The Originals 2x19 When the Levee Breaks

 

Before I watched this episode, I stumpled upon some spoilers saying that it was both „heart-wrenching” and „soul-crushing”, and seeing as I’m never above jumping to the worst possible explanation (in fact, that is my go-to method of approaching everything in my life), I immediately assumed that Hope was going to die. It makes a lot of sense. Obviously they’re not going to kill off Hayley or any of the Mikaelson siblings anytime soon, and while it would be definitely sad to watch Hayley cry over Jackson’s dead body, „heart-wrenching” may be taking things a bit too far if that was the case. So who else? Cami? Marcel? Davina? All important characters, but would it be really that sad if they died? Probably not. So it has to be Hope, right? Sounds logical enough to me. But thankfully, the writers of The Originals are apparently not quite as cruel and heartless as I assumed them to be. Also, it turns out there are characters on this show that other people care a lot more about than I do, because honestly, I didn’t even blink when The Thing happened. As usual when someone I care so little about that I regularly forget that they’re on the show dies, it was only the reaction of other characters that made it sad for me. All that said, please don’t ever kill Hope off, alright? If you don’t want to bother with a toddler on set, or if it gets tiring writing in a way where you always have to take the baby into consideration, just ship her off to somewhere safe, like you’ve already done it once. I don’t think I could deal with watching Hayley break down if her daughter was killed. So please don’t?

Revenge 4x20 Burn

 

If last week’s flashback episode wasn’t a big enough sign that Revenge is slowly coming to its end this season, than this one definitely was. And I’m happy to say that it was just as enjoyable to watch as the one last week, which means that my hopes of this series going out on the high note it deserves are probably justified. Fingers crossed that I didn’t just screw it up by saying that!

The Vampire Diaries 6x18 I Could Never Love Like That

 

If I’m keeping track correctly, this is the first episode of The Vampire Diaries that has aired since it was announced that Nina Dobrev is going to leave the show at the end of the season, and judging by certain events in the episode itself, I think it’s safe to say that we now have a pretty good idea as to how exactly her departure will be handled. It’s going to be weird watching TVD without Elena... no, not weird... more like completely surreal. Whether you liked her or not, she IS the main character of the show, the driving force that kept it going for all these years, and I honestly can’t imagine how they plan to go on without her. But the show is already renewed for a seventh season so they’re going to have to try, although I’m pretty sure that, unless Nina changes her mind a year from now, season 7 will truly be the last hurrah. I will be sad to see this series go because even in its arguably worst period (aka season 4-5) it was always entertaining, most of the characters are very close to my heart, and except for maybe Supernatural, I can’t really think of another show with such a gigantic, complicated and fascinating mythology as this one.

But let’s not start digging the grave just yet! Season 6 has been truly wonderful, and what a feat it was to bounce back like this after all the mistakes of season 5. This episode followed suit, as it was both exciting, emotional, hilarious, and a little bit confusing, which is just the way I like my TVD.

Reign 2x18 Reversal of Fortune

I can’t think of another show in recent years that has been such a rollercoaster ride in regards to my attitude towards it than Reign. When it started, I was mildy interested in it. As an English major and self-proclaimed general history nerd, a show about the life of Mary, Queen of Scots was right up my alley. Unfortunately, I quickly found myself bored with the whole love triangle angle of the show which was pretty hard to care about when you already knew who Mary was going to end up with anyway... Remember, this was back when I still thought this series was only going to be a little bit historically inaccurate, just enough to make for better drama, but devoid of any major changes to historical facts. Well, we all know how that turned out, but the point is, I enjoyed season one and was happy when the show got renewed, but I never particularly looked forward to any of the episodes, and it wasn’t unusual for me to let them stack up when I had better things to do, and only catch up three or four weeks later. That all changed, however, with the introduction of the brilliant character of Lord Narcisse, who I only paid attention to in the beginning because he is played by Craig Parker and you simply can’t NOT pay attention to Craig Parker, but I never thought I would ever care much about the character itself, and I expected him to be in only a couple of episodes anyway... but then. BUT THEN. That scene in the crypt with Lady Lola changed everything, I completely fell in love with not only the character but the pairing too, and from then on I religiously waited for each new episode just to see those two interact for ten seconds. What a wonderful few months that was.

