TV Episode Review: The Chicago Code “Greylord and Gambat” and “Mike Royko’s Revenge”

My delayed reviews are bad enough, but unfortunately they’ve come during a time window in which Code itself has been snatched from us all too soon.  For those who haven’t heard (if I’m your only pop culture internet stop, you should really surf the internet more...) Fox has officially killed the show without any chance of a second season.  I’ll be honest, I don’t understand how TV ratings work—Code ranks about even with most of the other shows that Fox runs, the difference being that it had a pedigree of creator/showrunner and actors which put it a cut above most of the material Fox traffics in.  Long story short, they had an opportunity to be the network bringing something to television that’s noteworthy (they seem to ignore all of the glowing reviews they get for Fringe as well) and acclaimed for reasons other than billions of mouth breathing pre-teens tune in for it three times every week.  I’m not going to launch into that rant, but just keep in mind:  If you’re a regular American Idol viewer, you’re helping send the message that America’s ideal night of television is manufactured celebrity and manipulative “reality” programming.  It’s your right, but just remember that ratings come from somewhere.

At any rate, given the tardiness of my review of “Greylord and Gambat”, I’m going to be reviewing that episode and the finale within the same space here.  They’ll still be treated as separate entities, but if they’re the last two episodes of this show we get, we might as well celebrate them collectively. 

TV Episode Review: Chicago Code “Black Sox”

This episode played way too much like a “socially conscious” episode of a bad police procedural to be very likeable for the crime of the week.  It’s nice and all that everyone in the episode is so casual about talk of being openly gay—by golly, there’s even an old buddy of Jarek’s on the force who’s gay, and Jarek is totally cool with that; he even asks how the relationship is going—but ultimately it feels like a stale attempt to be modern and edgy while ironically drawing on pretty clichéd (and arguably offensive) storylines.  A really successful homosexual man is killed while trolling through Boys Town for tail, and the immediate suspect is, big surprise, a pair of brothers who must commute a LONG ways to work in the morning, because they certainly don’t seem like Chicago natives with their redneck tattoos and lynch-mob attitudes.  Forgive me for feeling like nuance and realism are somewhat lacking in an episode which can’t be bothered to go beyond the simplistic notions that minority groups still suffer hate crimes against them and the perpetrators are usually one-dimensional, hateful, undereducated country bumpkin types.  Dull. On top of that, the writers feel the need to cram Colvin’s mouth with an awful little speech about bigots and how horrible they are, just in case you weren’t keeping up with how atrocious hate crimes are.  

TV Episode Review: Community “For a Few Paintballs More”

Well, I guess I completely underestimated the writers last week in casually remarking that the second part of this paintball opus would be another homage to action movies in general.  I realized when “Pistol Peggy” emerged from the smoke of a paintball battle a-la Darth Vader’s entrance to the rebel blockade runner in the original film just what we were in for tonight, and I have to admit to a twinge of excitement in spite of having grown fairly sick of all things “Star Wars” in the past few years.  By and large, the episode followed through with some really fun scenes and playful character moments (how great is it that Abed-as-Solo gets Annie as hot/bothered as we’ve ever seen her on this show?) built around the well-known mythology of the original trilogy.  It didn’t quite live up to last week’s outstanding Spaghetti Western motif, but it managed to come through as a fairly energetic and amusing resolution to the most high stakes story we’ve seen on Community (if Greendale loses, it seems the college will be financially doomed) while putting some closure on that pesky Pierce problem that’s been hanging over the entire season.  I’m not sure how you do a “Star Wars” themed episode, though, and fail to put either Britta or Annie in the metal bikini.  Just saying, who was asleep at the wheel on that one? 

TV Episode Review: Fringe “The Day We Died”

Is it blasphemous if I admit that I was a bit underwhelmed by the Fringe finale?  I’m having trouble coming to terms with it myself, so amped was I after last week to discover what exactly had happened to Peter and what world it was he had been suddenly plopped into the middle of.  The answers to those questions weren’t entirely surprising, nor were they unsatisfying.  In fact, I’m quite intrigued by the cruel twist of fate involved—Peter’s activation of the machine on our side led to the destabilization of things on the other side which resulted in that Earth’s complete destruction.  It’s a twist we didn’t see coming, but it’s compounded by the fact that the worlds were never meant to be in competition with one another in the first place—they are linked together in some Fringe-sciencey way which makes certain that the destruction of the one means the imminent (and painfully slow, apparently) doom of the other.  This would probably also be a fitting place to note that the show’s opening has changed again (the last time representing the introduction of Earth 2 as a setting for complete episodes) suggesting a shift in the show’s fundamental premise.  Among the new pseudo-science phrases floating around were concepts like “biosuspension” and “dual maternity”.  Intriguing. 

TV Episode Review: Community “A Fist Full of Paintballs”

I can’t decide whether I was surprised to see Community go back to the paintball well this week; it made a ton of sense based on the high praise that episode drew last year, but it was a bit surprising given that Community has found so many other forms of parody, satire and silliness to fill episodes with.  In retrospect, I should have known that a revisiting of the general premise of paintball wouldn’t involve any laziness or repetition by the writers.  Instead they’ve taken their original premise and given it a couple of fantastic tweaks (namely the strange mystery of the $100,000 prize from the ambiguous Pistol Patty’s Cowboy Creamery, allowing for the “Fistful of Dollars” parody, and the flashback-centric subplot wherein we discover that Annie either cast the only vote to keep Pierce in the group, or the only vote to kick him out, putting them at odds during the battle).