Community 1.03: "Introduction to Film"

“My dad will only pay for classes that will help me run the family restaurant. It’s been struggling since 2001. 9/11 was pretty much the 9/11 of the falafel business.”

-Abed

While I was, at first, not at all impressed by this week’s episode of Community, I was sold on this episode by the end. It, essentially, went from stupid, unfunny, uncomfortable attempts at humor to something resembling genuine emotion. This week explored in more detail a theme that has been lightly alluded to in previous episodes- the value of going after true dreams. The episode was structured nicely with an A and B story that came together right at the end and a (mercifully) small C story that provided a few extra cheap laughs for those who like that sort of humor.

Jeff has discovered a class that he believes is the key to re-implementing his “coast as much as possible through community college” grand scheme, and he shares this discovery with the rest of the study group. The professor of this class thinks he’s the next Robin Williams in “Dead Poets Society.” It turns out that it’s actually just an accounting class, but the professor is teaching them nothing about accounting. He just wants the students to “seize the day.” I didn’t really find the class “seizing the day” to be all that funny. Mostly it was just uncomfortable. Shirley had to tell the real reason she came to community college, “to get what’s hers,” and Annie had to stand up on a desk. Then the rest of the class stood up on their desks too. And, of course, somebody’s desk collapsed. I’ve heard of the term “embarrassment squick” before, and I don’t usually fall victim to it. I found Ted’s first day teaching at Columbia in the HIMYM season premiere to be hilarious, for instance. I did feel what I believe is embarrassment squick here, though, and it kind of ruined my enjoyment of the classroom scenes.

The class turns out not to be as much of a boon for Jeff as he anticipated. The professor can see right through his act, and he accuses Jeff of just being in the class for the “A” and not truly seizing the day. Jeff resorts to crazier and more outrageous schemes in order to try and convince the professor that he really is trying to seize the day. He wears rainbow suspenders and a light-up Christmas tie to school one day. Then he makes the mistake of ordering a plain black coffee when the professor is watching. Later, Jeff orchestrates a whole over-the-top scene where he runs through the quad flying a rainbow kite then joins in a game of Double Dutch with some young girls. The professor again isn’t buying it and is (rightfully) a little creeped out.

The other major story at play is that Britta discovers Abed’s true wish is to take film classes, and she wants to make his dream come true. Abed reveals that his dad will only let him take classes that will teach him what he needs to know to run the family falafel restaurant, and Britta responds by giving Abed the money he needs to pay for an intro-level film class. Abed goes all out once he’s in the film class. He starts filming a documentary that he claims is about his father. His father disapproves and cuts off all contact with Abed, however, so Abed continues filming Jeff and Britta as his “parents.” Jeff and Britta think this is weird and kind of creepy. I agree. Britta also is upset that Abed seems to be blatantly wasting the money she gave him on things like pizza and lattes for the study group.

At Britta’s request, Jeff tries to come up with a solution to the problem. He organizes a conference of sorts with himself, Britta, Abed, and Abed’s dad. Abed has finished his documentary, and he wants to show it to everyone. Frankly, the documentary is just strange and kind of disturbing. It has Britta and Jeff saying kind of mean and discouraging things about Abed with the faces of Abed’s parents superimposed over Jeff and Britta’s faces. Jeff and Britta aren’t especially impressed, but Abed’s dad is. He’s more impressed about the fact that Abed found a way to express his emotions, really. Abed’s dad now approves of Abed studying film, and it turns out Abed got what he wanted all along. He had been manipulating Jeff and Britta to get to this point. Jeff and Britta are just glad to be rid of the problem, though, I think.

The last scene is really where the two plots come together. Jeff and Britta are walking out of the classroom building, and Britta thanks Jeff for his help in dealing with Abed. Jeff notes that Britta must not like the fact that she now owes him one. Britta notices the crazy professor is watching them and tells Jeff to kiss her. The professor is delighted at Jeff’s spontaneous action and is truly convinced that Jeff has tried to seize the day. “Now we’re even,” Britta says as she walks away from a slightly confused Jeff.

