Not only did I not catch HBO's Sunday lineup and crash early Monday, but I didn't get a chance to watch anything Tuesday night at all. I blame the government. So I'm going to be playing catch up all week. The Riches, Gilmore Girls, Veronica Mars, and The Shield after the jump.
The Riches: Returning from the funeral, Hugh is flipping out over his missing money, and Wayne's been missing for two days, making him the prime suspect. To avoid suspicion, he says he was gone recruiting a rich investor. So the Malloys go looking for a mark. And they find one in an ex-baseball player/ex-con. Hookers, fast cars, statutory rape, and a sex addict. Cael thinks this guy is the greatest guy ever. Dahlia goes undercover at a sex addict support group with him ("Well the co-pilot was there too"). It takes... oh, about a half a second to hook the guy in ("Good thing I'm ambidextrous!") by playing to his addiction. Very sensitive.
They convince him that Wayne is Dahlia's ex, and that he's about to close a huge business deal that'll make him "richer than God," and he falls for it in a second. The one problem being that they need extra people to pull off the con, so they have to recruit some amateurs who make the whole situation extra stressful, but they pull the con off without a hitch. They managed to steal $500,000, but they're giving it all to PanCo.
In the end, when Wayne says next time they should keep the money and run, he and Dahlia come to the scary realization that they can't run, that they've settled in as the Riches and this is their home now. Best Wayne moment: "You know when you keep something in a hedge? Well, imagine a fund... hedge... uh...."
Gilmore Girls: The season finale isn't far away, and it sounds like it'll be aired before anyone knows the fate of the show, which sucks. It's always best for a show to know it's going to be canceled ahead of time so they can wrap things up nicely. Anyway, on to the show. They totally fooled me with a dream intro, showing Rory in a Chilton uniform made me think I was watching a rerun. Rory's freaking out about her future, having passed on a great job to hold out for a New York Times internship, and the Times later turning her down. I love that Rory had a birthday party at the Mark Twain house, since I didn't grow up too far from Hartford, and as a kid, that was the only museum type place that I thought was cool.
Lane's kids have some sort of lullaby thing playing a little baby version of "Boys Don't Cry," which is very cool in a Lane sort of way. Zack got a gig with some band touring over the summer, and they've agreed to take him and Lane and the kids. But Lane realizes she can't go, with two babies. But even though Zack wants to bail entirely, she insists that he go.
Lorelai takes Rory to a karaoke bar to cheer her up, and after a pretty awesome Culture Club cover by Kirk, Lorelai takes the mic to sing for Rory's gradutation, doing a pretty darn good rendition of "I Will Always Love You." So naturally, Luke walks in mid-song, and it takes on a whole new meaning. They're really laying it on thick lately. Perhaps my favorite moment of Luke and Lorelai's relationship happened in this episode, involving Luke's hat. Lorelai was all excited because she had given him a blue hat, which he hadn't worn since they broke up, but suddenly he was wearing it again. She thought this was a really big sign and was all excited, but in the end, we learn that Luke had dropped his other hat in the dishwasher.
We end on a cliffhanger as Logan gets a job in San Francisco, and asks for Lorelai's permission to propose to Rory. She looks horrified and the credits kick in before she gives an answer. I didn't care for the cliffhanger, but it was a pretty good episode. It's definitely past its prime, but the show's been a lot better lately than it has been the previous year and a half or so.
Veronica Mars: Finally, it's back! A local restaurant owned by Arabs is vandalized, and the owner comes to Mars Investigations to hire Keith, but since he's busy getting his sheriff on, Veronica takes the case. She not only catches the vandal, but she helps the father learn about his daughter's Jewish boyfriend and learn to accept it and get a disturbingly anti-American immigrant deported.
A 19 year old got loaded at a bar owned by Rescue Me's Chief Jerry (Jack McGee), walked outside, and got hit by a car. He had a bad fake I.D., but Chief Jerry doesn't even really care, so Keith is trying to crack down on ID checking. But his deputies mysteriously turn up nothing. Keith visits Chief Jerry's bar again, and finds Wallace and Piz there, checks their IDs, and immediately recognizes Veronica's handiwork (she hooked them up in exchange for them testing drinks for roofies at the frat party a while back). So he gets them to go to a bar with really awful fake IDs (John Bon Jovi and Biggie Smalls) to check on the Deputies, and cans the ones who don't catch it.
