Glee: The Rhodes Not Taken

We open with the glee club kids sing “Don’t Stop Believing”, and already the episode is off to a fine, fine start. I love Journey. Embarrassing but true. After Quinn rushes out mid-song to vomit, Finn frets to Will that all the dancing will endanger Quinn’s pregnancy. Rachel is still gone, having defected last episode in a flurry of snitty entitlement for the starring role in Sandy Ryerson’s production of Cabaret. The kids figure Rachel’s absence dooms them to mediocrity. As Puck puts it, “That Rachel kid makes me want to set myself on fire, but she can sing.”

(The glee club, by the way, is called New Directions. Not sure how I’ve missed that thus far, but I’m using it from here on out.)

Terri and Will eat grasshopper pie at a garish family restaurant. Their server, who is sporting plenty of flair, turns out to be a former student of Will’s. He’s currently attending another high school, even though he’s 24, because the school keeps failing him so he can continue to sing in New Directions’ chief competitor, Vocal Adrenaline. This gives Will ideas.

Emma calls Finn in to encourage him to apply for a music scholarship. She points out that he’s more likely to win that than a football scholarship… provided New Directions does well at Regionals. Finn realizes they need to get Rachel back for this to happen.

A reporter for the school newspaper interviews Rachel about her starring role. Rachel is totally odious, as is the reporter, who asks her to show him her bra in exchange for positive press. Finn visits Rachel with the intention of luring her back to the glee club, but Rachel isn’t having any of it. As she puts it, “It’s clear my talent was too big for an ensemble.” Oh, Rachel. I sort of hate you these days.

Will tracks down April Rhodes, who was a senior when he was a freshman in high school. April, who was a blazing talent in the glee club, never graduated. Will visits April, who is drunk and sultry. She invites Will in for a drink, chirping, “I just cracked open a fresh box of wine.” Box wines have come a long way in recent years. A realtor arrives, exposes April as a squatter, and kicks April and Will out of the house. Will offers to let April return to high school and get her diploma, as long as she joins the glee club.

Will introduces April to the assembled members of New Directions. She gives them the once-over and describes them, aptly, as “the world’s worst Benneton ad”, then launches into “Maybe This Time” from Cabaret. Because April is played by Broadway powerhouse Kristin Chenoweth, she naturally does a great job, but if we’re going to do Cabaret, I wish they’d gone with “Mein Herr.” Despite her obvious vocal chops, the kids aren’t sure they want her in the group. April does a stellar job of winning them over, one by one. She befriends Kurt with cheap Chablis and muscle magazines, teaches Mercedes and Tina optimal shoplifting techniques, and shows up in the boys’ locker room dressed only in a football jersey and seduces Puck. When April meets Rachel, who is growing exponentially nightmarish, Rachel calls her “ancient” to her face and flounces off. Setting aside the ego trip, what’s with the outright nastiness, Rachel?

After a drunken Kurt vomits on germphobe Emma (requiring an emergency room visit and four decontamination showers), Emma tells Will she disapproves of April -- and of Will giving away the kids’ chances to sing to an outsider.

As part of his plan to lure Rachel back to New Directions, Finn takes her bowling. Rachel protests having to put her fingers into the germ-ridden holes of the bowling ball. Just bowl, you insufferable twerp! Why have they turned Rachel into such a foul, unlikable creature? In a nearby lane, Will bowls with April while confronting her about being a bad influence on the kids. She offers to give up drinking, then takes him to the bar to sing a karaoke duet of Heart’s “How Do I Get You Alone?” Rachel and Finn split some pizza and end up kissing. When Finn asks her to come back to New Directions, she accepts and tells him she’ll quit the play. Finn looks suitably guilty.

The glee club kids cluelessly try to figure out why Quinn keeps getting sick in the mornings, until Puck sets them straight. When Rachel returns to the club, the other kids fill her in on the new scandal. She confronts Finn, who has just turned in his scholarship application, and slaps him for toying with her emotions. Rachel runs into Sue, who offers to give Rachel complete artistic control if she’ll return to Sandy’s musical.

New Directions performs for the first time in front of a real audience. April shows up drunk, but manages to belt out a powerhouse version of “Last Name” anyway. It’s a smash success, but Will refuses to let her go back out after intermission, telling her he made a mistake in asking her to join the club. April takes it gracefully and decides to give Broadway another shot (Will diplomatically suggests Branson instead). Will breaks it to the kids that she’s no longer in the club. Rachel pops up and offers to go on in the second act in April’s place. Or, I dunno, Quinn could do it, or Tina, or Mercedes, or anyone else who’s been to all the rehearsals and hasn’t acted like a monster. But no, Will gives the part to Rachel. She leads the group in Queen’s “Can Anybody Find Me Somebody to Love?”, and it’s a great number, but it’s disappointing to see this episode ending with Rachel getting rewarded for her unbroken string of crap behavior.
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Heroes Volume Five, Chapter Three: Ink

Okay, look: Seeing how Mohinder’s going to be MIA for another, oh, eight episodes or so, I’m not going to waste our time whining about his absence. Here’s the thing, though: I know the producers and writers have made a big fuss about how this season is all about smaller, more personal stories involving fewer characters at a time, and Mohinder just drew the short (really short -- downright microscopic) straw for these introductory episodes. Seriously, though, the back half of this season better be Mohinder-heavy, with virtually no Claire, to make things right with me. It seems like we’re getting double-doses of Claire, at the expense of Mohinder, and that’s just plain wrong.

Speaking of Claire… She’s busy avoiding Gretchen, who is chock full of questions about how Claire jumped out of a window and didn’t, like, die. When Gretchen does finally corner her, she asks Claire, “What are you, a vampire, an alien?”, which comes uncomfortably close to West’s uber-irritating “Are you a robot or an alien?” babble in Volume Two. Is Gretchen this volume’s West? Discuss. Bennet, who seems pretty hale and hearty considering he got gutted by Edgar toward the end of last episode, shows up at Claire’s dorm and offers to take her to lunch. He fails to pick up on Claire’s unsubtle hints and invites Gretchen to join them.

