It's time once again for the Tuesday TV Touchbase where I'm So Glad My Suffering Amuses You answers the question that grips America every week, "What the hell is Dave-El watching on TV?"
It's season finale week here on the ol' touchbase!
Stargirl
Season one of Stargirl ends as one expected it would with Courtney and her motley crew of super heroes emerging victorious over the Injustice Society of America. But life is as much about the journey as the destination, as they say.
The ISA has a doohickey that will mind wipe about half of the United States and during this mental down time, the ISA will upload their manifesto to these mind wiped Americans calling for...
Universal Health Care?
Wait! What? The bad guys want to do do... what?
As Rick (Hourman) asks, "Are we on the right side here?"
Surprisingly progressive agenda aside, the ISA is intending a massive mind wipe of people's free will with a process that has about a 25% chance of killing people.
A big honking dish thing has popped out of the Blue Valley High School football field and all the adults in Blue Valley are now mental zombies as the process begins.
So, yeah, this needs to stop.
Oh no! It's Stargirl vs. S.T.R.I.P.E. when the ISA mind wiper wipes Pat Dugan's mind. In an effort to break Pat of his mind control, Courtney says she's Pat's daughter. Awwww!
Rick finally gets to confront Solomon Grundy, the massive man monster who killed Rick's parents. Rick turns on his hour of power and starts pounding away on Grundy only to discover Grundy is not a hulking mass of evil but a wounded and abused animal. Originally determined to kill Grundy, Rick instead shoos him away as Solomon shambles off.
Meanwhile, Yolanda (Wildcat) who earlier tells Rick that killing isn't the answer has a head to head match up with Brainwave. A sharp claw strike to the jugular vein is more than a match for Brainwave's mental hocus pocus as he bleeds to death.
The ISA's plan to mind wipe half of the USA goes down when Courtney uses the cosmic staff to blast the big honking dish thing to rubble.
Icicle has gone after Barbara, Courtney's mom, as the ISA plan is thwarted. It's Stargirl to the rescue but it's step brother Mike who saves the day with Pat's pick up truck. The Icicle in his frozen form is no match for an American made classic pick up truck, smashing Icicle into little ice cubes.
So Stargirl and her Justice Society have defeated the ISA and saved humanity from mind control, death and, apparently also, Universal Health Care?
The season ends with an extended epilogue. The Shade, an ISA member who was absent from the shenanigans in Blue Valley, is getting ready to do... something. Uber bitch Cindy Burman who killed her dear old dad Dragon King (probably not dead-dead) has located the black diamond of Eclipso.
New threats are a brewin'.
The episode ends as the series begin. It's Christmas as Stargirl and S.T.R.I.P.E. pose dramatically with an American flag flapping in the breeze on top of the Blue Valley water tower and then fly off into the horizon with a fade out to a title card dedicating this to the memory of Courtney Johns, the sister of series creator Geoff Johns who served as the inspiration for Courtney Whitmore.
But we're not done.
Los Angeles, CA. At the former apartment of Pat Dugan,someone has come looking for Pat.
That someone is Sylvester Pemberton.
You know, the former Starman who was killed at the start of episode 1.
Well, what the hell?
Stargirl is hardly ground breaking television but it is a solid super hero show with good character building and an energized group of young heroes. I enjoyed Season 1 and look forward to season 2.
The Alienist: Angel of Darkness
For a show with "The Alienist" in the title, the titular alienist in question, Laszlo Kreizler, is mostly a supporting character. Lazlo meets Karen Stratten who is an alienist as well (and perhaps a smarter, better alienist) and also (shudder!) a woman which leaves Lazlo all twitterpated. No worries: Karen does not get killed like poor Mary did in season 1. No, she's going to Vienna to work with Sigmund Freud so.. still tragic?
Speaking of romantic entanglements, John Moore is engaged to be married but not to Sara Howard who he is still in love with. No, the woman to whom he is to be betrothed is Violet, the god daughter of William Randolph Hearst. Sara/John shippers do get a sex scene in the second season so there's that going for us.
The main narrative follows Sara Howard, formerly with the New York City police and now a private detective in 1897 New York. A woman running her own business in an era where women do not even have the right to vote? Who does she think she is?
Hearst has no compunction against depicting Miss Howard's adventures in his newspaper as an oddity and an affront to the norms of society. Thomas F. Byrnes, retired police chief who fills his days and his pockets doing clean up work for society's rich and powerful, has little regard for the norm defying Miss Howard or her friends such as Dr. Kreizler.
Meanwhile, Sara has a madwoman to catch.
Sara has successfully extricated the Lenares baby from the clutches of Libby Hatch. But Hatch has escaped and targeted another infant for her deluded obsession. This time, she's taken a baby belonging to the powerful Vanderbilt family. Cornelius Vanderbilt, more concerned with results than the objections of Hearst and Byrnes, is aware of Sara Howard's success with the rescue of the Lenares baby and hires Sara to recover his grandchild.
Sara, Lazlo and John are able to retrieve the Vanderbilt baby but Libby has a new target.
It seems that Libby's descent into madness began when she became pregnant out of wedlock and Libby's mother did not have the time or patience to deal with this shit. So she faked being attacked and had Libby committed and her baby taken away to be placed in foster care. Libby knows the child is at Laszlo Kreizler's institute and goes to retrieve her. Lucius and Marcus Isaacson are on guard duty and sadly one will not survive as Libby Hatches steals the child. I liked the Isaacson twins but I always felt that one or both of them were on borrowed time in this brutal world of 1897 New York.
