Agent Carter - 'SNAFU'

The plot thickens.

“I conducted my own investigation because no one listens to me. I got away with it because no one looks at me. Because unless I have your reports, your coffee, or your lunch, I am invisible.”

Handcuffed in the interrogation room, Peggy Carter is submitted to every approach at the SSR's disposal, to little avail. The men she has worked with think that they can get to her because they know her, but she knows them much better and she knows their methods.

“To you, I’m a stray kitten left on your doorstep to be protected. The secretary turned damsel in distress. The girl on the pedestal, transformed into some daft whore.”

Enter Jarvis, bearing Howard Stark's confession in return for Carter's freedom. It's not exactly flattering for her to be 'saved' by a false confession which paints her as "A patsy? A doe-eyed idiot who succumbed to the charms of America’s mustachioed Casanova?" but it turns out that it isn't even real; Stark is still unreachable, but Jarvis has finally decided that his loyalty to Carter outweighs that to his employer and the partnership that emerges from the deception and its later abandonment is stronger, richer, and quite utterly delightful.

Carter warns that Leviathan is coming, after spotting Ivchenko signalling in Morse across the street. Dooley is under Ivchenko's mesmeric sway, but Thompson and Sousa are persuaded to search the building opposite, finding 'Dottie' but failing to capture her. Dooley secures Carter and Jarvis and helps Ivchenko to steal 'Item 17', leaving Dooley strapped into a prototype armoured vest that was abandoned on account of its tendency to explode. Dooley gives his life for his people, after charging Carter with running down his killers, but Dottie and Ivchenko are already moving, deploy Item 17 to cause a theatre full of moviegoers to turn and slaughter one another.

Jarvis: “What if there are people behind this mirror we’re breaking?”
Peggy: “Then they may get hurt. There will be a spray of glass.”
Jarvis: “What if those hypothetical people behind the mirror have guns?”
Peggy: “Then we may get hurt. There will be a spray of bullets.”

The penultimate episode of Agent Carter is possibly the best yet. Charming, quirky, yet still powerful; the danger to Agent Sousa when he tried to take Dottie alive and the Chief's ultimate sacrifice were no hollow gestures. The gender politics achieved a new level of subtlety as well. Thompson is aware enough to still respect that Carter saved his life, and to warn Sousa of Dottie's likely capabilities, although he tellingly refers to the Leviathan proto-widows almost as animals, and the eyes of the SSR are slowly opening despite their ingrained prejudices.

Most importantly, however, Haley Atwell and James D'Arcy sparkle throughout the episode. It's almost impossible not to adore them, and they carry us through any wrinkles created by the necessarily swift approach to next week's resolution. Atwell also delivers the critical rebukes to Carter's colleagues without seeming strident, which takes some doing when addressing 70 year old gender politics, however little may have changed in real terms.

I ma both really looking forward to the finale, and a little misty eyed to see the series go. I can only dream that they will learn some lessons from the success of the series and bring some of its verve to the next season of Agents of SHIELD.

Wayward Pines - Betrayal

Big bada Boom!

Ethan Burke is in a bind, unable to make the truth about Wayward Pines public for fear of starting a panic. He does confide in his wife, however, who immediately assumes he has been brainwashed, which is actually reasonable enough given that he was ranting about surveillance and control and then suddenly is all 'it's 4028 so let's go along with it.' He also begins investigating the insurgents, and achieves in hours what Pilcher's entire team couldn't crack in years. Deducing that Kate is the ringleader, he tries to tell her the truth, but she also disbelieves him and thinks he's drunk the kool aid. Even when he stops the first attack on the fence, she won't roll on the rest of the group, and he realises that there is a second bomb.

I can not think of a more effective passion killer than teacher-
approved sexual pairings, except perhaps you parents giving
you a pack of condoms and a roguish wink on your way out.