Before this episode, I hadn’t really been at all invested in Jeff and Britta’s relationship, but I’m definitely rooting for them now. In the first two episodes, I couldn’t figure out why Jeff was pursuing her, except for the fact that she’s a cute blonde. It was nice to see them actually working together in this episode- there was definitely chemistry. The episode added more depth to Britta herself, as well. At the beginning, I thought this was going to be yet another “Britta goes on an empty idealistic crusade” plot, but it ended up having a bit more depth than that- probably because of the inclusion of Abed’s family. As for that “C” plot I mentioned? Troy has a girly sneeze. Yeah. That’s about enough said about that.

Fringe 2.03: "Fracture"

“Of course, you never would have found Busby’s apple fritters if you hadn’t gone the wrong way down the street.”

-Astrid

This week’s episode of Fringe again compelled me to call my mother. At least she wasn’t on vacation this time. I believe my exact words were, “If something creepy and gross happens in Baltimore in next week’s episode, I’m going to start taking this personally.” Overall, this episode was kind of lackluster. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t especially memorable, either. Scheduled in the most competitive timeslot in television, Fringe is going to have to step up its game and consistently produce episodes of late season 1 quality to survive.

The reason I found myself calling my mother during this episode was that in opened in Philadelphia. For the first few seconds, everything was cool. The cop car looked like what I remembered from news reports when I’m home visiting family. Even though Fringe is filmed in Vancouver, the street scene looked plausibly Philadelphian enough. There’s even a mention of Suburban Station, one of three SEPTA regional rail stations in the city. When we cut to the actual train station, however, that’s when it all fell apart. For how fancy the station was, they really should have said it was 30^th Street Station. Suburban Station is SEPTA Regional Rail, not AMTRAK. It’s dark and dingy and mostly underground. 30^th Street, however, handles both SEPTA and AMTRAK. It doesn’t really look like the station from this episode (the real 30^th Street looks older), but it would have been nice to know that the writers bothered to look at the AMTRAK website to determine the major train station in Philadelphia.

Anyway, what’s more important than inaccuracies is what happens inside that train station. A police officer stops a man with a brief case. All the arrival/departure screens start flickering. The police officer grabs the suitcase and immediately appears to be in pain. The hand holding the suitcase starts to look strange, and then there’s an explosion. The fact that, once investigated, there were no traces of explosive materials at the scene alerts the Fringe crew to something strange going on that’s probably right up their alley. The crew goes down to Philadelphia, and Walter brings the body of the police officer back to his lab for analysis.

At the lab, Walter makes a pretty grisly discovery. What he thought was a stone of some sort turned out to be the police officer’s ear. Walter also discovers a bunch of injection marks around the police officer’s toes. Olivia and Peter go to visit the police officer’s wife. While there, Olivia starts to experience more side effects from her trip to the Other Side. She gets a massive headache and asks to use the bathroom. In the bathroom, Olivia discovers a loose panel, behind which just happens to be some odd injection paraphernalia. Walter is eventually able to put the pieces of the puzzle together. The police officer had been injecting himself with a serum that would make his body explode if he came in contact with radio waves of a certain frequency. Research into the police officer’s background leads to a secret military experimental medical procedure, and Olivia and Peter are on their way to Iraq to investigate further.

I really like the scenes of Olivia and Peter in Iraq, because it is good Peter and Olivia bonding time. I like seeing the two of them work well as a team. Because neither of them are really used to trusting other people, it’s a big deal that they work as well together as they do. They manage to track down an Iraqi doctor who helped administer the experimental program. Through the doctor, Olivia and Peter find out that three soldiers were treated with the serum, and all three soldiers served under the same Colonel.

Meanwhile, we see a woman in Illinois meet with someone she calls Colonel, who gives her instructions to go to DC and asks if she’s been injecting the serum like she was supposed to. We see Broyles addressing FBI agents in DC. He tells them that one of the two remaining soldiers is still out there and headed for DC. Everything is supposed to go down at a Metro station. Although they should have probably just said Union Station, because the place they went to was way too fancy to just be a Metro station. But I digress. Again.

