Nova: Listen, Battlefield Earth

2BG - “And the Pretty Problem”

We’ve heard two main criticisms of this show, and now we’ve heard these criticisms again from a source that we actually like, so we shall name them and respond. They are 1) Max is too mean to Caroline and the show can be mean-spirited in general, and 2) the show is racist. As for the first thing, we agree with half of it. Max can sometimes say cutting things to Caroline in a way that comes across as cold and disrespectful. While we hope that is toned down as the show goes on (the last couple of episodes seem to have gotten rid of it, for the most part), it doesn’t ruin the show for us. We are more concerned with the number of groan-worthy sex jokes. Friends did sex jokes right. This show doesn't really get how to make those funny.

As for the show being mean-spirited in general, we don’t care about that. The world the girls live in is snooty and harsh. Hipsters and hippies always deserve to be mocked. Also, people who are rude to waitresses should be mocked. Regarding the second point, we think Han is funny, so we don’t mind that he is a caricature. The Ukrainian guy (Oleg) needs to go though, stat. Last night, the show stereotyped American/Jersey Italians (not regular Italians. There's a difference). While these criticisms are true, they don’t ruin the show for us, and we can see them becoming less of a problem as the girls bond and more side characters are introduced. We already have Johnny, and he’s pretty cool. The “insult cupcake” idea is perfect for these girls and the show. Decent episode this week.
Episode grade: B-
TN- “Bylaw”

This show is lucky it’s on Mondays, the stalest night of the TV week, except for Saturdays. One thing annoying that we noticed is how Elizabeth is always so perfect in her interactions with the ever-annoying Zoe. When Zoe played sick to visit Elizabeth at work, Elizabeth’s reaction just didn’t feel authentic. That’s not how parents sound. We’re not saying she should have screamed at the kid. She just shouldn’t have sounded so rehearsed and like a Brady Bunch mom. None of the parent/child interactions feel real to us.

Something we like? The female cop. She seems like a no-nonsense professional. And we also still like Taylor. During this episode, we were most interested in Josh’s fight to get his girlfriend to Terra Nova. He described the future as a place so bad that some of his friends killed themselves. That makes sense. There’s a saying that goes, “What you believe about your future controls what you do in the present.” That’s why hope is so important, we guess. It makes sense that Josh would do anything, even work for Mira, for someone he cares about. We like that kid.

We liked that Jim and Elizabeth had a little fight in the episode about what should be done with the prisoner. This family needs to start acting more like a Friday Night Lights family and less like the Cleavers. The plot was decent, but we can’t say the show has hooked both of us yet. It’s halfway through its first season, so that’s not a good sign. And OF COURSE Zoe has a pet dinosaur now. Ugh. Ok, ok. We admit it’s a little cute.

Episode grade: C+

So Much Potential, Money, and Talent. Why Did This Have to Be a Kids' Show?

Terra Nova - “The Runaway”

A girl of about ten years runs away from the Sixers camp and is picked up by Terra Nova residents. Her name is Leah, and she has horrible hair. Finally Maddy Shannon gets her to brush it, but it’s rough going for a while. Leah is no fan of Taylor’s, calling him “the bad man.” The Shannons temporarily adopt the child. Soon, Mira and some Sixers arrived with captured Terra Nova soldiers in tow. The Sixers offer their prisoners in exchange for Leah, and Taylor says that Leah is free to go if she wants to go. Jim brings Leah out to talk with Mira. Leah tells Mira that she is going to stay in Terra Nova.

It turns out that all this is just a ruse. Leah was sent by Mira into Terra Nova to get a container from Mira’s former house. Leah is caught before she can escape with the box. Leah tells Jim Shannon that Mira has her little brother, and that she had to become a mole to save him. Against Taylor’s orders, Jim went out to try to save the little boy. He falls into a Sixer trap, is almost eaten by a dinosaur, and is taken to Mira by passing Sixers. Mira tells Jim that she wasn’t going to hurt the boy; she only wanted to encourage Leah to bring her the container she wanted. She also tells Jim that powerful people back in 2149 aren’t too into Taylor.