Meanwhile, Ben Burke and his assigned special friend Amy are called up in front of the class during sex ed and basically presented as the ideal Wayward Pines couple who should not feel reticent in asking for a hall pass to boff like weasels in the toilets, because damn the teacher is keen for these kids to breed. This makes sense - Wayward lost almost a townful of survivors in the first panic so its numbers must be wobbly, and like the First Generation, any subsequent children can be raised Pines instead of living the lie of the 21st century - but is still creepy as all get out. It's not that the sex ed class is encouraging them to reproduce so much as how into it the Mrs F seems. She urges Amy to move forward with Ben and the two of them sneak out and hide on the delivery van... which then explodes.

My main takeaways from this episode are:

1. Pilcher's volunteers are useless assholes (I think it was supposed to be 'Ethan is awesome'.)
2. To Theresa, subtle is something that happens to other people.
   Theresa: I thought I'd check out that vacant lot.
   Big Mike: Don't check out the vacant lot.
   Theresa: I checked out the vacant lot.
   Big Mike: I said don't do that!
   Theresa: There's some sort of hatch there.
   Big Mike: How are you not understanding that I don't care and want you not to care?
3. Wayward Pines kids have a way different relationship with their teacher than ordinary kids; possibly that's the whole 'secret cult' thing.

Dark Matter - Episode 8 and Episode 9

The resistance only meet in yellow filters.

Two episodes that might be grouped together as 'The Revengers' Tragedies'.

In episode 8, Six goes off the reservation in pursuit of the General, leader of his resistance group and the man who duped him into an act which led to the deaths of 10,000 innocents. He does this via transfer travel - his consciousness is copied into a cloned body at a distant location, giving him a short time to complete his business and return to the TT booth in order to have his new memories copied back to the original. Concerned, the crew send Four and One after him, which leads to Four seeing One's original face, which is decidedly not Jace Corso. In the end, One's secret is out and Six is robbed of his revenge, but One is able to find his real identity from the TT records and determine that he is on the Raza in order to assassinate Three, prime suspect in the murders of his wife and child.

Samurai Rangers! Victory is ours!

In episode 9, it's Four's turn to go awol, arranging a tete a tete with his stepbrother. When his mentor arrives instead and arrests him, they spend most of the episode walking and bonding, before the rest of the crew turn up to rescue him from the mentor's reinforcements. Then Four kills his mentor to send a message to his brother, which is... frankly a little out of nowhere. Also out of nowhere is the fact that having cracked the riddle of his identity, Four seems able to remember everything about himself, from the name of his mentor to events in his childhood. Maybe he's just blagging well, but it seems odd.

Between these episodes, we now have half of the crew defining themselves by the vengeance that belongs to the old them:

• One gives serious thought to offing Three for the deaths of a family he never knew and can not prove that pre-Three even killed. He tells Two that some people become bad, but others are born bad, implying that Three is the latter, but I still suspect that Three will turn out to have been that happy boy in the stables from Five's dreaming. 
• Six clearly feels the blood of innocents on his hands, and whatever brought him to a ruthless mercenary crew like the Raza, it is clear that as Six he can barely live with himself, stating that hating the General is the only thing that keeps him from being consumed by self-loathing, although by reconnecting with Five he asserts some of the warmer side of his personality.
• Four seems devoted to getting his throne back, but again one has to wonder what brought him to the ship in the first place and why the throne feels so important to him if he has no memory. If he has no memory.

These two are adorable, and yeah, I know, I'm a sucker for a father-daughter
dynamic.

For all except Four, a crisis of identity is looming; Four however seems pretty sure of who he is, and as I mention, this seems odd. He knows a few key facts about his past, but the rest of his knowledge is almost prescient. Three hints that some of his memories might be on the verge of returning, but Four displays much more than that.

Oh, and we end on a cliffhanger, as a squadron of ships sent by We Hate You Corp emerge from FTL and cripple the Raza's drives.

Agent Carter - 'A Sin to Err'

"Hiding on a window ledge outside a girl's bedroom. Is this what it feels like
to be Howard Stark?"

