Oh, I didn't dislike the angel. I just couldn't avoid thinking....you know....maybe she should whip those things out at least one time other than when she's about to make out with a mortally wounded person. The stuff with Sylar, though. Man. I just blanked most of that out of my memory. I'm kind of glad I did. Also, while I'm on the subject, put me right along in the same boat with everybody else who doesn't understand how she could possibly not have killed Sylar while choking him. It's not as though she would have had to do anything else. Killing him there would have been easy. She just had to keep doing the thing she was already doing. I actually thought we might be headed for something of a weird Gerald's Game situation when it turned out that he didn't have the key. I don't know whether that would have been better or worse, but I think I would have preferred it either way.
To be fair, I think it takes like six minutes or more to actively choke someone, but I don't know why she didn't just bash his head in after she'd incapacitated him or slit his throat. Sloppy, Lana!
I liked that before the demon nun was basically announcing to folks "I'm a demon nun!" the one person who actively resisted her influence was the nazi doctor. Already being so evil himself, it was like her powers of deception and temptation were of little use on him. I was kind of dissapointed when he failed his saving throw against her telekinesis.
So, two weeks ago. I'm kind of glad I never watched Deadwood. Instead of sitting perched on the edge of my seat waiting for him to say it, now I just get to make jokes to myself about it. I'll also give them this - I was expecting no plot movement at all in a Christmas episode, but there was actually stuff. Granted, it wasn't all good stuff, but there was at least relevant stuff. On the other hand, locking somebody in a room with a big glass panel on the door for the purposes of murder is just the writing equivalent of anal leakage, so I really hope that that wasn't a big glass panel on the door that I saw that Jessica Lange was banging on. And for a mental institution, this place has the shittiest security, with Zach Quinto sneaking in and Sarah Paulson sneaking around and a flip razor being just beyond the pale to find within the walls but a letter opener sharp enough to murder with being available at a moment's notice. Oh, and apparently the monster from the basement in Morning Glories got his start here in their tiny underground railroad. And then last week. It might have been more of a shock when TheDermott appeared if I hadn't known it was going to happen (also, do not be shocked if he shows up next year in a bigger role if he doesn't land something, which I don't think he has yet). And fuck me, it was a glass door. Jesus, show. Though, again, I'll give them credit for what they did good - the frame job has all of the elements of a good story (though I would have put it all in one episode, first to save on McShane by paying him for one episode instead of two - if you can't tell, I'm not a tremendous fan of his other material - and second for impact, since it's actually one of the few things in the show that doesn't have holes so big you could drive, like, half of these performances through. And where do mental patients get a gigantic piece of recording equipment? I'm guessing that was supposed to be Zach's, but he cleaned out his office many weeks ago. And, just a tip, it makes it extremely hard to take her seriously in the scene where Sarah is walking determinedly down the hallway with her coat hanger to murder her nemesis when you play Torgo's theme music at the same time. On a general note, I'd like to say to the HFPA that they can eat a bag of dicks, because Lily Rabe is doing precisely the same amount and kind of work as Jessica Lange last year, and I guess now we know that the only reason Jessica got nominated was because she's Jessica Lange. And then again. I still find Rabe's character bizarre and confusing, but she's doing the hell out of it, and she's one of the few elements of the show that I still like.
Naomi Grossman is a brave damn performer. Ryan Murphy has, for whatever reason, a reputation for his stable of mentally and physically disabled talent, so for her to take this as what is effectively her biggest national role to date takes a real set of Thatchers. I'm not sure that I could let somebody make me that believeably ugly. Not that I need any extra help from makeup for that, but she kind of does. On the other hand, I'm starting to lose patience here. Not only is the growing implication that there actually are aliens doing crazy crap beginning to irritate, but the idiotic visual non-sequiturs, while perhaps entertaining in their own right, only serves to who how little respect this show has for itself. You don't get to do a silly musical number, a man getting raped by a woman, a painful confession from a priest of his own failure, whatever it is that poor Frances Conroy is supposed to be doing here, and the goddamn arrow shot from the Robin Hood trailer (Kevin Costner) in the same show. Pick a thing. Be it. You managed that your first year.
Yeah it really was something. I really enjoyed the bursting into musical number, I wonder if the song is available for download anywhere?
