Shadowhunters - 'This Guilty Blood' and 'A Door Into the Dark'

"I know that some of you are concerned by rumours that I might be British..."

Welcome back to Season 2 of well-dressed YA adaptation Shadowhunters. We pick up where we left off, with brooding, troubled Jace on a ship full of proto-Shadowhunters with his father, and his brooding, troubled friends worrying about him; and to a lesser extent about the army of proto-Shadowhunters being created with the aid of the Mortal Cup.

About thirty seconds of in-universe time after choosing to go with his father, Clary turns up and Jace is so out of there. Unfortunately, it turns out that this Clary is actually Valentine in disguise. Remember this trick; we're going to see it a few times.

Back at the Institute, before you can say 'unsanctioned rescue mission' the Clave has stepped in and sent oily Brit Victor Aldertree to take control of the Institute in the name of the forces of Shadowhunter conservatism. His first act is to crack down on unsanctioned rescue missions, put out a dead or alive warrant for Jace and boot Luke, Magnus and Simon out of the Institute. Luke puts Simon up, but the rest of the pack insist that he kip in the storage shed, while Magnus has his first fight with Alec because Alec is being a dick about... well, everything. While giving Clary a hard time because Jace is her sole and blinding priority seems to be a sign of being a bad un, Alex gets no such free pass, and that's good.

"These aren't the druids you're looking for."

Less good is that Clary continues to get that pass. Aldertree, and even Jocelyn, rag on her about not trusting Jace, even - especially - when she tells her mother that Jace is actually Jonathan, her long-thought-dead son, but no-one decent, not even snobby Lydia, has a bad word to say about her and her constant telling people what they can and can't do, and what's right and what's wrong. Actually... Alec does call her on basically being a preachy know-nothing, but that's mostly chalked up to him being a dick.

Incontrovertibly dickish is Valentine, who has his son beaten in an attempt to mend fifteen years of absence and neglect with half an hour of quality abuse. He also explains that he made Jace stronger by means of in vitro injections of demon blood, because that's quality parenting right there. To make his wider point - that the Clave has become a worthless, bureaucratic anachronism - he takes Jace out to roust an unsanctioned, people-eating vampire nest. Noticing his power, the leader of the nest surrenders, but Valentine goads him into executing her.

Well... that seems to be the intended takeaway. Actually what happens is that Valentine goads her into attacking so that Jace can kill her in self-defence and be all conflicted and stuff without actually executing a vampire in cold blood.

And Clary pops up in time to see her mother take a shot at both Valentine and Jace, so... conflict!

"Is the semi-nudity strictly necessary?"
"We're going to say yes."

Moving on to 'A Door Into the Dark', Jocelyn tells Clary the demon blood story and Clary is all poo-poo, soulful eyes, you don't know him. This pisses Alec off, because bitch you don't know him, but Clary takes the moral high road of throwing in the towel and going back to art school.

No, really. Suddenly she's all 'I wanna normal life!'

Alec apologises to Magnus for being a tool, and persuades him to help him track Jace using tasteful nudity, although not before Magnus helps Simon to look for Camille in order to get Raphael off the hook over the illicit vamp nest, which was one of Camille's creations. This entails a trip to Agra and a wonderful sequence in which Simon stumbles about and Magnus reclaims all his stuff that Camille walked off with after their last breakup. Magnus Bane PI is still my fantasy spin off.

"Come on, son; just one little bit of brutal, frontier justice."

While Alec is risking his life with dodgy tracking magic, Dot shows up at Clary's school. Remember Dot? Apparently died, now covered in scary veins? I liked Dot; I'm glad to see her back. I hope she'll be around for a while now. She briefly calls Clary out on never looking for her, then portals her to the ship of fools where Clary unaccountably starts spewing Valentine's propaganda. It turns out Dot has enchanted her, but refuses to do so again, instead helping Clary and Jace to escape the ship, leaving Dot and the white-haired werewolf to face Valentine's idea of fair play.

Seriously; they don't even try and fail to rescue either of them. I'm pretty sure that Clary's plan didn't involve Dot escaping at any point. Not even to the stage of trying to persuade her and 'oh no, I'm too far gone with the creepy, Valentine mind-control mojo.'

The show has a new look for the new season, most notable in the fact that the seraph blades have shining runes along the blades instead of looking like knock-off toy lightsabres. The other visuals remain strong, although I don't really see much of the 'darker edge' that has been talked up a lot. Valentine is more visibly evil, but I wonder if that's just the necessity of creating a gradient between total evil, the garden variety douchebaggery of the Clave, and the 'heroism' of the leads, who would look pretty whiny, useless and self-centred if the grown ups weren't all blinkered, bigoted and/or scenery-chewing evil. It's good fun, but I really, really hope we aren't supposed to cheer unreservedly for our 'heroes'.

The Librarians - '...and the Tears of a Clown' and '...and the Trial of the Triangle'

"I don't have to work with you clowns."

Here comes the circus(1)!

Jenkins is 'enjoying' this particular circus, because he received a call from Eve telling him on no account to try to rescue team Library from the circus. Fortunately, he is able to avoid the marauding clowns and weirdly monotonous staff of the fair and rescue his colleagues, who have been transformed into sideshow freaks. A bit of investigation reveals that the head of the circus is a magician (played by Sean Astin) who is searching for the lost love of his youth (played by Felicia Day) and intends to use magic to ensure that she loves him forever; because that's not creepy.