A bunch of relationship-y stuff happens later on. Logan's throwing a party for Parker, and Veronica has to act like a grownup and pretend to be over everything and go and be happy. Logan seems really happy though which makes her feel worse and feel even more guilty for feeling bad. Mac's still with Bronson, but it sounds like things are not all that great. She ends up on a couch at the party with Max, the test-selling hooker-loving geek we've seen a few times this year, and they seem to hit it off. Finally, Piz grows some cajones and makes a move on Veronica, which shouldn't have worked but did. It felt forced and stupid.
A fairly interesting case and the usual dose of wit and Lebowski references made it an ok episode, but I'm hoping for a little more for the rest of what hopefully isn't the last season.
The Shield: Gardocki shaved! Just one of several shocking moments this week.
Colette puts strike team on the machete massacre earlier in the season. Hyatt takes the lead and other new guy Julien is helping out. He's got a lot to learn about the strike team, and Vic isn't a great teacher but Hyatt is an excellent mediator, knowing both Vic and Julien's point of view. Dutch can't keep his mouth shut about Hernan, and spills the beans to Hyatt. They head out to Hernan, who tells them not only that the machete murders weren't Salvadoran, but that Guardo didn't kill Lem.
Vendrell gets the crap kicked out of him, and now that Heist is canceled, Mara is back. He got jumped because of Tilly, and Mara finds out and pitches a fit. With the guilt he's carrying, he doesn't care much about the beating or Mara, but Tilly calls his cell and Mara answers, so she kicks him out. He goes on a bender snorting ground up Oxycontin (can you do that? I'm drug-ignorant), and wanders back home, confessing to Mara that he killed Lem, in what would've been an awesome surprise had they not put "I killed Lem!" as the first three words of the commercials that ran during The Riches (thanks, FX!)
Dutch is still on the rape, and a concerned father shows up. Or is he a concerned father? The second he showed up, I thought he might be the guy, and Billings gets the same idea shortly after. They come up with a B.S. excuse to talk to him in interrogation, and one of the victims IDs his voice. He claims to have done it to generate publicity about runaways in the hopes of getting his own daughter's case re-opened. Or something. He was creepy. And he molested his own daughter, just to make it that much weirder. And thanks to the press coverage, he finds out that his daughter's dead.
Carl Weathers makes a return appearance, offering Vic a little off-the-books work that may be a preview of his life after retirement. Since Arrested Development, I have a hard time taking Carl Weathers seriously. I keep expecting him to say "Baby we got a stew going." It wasn't a very important storyline, except I think to make Vic appreciate his job a little more, and to provide a little dark comedy with Weathers' partner's incredibly gross treatment of drug dealers.
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
Catching Up
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Tuesday Night TV
Sweet, my sources (in the form of a commercial on the CW) inform me that Veronica Mars returns from hiatus next week. Gilmore Girls, House, and The Shield after the jump.
Gilmore Girls: Lorelai goes back into Luke's and it's awkward. Her jeep is pronounced doorknobs (as in "dead as a..."), so she has to bike to work and look for a new car. But this turns out to be a good excuse to try to reconnect with Luke since he knows cars and she doesn't. And she drives her kinda nuts with her car shopping technique, but in a way that finally gets them past their polite awkwardness. And they really do share some nice moments.
Jackson crashes with her cause he's never had the chicken pox and his kids have it. Sookie seems convinced that he will drive her nuts. And he ends up somehow killing Lorelai's doll house. In addition to that sucking, Sookie still hasn't forgiven Jackson for his deceitful non-vasectomy. But this little tragedy finally gets them talking about it, and they seem to be on their way to getting past it.
Paris gets into all her law/med school choices and freaks out twice. Once in celebration, and then in a very negative "what am I going to do?" manner. And she dumps Doyle as part of her second freak out, wanting to make sure she doesn't make her grad school choice based on him. This starts a whole career vs. relationship thing that at least starts the audience questioning whether Rory and Logan will work out. But like every other storyline this episode, it ends up bringing them closer together as Doyle decides he will be the one to sacrifice and will follow Paris anywhere. And in the last scene, Rory gets her rejection letter from the New York Times internship she was hoping for.
