Category: Television
Smallville: 05-14, “Vengeance”
Rating: 
I’m ridiculously behind on reviews, so no summary this week.
I was impressed with how well they’re dealing so far with Jonathan’s death, but I’m also surprised by a few things, namely how they handled his Senate seat. Surely, it can’t work that way in real life…
Lost: 02-13, “The Long Con”
Rating: 
I am spellbound by last night’s episode of Lost! It was Sawyer-centric, which couldn’t please me more. Sawyer is my absolute favorite character on this show and without him, I’m not sure I could watch it. For once we had a good mix of island and flashback, without too much of either.
While Sawyer was off in the raft and on the other side of the island, his stash of goodies was taken and distributed among the group. This angered him, so he raided Jack’s medical supplies and took back whatever pills he had previously.
Jack and Locke agreed reluctantly that they would both have the combination to the gun vault as long as both of them consented should it need to be opened. Locke casually explained the row of Virgin Mary heroin statues by indicating they may have some therapeutic value. He didn’t take them out of the statues because he thought it would be unlucky to break seven Virgin Mary statues. That makes sense enough. My hopes of this being an episode where Locke loses all rational thought were squashed already, I could tell.
Episode spoilers inside! Lots of thoughts about this episode and some cool clues (or at least one clue) I picked up,
Stargate Atlantis: 02-15, “The Tower”
Rating: Our lovable Atlantis team find themselves on a planet inhabited by who they think are primitive people. It’s harvest time and the villagers are busy, so the team is kept around waiting. During that time, Rodney wonders why they’re there since there’s no technology to glean from these folks. Teyla mentions that establishing good relations with other planets can prove beneficial for other reasons. I gotta side with Rodney on this. They can be a good neighbor to the galaxy when the Wraith are destroyed. Until then, they should be spending their time trying to find some weapons.
It’s a good thing they were there after all though. One of the villagers, Eldred, comes up to greet them and apologize for their wait. He explains that they are trying to prepare their tribute for The Tower from their harvest. Naturally, this peaks their interest and they inquire of it. Eldred is amazed they don’t know of The Tower and states it protects them from the Wraith. The team can’t get to The Tower soon enough to investigate.
What they find kind of blows their mind a little bit. Mine too.
Episode spoilers inside!
Stargate SG-1: 09-15, “Ethon”
Rating: Okay. I’ve been complaining ever since the return of SG-1 that it was missing something, namely Daniel. Although this wasn’t a Daniel rich episode, he at least got some screen time and more than a few lines of throw away, red shirt material.
In “Ethon”, last season’s “Icon” storyline is somewhat continued. That world was split into two primary forces, the Rand Protectorate and the Caledonian Federation. Disputes between the two nations really heated up when the Stargate, located in a museum in Rand’s territory, was activated and the SG-1 team came through.
This time, it’s the Ori who are driving these nations further apart. The Rand Protectorate has embraced the message of the Ori, so naturally the Caldonians are opposed. Rand works with the Ori to build a satellite weapon, capable of wiping out the Caldonians. With the help of Jarrod, a Rand officer who doesn’t want to see this result in more bloodshed, SG-1 obtains preliminary plans for the weapon. Their first choice is to send Daniel there to try to talk some sense into the Protectorate about the Ori and convince them to dismantle the weapon. Plan B involves sending Prometheus there to destroy it themselves. Neither plan quite works out in the end.
Episode spoilers inside!
Beauty and the Geek 02-04
Rating: 
This week’s episode of Beauty and the Geek offered my favorite type of challenge. Instead of the girls and the guys having separate tasks which are graded separately, they work together using their strengths to win one task. The beauties were tasked with giving their geeks a makeover. The geeks then had to go speed dating, which I actually think is a great idea for a task on this show.