MVL of the week: Jenkins gets a strong showing, but I'm giving this week as a tie to Cassandra and Ezekiel, the former for her enthusiastic skill at circus costuming, and the latter for his showmanship and sleight of hand.

"I don't think we're in Kansas anymore..."

'...and the Trial of the Triangle' see the return of Flynn, only to face a stern intervention from Eve and the other Librarians, who feel that he is distancing them from his battle against the rising ultimate evil. They're right, of course, and as the team set off to seek the Eye of Ra in the Bermuda Triangle, his refusal to include them threatens the mission of the Library itself.

The show has a bit of fun this episode, with the other actors playing the figures in a phantasmal otherworld of literary figures, riddles and self-discovery. It's interesting less because it picks out any unsuspected flaws in Flynn's character, and more because it so baldly faces the ones that have always been apparent (especially in the almost ludicrously heightened version of the character that appears in the series.)

MVL of the week: This one, in fairness, belongs to Flynn; rules bedamned.

(1) Or, you know, the Devil.

Timeless - 'Stranded'

"This is not a good start."

So, this seems a good point in the series to shake up the formula, right?

After the bombshells of 'The Watergate Tape', with trust between our three protagonists at an all-time low and revelations thick on the ground, we take a step back from routine Flynn thwarting, as our antagonist's latest time jump - this time to Pittsburgh in 1754, at the height of the French and Indian War - proves to be a trap, and while the team are being detained by the French Flynn's people locate the Lifeboat and blow a hole in its circuits. Thus our protagonists are forced to try and patch up their time machine with 18th century materials and to send a message by sealed time capsule to request navigational assistance from base.

Moving away from the disruption of the week allows 'Stranded' to just have fun in a time period, being victimised as English spies and threatened with death by Native American anti-colonials. There is also a chance for Lucy, Wyatt and Rufus to work through what they learned last week: Rufus' recordings and Lucy's journal in particular. Back at base, the potential loss of the team brings out the concerns of the base crew, which provides some vital humanisation for Agent Christopher and affirming that Mason's claim to care for Rufus are genuine. It's easy for an arc show like this to get caught up in chasing the big story, to the exclusion of the little details. Episodes like 'Stranded' help to avoid this by focusing on the characters and their relationships in the absence of an external threat.

Agents of SHIELD - 'Failed Experiments', 'Emancipation', 'Absolution' and 'Ascension'

For identification purposes, I am not Apocalypse.

And so to the end, as the season finale and the death of the be-crucifixed one looms.

In 'Failed Experiments', Hive recounts his origins as a primitive hunter who was captured by the Kree to become one of the first Inhumans. His plan is to repeat that experiment, to bypass the need to track down suitable candidates by turning ordinary humans directly into swayable Inhumans. When the first tests fail, killing the remaining senior HYDRA members, Radcliffe suggests that this is because the Kree blood which Hive donated to the distribution cocktail is long dead. In order to secure a better result, Hive summons a pair of Kree Reapers from orbital stasis to provide live Kree blood, at the same time that SHIELD hit the Inhuman town after Daisy appears on facial recognition.

Creepy mind controller has people management skill gaps.

In the ensuing clash, Alicia is killed and Mack gets the snot kicked out of him trying to get through to Daisy. Daisy gets a Kree for Dr Radcliffe to drain, but as a parting shot Mack splinter grenades the body. Unfortunately, Daisy realises that there is another source of viable Kree blood, as she was injected from the living source at Project TAHITI back in Season 1.

In 'Emancipation', we catch up with the movies as Peggy Carter dies and the Sokovia Accords are ratified. Coulson makes an appeal to Talbot to allow SHIELD to remain in the shadows, with their own records of Inhumans separate from the main register. He brings in Yo-Yo as an indicator of an Inhuman doing good work against the cartels, who would be in danger of her life if exposed by the Accords.

Team Hive kidnap a number of Watchdogs and expose them to the new version of Holden's delivery agent, a mix of Kree blood, Terrigen and Hive parasites which transforms the Watchdogs into waxy-faced supermooks. At the same time, Daisy hacks repeatedly into the base systems to talk to Lincoln and, with Talbot bristling at him from the other direction, persuades him to make a break for it. They crack him out of containment and he heads for the hangar and the quinjet, which Daisy remote pilots to Hive.

I tell you, I could watch this scene all day.

Only... surprise! It's not Lincoln, but Lash, who has also been languishing in SHIELD custody for a while. He lays into Hive like the ancient one were a pinata, incinerating his control parasites and thrashing his primitives. Unfortunately, Daisy shoves her oar in and, instead of just punching her, he pulls the parasites out of her, carries her into the Quinjet and gets skewered by James's burning chain. The jet returns them to base, but this leaves Hive not dead, and another black man dead of trying to save Daisy.

To cap that off, Yo-Yo gives her crucifix to Mack, putting the last black man standing in the crosshairs of fate.

'Absolution' sees Daisy in a bad place, psychologically, but honestly I struggle to care. After a decent season, Daisy is becoming unbearable again, and I think it comes back to her increasing prominence in the plot. The series struggles to make her important without the whole show becoming the Daisy hour, and she's just not that interesting.