I don't think I've ever heard the entire Name Game song. Everyone knows the core part and how to do it for their name and all the names that make for hilarious curse words (Let's do Mitch!) but somehow I never realized that like 90% of the song is the song explaining itself to the listener. Song, you are not as complicated as you think you are. Also, I love that this thread is Brian Seiler complaining about the episode, then people talking about how great it is. I liked it, but I'm concerned that they just killed off two of their big antagonists. Is the rest of the show really going to be them vs Bloodyface? There's three more to go. I guess they also have the shit in the present day to deal with, if they want to. Having Dylan McDermott show up for one episode was kind of out of nowhere. And of course there's the aliens.
D-Mac was in the scenes from next week last week, so I'm guessing he'll matter, though the weird break in the pacing makes it feel like he's been gone for a month when it's really just been a couple of episodes. That might play better in trade. And my problem with the episode wasn't that the part that people like was terrible - it's that, just like the rest of the season, the whole episode was a high pressure stream of effectively disconnected stuff. The show seems to think that you should take stuff like Lily Rabe raping the sexy priest seriously (if I'm not, that might be much worse, and super icky), but I'm not sure I can do that in the same sixty minutes in which Jessica Lange and several mental patients have a funny music video. I just want the series to find a tone and keep it. You can do that and still be funny or serious when you want (Breaking Bad, Parks and Rec, etc.), but what it's doing now feels discontinuous and difficult to connect to.
The most recent episode was pretty terrific; I still think the Name Game is the best episode of the season (if only for "I don't want to ruin it for you, but Spot jumps") but this one was pretty strong for what the show tries to do. A noir rip-off scene in a mid-century modern living room with a lesbian reporter and a serial killer psychiatrist with a flashback to necrophilia and then the (spoiler?) violent way the scene ended, that's pretty much the entire season in a nutshell: pastiche, sex, gore, lurid dialogue, blood, awesome sets, and lots of garish directoral gimmickry (the fish-eye lenses, which I didn't like, and the color changes from the police lights, which I loved). My heart was actually pounding during the scene when Lana's escaping from the asylum, and I haven't had that reaction to a TV series since the final few episodes of Battlestar Galactica, when stuff started getting crazy and you knew that anybody could die since they just didn't care any more. And Brian, the stuff you complain about is the reason I like the series in the first place. If they were to choose a tone, the whole thing would fall apart. It's all held together by the fact that it's terrible, but there's just so much of it. If they didn't just turn on a firehose of ideas, then it'd become clear that all of the ideas are pretty shallow and familiar. If they played it all straight, it'd just be ghoulish and horrible torture porn. But if they made it all camp, then none of it would be affecting. It's the only series I can think of where, when a scene starts, I have absolutely no idea of what's going to happen by the time the scene's over. And not knowing makes me nervous, because I know there's a pretty good chance I'm going to see or hear something horribly unforgettable.
Chuck, I think you summed it up perfectly. Watching this show reminds me of watching the last season of Lost, when I had pretty much given up on the show making any sense and was just enjoying the "whaaa?" moments as they came. AHS has that plus the ability to make me laugh and squirm uncomfortably at the same time ("Does it feel like a warm, wet hug?"). Lily Rabe really did own this season, and among some very strong contenders. I'm far less interested in the aliens as a season finale, but hopefully we'll have a suitably "whaaa" conclusion to the Son of Bloody Face story line.
Unfortunately, Chuck, the first season is the counterpoint to your assertion. The first season was scattershot and messy, yes, but everything eventually boiled down to a single thing from which the rest of the story blossomed. There is a magical house with ghosts in it. That's basically the opposite of what's happened this season, with entire driving plot elements appearing and disappearing at random. That's not okay. I honestly can't conceive of a way that this season ties everything up, short of an autistic alien and a snowglobe. Though, admittedly, that would be hilarious. It can't be a demon because the demon got fixed before the end of the season. The demon just happened to coincide with aliens and Nazi and cetera and cetera. It could be aliens, I guess, but there's not much of a way that it being aliens doesn't turn out to be universally shitty. For all of its faults, the first season had a sense of completeness that's just missing this year. This show would also benefit from knowing its limitations. At the point where you're inserting flashlight flares and sanding off nipples in post, you might want to reconsider your shots. There are enough networks these days on which you can have your tits out that it doesn't need to get that awkward. On the....I dunno, whatever side, I don't think that this was necessarily a bad episode, though it failed to touch on so many of the dangling threads (and why, exactly, did Pepper, whom we have established as magic, just let herself get dragged off like that?) that I have absolutely no idea at all what to expect from however many of these things are left this year. I guess that's different. Though if the final twist ends up being that D-Mac is actually Grace's baby I'll be a little disappointed. Given that the only thing that I've really come to expect this show to reliably do is not the thing that I think it will or that would make sense to any sane human being, failing to deviate from my expectations in this regard would just be the final tired squeak at the end of the long deflation that has been this season.