If Mira can get rid of Taylor, those powerful people will reunite her with her four-year-old daughter who is still living in the future. Mira advises Jim to be on her side, for the sake of his family. Mira lets Jim go, along with Leah’s little brother. Jim returns and does not share the info he got from Mira with Taylor. It looks like Jim is keeping his options open until he has all the information. That’s the smartest thing he’s done so far.

Leah is reunited with her brother, and she hugs Jim in gratitude. A widow in Terra Nova adopts both children. In teen love news, Josh isn’t featured a whole lot in this one, but Mark finally asks Maddy if he can date her. Maddy tries to apprentice under her mother to study medicine, but blood and guts make her sick (one of us is completely the same way), so that’s not going to work.

This show is really lame, but with The Lying Game gone now, what else do we really have to watch on a Monday nigh? We are NOT forgiving Gossip Girl for the last two seasons, so don’t even suggest that we take it up again. We will watch that when it’s on DVD later. It’s lost “real time” status. Terra Nova is just too sweet for us. It’s like it’s aimed at an 11-year-old girl who likes a little action. This is a kids’ show. We’re still sticking with it for the duration of the season. We like that this episode focused on the Sixers and some overarching mystery. At least this one was better than the Dinobird episode, right?

Episode grade: B-

Malcolm has no chance, even with the British accent

Terra Nova - “What Remains”

Much better than last week, show. However, viewership dipped after that last episode, so no one got to see the show start to be genuinely fun. We still have a lot of problems with the show. The most glaring one that we don’t think we’ve mentioned yet (see the previous post for a list of other problems) is that culture apparently hasn’t evolved in 100 years, even with this cool thing called the internet.

There are no new curse words, for one thing. Remember how in Firefly, you bought that these were people from the future? Still people, but different then us? Or Battlestar Galactica? Terra Nova has none of that. These people look, dress, speak, and act like people from 2011. Cheesy people with no depth or real emotional problems from 2011. Also, the guy who plays Jim cannot act when it comes to sneezing.

However, this episode got a thumbs up from both of us. Compared to last week’s bore-fest, this was an entertaining work of art. There was action, and the dinosaurs were back, and they weren’t just annoying little birds. The characters have more chemistry with each other. The action of the week helped us get to know our characters better, and it made us care about the Jim/Elizabeth relationship a little bit. People are comparing this episode with Star Trek, and that’s not far off. It’s also not a bad thing.

We had a little bit of a LOST touch when the episode started with a high-tech room and a guy freaking out. We didn’t know where this was or who this guy was, and that pulled us in, because with this show so far, we’ve always seen things coming a mile away. Then the man gets eaten by a carnosaur. Yes show! That’s what we like. Elizabeth and Taylor go off to investigate the research center this man was from, because they are having a problem communicating with that offsite facility.

Taylor, Elizabeth, and a random guy go and find the research center crawling with people who think they are living in some point in their past, along with research logs from when the scientists were almost sane and trying to figure out what was happening to them. Elizabeth determines that this amnesia was caused by a pathogen. There’s that scientifically plausible show we’ve come to know and love! Elizabeth, Taylor, and the random guy realize that Dr. Elizabeth needs to figure out how to cure these people and get everyone’s memory back, because they too have probably been exposed.

Soon, they actually do lose their memories. Zoe caught a cold, so Jim caught it from her. Kids are always sick, huh? Eventually, Jim and Malcolm go out to check on them. When they arrive, Malcolm decides that Elizabeth can still help cure the condition. She thinks she is a university student still dating Malcolm (Jim just loved this), and she was brilliant them too. So Malcolm, to keep things simple, omits her marriage and children from his description of her life and asks for her help. Jim goes looking for Taylor and leaves some threats while Malcolm and Elizabeth nerd out.