Just like in the opening scene, the woman walks into the station and seeks out a man with a briefcase. This time, however, the Fringe team and FBI backup are on the case and ready to make sure nothing…and nobody…explodes. The Colonel starts to broadcast the radio signal, and Peter and Olivia use it to try to track him down. As you expect from a TV show, it gets pretty down to the wire (the signal can broadcast for 30 seconds before a serum-treated person goes ‘splodey), but between Peter wailing on the Colonel and Olivia smashing the broadcasting device with her cane, they manage to save the day. When being interrogated, however, the Colonel reveals that he was using these soldiers to try and stop spies from taking information about our world back to the Other Side. Although I didn’t find the episode overall especially exciting, I liked the moral ambiguity of the end. Here the Fringe team thought they were stopping some evil plot to use human bombs to blow up train stations, but in actuality, they might have helped the Other Side prepare for war against our world. Oops.

There were also some personal stories that deepened characterization in this episode. One is Olivia’s continuing visits to the bowling alley to visit the guy Nina Sharp recommended. Olivia is getting frustrated by the fact that the bowling alley guy isn’t affirmatively doing anything to help her, but by the end, she can walk without her cane. The second is that Peter desperately wants to move to a new, bigger apartment (understandably, he doesn’t want to see his father doing naked jumping jacks in the morning…neither would I, Peter, neither would I). Walter, however, is a creature of habit and doesn’t want to move. Eventually, Astrid helps convince Walter that change isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and Walter suggests an acceptable new apartment to Peter. Once again, I think it is the relationship between Walter and Peter that really keeps me watching Fringe. It’s so complex, and it can be so funny.

FlashForward 1.02: "White to Play"

“In my experience, fiancées aren’t really big on their grooms dying before the wedding. Ruins the first dance. Heavy corpse. Bad wedding etiquette…or something.”

-Demetri

Last night’s episode of FlashForward continues several plot threads that began in last week’s pilot. It isn’t an especially focused episode. In fact, as I was taking notes, I had a bunch of one and two sentence paragraphs because it was so all over the place. But it does reveal some tantalizing bits of information. There is plenty of creepy imagery, too. Especially if you’re afraid of dolls.

Although the very first images of the episode are kind of lame computer generated images of Earth, things soon get better. And creepier. “Ring Around the Rosy” sung by small children can be heard as we see the playground at Charlie Benford’s school. “Ring Around the Rosy” is an extremely appropriate song choice here. The song, despite its child-like lyrics, is actually about people dying from the Plague. It’s a nice juxtaposition with the kids at the school as they play a new game called “Blackout.” I’m surprised school personnel let the kids play “Blackout,” considering how much we generally try to shield kids from anything unpleasant these days. I’m also surprised that Charlie didn’t get in more trouble for hitting a kid who wanted to know what she saw during the flash forward and then running out into traffic.

After the stunt Charlie pulled, Mark and Olivia are, understandably, called to the school for a meeting. Mark is actually called away from his job at the FBI, where a Deputy Secretary from the Department of Homeland Security has arrived to be this week’s skeptic and reason to have the other FBI characters repeat what they already know about the ongoing mystery of the flash forwards. At the school, Charlie’s teacher tells Mark and Olivia that they really need to get Charlie to tell them what she saw because it is clearly affecting her. I have two words for Charlie’s teacher. Hell yeah.

Olivia takes Charlie out of the school for the day, and Charlie accompanies her mom to work at the hospital. There are military personnel guarding the hospital. Other than the clearly military helicopters we occasionally see flying over LA, this is one of the few signs we see on the show that there’s actually been a disaster. Olivia’s first job: stitch up Charlie’s favorite teddy bear that got torn in the school fight. I’m left wondering why, if Olivia tells a co-worker that “it’s all she can do to get out of the OR,” and she claims she doesn’t have time to visit patients, is she stitching up a toy? Lloyd Simcoe wants to know that too. He’s a patient’s father, and more importantly, the guy from Olivia’s vision. Olivia tries to brush him off. She tells him to talk to Dr. Varley (the formerly suicidal resident) instead. Olivia continues to dance around Lloyd for the rest of her shift. She takes Charlie for a walk only to have Charlie completely freak out when she sees that Lloyd’s son Dylan, who she knows by name, is hurt. Olivia also gives Lloyd some heartfelt advice on how to break the news of his ex wife’s death to Dylan, and Lloyd does indeed take that advice. I guess the writers are trying to show us the couple’s chemistry here. I’m not sure I buy it.

