Friday Night Lights—Let's Get It On

Heeding Tim's plea of last week, Lyla arrives in Mexico, much to Jason's surprise. Tim continues to wear sleeveless sweatshirts, and his arms are really distracting. Honestly, this show doesn't need a plot when Tim's arms are around. Lyla is upset and starts to leave, but Tim has a PLAN that involves a booze cruise. Nice work there, Timmy. But he figures if they take Jason out away from other folks he'll talk, which kind of makes sense. Tim's determined to stop Jason from having the procedure, so they hold an intervention on the boat. It doesn't go well, and Jason jumps off the boat into the water. Fortunately they're close to shore. Lyla and Tim catch up to him on the shore--this was a little strange because I'm not sure how they got to the truck after the boat backed up. Then again I was really distracted by Tim's arms.

Having had an epiphany in the water, Jason finally decides he won't go through the procedure, and their section ends with a drunken threesome. Okay, not quite but man, it was close. And that was even more distracting than Tim's arms. These three are breaking my heart in a good way. Tim's direct confrontation of Jason, with his heartfelt, "I love you," was such a wonderful piece of writing. I love the way Tim has been written throughout this storyline. Frank, sincere, passionate, and then at the end of almost every scene he manages to undercut himself with a throwaway line. Really well-done, both the writing and the performance. I'm almost sad they're coming back to Dillon next week, because the time in Mexico has been so involving.

At the all-important six-week post-partum date, Coach Taylor plans for some nookie but Tami's more interested in a good night's sleep. Been there, done that. Practice goes just about as well, because the team is all tense and freaked out. Matt and Smash have a bit of a dust-up. Coach MacGill gives Coach Taylor advice on his floundering sex life, which seems to make Coach want to spork his own eyes out. Baby Grace continues to be really odd-looking.

Coach follows MacGill's advice in his usual overboard kind of way. His attempts to work things out with Saracen and Smash work about as well as his attempts to get Tami into bed. And the game doesn't go so well, either, with Smash and Matt both on the bench, until they bury the hatchet and the team gels again in the second half, with Landry's help. And after the game, Tami finally perks up and decides she'd like to fool around. This was a funny sequence, and the whole subplot was made even funnier by its sheer realism. Yep, boobs like concrete. I remember that well.

Matt and Julie have an awkward conversation in the cafeteria. Landry has a nice moment here where he's still Landry. Julie asks Matt to the Decemberists. Hey, she's kinda dumb about boys but at least she has good taste in music. Matt turns her down in the end, though, and tells Julie exactly how he feels about how she treated him. Good for you, Matt. And maybe Julie will finally realize how badly she screwed up.

The police consider Tyra a person of interest in the murder case, but I think I might ignore that and pretend that whole plotline isn't even on the show. Although Tyra and Landry are kind of cute together when the other part of their story isn't in play. Anyway, Tyra breaks up with Landry per his father's demands, because Dad Clark has realized Landry's lying to him about something, and blames Tyra for it. While Landry had some great moments on tonight's show, he's still being terribly undermined by this plotline. Not going to harp about it anymore, though.

Did I mention Tim has really photogenic arms?

Supernatural—Bedtime Stories

Sam and Dean make their way to a town where fairy tales are being brought to life in all their original gory glory. Glory gory? No, I got it right the first time. On their way, they have a very impassioned conversation about the Crossroad deal, since they have distinctly different ideas about how to deal with it at this juncture. Dean yells a lot. He's hot when he's mad. They think the first attack in town might be a werewolf, but the evidence doesn't add up.

Our next victims are Hansel and Gretel with Power Bars, all lost in the woods. They find a house and a sweet little old lady with pie. Poison pie. That's just wrong. And the she gets all stabby with a big knife, which is even wronger. Sam puts two and two together and comes up with the fairy tale connection. The next victim appears to be Cinderella, and all the victims are being stalked by Snow White. All this is way creepier than it sounds. Even the sudden strong saturation of color in this normally undersaturated show is creepy.