Jim finds Taylor. Taylor thinks he is still fighting a war in Somalia, and that his wife and son have been taken by the enemy. We loved this. Taylor has been a little too perfect and capable up until now. Seeing him totally irrational, violent, and scary was awesome. We liked when he tried to kill himself once someone told him his wife was dead. This is definitely a different side to this guy who apparently had a darker past than we though. It makes sense though.

Taylor knocks Jim out and heads for Terra Nova, looking for answers. Jim wakes up and finds Malcolm putting the moves on Elizabeth. Jim tackles Malcolm, and Malcolm says, “Oh, it was the pathogen. I’m going in and out of reality. And I was dating your wife in the time I flash back to.” Mmhmm. Elizabeth doesn’t get what’s going on. For a genius, she sure can’t put two and two together. These guys are jealously mooning over her. It’s been 20 years. Does she really think she stayed single until her 40s?

Jim and Malcolm find guy #3 who is knocked out and drag him to the safety of the lab. They are almost eaten by a dinosaur. We shrug. We can only ask for one death by dinosaur per episode, so we won’t be greedy today. Finally, Elizabeth realizes Jim is her husband and gets all tender. She realizes that it’s Jim’s cold that is keeping him from losing his memory. She makes out with him in order to get those pathogens to block the bad pathogens. We are satisfied that Elizabeth really would choose Jim over Malcolm, because even with no memories of Jim and thoughts of Malcolm being her current boyfriend, she picked Jim.

The most interesting thing going on, if you intend to continue watching this show, happened with Josh and Skye. Not them making out and then Josh realizing that he wants to be faithful to his girlfriend. No, not Josh getting a job with a bartender who says that he can help him get his gf to Terra Nova. What’s neato is that the bartender is the Sixers’ inside man, he’s bringing them supplies, and he intends to use Josh to the Sixers’ advantage because of who Josh’s father is.

We are wondering why Skye would take Josh to that bartender. She knew that he is the man who can get things from the future. Does she know why? Does Skye know that it’s because he has help from Sixers? She is crushing on Josh, and it seems a little too nice that she would help get her rival for his affections into their little town just out of the goodness of her heart. Is she setting Josh up too?

We deem this a “family show,” to be watched with your adolescents and older elementary school students. It’s mild, inoffensive, and nice enough. Even with amnesia and cheesy love dialogue in it, this episode entertained us.

Episode grade: B

This Show Is the Definition of Generic

Terra Nova - "Instinct"

We’re not digging this show right now. It’s too shallow and immature. It’s like every generic family action movie, except the whole family can’t watch it, because of content issues. We’re not sure who this is aimed at. We’re not attached to any of the character, and, worst of all, there is no real emotion involved in watching this show. Not fear, excitement, humor, sadness, joy. Nothing. There was almost curiosity last week with Taylor’s missing son and the equation, but that wasn’t touched upon this week. The show is centered on a family, but the family brings no believable interactions or power to the geeky premise.

A mystery alone can’t carry a show. Who is the audience for this? Teenage boys? Maybe. But it might be too sweet for them. This show is trying to please everyone, and we don’t think it’s pleasing anyone overmuch. This is a show that needs to figuring out what sort of reaction it wants from us, because light, fun, cute sci-fi that hardly makes sense isn’t going to elicit a strong reaction from anyone. This show desperately needs to take a risk, make someone unlikeable, shake things up, and get scarier. We are very disappointed and hope it improves. We were rooting for this one, because we are nerds.

Spoilers start here.

Some of Terra Nova’s men get a flat tire at night and then they get killed by little dinosaurs offscreen. Then we see the Shannon family, in the daytime, having a nice time in Terra Nova, settling in. Jim and Elizabeth start taking their clothes off (well, Jim’s shirt anyway), stand close to each other, and look at each other hungrily, but in a rated-G kind of way, so it creeped us out. Then a dinosaur screeches and ruins their good time. We would start to get annoyed with the dinos at this point. Jim goes out to scare the dino off and comes back to find Zoe in bed with her mom. We have already been annoyed with Zoe, who ruins everything but cannot be the target of wrath because she’s little.

