Review Roundup

The Killing: "El Diablo"- I totally missed when this show premiered last week, but given that it's on AMC, I figured it as worth watching. And it most certainly is. I love a good mystery and The Killing is delivering on that front. Yes, it's a slow burn, which is what turned me off to Rubicon, but there's something about The Killing that just feels incredibly compelling. The characters are down to earth but interesting. The show is just as much about the town's reaction to the  murder as it is solving the murder and that's a cool angle to take. My only complaint so far is the repetitiveness of the main character being told to stay longer. Hopefully, that'll be taken care of in the very near future.

How I Met Your Mother: "The Exploding Meatball Sub"- This was a very frustrating episode of How I Met Your Mother. First off, even if he was reacting to what he found out about his father last new episode, a lot of the stuff with Barney in this episode just completely invalidated every little piece of real emotion we felt from the character last week. Not only that, it also felt like it was invalidating his friendship with Marshall (and in the flashforward at the end of the episode, his friendship with everybody). They did a fantastic job with all this character stuff this season and a lot of it is just disregarded in this episode, like Lily leaving for Spain. None of the plotlines were particularly good either. Ted's storyline felt like a storyline interchangable with any of the relationship comedies that premiered this season. And the little recurring jokes and catchphrases in each episode require you to be interested in the storyline, so the 'graduation goggles' joke didn't work either.

Chuck: "Chuck vs the Family Volkoff"- Still not loving this arc. Chuck seems to be a show that stumbles a lot in the middle of arcs, so I'm hoping the show will peak up steam in the next couple of episodes (which will probably be its last, if you haven't seen the latest ratings). But the evolution of the Vivian character was just slowly increasing to the point we knew was inevitable, but at the end of this episode, she had just changed. It didn't really make a whole lot of sense. The return of Timothy Dalton was very welcome and there was some good stuff in that scene between the two of them at the end. Talking about the show in general, I do think it's time for this show to end. It's starting to feel tired and I really don't know where they would go after this season. Morgan's wedding or Sarah having a  baby? I really don't want to see either of those. And if it goes out on a cliffhanger, so be it. It feels right to have the show go out on a cliffhanger, fighting cancellation like it was its entire run.

Fringe: "Lysergic Acid Diethylamide"- In a lot of ways, this was season 3's "Brown Betty". It was partly humorous, partly retrospective, and told through a creative medium. But where as "Brown Betty" is one of my least favorite episodes of the series, "Lysergic Acid Diethylamide" was one of my favorites. Whereas in "Brown Betty", the musical stuff felt brief and half-assed, the animation of LAD was worked in very well and used in a way that was advantageous to the story. Speaking of story, another advantage this episode has over "Brown Betty" is that it actually advanced the plotline quite a bit, even if now the whole soul magnet/return of William Bell arc feels kind of pointless, I sense a parallel coming soon. But this episode was just so much fun. The Inception-style entrance into Olivia's mind to cartoon Peter, Belly, and Olivia was all just done so well. It was either a very creative idea or the best use of budget cuts ever. If this show hadn't been renewed yet, I would be extremely sad to think there were only three episodes left. But, at least for now, we have 25. What do you think about that, Peter?