I think you're missing the forest for the trees here. First season was a scary house were scary things happen. Second season is an insane asylum where fucking insane things happen.
Okay, show. I'll give you credit for this. Opening and working in that shot of Kit chillin' with his ladies....I laughed at that. I think I was supposed to. At least, I hope so. And as much as I enjoyed the Kit/Alma/Grace scene at the beginning, it does make me kind of sad. That could have been so much better if this season had been more regularly about them. The episode, though, was more of this season for me. A bunch of scenes that were reasonably well done by themselves, but in aggregate were so disconnected from one another that I was left with no clue what to do with it. It's a shame, because I think that I might like the show about the man who gets framed for murder and locked up in an asylum but it was really aliens all along that did it. I think that if the season had just focused on Kit and Lana more and maybe dropped all of the demon stuff and the Nazi stuff it might have been better. For me, anyway. And, of course, now I don't know where the show goes to end things. I can see that it's sort of drifting in the direction of D-Mac and Lana having some sort of confrontation, which will somehow be mirrored with whatever it is that Kit is going to do to shut down the loony bin, but there's so much that got left behind. Like the Nazi. And the demon. And I really hope those time slips throughout the episode weren't an indication of things to come, because that might end up being legitimately bad. I dunno. It's just weird that I can appreciate the show moment-to-moment, but the whole thing rolled up together is so decidedly icky. I certainly hope that next season is at least a little bit more tightly focused. I kind of doubt that it will be (going my direction, for example, would have required not doing much with Lily Rabe - whom I might like best of all the performers - at all and putting Jessica Lange in a comparatively minor role, along with the Monsignor, and I think that part of what got Lange and him and half the people to sign up in the first place is how they all get to have their big turn in the spotlight), but I can still hope.
I am satisfied with that finale. The first season was more cohesive, but I think I liked this end more.
I really, really hope that Jessica Lange isn't back next season. I want to be able to enjoy some of these scenes without the external awareness that she's obviously mugging for another award. I mean, c'mon - the scene with the kids? Really? This is like that one joke episode of the Drew Carey Show where they courted the Emmy voters. There's also some bizarre makeup going on in this episode. Lana does a good job of aging up as necessary. Kit....not so much. I don't get it. Maybe Evan Peters is just perpetually locked at a healthy 23 or something. I'll give the series this - it handled the core well enough. That part finishes well. That part has a good middle. That part even has a reasonable start. There's a good six or seven episode series submerged in this season. And because the finale stayed almost universally in that story, I'm okay with it. The two times that it strayed (aliens and alien kid superpowers) were unfortunate, and in no way justified those pointless asides in the season, but only having two plot screwups isn't bad, and it was well shot and had a coherent enough through line that I was interested in seeing how things played out, instead of watching in stupid amazement for the next utterly ridiculous thing to happen. That's a good episode. Now the season? That's still a total mess in my book. We got no really significant payout for the aliens or the demon or the weird forest mutants, and only really the most marginal of benefits from the Nazi thing. That is something that the show can and should fix in the next season. I get that there are some elements of the show that I'm never going to like much (rotating the camera all the way around made me want to barf quite a lot, which I put in the bag of "stupid camera tricks we do" that I can live with, because...I mean, hell - the directors of these things should get something to put on their reel), but I really did like the core bit. Please, Murphalchucky - just maybe constrain yourself to only the stories that you're going to carry through the season next year, huh? Maybe if they can get Taissa Farmiga back (she's in talks) that will help out a little too.
I really wonder if the aliens started out in planning as actual angels. That whole subplot fits so much better if that replacement happens. Heck, you have the devil stalking the halls, why not allow angels as well.
We don't have a Season 3 thread yet, since the show hasn't started but! The next season will be called Coven and will take place in New Orleans.
I look forward to it, bad accents and all. Adding to enjoyment will be that every time I see or hear "Coven" I'm still unable to not hear Mark Borchardt ranting about weirdo pronunciations of it. Here's hoping that the insanity is kept full-tilt throughout the season; my main complaint with the second is that it ran out of steam a few episodes before wandering dazed across the finish line.
