In last week's Tuesday TV Touchbase, I wrote this about this season finale of Jeopardy Masters
Tonight the contest is down to Victoria Groce, Yogesh Raut and Andrew He.
Everyone think good thoughts: Yogesh must not win. Yogesh must not win. Yogesh must not win.
<Sigh!>
YOU HAD ONE JOB!
ONE! JOB!
So yeah, Yogesh Raut won the damn thing.
To paraphrase Darth Vader: I find your lack of good thoughts disturbing.
OK, let's get on with this week's post.
Bring up the Tuesday TV Touchbase graphic!
Last week, The LIbrarians: The Next Chapter brought it's 2nd season in for a landing.
It was a white knuckle, super stressed season finale.
Even if it was all a dream.
Twice!
The mystic artifact at the center of the last two episodes of season 2 was called Reverie's Torque, a golden doohickey that has power over dreams.
In episode 11, our Belgrade crew of Librarians have arrived in a German village where everyone has fallen asleep and a demon named Alu is looking to recover the artifact to use dreams to breach his prison and enter our reality.
Merlin summons the team to help save Mrs. Astolat who is caught in Alu's spell.
Everything that can go wrong is going wrong as the team has to face their fears and traumas explored earlier in the season.
Charlie is faced with a choice of which Librarian she will need to let die to save the rest.
Lyssa is confronted with a child losing her parents and Connor has to deal with his reputation reduced to a mockery.
Vikram saves the team by entering their individual nightmares to guide them to safety. But in each person's psyche, Vikram appears differently:
To his great, great, great granddaughter Lysa, Vikram appears very, very old.
Resistant to using magic, Vikram is compelled to use Reverie's Torque to drive back Alu and save the town and his team from the dream demon.
Merlin usurps Reverie's Torque for his own purpose, using it to propel himself back in time to days of Camelot and make sure Camelot does not fall this time. The Librarians follow.
Which brings us to episode 12.
Merlin stops a young Arthur from drawing the sword from the stone and seizes the blade himself, declaring himself King.
Corrupted by the power of the crown and by his growing magical abilities, Merlin proceeds to make life at Camelot worse.
Merlin summons a fire breathing dragon and also instigates the death of the Librarians.
One by one, Connor then Charlie and then Lysa all die.
Merlin kills the immortal Mrs. Astolate by killing her young pre-immortal self who was at Camelot.
Vikram has one last desperate chance to stop Merlin and even reverse all the deaths that have occurered. Until Merlin kills him.
And then he unleashes his full magical power in a paroxysm of fire and fury that destroys Camelot.
Which is not what Merlin wanted.
So all the Librarians are dead and Merlin, totally corrupted by magic, has done the very thing he did not want to do.
How are we gonna fix this mess?
It bears remembering that Reverie's Torque is a golden doohickey that has power over dreams.
It is NOT a golden doohickey that has power over time travel.
Having hit rock bottom in his addiction to magic, Merlin wakes up in the Library's Belgrade Annex surrounded by the still very much alive Librarians.
So yeah, we're going with the old "it was all a dream" ending.
As we discussed in this Star Trek: Strange New Worlds post, the "it was all a dream" resolution can be such an overused cliche.
But in the case of the The Librarians: TNC finale, the writers do play fair with us. It is made very plain right up front in part 1 (episode 11), Reverie's Torque is a golden doohickey that has power over dreams.
It is only Merlin's desperate desire to recover his magical power and his fervent need to undo the fall of Camelot that even suggests that Reverie's Torque can do any more than that.
Last year, in my post about season 1 of The LIbrarians: The Next Chapter, I wrote:
I've enjoyed The Librarians: The Next Chapter well enough and I'm glad there is this opportunity to explore the world we met in the original series. But I cannot quite shake the feeling that TL:TNC is a pale, less expensive knock off of what came before.The team still feels like cyphers that elude significant engagement with the viewer.
Having rewatched season 1 in advance of season 2, I kinda feel that assessment may have been kind of true but also unnecessarily harsh. In retrospect, the new team was a lot stronger than I was giving them credit for.
But whatever misgivings I may have had about TL:TNC in season 1, season 2 more than made up for it. The show looked better with better lighting and better sets. And the characters more than came into their own.
Highlights of the 2nd season:
The physical comedy between Vikram and Jacob Stone in "And the Tethered Wish". The genie was a wild and wacky antagonist.
Ty Tennant's guest turn as a malevolent Peter Pan in "And the Vanishing Bankers" was amazing and we got a strong spollight for Jessica Green's Charlie. And Lysa introduces us to the term "magical woo-woo".
The chaotic body swaps in "And Descartes' Nightmare" where our intrepid cast has to play each other rather their regular characters.
- There's a bit where Connor is in Lysa's body and like any man in a woman's body starts to check out his new breasts. (It's what I would do in that situation!) Lysa in Vikram's body tells him to cut that out. There are more swaps as at any given time, any Librarian can be in the body of another.
- Shout out to Dominic Monaghan who is really on point when Lysa winds up in Merlin's body.
- On a serious note, the teammates who wind up in Charlie's body realize that the physical demands as the team's Guardian means that Charlie is always in a lot of pain and she's never said anything.
Props to Olivia Morris who has to play the heartbreaking scene where Lysa says goodbye to her dead parents in "And the Monkey's Paw" and gets to play her 1857 ancestor Anya in "And the Heart of a Librarian". Anya turns out be all sorts of awesome as she deals with a cursed artifact. I wanna see more of Anya's adventures!
O.G. Librarians Cassandra and Jacob take the spotlight in episode 9 in "And the Toy Phone". Oh it was so good to see Lindy Booth back as Cassie, still kicking butt and taking names with super math. And the episode is another excellent vehicle for Jessica Green's Charlie in a starring role.
Right now, the Librarians fandom is in an anxiety fueled frenzy over the fate of The LIbrarians: The Next Chapter. At the end of season 1, we knew season 2 was coming. So far as I write this, we have no word from TNT on season 3.
I would ask you all to think good thoughts but I saw how well that didn't work with Jeopardy Masters and Yogesh Raut 😠 so I don't wanna jinx our chances.
******************************************
Side quest to the Emmys!
Jean Smart won her fifth consecutive Emmy for her role as Deborah Vance on Hacks. Jean Smart is a goddess and you all must worship her!
In a big ol' "Fuck you!" to CBS and Paramount, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert won for best talk show. In the tradition of David Letterman after he left The Late Show, Colbert has grown a beard. By the way, Stephen will be on Jimmy Kimmel Live tonight.
Sally Field won Best Actress in a TV movie for Remarkably Bright Creatures which Andrea and I watched back in May which we enjoyed a lot. Sally took time to pay sincere tribute to Dolly Parton. Sally and Dolly were in Steel Magnolias together.
Emmy host Mariska Hargitay was in a Law & Order: SVU sketch that guest starred Taylor Swift which I rather enjoyed.
Widow’s Bay, an alleged comedy series I have not seen or heard of before tonight, won a crap ton of Emmys. They edged out my beloved Hacks for best comedy series so Widow's Bay can go fuck itself.
******************************************
That is that for this week's Touchbase.
Until next time, remember to be good to one another and try to keep it down in there, would ya? I'm trying to watch TV over here.
Later today on the blog: This (Non) Sporting Life with the Savannah Bananas!
No comments:
Post a Comment