A few funny parts, a little bit of Kirk, which is always my favorite, and the story was kinda nice. One of the better episodes of the season.
House: A three-card monte shill suffers from Aboulia, the inability to exercise will. A crack pipe sends them down the drugs/toxicity road, but that's a dead end. Foreman's new theory is lymphomatoid granulomatosis. So they give her radiation targeted at her immune system, but it turns out she has an infection, and they just destroyed her ability to fight it off. Foreman took the lead on this particular case, and takes the whole basically killing this woman thing pretty hard. I can't say I find any characters besides House, Cuddy, and Wilson all that interesting, so a Foreman-centric episode is kinda dull to me.
Mel from Frasier plays Wilson's ex-wife (#2), who, along with the budding Wilson/Cuddy relationship/friendship, gets a whole thing started where House may want to sabotage them or feel guilty about ruining Wilson's previous relationships with his... unique personality traits. Despite involving my three favorite characters, I am not enjoying this arc and I'd kinda like to see it end, especially since it takes away from House's time ridiculing patients and coworkers.
The Shield: Vic's replacement, Kevin Hyatt, arrives. Claudette tells Vic she wants to expand the strike team and will try to keep him on, but that was just a lie to get Vic to behave for his last few weeks. Vendrell's still feeling guilty over Lem and lashes out at the new guy, which jeopardizes Vic's imaginary chances at sticking around. But with Vic on his best behavior, Hyatt's actually impressed with the way he works.
Dutch and Billings catch a rape case. Billings' inappropriateness just keeps getting funnier ("I love the smell of underage sexual assault in the morning... I didn't mean that the way it came out."), which is difficult considering how nasty the rape case is. She was drugged and raped, but sometime before had "Go Home" carved into her stomach. Two more victims leave them with a serial rapist on their hands, and he's getting more violent with each victim.
The pile of bodies from the season premiere finally comes back up. A contact of Acevedo's says it's from a new Salvadoran gang and he gets the case reassigned to to the barn, since Hyatt comes from INS and might be best equipped to handle the case. The slow moving nature of this story probably means it'll last the whole season, and possibly into next.
Danny's back on duty and looks out of shape, taking Tina's place because she transferred out to be the "new face" of the cops, with her face up all over posters, or possibly to get away from Dutch's advances. And for the first time this season, Julien has a significant story development, with him being added to the New and Improved Strike Team(tm) starting next week.
The 19ers have a small faction who want out of the gang life, and all it does is make them targets. Vic makes it his mission to take care of these kids, somehow identifying it with a dream Corrine has about Lem. He almost manages to save the leader, but he dies when they get to the hospital. Vic loses it in a wall-punching, chair-throwing meltdown in front of the strike team, the new guy, and Claudette. I wasn't buying into the whole Corrine dream thing, but Vic's meltdown was really well done and left the episode off on a great, if heartbreaking, note.
Sunday, April 22, 2007
Lots of Catching Up
Almost caught up, I'll probably manage to just catch up in time to fall behind again Sunday night. Past the jump are my thoughts on last week's Gilmore Girls, House, The Shield, the last two weeks of Penn & Teller: Bullshit, and some Acceptable TV clips from the past two episodes.
Gilmore Girls: Logan is crashing with Rory and Paris since he's all no longer living off his father. Rory interviews with the Providence Journal, and she's feeling all grown up businesswoman-y, but as soon as the interview high fades, she starts stressing over getting the job. Then when she ends up getting it, she's stressing over whether to take it or not. After a Logan/Lorelai heart to heart, and then a Logan/Rory heart to heart, she decides to pass to go after her dream internship at the New York Times.
Logan and Rory come home to Stars Hollow for the Spring Fling. Maybe I'm crazy, but a hay bale maze actually sounds fun. I raced my brother through a real live maze (made of wood rather than hay bales) once in Ft. Worth, Texas, and a good time was had by all. Except that I lost. But while people seem to enjoy the Stars Hollow maze, it's mostly there for a cheesy metaphor for Luke and Lorelai to get lost but then find each other. 