... I got nothing.

Ahem. Anyway, she reveals Hive's plans and, together with a stolen ATCU warhead, the team realise that he plans to disperse his metaphorical seed across half of the world's surface by detonating a warhead full of it in the upper atmosphere. The team use some crafty mo-cap shenanigans to disable the chosen missile and capture Hive by overwhelming him with the memories of his many hosts. Unfortunately Giyera and James follow and use a Terrigen bomb to transform SHIELD Agents into swayed primitives. In the confusion, Daisy breaks out, confronts Hive and... begs him to take her back.

It's really not very dignified.

It turns out in 'Ascension' that she is in fact now immune to his powers, so she tries to clobber him because Hell hath no fury and all. He smacks her down and sticks her in a box, then he and his team nick the Bus Mk.II (it's actually called the Zephyr,) intending to use its high altitude capability as the launch vector, escaping in a containment pod as it is destroyed.

Well then...

Yo-Yo is injured as the team regroups. May and Fitz stealth onto the Bus and Fitz kills Giyera with an invisible gun. Coulson insists on heading to the Bus alone on the quinjet, but his team won't be left behind, because they follow from choice, do you see. While Hive gloats at a hologram Coulson, they take control of the Bus. The plan is to remote pilot the quinjet into space with the bomb. Daisy takes this on as her martyr sacrifice, but an injured Lincoln double-trumps her by stealing the crucifix of doom, frying the manual controls and taking Hive into space with him.

Six months later, Coulson - apparently no longer Director - and Mack are tracking a vigilant named Quake, who turns out to be Daisy with a dye job and a bandana, because trauma makes her edgy and cool.

Oh look, she's all attitude and cool and stuff.

So, Ward is gone, but Daisy is still my least favourite and at the same time the largest part of the show. I'm not of the opinion that she ought to be punished for her actions while under Hive's influence. I could even accept that her attempt to return to Hive's influence is the act of a recovering junkie and accept that, but I don't have much patience for sacrifice pissing contests and so many more interesting characters - Trip, Andrew/Lash, even Lincoln - seem to die to allow her to continue to mope about how hard it is for her that all these people die.

Agents of SHIELD continues to be a really up and down experience. There are some good episodes, but the arc is overextended. It doesn't help that I don't much care for Daisy, and I like her less each time the show tries to convince me that she's cool. You know who was cool? Trip was cool. I liked Trip, but Trip turned to dust while we were watching Daisy's superstar moment and apparently Andrew turned into Lash with the explicit purpose of saving Daisy, because apparently the universe loves her too much to let her die.

No, I will not 'get over it.'

Oh well; Ghost Rider next series.

Star Wars Rebels - 'Visions and Voices' and 'Ghosts of Geonosis'

"Okay... This got weird."

Having wrestled with my Sky Box and its sudden, partisan refusal to track the progress of shows on non-Sky channels, I have at last managed to get caught up, I think, with Star Wars Rebels.

First up was 'Visions and Voices'. When Ezra begins to see and hear Maul around Chopper base, Kanan takes him to visit the Bendu, only for Maul to show up in the desert. He explains that when they almost merged the holocrons, their minds were linked; the only way to end this is for him and his apprentice (he's still pushing that one,) to link properly and discover the secrets they both sought: The whereabouts of Maul's enemy and the key to destroying the Sith. To this end, and with Kanan and Sabine as backup, Ezra accompanies Maul to a little backwater world called Dathomir(1).

It's not easy being green.

Using the ancient magics of the Nightsisters, Maul links their minds and they learn that the answer to both questions is the same: Obi-Wan Kenobi is on a planet with two suns. Also there's a price to be paid and now the ghosts of the Nightsisters massacred by the Separatists during the Clone Wars want their pound of flesh. They are able to possess Sabine and Kanan, but even in their bodies can not leave their burial cave. Ezra declines Maul's suggestion that they just leave the others and Maul strops off. Ezra is able to Force push Sabine out of the cave, despite a few nasty moments when she comes at him with one of the relics from the cave; a black-bladed lightsabre(2).

Ezra then goes back for Kanan, persuades the Nightsister spirit to trade Kanan's body for his own, but destroys the Nightsisters' altar and so banishes the spirits. As they leave, Sabine picks up the black lightsabre.

They have actually given him Forest Whitaker's sleepy eye (and his voice.)

In 'Ghosts of Geonosis', the midseason two-parter, the crew are sent on a secret mission to bridge the Clone Wars/Rogue One gap by locating Alliance radical Saw Gerrera, who took a team to Geonosis to investigate the disappearance of the Geonosian species (c.f. last season's 'The Honourable Ones') after the Empire completed a massive construction project in orbit.

Kanan, Rex and Ezra locate Saw, who is pursuing a Geonosian deep into a warren of tunnels, and clash with squads of much-repaired battle droids. On the surface, Sabine and Zeb go to retrieve a shield generator in a sandstorm, and find it surrounded by currently dormant destroyers. Saw believes that the Geonosian - dubbed 'Klik-Klak' once captured, since they can not peak to one another - can be made to deactivate all the droids, persuading the ground team to press on. They discover that Klik-Klak is the last survivor of a genocidal gas attack launched by the Empire and decide to take him and several cannisters of the gas as proof to the Senate. Klik-Klak is also the keeper of what may be the last Geonosian egg, a queen egg and so presumably the sole hope of the species.