Unfortunately, after the midseason finale things went downhill very quickly, and the show completely regressed into what was always my least favourite thing about it: relationship drama after relationship drama, love triangles all over the place, and what bothered me the most was that they seemed to have completely forgotten about the wonderful blossoming relationship between Lola and Narcisse. If I’m counting things right, in the last eight episode they only had one important scene together, which actually could have been HUGE for them, except that it was never brought up ever again, as if it never happened. Now, you might think that it’s not fair of me to critize the show for not focusing on my ship, after all, there must be other, more imporant things to deal with, right? Well, if that was the case I wouldn’t be angry at all. I’m all for slow-burn relationships and God knows it wouldn’t make any sense for this particular pairing to just go from acquintances to lovers overnight... but the thing is, what we have instead ranges from boring to infuriating to completely nonsensical, and anyway, I’m more upset about the wasting of a perfectly good storyline than about my ship heading nowhere. Because believe me, I know the difference between „this couple has no chance of ever happening and it’s just the fans who read too much into it” and „this couple is written in a way that suggests that they’ll eventually get together”, and Lola/Narcisse was definitely, 100% percent in the second category... except that somewhere along the line the writers either changed their mind or just simply forgot about it. In any case, the last few months I found myself being back in my season 1 attitude: I watch the show every week but I don’t expect wonders. Which is sad, really... so much wasted potential, so many characters that deserve better.

Anyway, the reason I’m telling you all this is that you’ll understand how it could happen that I apparently fell asleep while watching the previous episode, because honest to God when I was watching the „previously on” segment this week, I didn’t remember any of that happening, and they were pretty important stuff too. Mary sleeping with Condé, Bash getting stabbed, Francis collapsing... important stuff. The only thing that I seemed to remember was Narcisse and Catherine kissing and probably sleeping together, which I sometimes randomly remembered all through the week but it seemed so improbable that I actually had to check the episode to see if it really happened or if I just dreamt it. But no, it did happen, and now you probably see what I meant when I said that everything BUT Lola/Narcisse seems to be happening on this show. Anyway, enough about my frustration, let’s see what this week’s episode had to offer.

Orphan Black 3x01 The Weight of This Combination

Lovers of fantastic TV and otherworldly acting rejoice, everyone’s favourite clone-drama is finally back, and by the looks of it, it’s about to get even more complicated! The last time we saw the Leda-sisters, Sarah has only barely escaped from Dyad, Cosima was still dying, Helena got kidnapped, Rachel got a pencil put through her eye, and Alison was... being Alison? I don’t remember anything particularly terrible happening to her in the finale, which is good because she’s my favourite and God knows she’s been through a lot in season 2. And then there was of course the big twist at the very end of the episode when we found out about the existence of Project Castor, a group of male clones who all look suspiciously like Creepy Mark from the Prolethean ranch.

That’s more than enough to make anyone crazy excited about next season, right? Well, I’m afraid here’s the part where most fans are going to get angry at me, but honestly, it didn’t make me excited at all, for various reasons. First of all, the twist didn’t shock me as much as it seemed to shock most people. I was kinda just like, okay, there are male clones too, so what? Plus I never really gave half a shit about Mark so there wasn’t even that to make me excited about getting to know his „brothers”. Just imagine if it was revealed that Felix was a clone instead. Now THAT would have been amazing. Also, by the end of season 2 I kinda got really confused about all the different groups and people and organizations and who wants to do what with which clones, that I was honestly more worried about season 3 than excited. I mean, how am I gonna enjoy this show going forward if I have zero idea about what’s going on? So I made this plan to rewatch the first two seasons and make notes of it so I can finally get everything straight, but then I didn’t, which meant that I basically went into this premiere completely lost. Thankfully, the „previously on” segment was unusually useful and it helped me remember a lot of things that have happened, so by the end of the episode I felt like I was good to go forward again. The reason I’m telling you this is so that maybe you’ll be more understanding if half of my review is going to be clueless ramblings and me wondering about why certain things are happening. I promise I’ll be more on top of things by the time the next episode rolls around.

Supernatural 10x18 Book of the Damned

Before I get started on this, I have to admit something: I kinda lost track of the main storyline on Supernatural a few episode back, so this episode was full of surprises and „wait, what?” moments for me. It’s very possible that I’ll be using the phrase „wait, what?” a lot throughout this review, simply because I didn’t remember that any of these things were supposed to be happening. Now, I would hate for anyone to get the wrong idea so let me just say this right now: I love this show. It’s one of my favourites, and I kinda want it to go on forever even though I’m well aware of the fact that the potential for new storylines that are actually interestint and entertaining to watch is getting smaller and smaller each season, and I’m really looking forward for the prospect of seeing these wonderful actors try themselves in something non-Winchester related after the show finally ends... and yet I still hope it gets renewed at the end of every season. So please understand that I only mean it in the best possible way when I say that this Mark of Cain storyline is boring my ass off and as far as I’m concerned it can’t end soon enough, and that is the reason why I’ve been kinda phasing out the last couple of weeks whenever something Mark of Cain-related  came up, and I always let out a sigh of relief whenever I see that an episode is going to be a standard good old-fashioned Monster of the Week one.

