True Blood, Falling Skies, Curb Your Enthusiasm (July 24)
Posted by The TV Critic on 24 July 2011 | 0 Comments
Tags:
True Blood,
Falling Skies,
Curb Your Enthusiasm
True Blood - 405 - Me and the Devil
As predicted Sookie finally gives in to the charms of memory-less Eric but I don't see how that can be seen as a good thing. Tara goes running out the door screaming out all the deceptions and torturing he has been party to. This is not a good guy and nothing in the story indicated why he would want or deserve to repent.
The show is so lazy that we don't even know who this memory-less Eric is supposed to be. Has he reverted to his Jessica phase of personality? As in when he had just been turned from human to vampire. We saw him as a human Viking and it's not as if they were the most docile peace-loving people. It just feels like the creative team wants him to be good and so they have made him that way. "I would never hurt someone as beautiful as you" he claims. Charming, so if she was ugly you would hurt her? I think Sookie should listen to her Grandma and keep away.
I can't believe Jason went through kidnap, torture and rape and yet is sitting in Merlot's having a burger the next day. Sadly I can actually believe it. There seems to be no thought that he would tell the police (you know, his employers) about where he was or who abducted him. In fact the story has already moved on to the confusion he is feeling since he is now connected to Jessica. Again it just feels a bit like the writers want to pair pretty people up and don't care about the story in between.
Entourage is on my mind as it returned on the same night as this episode and that show has often been called 'Lifestyle Porn.' Well I'm convinced that True Blood has become 'Misery Porn.' Most of the stories we see are just designed to showcase grotesque suffering and misery. We got more possessed baby stuff as one of the few happy human couples in Bon Temps get crapped all over. Then we get Tommy murdering his own parents and flapping about in his grief. Are there really fans out there who care about these stories? Are people tuning in wondering whether Tommy can become a good person or are intrigued as to whether Renee is possessing his offspring?
The writers don't even take their own storylines seriously. Pam's disfigurement is clearly causing her a lot of distress and yet we get poor Bill mocking her with talk of lipstick and veils to cover it up.
Falling Skies - 107 - Sanctuary (2)
Falling Skies remains a passable hour of television but there's almost nothing to it anymore. Everything in this episode felt like a Hollywood cliché. There was no real attempt to explain the psychology of Terry Clayton and the other collaborators. There was no evidence of the moral conundrum he had had to battle with. Instead he played things like a toned down generic villain, making jocular comments about buying a house in the neighborhood where they found the 2nd Mass children hiding. Similarly Mike had no character beyond 'nice guy' and 'loves his son' so his death was a neutral moment. Pope risks his life to aid the children's escape which was pure plot manipulation and nothing to do with his character. Finally you had Weaver showing his soft side and magically being an expert at delivering breached babies. What a guy!
The show is harmless enough but the one intriguing part is becoming less so. Mike's son claims that he is no longer a human and in fact seems to believe that he is a Skitter. I thought the show was going to go in the direction that the children genuinely were won over by the aliens way of thinking and being. Instead it seems like the Skitters are possessing or transferring their personalities into the children. If so that would again feel like creepy villain territory and rob the show of any pretension to presenting something new. We shall see but I have no evidence for optimism.
Curb Your Enthusiasm - 803 - Palestinian Chicken
The dialogue in this was far better than last week. The golf buddies and their wives all seemed like real people and their conversations flowed better as a result. Similarly Larry really is established as a Social Assasin, so plots flowing from his inclination to tell people what he thinks makes perfect sense. I also liked that the various wives immediately suspected that their husbands were the real source of the complaints.
Despite all that good logical stuff this lacked a real comedic punch. Larry's Palestinian lover Shara was blunt farce and the loss of the golf tournament wasn't really a funny moment. Again the episode went to a sensitive racial\cultural issue with the Israeli-Palestinian stuff but in a way that also felt too silly to be funny.