Josh seems to have accepted his dad now. Elizabeth meets another science geek, Malcolm, and he’s an ex-boyfriend from college who still likes her! Dramaaaaa. Not really. Jim just calls Dr. Malcolm out for liking his wife and wishing Jim were still in prison, choking to death. Later, Jim and Elizabeth try to do it again and dinos screech. Jim and Josh go out to scare the dinos off, but the little flying things attack! One bites Jim’s hand. Nothing else. But these are the same things that killed the Terra Nova men.

Malcolm figures out that Terra Nova was built on these pterosaurs’ breeding ground, and now they want it back. Offscreen, Jim catches a couple of the pterosaurs so that his geeky wife and her possible boy toy could figure out how to recreate their pheromones and lure them to a new place to breed. Once they make the formula, Jim and Taylor take it and lure the birds away. We don’t see this either. We don’t see any of the action. It’s like an old sitcom where they can’t show the kids fight, just talk about the aftermath. We guess this is a way to save money, and after the pilot, they need to. But without dino action, what’s the point of this show?

Elizabeth and Jim finally get to do it. No one cares. The only plot-advancing thing we learn (that doesn’t involve romance) is that the Sixers have a mole in Terra Nova. Well, of course they do. That plot is a freebie, show. Every show has to have a mole at one time. 24 had, like, a thousand. Also, that was heavily implied in the pilot. Taylor tasked Jim with finding the mole with his “cop nose.”

Funniest lines this week? “Dad, how do you know if a guy likes you?” “You can’t. He doesn’t. You’re 16.”

Episode grade: C-

Terra Nova is Almost Good

This show is more interesting and mysterious than it looks. The creators really tried to be appealing and spent a lot of money. The Event was being compared to LOST last season, but this show is much more similar. Put LOST, Jurassic Park, and some generic family drama/action movie together, and you get this. We are pretty interested. For a pilot, it was great, but it has to get better to really draw us in. We will be sticking around for a while. But this was a promising start. Sometimes this show bordered on “stupid,” but it always came right back to “entertaining.”

It’s 2149, and the Shannon family is living in a world with too much pollution and population control laws. No, China didn’t take over. But the hippies lost. The air quality forces people to where mask and filter the air in their home. The Shannon family has one kid too many, and they are hiding her. Sadly, she is discovered, her father flips out and attacks the police to keep them away from her, and he goes to jail for the next two years. Since “a family is four,” with the dad gone, the family gets to keep baby Zoe.

Two years later, Mrs. Shannon (Elizabeth) is recruited to go to Terra Nova, a new settlement 85 million years in the past, because she is a doctor. She is able to get her husband a laser that can cut through metal so that he can escape and join them, with Zoe. This works, because the world is so chaotic, dirty, and overpopulated that things like basic security have all gone to hell. The dad, Jim, joins his wife, five-year-old Zoe, and his teenagers, Josh and Maddie in Terra Nova and immediately gets put on agricultural duty. He is lucky that he wasn’t thrown in the brig for hitching a ride on the time portal, escaping prison, and smuggling over a kid he wasn’t allowed to have. Jim wants to be made into a cop (he’s an ex-cop), but for some reason, he is not trusted enough for this job.

Terra Nova is a pretty nice colony. They brought the best technology to the nicest prehistoric jungle ever. Everything is clean and big and beautiful. The houses are as nice as anything we’ve ever lived in. It’s full of other settlers and fruits. But it’s not perfect (thank God, or this would get boring). There are the Sixers, led by a tough woman named Mira, and these are settlers that broke off from Terra Nova to form their own colony. They steal from Terra Nova. There are also the carnivorous dinosaurs. Yes, people, there are men getting eaten by dinosaurs on this show, thus making it more awesome than most of the new shows in and of itself. There might also be a fever later too.