Back at the FBI, Mark and Demetri have an interesting argument when Demetri notices Mark’s friendship bracelet. Demetri takes the bracelet as a sign that Mark isn’t trying to stop the future seen in the flash forwards from happening. We see the men take opposing, but not entirely incompatible, views. Mark wants use flash forwards, and make some elements of them come true, for knowledge about the future that can be used in preventing it. Demetri wants to stop the flash forward future at all costs. As the men debate, they find out that D. Gibons, a name that is significant because it was on Mark’s conspiracy wall, has arrived at the FBI field office. She’s DeDe Gibbons, owner of a cupcake shop, and she comes bearing cupcakes. Her flash was of an unhappy phone call with her credit card company, where she was telling them that she didn’t care about pigeons and they should talk to Agents Benford and Noh at the FBI.

Eventually, the agents realize Dede’s credit card was cloned. Using “pigeon” and “Utah” as clues, they realize the significance of Pigeon, UT. Olivia shows up to the office, and she brings Charlie. She tells Mark what happened at the hospital, including that Lloyd is “the guy.” She doesn’t think Lloyd recognized her because he probably didn’t see her in the flash. I really do appreciate Olivia’s honesty here, and it kind of bugs me that throughout the first two episodes, Mark never reciprocates by telling Olivia that he was drinking in his flash forward.

Mark and Demetri go to Pigeon. This is where things start to get really creepy. They meet up with a local police officer who just so happens to have not seen a vision, just like Demetri. Mark recognizes an abandoned factory, and he, the police officer, and Demetri decide to go inside. The doll factory is seriously creeptastic. Somebody triggers an alarm that makes a sinister version of “Ring Around the Rosy” play. They find a random guy near a huge window and a countdown clock. The random guy says menacingly “He who foresees calamities suffers them twice over.” Shots are fired. Then there’s a huge ass explosion. As there tends to be in this sort of situation. The local police officer was killed in the gun fire, and Demetri isn’t especially freaked out by it.

While Mark and Demetri are off living a horror movie, the rest of the FBI crew makes two important discoveries. The first is that Suspect Zero from the ballpark is 5’8,” 150 pounds, and probably male. I’m wondering if that height and weight corresponds to a certain Lost veteran whose appearance in a few weeks I’m very much looking forward to? The other important discovery is that faux D. Gibbons, probably the creepy guy from the creepy doll factory, made a call to Suspect Zero thirty seconds into the blackout.

Late at night, Demetri and Janis are still at the office. They decide to put their stories on the Mosaic website. This pays off for Demetri in an unexpected way. He gets a call from a woman who read his post. She was reading an intelligence briefing that says he was killed on March 15, 2010. Beware the Ides of March, Noh!

Mark, meanwhile, is at home burning his friendship bracelet in the fire. After another frustrating conversation with Olivia, he goes up to Charlie’s room to kiss her good night. She wakes up. Charlie is confused about the flash forwards. She doesn’t understand what her vision could be warning her about. Mark asks what she saw. Her reply? “D. Gibbons is a bad man.”

Glee 1.05: "The Rhodes Not Taken"

“I'm pretty sure it wasn't a fake ID because he looks like an eleven-year-old German milkmaid.”

-Emma

I loved this week’s episode of Glee, mostly because I’m a huge fan of Kristin Chenoweth. Chenoweth guest stared as April Rhodes, a washed-up, has-been alcoholic former McKinley High student, and she provided plenty of comedy and beautiful singing. In fact, the musical performances overall were really a highlight this week, as opposed to last week, where the emphasis was more on moving the story forward.