After her performance in Russia, Carter is finally getting what she's wanted all along, as Chief Dooley sends her out to chase down her own leads. This means hooking up with Jarvis again and chasing down Stark's old girlfriends, because Carter reasons that if Leviathan are training female sleeper agents then no-one is more likely to have got close to Stark than a dangerous woman. Meanwhile, said woman - Griffith Hotel resident and proto-Widow Dotty - makes contact with the supposedly unwilling Leviathan psychiatrist Ivchenko, who is revealed to be a master hypnotist intent on penetrating the SSR lab to steal... something.

"No... This is what it feels like to be Howard Stark."

Sousa uncovers Carter's deception, distracting them from the real threat as they go after her. She takes out a room full of agents from Washington, and Agent Thompson, but has to return to the Griffith for Steve's blood. Angie helps her evade the SSR, but Dotty surprises Carter with her stolen Sweet Dreams lippy and only the timely arrival of Thompson and Sousa saves Carter from a slit throat.

With two episodes to go, we close with Carter a prisoner and the SSR finally taking her seriously, because in the minds of men like Agent Thompson it makes sense that the only capable woman is a bad woman. A Nazi agent or Russian spy might be a lethal femme fatale, but not a 'real' American woman. Of course, Carter is British, and that probably doesn't help; where the other agents see strength in women it's brass and banter, but Carter is all steel and reserve, like a female post-war Benton Fraser. As an Agent, she makes the tea; as an enemy, she gets no slack, although they still can't bring themselves to see her as an actual equal.

While overall benefiting from the shorter run time, I'm in two minds about whether Agent Carter could have done with an extra episode of the SSR taking her seriously. Still, if it would have been better what we have isn't bad, and it will be interesting to see how they turn this around.

Sleepy Hollow - 'Paradise Lost'

"Damn! My hat's on fire! Why didn't you tell me?"
"I thought it was a look!"

Moloch is gone and a quiet has settled over Sleepy Hollow, broken only by the twanging of angst strings as Ichabod and Katrina struggle with their relationship and her insistence on personally supervising the captive Horseman of Death/Abraham. When Abby and Ichabod do track down a genuine supernatural thing, their hunt is interrupted by an angel named Orion. He applauds their extension of the role of the Witnesses to actually kicking arse as well as taking names and gives Abby a feather to contact him. This all leads to trouble when Orion wants to kill the Horseman and Katrina releases him to prevent this. Ichabod has doubts and learns that Orion is a renegade angel with form for genocide. He means to steal the Horseman's power and use it to lay waste to the sinful human world, forcing Ichabod to fight alongside his archenemy and destroy Orion's glowy-spinny-power draining halo chakhram.

'Paradise Lost' is the reinvention of Sleepy Hollow, post-Moloch. With a season and a half wrapped up, they needed something to take its place, and that something is provided by the knowledge that Moloch's death has cocked up the balance of purgatory, letting many things escape, including Orion and Captain Irving. It would seem to be pushing for a slightly more monster of the week format, with a new arc involving Katrina's attempts to separate Abraham from the spirit of the Horseman. It's not a bad pick-up, but I do expect to see Henry again.

Agent Carter - 'The Blitzkrieg Button' and 'The Iron Ceiling'

Maybe it's the wallpaper that makes this look like a rehearsal shot from a
play.

A two-episode catchup today.

In 'The Blitzkreig Button', Howard Stark returns to New York and hides out in Peggy's room while romancing various of her neighbours. He tasks her with photographing those of his inventions in custody, and then retrieving the titular blitzkreig button, a device intended to black out a city in case of air raid, the effects of which are too widespread and irreversible. Despite his hopes, however, Peggy is not blinded by loyalty, and discovers that the 'button' is actually a container for a preserved vial of Steve Rogers' blood, provoking her to break with him, concealing the vial in the wall of her apartment.

In a subplot, a dodgy individual whom Howard paid to sneak him back into the country betrays him, leading to a cold open of Carter rescuing him from a ransom attempt. He pursues Carter and Stark with an unfeasible rotary machine pistol, but is killed by Carter's bubbly neighbour Dotty, who turns out to be a total kung fu badass.