They go to an Indian restaurant, where Gretchen and Claire act like little snots about the food. Gretchen taunts Claire in front of Bennet by making barely-veiled allusions to Claire’s healing ability. Remember when West taunted Claire in front of their biology class by making barely-veiled allusions to Claire’s healing ability? Gor blimey, Gretchen really is West! Here’s something to ponder: Back in Volume Two, when I still had a naïve and childishly endearing faith in Heroes, I was convinced West was deliberately being written as creepy and off-putting, because he would later be revealed as a villain. Nope -- he was supposed to be a genuine romantic interest for Claire, albeit an extraordinarily poorly-scripted one. So, creepy old Gretchen: Is she going to turn out to be evil, or are the writers aiming for “offbeat and charmingly quirky” and completely botching it?

Bennet does not seem to find Gretchen especially charming. Score one for Bennet. When Gretchen heads off to the ladies’ room, Bennet bawls Claire out for letting Gretchen find out about her ability. He goes to call the Haitian to have Gretchen’s noodle wiped, but Claire threatens to never speak to him again if he does. Promises, promises.

Back at the dorm, Gretchen apologizes for being creepy and confesses that girls in junior high called her Retchin’ Gretchen because she was bulimic. Claire decides it’s the time for deep personal revelations and tells Gretchen the truth about her powers. Bennet calls and interrupts their foray into girl-bonding and self-mutilation to apologize. He launches once again into his patented “I just want to protect you” thing, and Claire does her “You can’t protect me forever” thing, and I swear they just lifted this scene verbatim from another script. Possibly from multiple scripts -- I think we’ve seen this about eighty times by now. Lather, rinse, repeat. Claire asks Gretchen to be her roommate. Gretchen is thrilled.

Matt and his partner, Simon the Cylon (whose name, apparently, is “Mike”, but once a Cylon, always a Cylon), stake out a drug dealer’s house. Matt holds up a thirty-day sobriety chip and tells Simon the Cylon that he’s broken his sobriety. The psychic manifestation of Sylar shows up to mock Matt some more, which is kind of fun. He mutters about how much it blows that he’s stuck in Matt’s mind (“I mean, have you seen yourself eat a burrito?” Aw, Sylar. Cruel and funny!). Matt and Simon the Cylon get a warrant and burst into the dealer’s home. In a suspiciously generous move, Sylar warns Matt about the gun-happy drug dealer hiding in the closet. While Simon the Cylon searches the garage, Sylar goads Matt to use his abilities to find out where the drugs are hidden, but Matt remains stalwart and refuses. Sylar leads Matt to a stuffed animal and a ransom note -- the dealer has kidnapped a little girl. Matt uses his powers to read the dealer’s mind, and finds the girl hidden under the stairs, dead.

Matt beats the hell out of the dealer and quite possibly kills him. Simon the Cylon returns and is horrified by Matt’s actions. When Matt urges him to check under the stairs, there’s nothing there. No dead girl, no stuffed rabbit, no ransom note. Just Sylar, who was using Matt’s powers to have some fun. Matt gives Simon the Cylon his sobriety chip, then uses his Jedi Mind-Tricks™ to convince him everything’s hunky-dory. Sylar tells him he’s proud of him. Their next order of business: Finding Sylar’s body.

At the Sullivan Brothers carnival, Samuel gets dressed up in a suit, while Lydia ties his necktie in a provocative manner. Samuel mentions that they need to get the compass back. Wait -- if Samuel doesn’t have it, who has the compass? Didn’t Edgar knife Bennet toward the end of last episode and make off with it? Did I totally misunderstand that? What am I missing here? Samuel sucks a bunch of tattoo ink from a jar into his skin. Yeah, the carnival folks are definitely a lot of fun.

(There’s a commercial for some sort of Sprint-sponsored miniseries thingamajig featuring Lydia and Edgar. I like Lydia and Edgar, but not enough to research it further.)

Peter gets served with a subpoena: One of the people he rescued is suing him. Peter goes to the records office at the hospital to get a copy of the accident report, failing to realize that the pretty young woman manning the desk, Emma, is deaf. When she knocks over a coffee cup, she sees the noise made when it smashes against the floor as a burst of colorful lights. Later, a doctor tells Emma she’s experiencing synethesia, in which one sense is perceived as another.

Peter tracks down the man suing him, William Hooper, who turns out to be Samuel. Samuel claims Peter rescued him from a crashed bus, but dislocated his arm in the process. Thus the lawsuit. Peter doesn’t remember saving him, but Peter’s long-suffering paramedic buddy Hesam confirms Samuel was indeed on the bus. Hesam also mentions that people are claiming Peter has been causing all the recent accidents to get all the glory that comes with saving lives, which…yeah, that doesn’t make much sense, actually. Causing bus crashes? Trapping pregnant women in overturned cars? Really? Does this seem at all likely and/or physically possible?

Peter examines a newspaper photo of the bus accident and sees that Samuel was indeed on the bus. He meets Samuel in a park and apologizes for doubting his story. He offers to make amends. Samuel asks him, “Have you ever lost a brother?” Peter, curiously, answers “No,” which isn't quite right, actually. Yeah, Peter doesn't know about Nathan's most recent death, seeing as his mother and Bennet and Matt all conspired to hide that information from everyone, but didn't he see an alternate future version of himself gunning down Nathan during the press conference, right before trapping the real Peter in the body of Weevil from Veronica Mars? Man, somewhere along the way, this show got really convoluted and wonky. Peter and Samuel shake hands, and Samuel tells him he’s dropping the lawsuit. Meanwhile, in the same park, Emma sits on a nearby park bench, watching a group of musicians. She sees the music made by a cello as colorful lights. When the cellist conveniently leaves behind his instrument, she picks it up and makes rainbows of light with music. It’s a Skittles commercial! She plays the cello for eight hours or so -- I don’t know, it’s just a really long scene -- then stops when she notices people staring at her, Peter among them. She runs off.