Sara captures Libby and safely retrieves her daughter. Libby Hatch has a lot of blood on her hands but even hard bitten Byrnes recognizes that Libby for all her crimes is a broken person. The season ends with Libby Hatch is a prison cell. It isn't clear but the insinuation is that the same electric chair that took Martha Napp in episode one is awaiting Libby.
Laszlo Kreizler decides to follow Karen Stratten to Vienna. For all his training in the ways of the human mind, when it comes to love and women, Lazlo's still pretty much a puppy dog.
Sara Howard still can't bring herself to tell John Moore she loves him even though it's bloody obvious to everyone else. Even psychopathic murderer Libby Hatch could see it. But it is a moot point as John tells Sara he cannot break his engagement to Violet due to her delicate condition. Yep, John has done gone and impregnated Violet. And John is an honorable man who will do the honorable thing and besides, he wanted kids.
The season ends with Sara greeting a new member of her agency staff and rallying the women to get back work.
The Alienist is as much about aesthetics as it is about the story it tells. From the gilded gleam of high society to the dark grime of the poor and decrepit sections of the city, a lot of care and attention goes into bringing 1897 NYC to life. It is an immersive experience to explore this time and place in such detail.
Angel of Darkness differs from the the first Alienist series with the shift in focus to Sara Howard. And it is a welcome shift. As Lazlo presents the idea of applying intellect to solving crimes in the first season, the approach this season is on empathy, something that makes Sara unique compared to the blustering bull headed approach of men like Thomas Byrnes.
Whether or not there is a 3rd season of the Alienist depends on whether or not Caleb Carr writes a third book based on this cast of characters. I wouldn't mind see what happens next with Lazlo, John and Sara as they approach the cusp of the 20th century.
Fleabag
In my re-watch of this series on Amazon Prime, this past weekend I reached the end of Season 1 and damn, this hit hard.
Fleabag is supposed to be a comedy, right?
I think certain forms of entertainment, be they books, movies or TV shows, are done a disservice by being pigeonholed as "comedy" or "drama".
The end of the first season of Fleabag really shreds that dividing line between comedy and drama.
Over the course of the first season, we've seen snippets of flashbacks to Fleabag's relationship with Boo. Boo was her best friend and they started a cafe together. Boo is no longer around, dead in an accident of almost comically absurd dimensions. She was hit a by a bike that pushed her into a car which knocked her into another bike.
Except...
It wasn't an accident. It was suicide.
A suicide prompted by betrayal when Boo's boyfriend slept with another woman.
Except...
The betrayal that hurt Boo wasn't the boyfriend's. The other woman was Fleabag.
After her Godmother's "sexhibition" where everything that could go wrong for Fleabag has invariably gone wrong, Fleabag stands along side the same busy street where Boo made her fateful step into traffic to take her own life. Fleabag is clearly decided to follow in Boo's footsteps, literally and figuratively.
Are we laughing yet? No because this isn't funny.
Then a car stops. It's the bank manager from episode 1, the one who did not give Fleabag the loan to save the cafe. He asks, "Are you OK?"
Inside the cafe, Fleabag confesses to the bank manager what shit her life has become and why. The bank manager leaves the cafe but returns with paperwork from his car. It's the loan application.
Sitting in the cafe, the bank guy goes over the loan application with Fleabag.
There may be hope for this woebegone cafe after all.
There may be hope for Fleabag after all.
After the flashback that triggers the revelation of Fleabag's role in Boo's suicide, Fleabag stops talking to the camera. She averts her eyes from the camera. Her shame and guilt is too great for her to even abide the audience watching at home.
Fleabag can be funny, absurdly so at times. But at the core of this show is a profoundly broken woman and Phoebe Waller-Bridge is not afraid to follow where that brokeness leads, whether it is to a laugh or to a deep sadness. In what we might define as a television comedy, Fleabag would be the wacky character who does wild, off putting things and will never suffer any meaningful consequences for their actions. But in Fleabag, there are consequences and Phoebe Waller-Bridge is not at all hesitant to show them.
Fleabag may be best described as “tragicomic”.
Don't
Last week, the game show that pays you money to don't do things reach the end of it's first season.
This game show was outrageously weird as it presented absurd challenges to contestants to win money. For example, while walking on a tread mill under a heat lamp while eating increasingly hot, spicy foods, you can win money if you don't drink the ice cold beverages that hosts Adam Scott offers.
And the snarky voice over asides from Ryan Reynolds are also amusing.
And it's a show that I think has a limited shelf life.
The challenges become rote over time and the snarky voice over asides from Ryan Reynolds almost seem desperate to keep our attention.
It's a fun show and would be interesting to see a 2nd season where contestants have actually seen the show.
As of right now, the jury is out on a second season. ABC has neither cancelled or renewed the show. The numbers do not bode well. After pretty good numbers for the debut episode, the ratings had fallen by half by the mid point of the first season.
Next week on the Tuesday TV Touchbase, I'm going to report on some shows my wife and I watch that I really don't like.
The week after, we catch up on what's what with Star Trek.
That's all for now. Until next time, stay safe, remember to be good to one another and keep it down, would ya, I'm trying to watch some TV here.
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