Oh, hells yeah!

At the head of 'The Iron Ceiling', we learn that Dotty is the result of a Russian training programme to create ruthless sleeper agents; a sort of proto-Black Widow. Meanwhile, a message on the magic typewriter suggests that a Stark weapon is being handed over to Leviathan in Belarus. As Carter knows the codes, the language, the area and is able to set up an operation with the Howling Commandos, she gets a field assignment under Agent Thompson.

The op is, of course, a trap, but they retrieve a Stark blueprint and a psychiatrist kept prisoner by Leviathan to keep their captive physicist stable while he works on it. There is also a killer nine year old girl on the loose, which is creepy enough even without her kicking off y crying in a corner like the Witch from Left4Dead, and home truths to be revealed from the man of action Agent Thompson.

There's a particularly neat moment, when Carter is obliged to change in the men's locker rooms and Thompson tricks Souza into going around to her side of the lockers. After a moment of awkwardness, he catches sight of an old bullet wound on her shoulder which connects her to the disguised photos from the very first episode. I appreciate the arc continuity, as well as the continuing competence of the other SSR agents.

The other arc development involves the battle of Findhelm, in which a great many Russians were massacred by no-one knows who, and which seems to be linked to Stark and to Jarvis's past.

Sense8 - 'I Can't Leave Her'

This is pain.

Sense8 wraps up its first season with a barnstorming eight-strong one-man rescue mission, as Will races to spring Riley before Whispers can make contact with her. As the separate plotlines collapse into one, I won't track the Sensates individually.

First off, we see Riley's whole painful birth and loss experience, stranded in the snow with a dead husband and a dying baby. It's grueling, and feels like much too much, although in fact it all comes home in the end of the episode.

Next, Wolfgang wraps up his family business by killing a lot of people. Will stops in to warn him that his Uncle was wearing a bulletproof vest, and Kala's chemical skills make an improvised bomb to help him take out the muscle, but the coldblooded assassination of the Uncle is pure Wolfgang, marking him out from the others in the cluster and horrifying Kala, who is still in tears later in the episode.

The rest is the rescue. Nomi and Nita use the late Dr Metzger's credit cards to arrange a flash sports car to race Will to the research facility where Riley is being held. Riley recovers consciousness briefly and Jonas and Yrsa both urge her to top herself to save the rest of the cluster. Will, however, promises that he is coming for her, which is a defining moment for him and the cluster and sets them apart from their 'parents'. Where Jonas, Angelica and Yrsa all felt it was impossible to escape or defeat Whispers, they are at least ready to try.

“Men cannot stand to see a beautiful car in trouble.” 

“It’s a primal instinct. Look at you, you’re hesitating.” 

“It’s a really nice car.”

Nomi directs Will to sabotage the car as a distraction, citing his reluctance to do so as proof that no man could fail to be moved by the plight of a flashy red sports car in pain. Then she forges him access to the building, where Lito steps in to smooth-talk Riley's location from a nurse. Sun crashes the room in her inimitable style, then Kala administers a wake-up shot to the unconscious Riley. As they make for the exit, however, Will sees Whispers and their eyes meet.

Relentless, Will gets Riley to an ambulance and Capheus hotwires the engine. Nomi directs him towards a mist-bound pass where Whispers' helicopter can not follow. Whispers tries to block them, telling Will he knows he won't endanger Riley or the pilot by crashing into the chopper, but Will trumps his game of chicken and lets Wolfgang take control. In the pass, Riley has to confront her loss, and then take Will to safety while he anaesthetises himself so that Whispers can not use him.

We end with the eight gathered on a boat, in fact or visiting, as Riley spirits the unconscious Will out of Iceland, having overcome her loss to become the hero, because it's important that having been the object of the rescue she finishes as the agent.