That said, this eisode was plenty entertaining, even with all the Mark of Cain (which I’m just gonna calll MoC from now on because typing Mark of Cain every ten seconds is about as boring as hearing about it all the time) stuff going on. Most of the entertainment value came from the fact that Charlie was involved, and she always brings a kind of lighthearted fun to whatever episode she is in, even if said episode would be pretty dark and doom-and-gloomy otherwise. I can only guess that Metatron’s presence was also supposed to provide some comic relief, but I’m so sick of the guy that I could only roll my eyes whenever he was cracking jokes, rather than being actually entertained. But let’s not get too ahead of ourselves, and let’s see what Charlie was up to first.

Movie Trailer: Black Mass (2015)

So I know that technically this is not a news blog and I never intended it to be one (although lately I have been thinking about doing weekly news roundups every Sunday, but more on that later), and I always considered the release of a new trailer to fall under the news category, but this one is so incredible that I don't care, I just have to share it.

HOLY FUCK. Did Black Mass just became my most anticipated movie of 2015 after Age of Ultron? I think so. This movie has been on my Watchlist ever since it was announced, back when it was still Guy Pearce who was supposed to play Johnny Depp's brother, not Benedict Cumberbatch - I love them both though so I wasn't really upset about the change - but then it kinda fell off my radar as it was overshadowed by more urgent, bigger releases. BUT NOW. I'm so excited, everything about this trailer screams perfection to me, and can I just say how pumped I am for the first Johnny Depp movie I'm going to be watching in the cinema since The Lone Ranger? I've been feeling kinda bad about "abandoning" him and not seeing either Transcendent, Into the Woods or Mortdecai... I always planned to but then I just didn't, for various reasons. Anyway, this is gonna change in September, and by the looks of it, it's gonna be worth the wait.

Also, as a sidenote, can I just say that I absolutely love how this movie is the perfect middle finger for those people who've been complaining for years that he only ever plays crazy characters with overdone make-up, and he probably wouldn't even know how to act in a serious movie anymore? Well, his character in this movie looks as crazy as they come with plenty of make-up, but it's also supposed to be a serious crime drama... I can't wait for him to nail the role and prove all his doubters wrong.

Arrow 3x19 Broken Arrow

Who doesn’t love a good double twist? I know I do.

Leading up to this week’s episode of Arrow, all the fans could talk about was which character was going to be the one to die, thanks to the promotional material for the episode as well as a couple of not subtle at all tweets by various cast members. The obvious candidates were Roy and Captain Lance, but nowadays where everyone is expecting twist endings and just twists in general, what kind of show would go for the obvious? Unless, of course, they have figured out which one the fans would think was the obvious choice, therefore knew we would be expecting them to surprise us, in which case doing the obvious would end up being the bigger surprise... Well, this is the kind of mental gymnastics that I usually do whenever a show announces that there is a big death coming up. For me, personally, at this point of the show I would have been cool with anyone dying except for Dig and Laurel, and given that one of them has just gotten her first major storyline in ages and the other is supposed to get one next season, I was actually fairly calm waiting to find out just who it is exactly that I’m supposed to say goodbye to. As it turns out, it was no one. Or at least I think it was. Because that’s the thing, isn’t it? The writers somehow managed to do both the obvious AND the not-so-obvious at the same time, but the way the episode ended we just all know that it isn’t going to stick. Which wasn’t a very easy sentence to come up with without mentioning any names or what actually happened, and because by the time I’m posting this I know that everyone has most probably seen not only this but also the next episode, I think it’d be better for everyone if I just stopped rambling and got started on the actual review.

The Originals 2x18 Night Has a Thousand Eyes

 

If I had to sum up this week’s episode of The Originals, I would say it was a delightful combination of strange alliances, horror and suspense, as well as some truly spectacular pieces of poetry. Starting with a fantastically creepy opening sequence complete with a melancholic violin solo, a message about promises made, and a black dahlia, and ending with the devastating death of a beloved character, this episode was truly one of the best this show has ever produced.

This week it was all about preparing for Dahlia’s inevitable arrival, and trying to find way to protect Hope when her great-aunt finally rolls in to take her. Unsurprisingly, Klaus, Freya, Jackson and Elijah all had different ideas as to how to achieve this, and in the span of the episode we got to see all but one of those plans fall apart. It was actually pretty telling, the different methods each of these characters deemed appropriate to employ in the same situation. If I had to sum up each of them with one word, it would be: Klaus – fight, Elijah – protect, Jackson – run, Freya – prevent. Let’s take a look at how exactly each of these plans did NOT work out.