(Wow, there needs to be an awesome payoff to Emma’s plotline, because the setup is deadly dull.)

Samuel approaches a mansion where a gala party is taking place. He tells the lady of the house that he grew up there -- his father was the butler and his mother was the maid. He asks to take a look around the carriage house, but the woman shuns him. Later, Peter and Hesam are called to the scene of a terrible accident: Three people died in a sinkhole that sucked the entire mansion into the earth. While Samuel watches from the shadows, Peter looks down at his own forearm. A moving tattoo of a compass has mysteriously appeared on his arm.
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The Triumphant Return of The Smallville Files

Fans of Smallville -- and, maybe especially, those who just like to mock it a bit --need to head on over to Dan Liebke's Astonishing Tales right now. After a break of over a year, presumably to regain his faith in humanity after the wretched awfulness of that season where Lex and Lana settled down into domestic bliss, Dan has taken up the torch of The Smallville Files, his blisteringly funny and bizzare episode recaps, and has tacked the ninth-season premiere ("Are You There, Zod? It's Me, Brian Austin Green").

The Smallville Files is the gold standard of television recapping. Be prepared to stay a while; the temptation to sit and read through eight years' worth of accumulated recaps might be too great.
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FlashForward, Episode One: No More Good Days

Okay, wow, that was great. Really, really top-notch. In fact, the only part of it I’m a little noncommittal about is the title: Given the option of calling it either Flash Forward or Flashforward, they went with… FlashForward. Yeah. It just looks wrong, doesn’t it?

FlashForward opens on a scene of devastation in downtown Los Angeles: Joseph Fiennes, who plays FBI agent Mark Benford, crawls out of an overturned car calling out for someone named Demetri. Cars are overturned, people are lying unconscious… It’s madness.

There’s a flashback (FlashBack?) to four hours earlier: Mark and his trauma surgeon wife Olivia head off to their respective workplaces, leaving their young daughter Charlie in the care of babysitter Nicole. Olivia tries to get in touch with surgical intern Bryce, who is ignoring her call while wandering aimlessly around the Venice Pier, looking moody and soulful. He pulls out a gun and places it under his chin.

Mark sits in the back of an AA meeting, at which his sponsor, Aaron, relates the story of how his daughter was killed in action in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Nicole has sex with a hot guy on the couch in the Benford house.

Mark and his partner Demetri, played by John Cho (John Cho!) stake out an SUV, which is occupied by two men, Khalid and Omar, and an unidentified blonde woman, who are suspected of planning to detonate a dirty bomb. Demetri talks about his upcoming wedding and his distress about having to dance to “Islands in the Stream” at the reception. This actually seems like an extremely reasonable fear to me. That’s a terrible song. But catchy! Mark and Demetri get into a high-speed chase with the SUV. They’re skidding out of control, hitting cars, about to crash into a random oil tanker… and suddenly everything changes...

Mark finds himself in his office at night, swilling booze. There’s a bunch of notes and photos pinned to the wall: he sees what seems to be a case name, Mosaic, and some random crap, including the phrase WHO ELSE KNOWS? written on a calendar page for April 29, 2010. Mark wears a knotted friendship bracelet around his wrist. Masked gunmen burst into the office. One has a tattoo of three stars on his forearm. They’re about to shoot Mark… and then he finds himself back in the present, in an overturned car, with chaos erupting around him.

Bryce wakes up on the pier and sees everyone else lying on the ground, slowly coming to their senses. In the ocean below the pier, a surfer shouts for help: There are people lying unconscious in the water. Bryce runs to assist. Olivia regains consciousness on the floor of the hospital, in the middle of operating on a patient.

Mark searches for Demetri. The oil truck explodes and spews fireballs all over the place, as oil trucks are wont to do. Mark looks at the buildings of downtown Los Angeles, which are surrounded by billowing black smoke. Stuff explodes, buildings burn. A helicopter crashes into the… shoot, it used to be the Sanwa building, but I don’t think it’s called that anymore. That cool greeny-browny building on Wilshire and Figueroa? (Ah, I see it’s now known as Figueroa at Wilshire. Catchy!) Mark finally meets up with Demetri, and they survey the devastation.

Nicole wakes up on the couch with her boyfriend. She runs upstairs to check on Charlie, who looks thoroughly freaked out. Charlie claims she had a dream: “I dreamed there were no more good days.”

Mark and Demetri find the SUV they were chasing, with Khalid and Omar dead in the front seat, and arrest the unknown blonde woman. Demetri takes her into custody and tells Mark to go check on his family. Mark runs through downtown, through streets crowded with stalled traffic, avoiding downed electrical lines and looters. Bizarrely, a kangaroo hops down the street. In a shop window, televisions show scenes of worldwide destruction and chaos.

In the hospital, Olivia preps a severely injured young boy for surgery. Even though she has no idea who he is, he refers to her by name in his semi-conscious state. Bryce shows up to help.

Stan, the FBI director (played by Courtney B. Vance, otherwise known as the man who had the good sense and great fortune to marry Angela Bassett), assembles his staff in a meeting. They’ve determined that the flash forwards (title be damned, that's how I'm spelling it) affected everyone worldwide at the same time, and that they lasted for exactly two minutes and seventeen seconds. The devastation is massive: the FAA reports 877 downed aircraft in the United States alone. Mark points out that he wasn’t unconscious during that time -- he had a very clear, very precise vision, which he doesn’t believe was a dream. Everyone begins to realize they all had a vision of April 29, 2010, at ten p.m. -- about six months from now. One of the FBI agents found himself in London during his flash forward, meeting with a London field agent. He calls her in London and verifies that she had the same exact vision, thus confirming that it wasn’t a dream or a hallucination, but a vision of the future.

Everyone compares visions: Demetri, ominously, claims he blacked out and saw nothing. Fellow FBI agent Janis found herself getting a sonogram, even though she’s not currently pregnant (and has no plans to be, and indeed seems kinda bummed and weirded out by the idea). Janis suggests starting a website where everyone can record their flash forward experiences to search for patterns of events to help figure out the cause. Stan assigns Demetri, Mark and Janis to the investigation.