Any episode with Kirk wearing a giant minotaur head and stilts has to be pretty good (if only he could've done both at the same time) and I'm glad that we're finally making progress towards the inevitable reunion of Luke and Lorelai.
House: Hey, Carla Gallo from Undeclared, and that guy from Grandma's Boy and Art School Confidential. And I love a good Casablanca reference.
So a little girl has JRA, they think, meaning her immune system is attacking her joints and eyes and other stuff. Then she has a stroke. This means her blood is too thick, which actually caused the JRA symptoms, but they don't know why. An inspection of their house reveals some bloody clothing, so they suspect abuse, perform an exam, and find a series of cuts in her genital area. This is turning disturbing like an SVU episode. Then they figure out that she's somehow hit puberty.
The sick girl's brother has a crush on Cameron, and she seems to be using his affections to mess with Chase, which is kinda bitchy. But the crush turns out to from the same early onset puberty. And in the end, it all turns out to be cause of their father's "male enhancement" cream. If that could seriously cause something like this, how is it even legal?
House's clinic hours were pretty useless this week, despite that guy's cameo, but there was a pretty funny side story about Wilson and Cuddy, and I love that House watches wrestling. It's sorta like his soap operas, except homo erotic. With the exception of House messing with Wilson, the episode was pretty lame, I thought. Probably the least interesting of the season.
The Shield: Dutch and Billings catch a robbery/murder with some guys boosting ephedrine from a pharmacy. Billings says they make a good team, that his strengths are Dutch's weaknesses, and accuses Dutch of both arrogance and insecurity (and he does manage to show both pretty frequently). Dutch manages to ditch the pharmacy case onto the strike team (or just Gardocki, who doesn't have a personal day available to go help kill Guardo) because he wants back on Lem's murder. He floats the name of a guy named Hernan, who sounds all super scary, but it turns out that Hernan is an undercover Fed. But for now, Dutch is stuck babysitting the case. The same people hit a second pharmacy, and I think the pharmacy manager was the secretary from Andy Barker, P.I..
Officer Tina, who's been under Dutch's tutelage for a while, practically has an orgasm when she sees Gardocki knock a suspect around. And then later when the bust a related drug ring, she roughs a guy up herself, and then almost jumps Gardocki. She still seems to stick with the detective lessons from Dutch, but when he brings her over to check out his case library, she seems to be on to the fact that he just wants in her pants. 
Guardo calls in about the kidnapping, and Vic threatens to rape and kill the girl over the phone while Guardo listening. I'm not sure it's just a threat, either. They arrange an exchange, but Guardo still thinks it's a ransom, so he's worried about protecting the money, while Vic is just planning to blow in and kill the guy. When Vendrell brings the kidnapped girlfriend back home, she says she's pregnant. So now by killing Lem he's also going to orphan an unborn child. He really can't handle the guilt, and when they abduct Guardo, Vendrell looks like he's just barely going to talk Vic out of killing the guy, but then Vic turns around and shoots him.
And the episode wraps up with news that Claudette has found a new strike team guy. Not a new addition, but Vic's replacement for when he retires in a month. Another good episode. A bigger role than usual for Billings and Gardocki, which is nice, but whatever happened to that murder scene they found in the season premiere? It seemed like that was going to be the season's big investigation, but then completely disappeared. Also, Danny and Julien seem to be relgated to background characters this year. But it's all ok, because the Lem/Guardo/Kavanaugh stuff has been very entertaining.
Acceptable TV: I was an entire week behind, so I checked out last week's stuff on the website as well as this week's content. Both were fairly weak, but Operation Kitten Calendar 3 last week and The Highfiver this week were both good.
Penn & Teller: Bullshit: Oh boy, the circumcision episode a while back was the grossest thing I've ever seen, but this was a close second. The theme two weeks ago was the detoxification movement, so they showed us someone actually getting a colonic, with the little clumps of crap coming out. Nasty. The look on the guy's face was priceless, though. You could tell he immediately regretted the decision to go in there. But the episode ran with the idea that we've seen quite a few times in the series: don't take medical advice from anyone but a doctor. Especially if they're telling you to buy $43 cans of maple syrup or charging you to stick stuff up your ass.