Once Upon a Time 4x19 Sympathy for the De Vil

If you’ve read some of my previous posts, you might have stumbled upon half-sentences here and there, mentioning my favourite series of them all, Once Upon a Time. Now that I actually get to write a proper review for one of its episodes, I need to mention just two things real quick: 1. I’m super excited about this, and 2. Just because this show means more to me than most other things in my life, it doesn’t mean that I’m not super critical of it and acknowledge when it fucks up. This is important because, unfortunately, OUAT has been doing a lot of fucking up during its current season. The first half wasn’t so bad. I thoroughly enjoyed all the Frozen characters and their corresponding story, the Snow Queen was as cool a villain as any – no pun intended – and if you don’t count the fact that it contained what’s probably my all time least favourite episode (4x05 Breaking Glass, also known as The One Where Regina Verbally Abuses Emma For 40 Minutes and Emma Never Gets to Fight Back), most episodes were actually pretty solid. Then season 4B happened, and... holy shit, where do I even start

There’s this whole mess with the Author who supposedly controls everything in the story, which is in direct contradiction with previously established canon but hey, it’s okay, the writers had a last-minute explanation for that so we’re all supposed to be cool with it now! In connection with it there’s all of our main characters tripping over themselves to help Regina get her happy ending, conveniently forgetting that she’s the reason for pretty much all the terrible things that have happened in their lives, and also that happy endings are not supposed to work that way (see previous sentence). Then there’s the fact that there’s little to zero focus on Emma, the main character of the show, and her basically non-existent relationship with her parents, if you don’t count the fact that the writers have managed to come up with a truly terrible way to make her angry at them, which also involves fundamentally changing some of the characters’ pasts, which we’re also supposed to be okay with because it apparently proves that not everyone is truly good or bad... which is something we’ve all been aware of for the past four seasons but whatever, let’s just make the heroes of the story into secretly horrible people to make the villains look that much better. And finally, speaking of villains, Emma and Regina are apparently best friends now, which we’re supposed to not question even a little bit, because a lot could have happened in that six weeks we’ve conveniently skipped, right? Well yeah, but this is kind of a huge deal because it wasn’t that long ago when Regina only reluctantly admitted that she doesn’t want to kill Emma, shortly followed by the revelation that what she actually feels for her is nothing less than the polar opposite of True Love, aka probably the most passionate hatred you can ever feel for a person... but it’s all cool, they’re friends now. So that’s about all my problems with season 4B that I could come up with on a whim, but I’m sure I could think of more if I actually took the time to do so.

Now, remember that I’m being 100% subjective here. This is my opinion, you don’t have to agree with any of it, but I’m pretty active in this fandom to know that at least I’m definitely not alone in thinking that this whole „let’s help the villains get their happy endings even though they did squat to deserve it”plot is the dumbest thing to ever happen on this show. Hell, you only have to look at the ratings to see that the numbers are steadily declining as more and more people lose faith that things will ever get back to how they used to be. As for me, I still watch every episode, but I no longer stay up until 3am just so I can see them live – what used to be the highlight of my week slowly turned into „I’m just gonna watch it when I get back from school on Monday”.

Taking all this into account, it’s probably not that surprising that I wasn’t all that excited for this week’s episode either. True, Cruella’s origin story was definitely more promising than most things that we’ve had to look forward to this season. Cruella herself has been my favourite of the three Queens of Darkness basically since the moment we first saw them all together, and the last one to get her own flashback episode. I had all the reasons to be hopeful about this one because while Maleficent’s backstory was pretty much a disappointment in that it gave us nothing of her actual origin as an evil sorceress, the episode which featured Ursula’s past is easily my favourite episode of the season. Yes, I am a little bit tired of almost all the villains having sad pasts that are supposed to explain their actions, but at least Ursula’s was truly touching and emotional, plus, if we’re being really honest, she wasn’t even that much of a villain to begin with: all we ever saw her do was choke people lightly with her tentacles. Not that the other two Queens were any more frightening, mind you. Maleficent’s dragon powers were severely underused, and Cruella’s only magical talent seemed to be... controlling dogs? Yes, sadly the much-anticipated, all-powerful Queens of Darkness turned out to be surprisingly mild as far as villains go, and looking at the big picture of the season, things wouldn’t really be any different if they weren’t there at all. Ursula was needed so she could help out the heroes a little bit, and then, having served her purpose, was quickly whisked out of the picture. Maleficent was needed to give Snow and Charming that completely unnecessary „terrible secret” storyline which would distance them from Emma, as well as to somehow connect Lily to the main cast, and Cruella was needed... well, that’s not entirely clear to me, not even after having watched her centric episode. But at least her backstory was super entertaining, probably one of the best I’ve ever seen on this show, so let’s get right into it, shall we?