Given how a lot of the plots have worked out, I was glad that this one didn't resolve through pure violence, but through the interaction of the varied skills of the eight Sensates. It was also good to see Kala getting to do something besides being conflicted. A lot was left open for future series - in particular Whispers' foothold in Will's mind and Sun's ongoing incarceration - and many potential connections - such as the drugs and diamonds from Mumbai - yet to be explored, but the purpose of the season was to build the world and bring the cluster together, and this was achieved in fine style.

Sense8 made a good fist of its overall message of human unity, especially in this final episode. There has been a lot of violence in the series, but Wolfgang's actions here stepped into a different level and in many ways served to provide a cap on the potential of violence to solve problems. This was important, as there was at least one point where Will and Reilly had a good chance to assassinate Whispers and let it go. Presumably this was to avoid presenting deliberate murder as a resolution even to as horrific a foe as Whispers, but in universe is easily explained as the shock of Wolfgang's actions resonating in the network. Few of the Sensates are innocent of violence, but he inhabits it far more readily.

Man, I am reading all kinds of symbolism into this shot.

Let's talk about symbols, archetypes and that final shot.

Capheus is the centre, the heart. In the image he is the sun. I'm pretty sure he visited more people than any other and he always wanted to know about them and where they were. If this is a show about empathy, and it is, then he is the hero, because he wants to know and to like everyone. He knows violence, is somewhat inured to it, but it doesn't own him. He is the Knight, an Arthurian figure who truly believes that might should serve right.

Nomi is the brains of the operation, and more than any other the senses; she stays local, but lives global, her hacktivist networks and electronic infiltration the electronic equivalent of the Sensate cluster. She is the Crusader, refusing to let a wrong stand. She also knows pain, rejection, but also love.

Lito is the Trickster, who lies with all his being, but he also understands the transcendent quality of love. While Jonas may call love within the cluster the purest form, the most passionate, the most elevating love affairs in the series are Nomi's relationship with Nita and Lito's with Hernando. Nita gives Nomi strength, while Hernando gives Lito heart.

Will is the Soldier, duty-bound. In any other show, he would be the hero, the straight, white, alpha male who rescues the damsel, but here he is one of eight and also in need of rescue. Actually, everyone is in need of rescuing at some point, and everyone rescues someone, even if not physically.

Riley is the hardest to categorise, because the mystery of her past is such a dominant part of her character. I think, in the end, she is the Hero, the one who more than anyone faces her past and emerges stronger and better. She has the greatest pain, and thus shows the greatest strength.

Kala is also difficult, but I think she is the Idealist. She tries to do what is right, tearing herself apart to do it, and while she clearly hates and is a stranger to violence in a way most of the others can no longer understand, she is willing and able to defend those she loves.

Sun is the Warrior, cool and detached and effortlessly capable, in business as in combat. Her pain is a part of her strength, a rock on which she plants her feet, and she has been disappointed so often that only hope can open her heart enough to be hurt.

Finally, Wolfgang is by his own definition the Barbarian, the cluster's own monster of the id. He is the last to be shown in the closing group shot; for a moment it is almost as if he has detached from the cluster. He is cold where Sun is cool, embraces violence where Capheus accepts it, and knows what is best in life.

So that was Sense8 Season 1; the planned arc is five seasons, so fingers crossed it can keep going.

Melody

Melody (Angharad Rhodes), Mum (Laura Bacon) and Fudge

Children's TV can be pretty hit and miss. A recent hit with Arya and with us as parents is Cbeebies Melody, in which the title character - a partially sighted girl - is given music to listen to by her mother and describes what it makes her imagine. Sometimes this links directly to the theme of the music ('The Flight of the Bumblebee' accompanies a story about a bee,) but plenty have little relation to anything but the musical effect of the piece (for example, 'Danse Macabre' evokes the story of Little Red Riding Hood.)

The animated Melody.

The imagined adventures are depicted via simple animation, usually featuring an animated Melody and her cat, Fudge; a stuffed toy in life but animate in her imagination, of course. The music chosen is a pretty eclectic grab bag, ranging from baroque to modern. The series thus introduces children to a wide array of music, as well as gently prompting their understanding of disability.