"Who's a cute little Geonosian!?"

That's when an Imperial cruiser pops up(3) and the captain decides to try and get a feather in her cap by taking out the Ghost. Hera, Zeb and Sabine scrag a pair of TIE Bombers, and Sabine gets to be all manner of badass fighting Imperial rocket troopers using her shiny new Mandalorian jetpack. There's a tense standoff when Saw wants to take Klik-Klak off for waterboarding, but ultimately even he accepts that the Geonosian belongs on his own planet and they leave him with the egg in the deep caves while the cruiser bombards the surface.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this episode, along with Ezra's realisation that the Alliance is not an ideologically unified group, is that the purpose of the mission is to provide evidence of genocide to the Senate, a timely reminder that we're in the period when the Senate had a presence and a voice, and the Rebellion a heavy political component. Unfortunately the cannisters were lost in the fight, so there is no proof.

Oh, and I for one am terrified to know what Saw Gerrera is supposed to be doing in the next couple of years to end up like he is in Rogue One.

(1) Home to the non-Sith dark side Force users/sorceresses known as the Nightsisters, and also rancors. This episode, for all its fine qualities, has no rancors.
(2) The Darksabre, because this episode, nay, this season, is neck deep in Clone Wars references.
(3) Actually, this is not entirely true; I'm more sort of theming events rather than relating them chronologically.

Agents of SHIELD - 'The Team' and 'The Singularity'

Secret Warriors.

Another mini-binge for Agents of SHIELD, leaving me with, IIRC, four episodes of Season 3 to get through.

Daisy and Lincoln activate the Secret Warriors Initiative, calling in Yo-Yo and Gutierrez to assault HYDRA's base and rescue the rest of the SHIELD team, currently besieged in the rear compartment of the Bus. This they achieve in swinging style, but the victory is marred as a captured Gideon Malick reveals to Coulson that the ancient Inhuman - Alveus, or Hive - can control other Inhumans through the use of his parasites. The team lock down the base and try to contain the Secret Warriors, which utterly destroys Gutierrez and Rodriguez's willingness to be a part of it, even when Lincoln is unmasked as the traitor. Lincoln is secured, only for Daisy to reveal to him that she is the infected party. When he refuses to leave with her, she steals the Kree orb and a box of Terrigen crystals, smashes up the hangar with her powers and then flits to meet up with Hive.

"Do we always wear lab coats?"

In 'The Singularity', SHIELD struggle to recover. Lincoln - strapped into a 'murder vest' just in case - accompanies May and Coulson to contact Multiple Redhead. She turns out to have already been suborned by Hive, to the point that she is willing to shoot one of her own duplicates rather than let her be captured. Although clearly rattled, the 'original' Alisha assures Hive that she feels grand. Still one step ahead, Hive and co then visit lippy Australian James to retrieve the other part of the Kree orb, which Hive says is the only thing that can destroy him (although my money is still on Lash being the anti-Hive.) They also turn James into an Inhuman with the power to make things explodey.

Fitz, Simmons and Mack infiltrate a transhuman club in search of dodgy scientist Holden Radcliffe, who might just be able to cure Hive's infectees (or 'Daisy' as Coulson calls them, until May pulls him up on his hypocrisy for treating Lincoln as expendable and Daisy as untouchable.) They make a good sell, but then Daisy and Hive show up to nab Radcliffe. They both insist that they don't want to hurt anyone, and Daisy tells Fitz that she doesn't need saving, or pity, anymore. Hive channels Will's memories to get at Simmons, who shoots him several times, because she's awesome. Although acknowledging that it is a line than can never be recrossed, Fitz and Simmons have sex.

D'aaaw. Please don't kill them.

Coulson and May find James's trailer booby trapped, but are saved by Coulson's new toy; an energy shield built into his hand. It is very cool. Alongside all of this, the ATCU sweeps up what is left of HYDRA, but it seems small potatoes now, as Hive gathers and grows his army, and uses Malick's money to buy a small town to house them in.

Hive is really, really creepy. Not as creepy as Kilgrave, perhaps, but in a similar way and not just slightly. His combination of mind control parasites and pulling up the memories of the dead is bad enough, but his subjects also seem to be inspired to do things, as if being directly controlled; Daisy, as soon as she is zapped, knows that she needs to retrieve the orb. This suggests a level of genuine 'hive mind', although notably Hive did not know that Daisy was no longer calling herself Skye, which suggests that the link may be transmit only, or entirely one way. Any which way you slice it, I have an intense dislike of anyone who drugs people into being their friends/family/army; it's the same problem I have with ALIE in The 100, whatever you may say about the whole 'nuking the Earth' bit.

The 100 - 'Wanheda'

"I'm on a horse."

With the Arrowverse in mid-season hiatus and Sleepy Hollow having spent the last of its goodwill capital with us, it's time to go back to The 100 and see what we missed in the entirety of the last season. You know, since the next one is coming up(1). We begin with the two-parter 'Wanheda'.