The second episode was about demonic possession and exorcism and stuff. This touched on an issue that's always bugged me. What kind of an idiot would worship Satan? Believing in the Christian devil means you also believe in the all powerful and benevolent god of Christianity who offers eternal life in paradise in exchange for faith and being sorry when you screw up, so they decide to go with the one who offers eternal torture. Sure. The guy with his pendulum that answers questions about demons was hilarious. I feel awful for those people that buy into this stuff though. I felt worse when we learned that one exorcist is a public school teacher, and that another tells kids that their imaginary friends are demons.
And now I'm left with only Entourage, The Sopranos, two Jerichos, and Smallville to watch.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Tuesday Night TV
April's a television lull... Gilmore Girls, the Law & Orders, and Veronica Mars are all off, so it's just House and The Shield tonight. Spoilers for last night's episodes past the jump:
House: Two cases running in parallel this week: Old lady gone wild is about to get down to business with a hooker when she passes out, and House and Cuddy try to stop a quickly spreading illness on a plane.
On the flight, people are puking all over the place. I've seen Airplane! about a thousand times, so my immediate thought is that it's the fish, and they'd better find someone who knows how to fly a plane. And look out, House agrees with me! Sadly, the pilots had the chicken or something, so House and Cuddy don't get to play Striker and Elaine (yes, I'm going to keep making Airplane! jokes). But the fish theory goes out the window pretty quickly, and they're leaning towards meningococcus, which is bad news.
Back at the hospital (it's a big building with patients, but that's not important right now), with House gone it's up to Wilson to treat our crazy old lady (who may or may not speak jive). The hooker brought her in, and since they've been telling everyone they're friends, our prostitute keeps getting guilted into hanging around. We get our usual dose of only partially intelligible medical jargon, and eventually just as about they're about to cut into the old lady's brain, they discover that her neighbor's house was being fumigated, and there was a vent pumping poison into her home.
On the plane (a big pretty white plane with red stripes, curtains in the windows and wheels and it just looks like a big Tylenol), House figures out that everyone conversion sydrome, a totally fun non-disease, except for the original patient, who's really sick. House's theory is that he's a drug mule with a burst condom full of heroin inside him. Since they flew out of Singapore, that would make this guy pretty stupid, as they have especially harsh drug laws there, with possession of more than a half ounce of heroin leading to mandatory capital punishment. Also, I think House is secretly upset that all that good smack is being wasted on this guy's instestines. But just as he's about to cut in to search for the drug-filled condom, House picks up on another symptom and determines that he has the bends.
And we wrap things up with House asking the hot stewardess if she's "handicap accessible," Wilson asking out the prostitute who he doesn't know is a prostitute, and Cameron dumping Chase because he likes her too much.
Cool episode. I liked the two cases running side by side, House was amusing as ever, and we're (hopefully) getting to the end of the Chase/Cameron relationship drama while possibly starting up a much cooler one between Wilson and a "lady of the night."
The Shield: All sorts of stuff going on in the opening few minutes. The evidence Kavanaugh plants gets them a warrant for Vic's arrest, and Vic finds out that Guardo's hiding in Mexico. Claudette's been captain for about ten minutes, but according to Acevedo she's getting screwed by neighboring districts. Plus, a Mexican jail is releasing tons of prisoners who are likely headed to Farmington. 
Dutch and Kavanaugh, still waiting for Vic, interrogate Vendrell. He helps plant the idea in Dutch's head that Vic's being framed. Dutch namedrops Occam's Razor and Chatton's Anti-Razor (I'm on fire with the informative wikipedia links tonight) to the lovely Officer Tina, and begins to investigate conspiracy theories. But of course Kavanaugh gets wind of it and tries to get Dutch off the case. Dutch and Claudette, though, are starting to piece together what Kavanaugh's up to. They bring Emolia into interrogation without Kavanaugh present, and break her in a hurry, forcing Kavanaugh to confess. He tried playing Vic's game, but he obviously isn't very good at it.