Josh is upset because he had to leave his girlfriend forever. He’s also upset with his dad for punching cops and leaving the family to “fend for themselves.” As we found out that Elizabeth Shannon is a doctor with the means to become rich in the old world, that’s not really such a bad offense. She does alright. But Josh isn’t in a reasonable mood.

Josh soon meets Skye, a daredevil orphan teen who looks like a young Melora Hardin (Jan on The Office). They sneak out of Terra Nova and go running around in the wilderness. They bluff jump and drink some moonshine with Skye’s other friends. Weirdly, the fashions of the 22nd century are a lot like today’s fashions. Skye still wears a bikini that you could go find in a mall right now. We guess plaid shirts are also never going out of style. Skye shows Josh a bunch of symbols carved into rocks.

The leader of Terra Nova is Nathaniel Taylor. Jim saves him from being shot by a Sixer and finally gets made into a cop. That didn’t take long. Taylor had a son, but he went missing a few years ago. We learn that Taylor Jr. is the one leaving the carvings on the rocks. "Every time he gets closer to an answer, he puts it here for Taylor to see," says Mira. "To remind him the real reason of Terra Nova's existence: control the past, control the future. These are the key to everything."

Meanwhile, Josh and Skye’s vehicle has been stripped of its power by Sixers, and all the teens are trapped outside. They are now a possible feast for “Slashers,” dinosaurs that only hunt at night. Taylor realizes the kids are gone and he, Jim, Dr. Elizabeth, and others go out and save them. We’re liking Elizabeth Shannon. She’s capable, smart, and she doesn’t just stay home when her son is in trouble when her husband tells her to.

Maddie is like a less cool version of Hermione Granger, but her love interest is cute, so we will accept her. There’s something we don’t like about Mr. Shannon, but we can’t put our fingers on it. We question why that character would have an eight pack after two years of nearly choking to death in prison. We're not sure if we like the "family" element of this show. It may never end up being gritty or scary and may always be lightweight entertainment. We liked the pilot, but it needs to keep delivering.

We also like that this is a whole new time stream, which means that the future of the world isn’t set in stone. There are some logic gaps and science holes in this one, but you just have to go with it. It’s hard to fill in every crack during a two-hour, expensive pilot that’s just trying to show off and make a hit. The names of the dinosaurs kind of annoyed us. They are explanatory, but there are actual names for dinosaurs we can use. Ten year olds everywhere are going to be telling their science teachers about the deadly “carnatorous.”

Question: Does anyone else think that Josh looks like a morph of the guys who play Neville Longbottom and Harry Potter in the HP movies? (Answer: No, because he's Declan from Degrassi: The Next Generation. Duh.)

Episode Grade: B+

New Show: Terra Nova

Terra Nova
Monday, September 26 on Fox.

Starring: Jason O’Mara (Life on Mars, In Justice, guest stint on Grey’s Anatomy), Stephen Lang (Public Enemies, Avatar), Landon Liboiron (Degrassi), Naomi Scott (Lemonade Mouth), and Allison Miller (Kings).

Plot: About a hundred years from now, our air quality is going to suck, so humanity is facing extinction. The solution? A time machine that transports people 85 million years back in time to live out their days. Weirdly, the time machine didn’t transport these people back in time to, like, the year 1910 to warn people not to ruin the air and save the world. But these people want to survive, so they will take what they can get. Our main characters are Jim and Elisabeth Shannon and their three children who are sent back to Terra Nova, the first human colony set up in the past. Sounds great. Except there are dinosaurs.

Why We Are Excited: We have high hopes for this. Why? Because we are nerds. Also, it’s a cool idea. And there are DINOSAURS. Leeard is more into sci-fi than Ern (who enjoys fantasy when the time for geekitude arises), but both of us want to watch this a LOT. It’s expensive and Stephen Spielberg is producing it.

Why We Are Not Excited: The preview didn’t blow us away. Also, one of us wonders if this will have much in the way of a good plot, after a while. Avatar looked great and had a good concept. The story? MMMM not so much.

Preview:


Anticipation Score: 8.5

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