Mark tries to remember everything that was taped to the wall of his office in his flash forward: the word Mosaic, the name D. Gibbons, a photo of a burned doll, the phrase Blue Hand. Demetri and Mark start to assemble the wall according to Mark’s memories. Demetri feels a little squirrelly: he blacked out during the worldwide flash forward, which he figures means he’ll be dead in six months.

Olivia and Bryce discover the mother of the boy in the trauma ward died in an accident. Bryce tells Olivia about his suicide attempt. In his flash forward, he was alive. Thus, he’s not destined to kill himself.

Mark confesses to Aaron that he saw himself drinking again in his flash forward. Aaron can top that: in his own flash forward, he discovered that his dead daughter Tracy is still alive.

(Off topic, but at this point ABC showed a commercial for the remake of V, which starts in November and which looks pretty darn good. Wow, ABC is firing on all cylinders this season.)

Mark and Olivia nuzzle with their daughter, then nuzzle in bed. It’s kind of a draggy scene, actually, but the episode as a whole has been so bang on that I’ll easily forgive it. Olivia confesses that she was with another man -- one she’s never seen before -- in her flash forward. Meanwhile, in the trauma ward, the injured boy’s father comes bursting in to see his son and talks to Bryce -- it turns out he’s the man in Olivia’s flash forward.

Charlie tells Mark she had a bad dream and gives him the friendship bracelet he was wearing in his flash forward.

At the FBI office, Janis tells Demetri she’s been searching through surveillance camera footage of the exact moment when everyone worldwide passed out. She shows him tape of a baseball stadium in Detroit, in which everyone lies unconscious… except for one figure in a dark coat who is up and walking around.

Yeah. That was a great start. Very happy with that. High marks.
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Glee: Preggers

The episode opens with Kurt wearing a black sequined jumpsuit and bopping around, awesomely, to “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It).” When his father catches him, Kurt claims to be on the football team and manages to convince him that sequined unitards are pretty standard apparel. Kurt may be my favorite character.

Terri’s sister Kendra gives her some Lamaze lessons. Terri confesses that her pregnancy is a fraud. She wants to confess the truth to Will, but Kendra talks her out of it, claiming, “Dishonesty is food to a marriage -- it’ll die without it.” I’m still not feeling Glee 100%, honestly, but I’m a fan of all the bon mots.

In other news, Sue Sylvester has begun hosting a local news segment, “Sue’s Corner” (in her debut appearance, she rhapsodizes about the benefits of caning). The station manager grows concerned that her cheerleaders won’t make it to Nationals, seeing as three have defected to the glee club, and implies that Sue’s future with the station is contingent upon the success of Cheerios. This hardens Sue’s resolve to destroy the glee club.

Rachel flips out when Will gives the solo in “Tonight” from West Side Story to Tina, the cute girl with the blue streak in her hair and the stammer, instead of to her.

Kurt tries out for the school’s losing football team, and is all kinds of adorable about it (“Hi, I’m Kurt, and I’ll be auditioning for the role of kicker”). He boogies around the field to “Single Ladies”, kicks the ball cleanly over the goal post, and celebrates making the team with his best pageant wave.

Quinn tearfully confesses to Finn that she’s pregnant, even though they’ve never had sex. She reminds Finn of the time he prematurely ejaculated in the hot tub when they were making out. Aw, crap. Every time I mention the phrase “prematurely ejaculated”, which seems to happen an awful lot while discussing this show, my website keyword stats start getting wonky.

Sue blackmails Principal Figgins by threatening to leak a cheeseball PSA he starred in about the dangers of embolism unless he agrees to let disgraced music teacher Sandy Ryerson return to the school. Sue and Sandy conspire to lure Rachel away from the glee club in the hopes of crippling it, with strategically-placed notices about upcoming auditions for a production of Cabaret, in which all hopefuls must come prepared to sing the Celine Dion song of her choice. This, naturally, is catnip for Rachel.

Will squabbles with Rachel, who is still furious with him for giving the solo to Tina. This is the point where I need to take Rachel aside and have a stern chat about her monstrous and unattractive sense of entitlement. Rachel’s argument is that she’s clearly the better singer, and thus it’s not fair to give Tina the solo just to boost Tina’s self-confidence. Per Rachel: “Why do you have to hurt me to help her feel good?” Here’s the thing: The value of anything artistic -- writing, singing, dancing, painting, what have you -- is always, always subjective. No one ever deserves to be chosen for the lead, and being given the big solo is not Rachel’s automatic right. I've been in Rachel's corner thus far, but her attitude in this episode is ghastly. Anyway, Tina ends up singing “Tonight” in rehearsal and doing a lovely job.

A sobbing Finn tells Will about Quinn’s pregnancy, which sort of weirdly and awkwardly segues into Finn asking Will to give the football team dance lessons to improve their performance on the field. The dialogue on this show is head and shoulders above the plotting. Will mentions Quinn’s pregnancy to Terri, which gives her all kinds of ideas.

After Finn fills Puck in about the pregnancy, Puck taunts purported virgin Quinn, mentioning that, unbeknownst to Finn, they’ve slept together. Quinn offers up this rationalization for events: “You got me drunk on wine coolers, and I felt fat that day.” Later, as Quinn sobs in her car, Terri accosts her, gives her prenatal vitamins, and offers to help her through the pregnancy.

The football game goes poorly, until the team rallies and performs a beautifully choreographed routine to, yes, “Single Ladies.” Finn scores a touchdown, then Kurt kicks the final goal, thus winning the game. In the stands, Will and Emma hug passionately. Quinn and Finn smooch while Puck storms off the field in a jealous huff.

After the game, Kurt finally comes out to his father, who isn’t terribly surprised by this turn of events.