When last we left our ragtag band of post-apocalyptic survivors, Jaha had led Murphy to an island where they found the AI who scorched the world, and we open with Murphy going insane in a bunker until finally being allowed up to the mansion where Jaha and the AI, ALIE, offer to let him in on their little salvation game. Having spent a couple of months watching the tapes made by ALIE's guilt-wracked creators, Murphy is, to say the least, unconvinced. He not only knows that her sexy lady appearance is an imitation of one of her creators who suggested that she needed an avatar, but that she was built to 'make life better' and swiftly diagnosed that the Earth had a 'too many people error.'

I don't know which makes me more sad; the severe haircut or the loss of the
signature goggle.

Back at the former Fort Jaha, now renamed Arkadia since Jaha went nuts and took off looking for the City of Light, the survivors of the Ark are doing pretty well. A peace with the Grounders continues as the 'Skaikru' search for the populations of the other crashed Ark stations. Chancellor Griffin is wary of drawing too many supplies from Mount Weather given the risks of associating themselves too strongly with the Mountain Men, and the understandably bad memories the place brings up; especially for Jasper, who has gone, how you say, cray cray. During a mapping mission with Bellamy, Monty, Octavia and Kane, he tries to snatch a locator beacon from an Ice Nation raiding party who are searching for 'Wanheda' and laughs as one tries to cut his throat. Meanwhile, Lincoln is going stir crazy staying in to duck a Grounder kill order, and Octavia is giving him evils for putting on a guard jacket. Indra, Octavia's mentor in the Trikru, shows up to explain that 'Wanheda' means 'the Commander of Death' and refers to Clarke. Grounder belief is that you command what you kill, so if the Queen of the Ice Nation can kill Wanheda, she will be able to defy the Commander's peace and make war on anyone they like.

"It's a grunge thing, apparently."

Out in the wilds, Clarke is living rough and killing panthers. Straight up; we are reunited with her as she kills a panther so that she can sell the pelt for butchering services and supplies at a trading station run by a lass who shields her from bounty hunters looking to hand her over to the Ice Nation. She explains that she is grateful for the end of the Reaping, and the two of them get groiny with comparatively little foreshadowing. Compared to her awkwardness with Lexa last season, it's apparent that mass murder and living in the wilderness like a feral animal is a grand way to get over your coming out nerves. I guess you would get perspective.

"This also is a grunge thing."

Bellamy, Kane, Monty and Indra set out to look for Clarke, but run into a group of survivors from the Farm Station, including Monty's mother, Hannah and Captain Pike. Having crashed in Ice Nation territory, they have lost a great many of their number to Grounder attacks, including seventeen children who went out of the station to play in the snow (thanks for that, The 100, although actually thanks for not feeling the need to show it.) Understandably, if incorrectly, the Farm Station survivors are still very much in the 'all Grounders must die' phase, like the 100 in season one, despite Kane's assurance that not all Grounders are alike. I strongly predict that shit is going to kick off when Pike (or possibly Hannah) kills someone who is actually on their side.

After making a walk of shame from the trading station, Clarke is captured by a warrior of the Ice Nation who turns out to be Lincoln levels of unbelievable badass, taking out three members of an Ice Nation patrol who try to swipe his bounty. He coshes Bellamy when the latter tries to rescue Clarke, then takes her on her way despite having already received a nasty stab wound at her hands. This, we will later learn, is Roan, banished Prince of the Ice Nation, and he is taking Clarke not to his mother, but to Lexa, where Clarke responds to the hand of friendship with the fury understandable when meeting up with the woman who punked out on a military victory that would have prevented the need for all that gassing and then had her dragged across the countryside to ask for her help.

"Of course I'm a prince; check out my coat."

Murphy and Jaha are picked up by Emori, the scavenger who robbed them on their way to the City of Light. Emori is a tech-scavenger, and tries to rip off Jaha, forcing she and Murphy to kill ALIE's giant major domo. They discover that the tech they have stolen is ALIE herself, but Emori's brother is converted to the City of Light and they have to exchange the AI core for their freedom. In the City, essentially a VR environment generated by ALIE in the minds of her followers, the major domo assures Jaha that here there is no death.

So, somewhat unexpectedly, Season 3 of The 100 turns out to be less the Tom Hanks section of Cloud Atlas and more like the fourth Matrix movie. It's still the same great-looking, well-acted ensemble piece we know and love, although I am a little worried that the Farm Station survivors will be retreading the same blind hatred subplot that we followed with the Skaikru in Seasons 1 and 2, where we could be doing something new.

(1) And the problem is of course that leaving it so long means that you look for a background detail on some new character and find out that they're due to die in five episodes, or worse to kill a former regular.

Agents of SHIELD - 'Many Heads, One Tale', 'Closure', 'Maveth', 'Bouncing Back', 'The Inside Man', 'Parting Shot', 'Watchdogs', 'Spacetime' and 'Paradise Lost'

Perhaps surprisingly, it's not that man again.

Oh, man, so... yeah; I got a little behind. My much delayed catchup of Season 3 of Agents of SHIELD began with 'Many Heads, One Tale' in which Ward learns the secrets of the castle and the monolith. The stone was first used to send an Inhuman to Simmons' planet long, long ago. When the Inhumans rebelled against the Kree, one among them was so powerful that the others booted it to another planet, and it was HYDRA's goal to bring it back long before they got into all this fascism malarkey.

