Why I'm (very cautiously) optimistic for Supergirl Season 2

I liked Supergirl from the start, but not enough to watch consistently. When episodes aired out of order due to real events, I decided that I'd wait one episode to watch them in order. I caught up 15 episodes later with the Flash crossover. It's not a promising endorsement, but it's where I'm coming from.

TV Review: Agents of SHIELD Season 3, Episode 7 "Chaos Theory"

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. can be a weirdly frustrating show at times. When it's good, it's really good, but not for reasons that are all that interesting to talk about. It also has difficulty in trying to balance different storylines, so that when it's really good in one area, it has problems in another that don't kill it, but just drag things down a bit. This episode, "Chaos Theory" is a great example of that, putting a temporary bow on the Lash storyline while kind of fumbling some stories in the background.

TV Review: The Flash Season 2, Episode 6 "Enter Zoom"

I was not planning on reviewing two episodes of The Flash in a row, but that was before I watched this episode and started thinking about it. It just sticks out from everything else the rest of the season, and everything else that was on this week that I might have wanted to talk about, to the point that I have to review it. In this episode we meet Zoom, who manages to meet if not exceed all expectations, and the real question to ask is how the show managed to pull that off.

TV Review: Arrow Season 4, Episode 5: Haunted

This was the episode that everyone was really excited for because it featured Matt Ryan playing Constantine, after his show on NBC was cancelled last season. I found it hard to really get into that, considering that I never watched the show and didn't feel a particular compulsion to watch it. What mattered was how he worked in this episode, which oddly made it a good counterpoint to this week's episode of The Flash. Both of them featured a character with a lot of extra baggage attached (Constantine here, Wells there), but while The Flash used it to kickstart the plotline for the season, here most of it went to this one episode, not having quite as large of hooks for the main storyline.

TV Review: The Flash Season 2 Episode 5: The Darkness and the Light

Though they didn't share any explicit connections, this week's episodes of The Flash and Arrow had an interesting structural connection that I don't think was intentional, but found interesting nonetheless. Both brought in a character with a lot of attached baggage (Wells here, Constantine there) and mostly built the episode around them. Over on Arrow, it felt like a diversion from the main plotline of the season, while on The Flash it's being used to kickstart development far more quickly than we expected.

TV Review: Goham Season 2, Episode 5 "Scarification"

When I reviewed the Season 2 premiere, I was very mixed on where Gotham seemed to be going. Throughout the first season, it tried to take itself somewhat seriously, and I held it to those standards because of that.

Things seem to have changed. The last few episodes, the show has decided that it wants to have fun with its concept, to embrace the ridiculous. This show has always been a little silly and stupid, but now it's actually embracing that fact, which is not a direction that I was expecting it to go. While that makes for a much more enjoyable show, it also makes it harder to talk about. It's similar to trying to review a comedy, where trying to say what makes it good runs the risk of just repeating the jokes, trying to explain what makes Gotham so much fun runs the risk of just writing a recap of the episode.

TV Review: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 3, Episode 3 A Wanted (Inhu)Man

I didn't review a previous episode of the show this season, even though it's basically appointment TV for me. I tried for the first episode, but a lack of time that week and an inability to figure out where to start held me back. This show has a lot going on, and most of the characters are working on slightly different plotlines, meaning that it's often hard to find a cohesive way to talk about an episode without just listing the things that happened in the episode. It's not a weakness of Agents of SHIELD, just a consequence of how it tells stories that makes it a little more difficult to write a review.

TV Review: The Flash Season 2 Episode 1 "The Man Who Saved Central City"

The Flash ended a surprisingly great season on a surprisingly great episode, with the minor exception of a slightly cheap cliffhanger to end the season: Barry running into a singularity that was threatening to destroy Central City. This ending led to a lot of speculation and expectations for the story to pick up in a particular way at the start of Season 2, and it didn't really go in that direction. Many things that were taken as a given didn't happen or happened differently, and while this is still a strong episode, that and the strength of last season led to a lot of people thinking this is somewhat of a lackluster premiere.