Three football players, Puck among them, join the glee club. Will still refuses to give the solo to Rachel, so she quits, which... good riddance. If I were Will, I'd've booted her from the club for lousy sportsmanship. The episode ends with pregnant Quinn by herself, looking miserable and scared.
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Heroes Volume Five, Chapters One & Two: Orientation/Jump Push Fall

Double episode, folks, so this is a long one. The fourth season (and fifth volume) kicks off with carnival owner Samuel, surrounded by his band of misfits, burying his brother Joseph and monologuing in a distinctly Mohinderesque way about people with special abilities over a montage of scenes from previous seasons. None of the scenes include Mohinder. Just thought I’d point that out.

It’s six weeks after the events of the season finale, and Claire is off to college. She moves into her dormitory room and meets her snotty new roommate Annie, who is taken aback that Claire got into a (presumably prestigious) university with a GED. Annie is a grade-A twerp, but still, that’s a fairly astute observation. Claire informs her that she got really good test scores. Later, Claire gets overwhelmed by her linear algebra placement test and walks out. Ah… Claire? Remember that C-minus in biology you yammered on about in the first season? Still planning to stick to your “I got really good test scores” story? Claire meets fellow Texan Gretchen, who: a) knows all about Claire’s involvement in Jackie’s murder back in Odessa, and b) definitely comes down on the wrong side of creepy.

Noah visits Claire in her dorm. Nothing happens. Really, nothing. It’s this odd vortex of nothingness. Moving on.

Claire attends a mixer, where she and Gretchen make fun of Annie and play Guitar Hero. Watching other people play video games in real life is boring as snot. Watching other people play video games on a television show? Excruciating. Awful. At this point, I was an eyelash away from turning off the television, going to bed, and never thinking another thought about this damn disappointing show. When Claire returns to her room, she discovers Annie dead on the sidewalk, having apparently fallen out of the window. Even though the police find a suicide note, Claire suspects murder. In that inimitable and loveable Claire fashion, she gets sullen and self-righteous with the cops.

Sandra visits Claire at college, and yet again nothing happens. Look, it’s perfectly plausible that both of Claire’s parents would come visit her at college, especially in the aftermath of Annie’s death, but if nothing of importance happens, we don’t need to see it.

Claire and Gretchen decide to find out who killed Annie. Gretchen suggests swiping a cadaver from the medical school so they can replicate Annie’s plunge to see if she was pushed or jumped from the window. In the middle of the night, Claire jumps out of her dorm window to test the trajectory of Annie’s fall. She lands within the chalk outline of Annie’s corpse, suggesting Annie really did commit suicide. She looks up and sees Gretchen watching her.

Sullivan Brothers Carnival: Lydia, a naked tattooed chick who can show prophetic visions in the patterns on her back, reveals a picture of Danko to Samuel, who has a moving tattoo of a compass on his wrist. Samuel sends his henchman Edgar to kill Danko. When Edgar refuses, Samuel stains Edgar’s wrist with ink, which spreads up creepily and magically to his throat.

In Tokyo, Hiro and Ando set up a side business (Dial-A-Hero) dedicated to helping people in need. For their first assignment, Hiro and Ando help a girl rescue her cat from a high platform. Ando falls from the platform, so Hiro freezes time and saves him. When he unfreezes everything, he freezes himself into a comatose state for a while. He resists Ando’s attempts to take him to see a doctor: he’s has already seen one, and he knows he’s going to die soon.

There’s a little plot detour about Ando’s crush on Hiro’s sister Kimiko, who has apparently loathed Ando ever since he accidentally dumped a slushy on her at a carnival fourteen years ago. Hiro remembers he met a fortuneteller at the carnival who told him he would become a hero, which was the incident that set him on his current path. While he’s pondering this, Hiro accidentally teleports back in time fourteen years to Samuel’s carnival.

In the present, at the carnival, Lydia produces an image of Hiro on her skin. Samuel tells an elderly man he’s found someone who can help them fix the past. The old man sends him back in time fourteen years. At the carnival, Hiro is approached by a younger version of himself, who asks him to take a picture of himself with Kimiko and Ando. Dude, hasn’t Hiro encountered various young versions of himself about eight times by now? After young Hiro scampers off to the fortuneteller, Samuel approaches Hiro and introduces himself, saying they’re going to be great friends.

Samuel encourages Hiro to correct the past. Somewhat accidentally, Hiro prevents Young Ando from dumping the slushy on Young Kimiko, then returns to the present and finds that the timeline has indeed been altered: in the new timeline, Kimiko and Ando have been a happy couple for years. Hiro decides to devote the remainder of his life to undoing all his past wrongs.

Angela Petrelli meets Sylar-as-Nathan for sushi in a very long and very tedious scene, in which Nathan babbles on about how he’s determined to change himself for the better and Angela tries to convince him he’s having a midlife crisis. Later, alone in his office, Nathan moves coffee mugs telekinetically and shoots blue lightning from his hands. Freaked, Nathan calls Peter, who ignores his calls.

In Los Angeles, Matt Parkman is now back together with Janice and helping her raise Matt, Jr. He’s also an LAPD officer again. He fields a call from Angela, who wants Matt to do another mind-whammy on Sylar to make him continue believing he’s Nathan, but Matt refuses. He’s being haunted by a psychic manifestation of Sylar, who keeps taunting him and threatening his son and being a general nuisance.

When the apparition of Sylar shows up at Matt’s addiction support group (Matt is addicted to mind-reading, apparently, which is almost as cool as Willow being addicted to magic back in late-series Buffy), Matt yells at him like a crazy man. Matt and his partner, who is played by Simon the Cylon, interrogate a drug suspect, but Sylar won’t stop taunting him. Matt goes bonkers and yells and throws a chair against the wall, which perturbs Simon the Cylon. Watch out for that guy, Matt. He’ll steal one of your ovaries if you’re not careful. (Eh, skip it. A little Battlestar Galactica humor there. My apologies). Back at home, Matt acts like a creep to the good-natured water delivery boy, who has established a friendship with Janice. While Sylar gloats, Matt bribes the guy to never visit Janice again.