Chris was being his typical jerky self when he told one of his speed dates that he was thankful for some intelligent conversation after being paired with his beauty for weeks. This, needless to say, greatly upset Tristin who up until that point was feeling very good about all her accomplishments thusfar. Tristin let Chris know she wasn’t stupid and didn’t appreciate Chris constantly telling her she was in so many words. I think their conversation got through to Chris. It isn’t that he’s really a jerk deep down inside, he’s just has a huge ego. He apologized to Tristin with one of his custom greeting cards.
It was no surprise that Tristin and Chris were chosen to go into the elimination room. Unfortunately they weren’t able to survive their third journey to the room and were sent home. Chris seemed to walk away understanding that there’s more intelligence in the world than what can come from a book. Hopefully Tristin gained enough confidence in her ability to tackle the unknown that she’ll crack open a book and figure out the sun isn’t just a really big planet that’s way too hot to visit.
Battlestar Galactica: 02-14, “Black Market”
Rating: 
This season is just irritating me. It’s too depressing. I understand and appreciate that these people just had their whole world turned upside down. I do admire the fact that the writers don’t make the show fluffy or fill it with a lot of out of place comedy. Still, I just want something good to happen to them!
Stargate Atlantis: 02-14, “Grace Under Pressure”
Rating: A puddle jumper test including Rodney goes drastically wrong and the jumper falls out of the sky and into the ocean. It’s sinking to the ocean floor quickly and the Atlantis crew needs to figure out a way to rescue Rodney. Rodney desperately tries to figure a way out of this situation himself and conjures a hallucination of Samantha Carter to help him find a solution.
Episode spoilers inside! Continue reading at your own risk.
Stargate SG-1: 09-14, “Stronghold”
Rating: The Jaffa Council is putting democracy up to a vote. Some previous supporters of democracy for Jaffa are now acting strangely opposed to it, as if they’ve been brainwashed. So when Teal’C is kidnapped, everyone is worried about who may have taken him and for what purposes. In the meantime, Mitchell uses the memory device from “Collateral Damage“ to allow his dying friend to look back on his memories of being involved in the Stargate program over the last year.
Spoilers inside! You know the drill, proceed at your own risk.
Smallville: 05-13, “Reckoning”
Rating: Clark’s known for quite some time that since he was given the opportunity to come back to life, the life of someone close to him would be taken. I was hoping it would be Lana and the episode started out showing such promise. As I’ve stated elsewhere, Lana’s death would destroy Lex’s one last shred of humanity and his transformation into a villian would be complete.
There’s not much I can say about this episode without spoiling it, so meet me on the inside.
Spoilers inside! Continue reading at your own risk.
Beauty and the Geek: 02-03
Rating: This week’s challenge made use of the geeks’ interior decorating skills and the beauties’ technical skills. The guys went on a Bed, Bath and Beyond shopping spree to pick up anything they’d need to decorate a bedroom. The tie for worst decorated room had to be between Josh, who did a kid’s room complete with a messy floor and a teddy bear stapled to the wall; and Wes, who dipped his finger in red paint and wrote on his dark green walls, “Time stands still when I’m with you.” Why he thought a psycho message on the wall was the way to go is beyond me. Besides Josh and Wes, most of the guys did pretty well.
The girls were asked to come in and judge each of the rooms without knowing which geek did which room. Once a winner was determined, desks and boxes of computers were brought out. The task for the beauties would be to hook up a computer, burn a CD and then play that CD on a separate CD player. When I first heard the girls were going to be building computers, I thought they were going to build one from scratch. I should have known better. Surprisingly, most of the girls did well in this task too. Some of them, of course, were pretty hopeless though. In the end, Tristin and Cher were neck and neck.
Spoilers inside! Do not continue if you don’t want to know the outcome.
Battlestar Galactica: 02-13, “Epiphanies”
Rating: Unfortunately I’m a week behind on this review, so it’s going to be short. With the lack of Pegasus plot lines and characters, this felt like an episode of BSG from the first season and made me fall in love with the show all over again.
President Roslin is sicker than ever. On her deathbed she orders the abortion of Sharon’s baby after anomalies are discovered in its blood and begins thinking back to the hours right before the Cylon attack on Caprica. She has a meeting with the President to discuss some sort of teacher’s union strike.