And tonight even the commercials have a fairy tale theme.

As it turns out, Snow White is the spirit of the local doctor's comatose daughter, and he's been reading her Grimm's fairy tales. Her spirit is seeking revenge for her stepmother's having poisoned her when she was eight, putting her in the coma, and the angry spirit is lashing out through the fairy tales. The latest is Little Red Riding Hood, and Dean goes to rescue the granddaughter, since grandma has just died of Big Bad Wolf mauling in the hospital. Sam confronts the father, to stop the haunting, and is surprised when the doctor believes him--he's sensed the girl's spirit, too. While he tries to convince the doctor to listen to Callie's spirit, Dean throws down with the big bad wolf (actually a human who's being driven by Callie's spirit). Once the doctor hears his daughter's story and believes her, she passes on.

And there's still fifteen minutes to go... Hm. There was a lot of arguing about the Crossroads Demon at the beginning--want to bet we see something else about that here at the end?

Well, DUH, cause later at the hotel, Sam sneaks out and summons up a crossroads demon, who turns out to be Jared Padalecki's girlfriend Sandra McCoy, Awkward much? He threatens to kill her if she doesn't let Dean out of his deal. She plays mind games with him, telling him part of him will be relieved when Dean's gone. Killing her won't break the deal, though--there's a higher power who holds the contract. She won't tell him who the boss is, so he kills her. Ooo, they'll be having fun dinner conversation about that for months. "Honey, remember that time you shot me in the head and my eyes went all glowy and you could see my skull through my face? That was fun, wasn't it?"

This was a solid episode, though the framing for the Crossroads Demon sequence was a little blatant. Still, Dean looks hot when he yells and Sam looks hot when he shoots demons, so it's all good. And what is up with Sam shooting the demons? Good that the demons are dead, but the human hosts go down with them and that's been a bit of a moral quandary for him in the past. Doesn't seem to be bothering him much now. I'm really intrigued about what the writers are thinking about what's going on inside Sam's head these days.

Another interesting note--the Colt is not the same gun anymore, and the Crossroads Demon knew Ruby not as a compatriot but as a pain in her ass. More intriguing bits of information that I hope will play out in the future.

Bones—The Mummy in the Maze

Tonight, Bones has its first Halloween episode. It opens at a corn maze. I hate corn mazes. Poor little kid lost in the corn maze. And he finds an actual dead dessicated body, which makes it all even worse. Looking for the body, Booth and Bones and the coroner all get lost. Seems like if they find a dead body in a corn maze they could probably get permission to just doze down the maze to get to the body. Which Booth finally does with his body, which is kind of hot.

The body proves to have been actually mummified, with lacquer and cedar oil. Then another body is found at an amusement park, in a haunted house, just past the killer clown. The clown makes Booth squeal like a girl. The details of the deaths are extra gross tonight and involve tarantulas. Ew. Thanks to many disparate pieces put together by the Squint Squad, Booth and Bones are able to save the final victim from the killer clown. No, seriously.

Jack and Angela consult a private investigator (Azura Skye, who was the argot-afflicted Russian patient on last week's House). She finds out all kinds of interesting things about Angela. And she's found the ex-husband in the Florida Keys. He doesn't want a divorce, and he built Angela a house.

The highlight of the episode is the costume party, although it was really kind of disturbing how hot Boreanaz was done up like a geek. The private investigator was quite amusing in her attempts to be sure Angela really wanted to be with Jack and not with the apparently ridiculously good-looking and still-devoted ex-husband (although one must wonder how much of that she made up as part of her "test"). And the Halloween costumes were great. Overall, another solid outing.