Angela calls Noah, who is currently living in D.C., to warn him that Tracy Strauss is murdering people involved with Building 26. When Noah gets in his car, it floods with water and ice. Danko arrives and saves Noah from Tracy’s wrath by shooting out the windows of his car. Danko wonders how Tracy survived after he shot her last season. I’m kind of wondering how Danko is out wandering around after Sylar framed him for murder, so let’s call it even. Seriously, Heroes, there’s not a whisper of a mention of the whereabouts of Mohinder, and yet Danko is still kicking about? Low blow, Heroes. Low.

Tracy confronts Noah in a sushi bar for an overly long and tedious scene in which they talk about redemption and Noah offers to get Tracy her life back. Kind of a long, talky episode. Not bad, just… long and talky. Later, Noah meets with Danko and tries to give him a buttload of money to stop hunting Tracy. Danko refuses, so the Haitian pops up out of nowhere and wipes his brain. When Tracy shows up on Danko’s doorstep to kill him, he doesn’t recognize her. Edgar shows up and knifes Danko to death in super-speed. Edgar tries to hack Tracy to bits, but her freezing power protects her. Edgar zips off.

New York: Paramedic Peter Petrelli leaps and hops his way through back alleys in a distinctly superheroish fashion to reach a pregnant woman trapped in a wrecked car. Even though he saves her, he mopes and complains to his long-suffering partner, Hesam, about how he almost wasn’t fast enough to save her. There’s a chapter in The Emerald City of Oz where Dorothy encounters the Flutterbudgets, a magical race who spend all their time moping and panicking about things that didn’t happen, but could have happened. Peter is a Flutterbudget. Anyway, Peter has been living like a recluse and doing a whole bunch of super-powered rescues, thanks to the powers of strength and agility he absorbed from Mohinder. Yeah, that’s our only reference to Mohinder’s existence in this entire two-hour block of Heroes. I have no comment, other than to point out that the world is sometimes a dark and empty place.

In D.C., Noah burns his dinner in his crappy apartment. He calls Sandra, but hangs up when a strange man answers the phone. Tracy summons him to Danko’s apartment, where Danko lies dead. Noah rummages around inside the wounds Edgar made in Danko’s abdomen and finds a key to a safe deposit box. Tracy refuses to get involved further, so Noah picks up Peter and takes him to the bank. They open the box and find a broken compass. Edgar bursts in and attacks them, but Peter absorbs Edgar’s super fighting skills and fights him off. When Peter touches the broken compass, it springs back to life.

Later, Peter responds to an incident report and finds Noah Bennet badly injured, having been attacked by Edgar, who stole the compass. Tracy visits Noah in the hospital and shares some clam chowder with him.

Edgar returns to the carnival and tells Samuel he met an empath (which the closed captions decided to translate as “impasse”, which… sort of works, too). Tattoos of all the various heroes (I mean, not Mohinder, naturally. Let’s not get crazy here) magically appear on Lydia’s back...

Much as with last season's finale, I'm not quite sure yet how I feel about this episode. Parts interested me, parts dragged. Overall, did I like it? No, but I'm bearing in mind that I haven't liked much of anything lately (except last week's episode of Psych. That was kind of awesome), and the problem might be with me, not with Heroes. Maybe by next week, I'll have mellowed my current anti-Heroes stance.
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Psych: Bollywood Homicide

So it was a special Bollywood-themed episode of Psych tonight, with the theme song remixed in Hindi and a guest appearance by beautiful Heroes star Sendhil Ramamurthy. I’ve been Sendhil-deprived as of late, so this was a balm on my troubled soul.

Recapping Psych is something of an exercise in futility, since the episode plots are frippery and frothy and inconsequential, and since the great charm of the series lies in the rapid-fire jokes and the self-amusing sight gags, but here goes: Sendhil plays Raj, the impossibly beautiful fiancé of Mina, an actress in a local Bollywood-esque musical theater production. After Mina narrowly escapes injury when a runaway truck backs into her, Raj turns to the Santa Barbara Police Department for help. Raj believes he’s cursed: his last four girlfriends have all met with near-fatal accidents. Somehow this confession results in Shawn hugging Raj and telling him he loves him. Shawn, hon, I’d’ve done the exact same thing.

(Granted, I have a well-established pro-Sendhil bias, but strictly viewing this episode from a clinical and dispassionate perspective, it’s hard to shake this conclusion: Sendhil is smoking hot.)

Via strategic use of dry ice and a plasma sphere, Shawn and Gus try to convince Raj they’ve lifted his curse. Raj buys it at first… until Mina is almost injured when she falls through a malfunctioning trapdoor during a performance. After Shawn discovers the trapdoor was sabotaged, Gus and Shawn stop by Raj’s house to tell him he’s not cursed: Someone is actively trying to kill Mina. They end up joining a dinner in celebration of Raj’s brother Jay’s upcoming wedding. Jay, by the way, is played by actor/writer/director Jay Chandrasekhar, who: a) directed this episode (and, y’know, the Dukes of Hazzard movie -- thanks, Jay!), and b) is Sendhil’s real-life cousin. Shawn and Gus fumble their way through an authentic Indian dinner (“My God! Even the water’s spicy!”), until Lassiter and Juliet arrive and arrest Jay, the musical’s director, for the attempts on Mina’s life.

Shawn clears Jay of suspicion and continues his investigation. Gus and Shawn realize the attempts on all of Raj’s former girlfriends’ lives happened only after each relationship grew serious, so Juliet goes undercover as Raj’s new girlfriend to lure the attacker out into the open. The culprit turns out to be Sita, Jay’s fiancée, who secretly loves Raj and sabotaged his relationships in an attempt to win him for herself. Sita is arrested, and Raj and Mina are free to marry in peace.

I only joined the Psych bandwagon this season, and I’m embarrassed it took me so long. It’s fun, it’s clever, it’s genuinely funny, and stars James Roday and Dule Hill appear to be having a blast together. Throw Sendhil and his impeccable bone structure into the mix, and it makes for a pretty damn good Friday night.
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Glee: Acafellas

Another fine episode of Glee kicks off with Terri serving hamburger casserole (she cautions everyone to watch out for bones) to Will’s visiting parents while Will cheerfully spills the beans about her (sham) pregnancy. Instead of coming clean, Terri commits herself to getting pregnant for real.