After Vic spends the whole episode hiding from cops and on a wild goose chase to do a favor that'll get him Guardo, he decides to just abduct his girlfriend and get Guardo to come to LA to pay a ransom. Vic's hard core quest for revenge has Vendrell feeling even guiltier, since he knows they're chasing down an innocent (in this case) guy, and pursuing him so strongly that they're putting themselves at risk.
Random other happenings: Danny passed the Sergeant's exam, but will have to sit on a waiting list for an open position if she doesn't come back from maternity leave right away... and does Kenny Johnson get paid every time he appears as Lem in the previouslies? Cause I suspect that he'll be in them all season long.
Now that I'm pretty sure the Kavanaugh storyline's done, I think we'll get a little more focus the nasty murder that popped up last week and was only mentioned in passing tonight. But for now, Vic's only concern is finding Guardo. "Every second he gets to breathe and Lem doesn't is unacceptable." Not as good an episode as last week, but still pretty intense.
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
Tuesday Night TV
Great to have The Shield back. Highlight for spoilers:
- Law & Order: Criminal Intent: A doctor who performs cochlear implants turns up dead, and deaf groups angry at the whole concept are the chief suspects. An interesting idea, and I have no idea if it's true, that deaf people would find cochlear implants offensive. But not a very good mystery. I expect better from a Goren & Eames episode.
The victim's redhead wife was quite the looker though. Shockingly, they showed an extreme closeup of a text message sent to Eames, but didn't show any kind of brand or service provider or anything. - Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: A suburban girl drinks herself to death at a party in the city, and all the kids at the party take off to avoid trouble rather than try to help her.
They try to charge the kids who were at the party, but can only get them on trespassing. But the kids kept getting into trouble. The kid who plays Silas on Weeds showed up early on but wasn't one of the ones charged, though he was chummy with them, so you knew he had to be important. And the nice, nerdy girl, played by Sarah Drew (I guess from Everwood, which I never watched, but I remember her as Jaye's clone girl from an episode of Wonderfalls), who tutors him is in for a surprise when she and the cops find out that her mother is doing Silas.
The death of the girl early on becomes completely irrelevant, and the story is all over the place. Silas' character gets in a drunk driving wreck, killing himself and another girl. The nerdy girl is secretly an alcoholic. They use that to get her to turn on her mom. But it all wraps up with the slutty mom confessing for everything and wrapping things up.
I liked that they called back to Stabler getting his daughter off on the DUI charge. That always bugged me, and I'm glad he now sees it as a mistake. The special message at the end seemed a little hokey though. I guess if it clues in some parents then that's great, but as a non-parent, it just looks goofy to me. And of course, I reprint it here, because the purpose of this blog is not to kill time or vent my pop cultural ramblings, but to save the lives of children.
Random aside: the memorial service was pretty funny. "I can't believe I'll never play lacrosse with him again. The team will never take state now." Touching, dude. - The Shield: I missed the hell out of this show... but in the time (I think a full year) since the last episode, I forgot all about where we left off. The previouslies caught me up mostly, I think.
Kavanaugh and Dutch are working Lem's murder together. Kavanaugh feels guilty for providing Vic (so he thinks) with a motive to kill Lem, so he gets pretty desperate, and starts pulling the same stunts Vic pulls, breaking the rules to take down someone he knows is guilty.
Speaking of guilt, Vendrell finds out he killed Lem based on bogus information. As a result, he's getting kinda reckless. Vic's still being pushed towards retirement, and is hard on Shane, figuring if he has to retire, Shane's the one left to do Vic's work.
Random thoughts:- CCH Pounder is really awesome on this show. She's got an incredibly commanding presence without being hammy at all.
- Good to see the lovely Officer Tina back, and Dutch's hilarious ploy to get in her pants via detective training.
- Dick 'N' Granny
- "I got leftovers older than you." "Yeah, but not as tasty."
- The press calls Lem dirty, which seriously pisses Vic off. I mean, he's normally pretty angry, but this is crazy pissed.
- Danny had her baby. I guess with many of them being sorta pudgy and bald, the baby's resemblance to Vic isn't surprising.
- But wow, cat fight between Danny and Corrine.
- At the end there was one of the nastier crime scenes I've ever seen on tv.
Still to watch: House.