Coulson and SHIELD uncover a secret ATCU programme to expose its members to Terrigen crystals, but Price reveals that the man behind it is her partner, Gideon Malick, leading to his exposure as the last head of HYDRA and a full, working relationship between SHIELD and the ATCU. In 'Closure', Ward shoots Price while she's having dinner with Coulson, revealing that he's still a whining cry-baby who feels aggrieved that people he tried repeatedly to murder tricked him into killing his equally murder-happy girlfriend while he was working on a plan to murder them. Seriously, I get being upset when people are killed in a war, but when someone is swearing vengeance for deaths which occurred in a war which they pretty much started it just feels self-indulgent.

Malick's head of security, Giyera (played by bad movie superstar Mark Dacascos) kidnaps Fitz and Simmons and brings them to the castle, where Simmons is tortured to force Fitz to lead a team to the planet (named 'Maveth', from the Hebrew for death) where he plans to ditch them and rescue Will. As he goes through, a vengeful Coulson follows by HALO jumping into the open portal, which is to be fair pretty damn badass. While the rest of the team moves in to rescue Fitzsimmons and Coulson, Fitz finds Will and persuades Ward not to kill him as he is the only one who can get them to the exit point fast enough. They ditch the HYDRA team and Coulson shoots Ward before allowing him to lead him to Fitz. When he realises that Will is in fact the Inhuman possessing Will's body, Fitz kills him (again) with a flare gun while Coulson does for Ward. During the breakout, Simmons releases Andrew Garner who goes all Lash on the guards, and the Inhuman escapes the planet using Ward's body as a host.

In 'Bouncing Back' the team tracks down a super-fast Inhuman who has stolen weapons from the Colombia. Mac bonds with 'Yo-Yo' Rodriguez, despite a total language gap, and they discover that she was seeking to disarm the brutal police force, rather than selling the guns. The police turn out to have their own Inhuman, a man with a paralysing stare, who ends up captured by HYDRA to join their army under the recovering Ancient Inhuman, while Rodriguez becomes a detached assets while pursuing her own web series adventures. Interestingly, we open with a three month flash forward to a spaceship slamming through the atmosphere, while someone in a SHIELD spacesuit floats alongside Rodriguez's crucifix.

Nothing in his character became him like the ending of it.

'The Inside Man' sees SHIELD attending a conference on 'the Inhuman question', which kicks off Daisy's inner radical something awful. Together with new ATCU head and old sparring partner General Talbot, Coulson attends while the rest of the team search for a rumoured HYDRA inside man and try to play nice with Talbot's bodyguard, the Absorbing Man. Talbot turns traitor and sells Coulson out to Malick, who uses the moment to get an Inhuman 'sanctuary state' in Russia approved before the team can recover Talbot's kidnapped son and wreck HYDRA's shit for them. Morse and Hunter pursue Malick to Russia where they save the Prime Minister, take out an Inhuman general, but get arrested and have to take the fall for the team and be disavowed. They hit the bar, and are sent drinks by 'anonymous' admirers, as the team acknowledge their departure without making eye contact in what is, kind of unexpectedly, an awesomely moving scene of moving awesomeness.

Seriously; compare and contrast with the above, which I remind you is actually
Trip's emotional exit scene.

Bobbi Morse always felt a little like the spare May and Lance Hunter is Lance Hunter, but damn I felt for them in this scene because Adrienne Palicki and Nick Blood played it like pros. Little tears shining in the eyes, faces cracking just that little bit; it was possibly the single most effective scene in the entire three year run of the show. Of course, it was intended to set up the Most Wanted spin off that never happened, but that doesn't detract from the scene's power.

'Watchdogs' sees Mac taking some time off to visit his brother, while a group of anti-Inhuman hate bloggers start imploding ATCU facilities with Stark-tech knock-off paintball guns. It turns out that the self-styled and titular Watchdogs are being organised by ex-SHIELD Agent Felix Blake, who has been in a strop since Deathlok incapacitated him, and supplied with money and intel by HYDRA. Their goal is to identify and kill a powered, but they misidentify Mac as the source of Daisy's powers and go after him instead. Honestly, given how hard he fucks them up, it's probably lucky for them that they didn't target an actual Inhuman. Also, he gets to make his own shotgun-axe with a shotgun,a cleaver and some duct tape.

In 'Spacetime', HYDRA kidnap an Inhuman who can see the future, but only deaths associated with a person who touches him and who shares the vision. Failing to prevent the snatch, Daisy gets an image of what seems to be her death, with many of the team in a bad way and Coulson shooting her. The team try to avoid this future by not letting her go after the kidnapped Inhuman, but when May is forced to stay at base to say a last goodbye to Andrew before Lash takes over completely, they have to send her in. Events play out exactly as seen, but not as interpreted, which supports Fitz's interpretation of foresight: Seeing the future is glimpsing the universe from an extra dimension, which means that the events can not be changed. Essentially, free will is factored out of the equation.

Finally, 'Paradise Lost' sees the ancient Inhuman, all recovered thanks to his Soylent Green diet and decked out in a swishy AF long-coat, takes control of HYDRA from Malek. Having seen 'Ward' active in the previous episode, the team realise that he has been possessed as Will was, and Daisy and Lincoln travel to contact a failed Inhuman candidate who stole a Kree orb which contains information on the Ancient. In flashbacks we learn that Malick has been maintaining the HYDRA cult while using a trick stone to make sure he never had to go to Maveth, and the ancient Inhuman teaches him a lesson about sacrifice by confronting him, forcing him to confess to his daughter and then murdering the daughter. Meanwhile, Giyera is captured, but breaks out of containment using a stretcher buckle and captures basically everyone but Daisy and Lincoln, leaving them to contemplate activating the Secret Warriors Initiative.