At Sue Sylvester’s behest, Quinn and the other mean cheerleaders begin sowing seeds of dissent within the glee club by encouraging Rachel to criticize Will’s awful routine choreography. Rachel urges the glee club to hire famed choreographer Dakota Stanley to come up with a slick new routine for Nationals. Will grows disheartened by this (he even refuses to be mollified by the special star-shaped sugar cookies Rachel baked for him) and starts skipping rehearsals. Finn loses his enthusiasm for the glee club as well and squabbles tediously with Rachel about their unresolved sexual tension. Huh. I like Finn. I like Rachel. They're a couple of cute, likeable kids. And yet their nascent romance bores the snot out of me.

After some impromptu harmonizing while singing “Happy Birthday” to the cold medicine-addicted shop teacher (who accidentally cut off both his thumbs in an antihistamine haze), Will forms an a cappella quartet with some of the other teachers, including Coach Tanaka, who is Emma’s current boyfriend. They toss around a few (awesome) prospective group names like Crescendudes and Testostertones, then settle on the (also awesome) name Acafellas. Impressed by Acafella’s rendition of Bell Biv Devoe’s “Poison”, the school principal invites them to perform at the next PTA meeting. Creepy former glee club coach Sandy (Stephen Tobolowsky) bribes his way into the group by promising to arrange to have singer-songwriter Josh Groban--who’s been looking for a new opening act--show up at the meeting. Two of the Acafellas drop out of the group and are swiftly replaced by Finn and Finn’s loathesome-yet-hot football teammate Puck. (Puck, by the way, was presumably introduced in the pilot that aired in the spring, but must have been largely/entirely MIA last episode, because I have no prior knowledge of Puck. This is a shame. I highly approve of Puck. He’s cute.)

Crazy talented glee club member Mercedes develops a crush on fellow crazy talented glee club member Kurt, who is: a) cute, b) totally flamboyant, and c) not at all receptive to Mercedes’s attentions. Sensing an opportunity to cause further chaos within the group, the cheerleaders encourage Mercedes to pursue Kurt. During a joint glee club-Cheerios car wash to raise money to hire Dakota, Kurt lets Mercedes think he’s romantically interested in Rachel. Mercedes responds by smashing his car window (bad, Mercedes, very bad) and singing a thematically-appropriate rendition of, yes, “Bust Your Windows.”

The glee club hires Dakota, who turns out to be tyrannical and evil. He distributes personalized meal plans to each member and insults and ridicules them. The glee club kids try to quit en masse, until Rachel rallies them with an anecdote about Barbra Streisand’s nose, then fires Dakota. Rachel is sort of a force to be reckoned with.

Acafella performs “I Wanna Sex You Up” at the PTA meeting. Josh Groban does indeed make an appearance, though only to slap creepy Sandy with a restraining order and make a pass on Will’s blowsy, drunken mom.

Sue bawls out the cheerleaders and revokes their tanning privileges for failing in their attempt to destroy the glee club, Quinn shows faint signs of growing a backbone and a soul, Kurt admits to Mercedes that he’s gay, and Will once again contributes his crappy choreography skills to the glee club. So all ends well.
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Glee: Showmance

I missed the sneak preview of Glee in the spring, so this is all new to me. Here’s the setup: High school glee club coach Will Shuester and his squad must place at regionals, or funding for the program will be cut. He needs twelve kids in the squad to compete, and he’s only got six. The grim news is delivered by Will’s chief nemesis, Sue Sylvester, the brusque coach of the school’s cheerleading squad. (The cheerleading squad is named, awesomely, Cheerios, which is one of many details that won my heart, just a little bit). Plot = established.

Here are the players: There’s Will’s brittle pregnant wife Terri, played by Jessalyn Gilsig, who played Claire’s doomed birth mother Meredith on Heroes. There’s Emma, the school’s germophobic guidance counselor, played by Jayma Mays, who played Hiro’s doomed love interest Charlie on Heroes. There’s obnoxious one-note cheerleader Quinn, who is played by Dianna Agron, who played obnoxious one-note cheerleader Debbie on Heroes (no, not the obnoxious one-note cheerleader who was murdered by Sylar. That was Jackie. Debbie was the obnoxious one-note cheerleader whom Claire and West traumatized in a cruel prank for committing the unpardonable sin of not letting Claire on the team). There’s Quinn’s cute boyfriend Finn, the glee club’s newest recruit. There’s cute, prim Rachel, the shining star of the glee club, who pines after Finn. There are also a handful of other kids in the glee club, none of whom get much to do in this episode, but all of whom are, if the musical numbers are any indication, crazy talented.

Will and Terri are in the process of buying a prefab mansion too expensive for their means. A montage of Terri in her dream home rolls while the glee club kids sing Kanye’s “Gold Digger”, and at this point I started to have a whisper of a shadow of a problem I might possibly have with this premiere, which might possibly turn into a problem I’ll have with the show as it progresses: Terri is materialistic and self-absorbed, Emma is sweet but neurotic and flighty, Sue Sylvester is spiteful and paranoid to the point of buffoonery, and Quinn is… an obnoxious one-note cheerleader. See where I’m headed with this? Ryan Murphy, who created Glee, also created Nip/Tuck, which is a show I sort of love, but damn, it’d be nice if he’d knock it off with the “Aren’t women silly and/or soulless?” undertones on his shows, especially considering the affection shown in the depictions of likeable do-gooder Will and hapless swain Finn. Right now, smart-yet-awkward Rachel stands as the show’s best chance to produce a cool, multifaceted female character.

Will takes a second job as the school’s night janitor so he can afford the Grand Foyer Terri wants built in their prospective home. While scraping gum off of desks, he bonds with Emma, who barely conceals her crush on him. Will and Emma share a tender moment after she tells him about the traumatic childhood yogurt incident that sparked her lifelong fear of dirt and germs.