Spoilers inside! Don’t continue on if you haven’t seen this episode.
Stargate Atlantis: 02-13, “Critical Mass”
Rating: When Stargate Atlantis spun off into its own series, there were questions like, “Why didn’t they take any staff weapons or zats with them to Atlantis?” Atlantis seemed to be ignoring a lot of the established Stargate-verse and to the fans, that just didn’t make much sense. The reasoning as I understood it, was that the creators wanted Atlantis to hold its own. They didn’t want a Stargate newbie to tune into Atlantis and be confused by all the references to pre-discovered alien technology or enemies. The common tie between Atlantis and SG-1 was the Ancients, the builders of the gates themselves.
This resolve was somewhat broken by the 9th episode of the first season, “Home”, where the team returns to what they believe to be Earth and we see characters we’d normally see only on SG-1. Since then they’ve added an Asgard to the cast and have a method of returning home, securing the possibility for many cross overs and plot tie-ins from SG-1.
This episode put a final nail on the coffin of making Atlantis a stand-alone show. Don’t get me wrong, I thought it was great, but there’s no way someone who didn’t watch SG-1 will get the full impact of what happened.
Spoilers inside! Do not continue if you don’t want to be spoiled for this episode.
Lost: 02-12, “Fire + Water”
Rating: I truly wasn’t expecting to like an episode centered around Charlie. While I do like Dominic Monaghan as an actor (and a singer), the character he plays is a bit messed up. I don’t know if I’d say it was because of his heroin addiction, but maybe it is. He’s nice and charming and funny one minute and the next he’s giving you the evil eye and plotting against you. After last week’s disappointment, this episode was actually pretty freaking cool! It didn’t do much to solve any island mysteries, but it did open up some new ones!
Let’s jump into the meat of it. Spoilers inside! Do not continue if you haven’t seen this episode!
Stargate SG-1: 09-13, “Ripple Effect”
Rating: This week’s episode of Stargate SG-1 brought everything that last week’s did not. It was funny, had a whole bunch of scientific gobbledy-gook I didn’t understand, SG-1 worked as a team and the episode as a whole tugged at my heartstrings. Of course, any episode dealing with alternate reality versions of SG-1 promises to be good.
The SGC notices a weird power surge when the Stargate is activated off schedule. An SG-1 team dressed in black comes through the gate and during their debriefing with Landry we find reality isn’t quite as they expected. Tiny details are different, such as the planet they were visiting and the fact that Jacob and Selmak are still alive. A short while later, another SG-1 team comes through the gate and it is determined that since they arrived when they were originally scheduled and since all their details matched, that they are the “real” SG-1.
Sam thinks the other SG-1 are somehow from an alternate reality, she just needs to figure out how that’s scientifically possible with a Stargate. She pairs together with her other self for faster work. While the Sams are trying to figure out what happened, additional alternate reality teams (some SG-1, some not) pour through the gate. Gate operations are suspended and the SGC only accepts alternate reality teams trying to get through the gate who are under fire or in distress.
Continue on for more thoughts. Warning! Spoilers inside! Stop here if you haven’t seen the episode.
Smallville: 05-11, “Lockdown”
Rating: Last week’s episode may have been disappointing, but this week more than made up for it. In fact, it earned an extra half star from me because: 1) it wasn’t directly about sex and 2) it furthered the Lex/Lana ‘ship I have going on.
There are two threads running through this episode. The first focuses on Jonathan’s senate race. His newly appointed campaign manager, Lois is getting him lots of exposure. Paw Kent becomes suspicious because he knows they don’t have enough money to cover this. He learns the truth about the money’s origin and as you might imagine is none too pleased. The second thread is the primary storyline. An ex-cop holds Lex and eventually Lana captive until he knows where the spaceship from the most recent meteor shower is located.
Spoilers inside! Do not continue if you haven’t seen the episode.
