Falling Skies, The Last Ship, Under the Dome, Orphan Black, Penny Dreadful, Continuum, and Fargo. The joys and disappointments of summer.
The month of June is plunging to its death, like The Falcon of the helicarrier, but it’s been a surprisingly interesting month for Our Genre:
Falling Skies — a reboot in disguise? Is it just us, or does Season Four of Falling Skies feel more like a reboot that a continuation? SPOILER IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN 0401! Basically, the brutal (and very well done) opening scene throws us back to the very beginning of the series: a few roughed-up survivors of the alien invasion struggling against the Skitters and their own worst kind. The friendly aliens are gone (to all intents and purposes), the organized resistance under Charleston is gone, along with all those supporting players, even the possessed-by-technology kids are replaced by a new Hitler Youth movement. We like the new three or four storylines (Noah Wylie as post-apocalypse Batman, Moon Bloodgood as tough-ass resistance fighter, etc., speedily aged Lexi as creepy as Dune’s Alia — hey, wait, isn’t that Pansy Parkinson with a dye job?), though the “re-education camp” thing is a little ham-handed (Brownshirts? Really?), but still: quite the one-eighty.Don’t worry, we’re watching!
Even if Michael Bay wasn’t involved, we’d still hate The Last Ship. There’s just so much wrong with it. Wooden acting from folks that can do better, like Rhona Mitra and Eric Dane (look up “lack of sexual chemistry” in the dictionary, and you’ll find a two-shot of ’em), lazy and absurd ‘science’ about the virus, ridiculous plot choices based on convenience or disregard (yeah, that’s a great idea, keep the one and only ship working on a cure COMPLETELY IN THE DARK even after you KNOW the world is dying. Brilliant!), and an utter lack of imagery: not a single shot of the supposedly devastated world. Just a lot of bulship. And this is the pilot, when they’re supposed to pull out all the stops. Feh. Save your eye-time for something else. Anything else.
Under the Dome isn’t even back yet, and we’re already worried. You could draw a line right there, in Season One, when the writers and producers got word they could go two seasons. That’s when plot lines started to wander away, people who’d been ‘hiding’ in town for weeks suddenly showed up for three-episode arcs (hi, Mare Winningham! Hi, Natalie Zea — oh, bye. Never mind.), and the fascinating evolution of the core stories started stalling out. And now we hear in the first episode of Season Two that the Dome itself suddenly becomes…magnetized? What, your original ideas weren’t good enough? And don’t get us started on the divergence from King’s book. It’s really become an entirely different iteration, like The Regulators vs. Desperation, which is fine. Though we’d love to see the original story on screen someday. Fat chance.
Binge-watching candidate for July: Orphan Black. Don’t get us wrong, we LOVE this friggin’ show. Who doesn’t? But we haven’t talked much about it because, quite frankly, it’s so wonderfully complicated we can’t quite keep track week to week. So we kneel at the altar of the great god DVR, and now that this season’s finished, a good chunk of our Independence Day Weekend will be spent with pizza and Orphan Black, beginning to end (at least this season. We’re not crazy.) We’ll let you know how it goes (or join us!)
We didn’t like Penny Dreadful. Then we did. Then we didn’t again. You can’t complain about the premise or the production values. In many ways, this is League of Extraordinary Gentlemen done right. But for some reason, our first reaction to Episode One was ‘meh.’ Everything seemed kind of slow and gray and turgid. Eventually half the AmityvilleNow.com editorial juggernaut convinced the other half to give it a second try, and — huh, look at that, it was actually kind of clever and sly and surprising, even with all those old tropes. And then…the sex. Hey, we’re not prudes around here (have you seen our cosplay pic collection? Check out our twitterfeed!), but here it seems so intrusive and emphatic and weird that we’re back to not-so-much. Eventually we’ll catch up on the last of Season One, but still…it’s no Orphan Black. Though what is?
And so long, Continuum. Forever? Let’s hope not. Continuum is the best thing to happen on the SyFy channel in…um…what century is this? (Except for Donimino. Maybe.) And even if it is an import from the hated and feared “Canadians,” as they call themselves, it remains the smartest and most suspenseful time-travel TV series ever, even in the episodes where you need an interdimensional road map to keep the players straight. (Seriously, couldn’t they give one of the Alecs a different haircut or something? Heads are spinning around here). Unbelievable that SyFy hasn’t renewed it already. We await word from the Dark Overlords of Toronto.
Fargo, we can’t believe it’s over, and we never thought it would end this way. But God damn it, was that series great, from beginning to end. Amazing plotting, superb acting, the best straight (or crooked) suspense series since Breaking Bad, though it never got the recognition or ratings it deserved. It ended as beautifully (and unexpectedly) as it began, and if that’s all we get, then that’s all we get. But no other show on FX — maybe on all of cable — deserves another round. Come on, you guys!
Anyway, a pretty cool June for horror, suspense, and the supernatural on TV. And summer’s just getting started!