Although... this does feel like one of those situations where you might consider calling the Avengers (especially as we're still pre-Civil War.)

It's telling that Season 3 is probably the strongest season so far, but it's still not quite enough to keep me coming back. I maintain that it would have been far better off with tighter half-seasons and less filler, as it's good when it's good but has a lot of sag. I just binged seven episodes and watched two more before Christmas and there are still about ten left to watch.

Brett Dalton is, by the way, much less irritating as the ancient Inhuman than he was as poor little assassin Ward, although Daisy is rediscovering her inner irritating radical strawman in a series of arguments with Lincoln over the status of the Inhumans as a minority, race, artificially balanced combat force and/or symptom of disease.

Timeless - 'Atomic City', 'Party at Castle Varlar', 'The Alamo' and 'The Watergate Tape'

I'm going to be honest with you, I'm mainly going to be illustrating this series
with costume porn.

I was working from home yesterday, which is always a good chance to catch up on the brain candy side of my TV backlog. No The Expanse or The OA, but I did get through four episodes of Timeless and a crap tonne of Agents of SHIELD.

First, Timeless, and time-troubleshooters Lucy Preston, Wyatt Logan and Rufus Carlin(1) are first sent back to Las Vegas in a time when it was better known as 'Atomic City'. They discover that Flynn has kidnapped JFK's mistress, Judith Campbell. They rescue her, but faced with the threat of blackmail she turns on the team and unwittingly helps Flynn and his technical adviser, time travel project head Anthony Bruhl, to steal the core of an atomic bomb. Although they recover the case in which the bomb was being transported, they find it is empty, the core itself having been buried for recovery in 2016.

I seriously expect these two to kiss at some point.

Once more, Wyatt is unable to kill Flynn - I predict this becoming old real soon now - and Rufus gets huffy before handing over his recording of events for the scrutiny of the mysterious Rittenhouse. Rufus also gets to be cooler than usual as he uses his 'historical superpower' - he is black, and therefore in many periods in history essentially invisible - to effortlessly steal waiting staff uniforms to infiltrate a casino, and later boosts a car simply by walking up to the driver at the front door of said casino.

Back in 2016, Lucy still doesn't know her fiance's last name and has a bust up with her mother over her father's identity, while Wyatt's attempt to prevent his wife's murder via time-delayed telegram fails.

Worst. Costume. Ever.

The team tracks the Mothership's power consumption, but Flynn's group escape and the ship next turns up in Germany in 1944. Concerned that Flynn intends to use the stolen core to arm the Nazi regime with nuclear weapons, the team travel back and try to contact the Resistance, instead running into a British intelligence agent named Fleming; Ian Fleming (professional cheeky chappy Sean Maguire doing a posh accent.)

With Fleming's assistance they reach a V2 test site, but Lucy and Rufus won't let Wyatt start shooting due to the risk of hitting Werner von Braun and nixing the US space programme. Instead, Lucy and Fleming infiltrate the titular 'Party at Castle Varlar' to try to kidnap von Braun. Flynn turns the tables on them, but discovering that there is no nuclear material in the V2, Wyatt and Rufus smell a rat and turn up to be big damn heroes. The team grab von Braun, prevent Fleming killing him in revenge for the Blitz and escape through a secret tunnel before returning to discover the best historical change yet, as their mission report is likened to the plot of James Bond novel and movie Weapon of Choice.

Bonus points for Lucy not letting Fleming kiss her.

"Wait! Weren't we supposed to remember something?"

Next, in 'The Alamo', the team heads for the Alamo, where Flynn is intent on preventing the birth of the state of Texas by encouraging Santa Anna to attack early, attack often. The team is a little off their game, as Wyatt has been told that he will be replaced as the team's designated Garcia Flynn shooter for failing to shoot Garcia Flynn in a staggering 100% of missions, and is getting flashbacks to a previous mission when he drew the short straw and had to run off and get a vital message out while the rest of his team died to a man. It's amazing he can string a sentence together.

While Wyatt struggles to impress Jim Bowie and Rufus discusses courage with alleged bear-wrestler Davy Crockett, Lucy has to put together a reasonable and rousing approximation to the Travis letter. When Flynn's exhortations result in Santa Anna declaring no quarter, they also have to work out a way to get the women and children clear (with the letter.) Wyatt is minded to stay to the last, but Lucy insists he is the only Garcia Flynn shooter she could trust, and Jim Bowie gives him his signature knife as a remembrance.

Rufus refuses to lie anymore and tells Mason he won't be Rittenhouse's spy, only to be stopped on the way home by a man in a limo who hacks his car and threatens his family. Lucy's mom finally gives in and gives her the name of her father, but at the top of 'The Watergate Tape' we learn that it is not Garcia Flynn (I guess he probably is a bit young,) but some rando named Benjamin Cahill. Wyatt has a full-blown conspiracy wall for tracking his wife's murder.

Seriously; I do wonder if the concept wasn't pitched by someone in wardrobe.