In the ladies’ room, Emma catches Rachel trying and failing to become a bulimic to fit in with the popular girls and win Finn’s affections. When Rachel tearily tells Emma, “I guess I don’t have a gag reflex,” Emma chirps, “One day when you’re older, that’ll turn out to be a blessing.” I mention this to make the point that, whatever quibbles I may have with this premiere, it’s hard to deny that the script can be damn funny. To get close to Finn, Rachel infiltrates the school’s Celibacy Club, of which Quinn and Finn are charter members, and ends up participating in some inspired lunacy, such as a bit where club members pair off in couples and grind against each other with balloons pressed between their loins: If the balloon pops, Quinn claims, “The noise makes the angels cry.”

Rachel convinces the rest of the glee club, without Will’s knowledge, to add some sex to their upcoming performance at the school assembly to drum up interest in the club. I would have thought Will’s original plan, which was to perform Chic’s disco classic “Le Freak”, would have done the trick, but instead they substitute a raunchy version of “Push It.” This goes over swimmingly.

Later, Rachel and Finn rehearse (Rachel has packed a tidy picnic lunch, including virgin Cosmopolitans) and end up making out. Due to premature ejaculation and/or a flashback to a traumatic memory about learning how to drive, Finn abruptly breaks off their hanky-panky and runs out of the auditorium.

Terri discovers she isn’t really pregnant -- she’s having an hysterical pregnancy. Didn’t Lana have one of those, back in one of those really terrible seasons of Smallville that we’re all trying so very hard to forget? She tries to break the news to Will, but can’t bring herself to do it, though she does tell Will she’s willing to give up on buying her dream home.

Quinn, who suspects hanky-panky between Finn and Rachel, auditions for the glee club, along with two of her minions, by singing “I Say a Little Prayer for You”. By and large, the musical numbers, while a little canned, are the best part of the show. Sue decides to use the cheerleaders as her spies to gain ammunition against Will to bring down the glee club.

And then Rachel sings a big, swoopy, awful ballad, which takes us into the credits. Which is a damn odd way to end an episode.

So that was the premiere of Glee. I liked it. I didn’t love it. I’m already tired of the two parallel love triangles, in which decent, downtrodden guys (Will, Finn) are torn between the shallow, self-absorbed women they love (Terri, Quinn) and the sweet-natured women who love them (Emma, Rachel). If Quinn and Terri don’t start revealing some hidden layers soon, I don’t know how much longer I’ll hang in, because really, the world doesn’t need another show about obnoxious, mean cheerleaders. However, the dialogue is pretty zesty, as are the musical numbers. It’s off to a solid start.
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Fun with keywords: “Hooray! It’s no longer August!” edition

First things first: Why the photos of the grimy innards of my cheap wristwatch, you ask? Because I’ve started writing articles full-time, and the first one I sold was a piece on changing watch batteries. And I liked my photos.

In other news: After a yearlong hiatus (something about the recent seasons of Smallville being: a) Luthor-free, and b) soul-killingly awful), Dan Liebke has once again started up the Smallville Files, his bizarre and hilarious episode recaps, over at Astonishing Tales. This is reason for much celebrating.

Speaking of things that are soul-killingly awful, fresh episodes of Heroes start airing on NBC on September 21st (new time slot! Check your local listings!). I’ll continue the recaps unless/until the show manages to break my spirit for good. I’m also looking to add another couple of shows to the recapping roster: Flash Forward, maybe? Does anything look good and/or endearingly terrible?

A look at the keywords used to find this site in August:

"haven't you heard? i'm the defensive player of the year."
Worst Heroes line ever. And there’s some daunting competition in that arena. Fun contest: Submit your least-favorite Heroes line in the comments below. Best (i.e. worst) submission wins praise and admiration.

mohinder hair cookies
Ah, the legend of Mookies, the cookies that smell like Mohinder's hair, continues! For the record, three different people used this search term to find this site last month.


"time travel" "kiss herself"
Hemingway once claimed he could write a story in six words: “Baby shoes for sale. Never worn.” I think his record just got beaten.

are volume three and four of heroes going to sell together
Yeah. It’s out on DVD today. That would have been wildly greedy of NBC Universal to sell them separately.

chris evans banana up my ass
Ah, yes. Not Another Teen Movie. Some of Evans’s finest work. (You know that scene in Varsity Blues with Ali Larter and the whipped cream bikini? See, Evans’s character attempts to recreate it, only he decides to be a banana split… It’s more tasteful than it sounds.)

heroes 4 publicity photo
Here it is. Underwhelming, except perhaps for fans of Hayden’s cleavage. Remember last summer how Heroes did that awesome pre-Season Three publicity blitz with individual bus posters for each of the twelve regular cast members and huge full-cast billboards? I miss those days.

Then again: great posters, but an underwhelming season. Maybe an underwhelming poster will result in a great season? Maybe?

what episode of heroes plays my little runaway
sylar ima walking in the rain
“Into Asylum.” Which, despite Sylar getting the shapeshifting ability and the strategic use of Del Shannon tunes, is sort of a godawful episode, what with Peter and Angela being all kinds of self-absorbed and loathsome while hanging out in a church and Claire and Nathan wasting the viewing audience’s precious time getting drunk in Mexico. It’s no 1961 in terms of overall wretchedness, but man, it wasn’t good.

jason gilman fanclub
Something you haven’t told us, Jason?

who is Alex in heroes volume 4
justin baldoni gay sex
Yeah, cute Justin Baldoni played cute Alex, but since I’ve had no exposure to him beyond his brief stint on Heroes, I’m clueless about the second search term here. But! I just remembered I actually had a dream about Baldoni last night, in which we were at a party and I was telling him that I liked him on Heroes, and he was insisting that he was never on Heroes, he was in Mission: Impossible instead. Yeah, I don’t know. We’re having a heat wave and I’m not sleeping well. My dreams are getting a little wonky.
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