Heroes—The Line

I think it's safe to say a show has entered a sophomore slump, at least for me, when I find myself more interested in playing Tetris than paying attention. Last night's episode did very little for me other than to annoy me. Mr. Bennet had some intense moments, but I'm not sure I buy his extreme measures--it's like he's a Company man again, but working against the Company, and I know that's the point, but it feels out of character to me. The Maya/Alejandro/Sylar thing is doing nothing for me, nor is Hiro/Yaeko/Kensei. Mohinder is being a bit of a dumbass, in my opinion, although he's been kind of hot lately. And Claire and West? Still not working for me. The prank on Debbie was mean, even though she kind of deserved it, but Debbie seemed really over the top as a character.

Anyway, going lukewarm on this show right now, and really hoping it picks up again soon.

Reaper

I've just spent a lazy Sunday afternoon catching up with Reaper, and I think this show has emerged as my favorite of the new fall series. When he turns 21, Sam (Bret Harrison) discover his parents sold his soul to the devil before he was born, so now he has to work as a bounty hunter for Satan for the rest of his life. His job is to return escaped souls to hell where they belong. With the aid of his friends, Sock (Tyler Labine) and Ben (Rick Gonzalez), he uses various devices as "vessels"--a Dirt Devil, a remote control car, a toaster--to bring back the demons based on often obscure clues from Satan (Ray Wise). Also in the cast are familiar faces Missy Peregrym (Heroes) as Andi, Sam's unrequited love interest, and Valarie Rae Miller (Dark Angel), Sock's ex-girlfriend and often unwitting accomplice. The premise is quirky, the execution even quirkier, and the show overall funny, entertaining, and not stodgy or predictable.

Ratings for Reaper have been fairly solid for the CW so far. It seems to me that it might be a good programming move for the CW to pair it up with Supernatural next season, since Smallville will reportedly be coming to a close.

The soundtrack is cool, too. Here--have some songs:

Lazy Eye—Silversun Pickups (Episode One)



The Bravery—Believe (Episode Two)



The Perfect Crime #2—The Decemberists (Episode Three)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Omnibus—Volume One

In the wake of the arrival and consequent crazy-good sales of Buffy: Season Eight in comic book form, Dark Horse Comics is now re-releasing the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics in trade paperback format. I'm glad they're doing this, because the original comics are a bit hard to track down now, and buying all the paperback compilations is expensive, plus not all the comics were rereleased in this form.

The other thing I really like about the new compilations is that they're not in publication order, but in chronological order. The original Buffy comics jumped around on the timeline, with some set pre-series, and others set during various seasons of the show, in somewhat random order. In these new omnibus editions, the comics have been reordered to fit the series timeline.

Volume One consists entirely of pre-series stories, some of which I had read and some of which I hadn't. All of them are solid stories, and I enjoyed the book quite a lot.

The book starts off with All's Fair, a Spike and Dru series set during the 1933 World's Fair. It's an enjoyable story, but I found it to be the weakest of the set. The next series is the strongest. Buffy: The Origin is an adaptation of Joss Whedon's original script for the Buffy movie--i.e., this is what the movie would have looked like if studio suits and egomaniacal actors hadn't stuck their fingers in the pie. The Origin leads directly into Viva Las Buffy!, in which Buffy fights vampires in Las Vegas with Pike, her boyfriend from the original movie. This series and Slayer, Interrupted, in which Buffy ends up in a mental institution, fill in a good bit of the timeline between the movie storyline and the story that picks up with the pilot of the TV series. Also included is backstory on Giles, with a much-appreciated cameo from Wesley Wyndam-Pryce. Sandwiched between these two stories is the one-shot Dawn and Hoopy the Bear, in which an attempt to kill the Slayer affects her little sister, instead. Her arguably non-existent in this time-frame little sister.

The inclusion of Dawn in these comic sets was a conscious decision by the writers, since Season Four through Seven canon includes the character not only in the present but also in the other characters' manufactured pasts. It makes sense given when these comics were written, so I don't have a problem with it, but it'll make your head explode if you think about it too much.

Overall, this is a very enjoyable read, and I plan to follow this series as it's made available. Volume Two is already out--Borders here I come! With coupons, of course.

Preorder