At the beginning of this week’s episode, Rachel has still quit Glee Club to be in Cabaret. Will needs to make sure that the Glee Club still has a shot at Regionals, despite their star’s departure, so he indulges in a little high school fantasy. He looks up April Rhodes, who was a senior when he was a freshman. Will claims that hearing April sing is what inspired him to join the Glee Club in the first place. It turns out that April has quite an online presence, so Will is easily able to find her. April agrees to meet with Will, and Will arrives at a fancy house in an upscale housing development. April greets him with a box of wine. That should have been Will’s first sign that something was up! It turns out that the house is actually just a random house on the market, and Will finds this out when a Realtor shows up with a couple considering buying the place. Will and April end up having a heart-to-heart on the curb outside the house, where April explains how after dropping out of school, she didn’t exactly make it to Broadway. More like Cleveland. Will suggests, since she only needs three more credits to graduate, that April return to McKinley High, take his Spanish class, and join New Directions.

One of my favorite scenes in this episode is when Will introduces April to the Glee Club. To win them over, April sings “Maybe This Time” from Cabaret at the same time that Rachel is rehearsing the same song for Sandy’s production. It’s an absolutely beautiful duet, and one of several wonderful musical moments in this episode. It takes more than the music to win over the other members of New Directions, however. For instance, April gives Kurt alcohol and vintage muscle magazines. Normally, I’d be horrified by this, but it leads to a hilarious scene where Kurt calls Emma (who happens to be a serious germaphobe) “Bambi” and vomits on her shoes. Poor thing had to get four showers at the emergency room just to feel clean again. I’m assuming Emma was at the ER because she took Kurt there- not just because she got vomit on her shoes…but you never know.

Emma has more of a part to play in this episode than just providing germaphobe humor. She calls Finn in for a meeting and alludes to the fact that she knows his girlfriend is pregnant. She reminds Finn that he can get more than just an athletic scholarship to college- there are music scholarships, too. To get one of those scholarships, though, New Directions is going to have to place well at Regionals, and Emma also reminds Finn that to do that, they need Rachel back. What Finn does next is something I never expected from him. He uses his knowledge that Rachel has feelings for him in an attempt to bring her back to the Glee Club. He offers to read lines from Cabaret with her, and he takes her out bowling. What makes this not quite as bad as it could have been, and the reason that I still think Finn is a decent guy, is the fact that they had a genuinely good time together. I think Finn, even if he started with an agenda of manipulation, does really reciprocate Rachel’s feelings. At the very least, he’s confused.

Unfortunately, just as Rachel is about to re-join the Glee Club, she hears Puck telling everyone that Quinn is pregnant and Finn is the father. Puck is certainly being passive aggressive in showing his displeasure at Quinn’s decision that Puck shouldn’t be a part of the baby’s life. Rachel gives Finn a good slap. Which he probably deserved. For being wishy washy, if nothing else. She goes back to Cabaret, where she gets yelled at constantly by Sandy. What’s kind of strange is that Sandy is treating Rachel so horribly because he wants Rachel’s part for himself. I guess you can chalk that up to Sandy just being strange and creepy overall.

Emma keeps trying to convince Will that keeping April around the Glee Club is just a bad idea. I’m not sure if this is because she is genuinely concerned for the kids (she probably is, to a point), or because she is jealous of all the time Will and April are spending together. Either way, she’s right. I adore watching Kristin Chenoweth, and April is a funny character, but she needed to go! New Directions has an evening performance, one of their first chances to really show what they’ve got, and April is the star. Everybody is dressed in cowboy gear for a Carrie Underwood song. April is wearing a bright pink costume compared to everyone else’s black costumes, and the spotlight is always on her. New Directions gets a standing ovation. During the intermission, however, April realizes that it’s the kids’ turn to shine, not hers. She had her chance at high school. She’s off to bigger and better things- maybe Branson.

After some cooling off time (and more abuse from Sandy), Rachel has learned her lesson. She approaches the Glee Club while they’re still back stage and offers to be April’s “understudy.” The group, with a little prodding from Finn, reluctantly accepts her offer, and they go on to do an amazing rendition of Queen’s “Somebody to Love.” One might argue that Rachel hasn’t really learned much of a lesson- she got a solo. I think, however, that even calling herself an “understudy” was a big step. Rachel is acknowledging that she’s not always going to be the star.