Unsurprisingly, the next trip is to Washington DC in 1972, where Nixon is about to go down and Flynn appears to be after the missing 18.5 minutes in the Watergate tapes. Rufus is charged with making sure that no-one gets the tapes, and given a number to report to in 1972. Unfortunately, it turns out that Flynn already has the tapes, and after he nabs the team as well he plays it, revealing that Nixon was concern with recovering 'the doc' on behalf of Rittenhouse. He also reveals that his guide in all of this is the journal written by future Lucy, causing her comrades to doubt her.

Flynn sends Lucy and Rufus to locate the doc and return it to him, but Rufus' unseen contact tells him to destroy it. Using future knowledge to find and blackmail Deep Throat, they learn that the Black Liberation Army have the doc, which turns out to be the Doc, a woman with a PhD in history who used to keep books for Rittenhouse, which she describes as a secret society with vast reach, into which she was born. Back at the safehouse, Flynn tells Wyatt that Rittenhouse and America are too intertwined to destroy Rittenhouse - which he claims had his family murdered in order to frame him when he stumbled on the conspiracy - without attacking the USA. Rufus confesses his involvement with Rittenhouse and together they set Rittenhouse and Flynn at each other's throats while getting the Doc to safety. All secrets are told, and Wyatt decrees that they both suck, but that Rufus is now their inside man.

In 2016, Lucy goes to visit Benjamin Cahill, but bottles it just after we get to see that Cahill is the Rittenhouse agent who threatened Rufus and was on the other end of the phone in 1972.

Timeless has a nice little conspiracy going on, but I'm not sure how much staying power it has, as eventually they either need to bring Rittenhouse down or face the increasingly unlikely scenario of these impossibly powerful Illuminati allowing their sworn enemies to remain in a position to threaten them. What mileage the show will have after that remains to be seen, especially as we're six episodes in and the team is looking rocky. Individually they aren't ad, but they need to develop a more than one-note rapport if they are to carry the show past that difficult moment when the conspiracy theory strains credibility.

(1) I straight up failed to notice that our three protagonists are named after Bill S. Preston, Esq, Ted "Theodore" Logan, and both the character Rufus and actor George Carlin, partly because their surnames are rarely used given the tendency to offer ludicrous aliases.

The Expanse - 'The Big Empty' and 'Remember the Cant'

Parts of the big empty are notably full.

With Westworld wrapped up for the season, it's time to go back to some of the other stuff. The Expanse moves on from its opener with 'The Big Empty'. While Miller follows the trail of Julie Mao to the doomed Scopuli, Avasarala pursues the rumoured acquisition of stealth tech by the Outer Planets Alliance and the survivors of the Canterbury struggle to repair their shuttle enough to have any hope of rescue. When rescue does come, it is in the form of a Martian warship, and Holden makes the fateful decision to broadcast a message telling the world that it was an apparently Martian ship that destroyed the Canterbury.

The decision to cancel the One Direction concert did not go down well.

Since the loss of the 'Cant' has intensified water shortages on Ceres, this broadcast ignites tensions and leads to rioting outside the Martian embassy in 'Remember the Cant'. Avasarala's politicking angers the Martians, but confirms to her that they are not behind the attacks; someone else is fomenting a war. Miller is pulled off the Mao investigation, but tells his chief that Mao seems to be up to the eyeballs in this, explaining that she left aboard the ship that the Cant was going to rescue. The survivors of the Cant are questioned by the Martian navy, who want Holden to recant his former broadcast and blame the Cant's engineer, Naomi Nagata (whom they believe to be an OPA operative,) for the ship's destruction.

Then the Martian scopes pick up a ship on fast approach.

The Expanse is, essentially, far less scifi than it is a big, complex political thriller that happens to be set in space. Space provides the specific issues, but actually the same story could be told in an entirely terrestrial setting, requiring only a suitable choice of restricted transportation, resource shortage and political tension. I say this not as a criticism, but because I think that it shows that scifi is growing up and telling stories that are not wholly defined by their genre. The Expanse is science fiction, but it is also a dense and relevant political story, and an espionage thriller.

A Series of Unfortunate Events - 'The Bad Beginning, Part 1'

It is uncommonly difficult to accurately and comfortably assign to the
television adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events a definite genre. The
closest I can get is probably the Gothic; a word used here to mean a style of
fiction characterized by a gloomy setting, grotesque, mysterious, or violent
events, and an atmosphere of degeneration and decay

From the first, Netflix's adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events announces its intention to hew closely to the conceits of the original. Patrick Warburton is a constant, dour presence as Lemony Snicket, self-appointed and duty-bound chronicler of the story of the Baudelaire orphans, informing us that this is a story bereft not only of a happy ending, but of a happy beginning or any happy events. By this point we have already been advised to go and watch something more cheerful by the morbidly upbeat theme tune.

Snicket introduces the three orphans - brilliant inventor Violet, absurdly well-read Klaus, and Sunny, an infant with a high level of expression and razor teeth - on the day that they learn of their parents' death in an unexplained fire which also destroys their home and, thanks to the geographically literal mind of their executor Mr Poe, sees them sent to the crumbling home of their mysterious Uncle Olaf. Discovering that they don't come with a wodge of cash, but rather with an untouchable trust fund, Olaf sets the children to work in his house, while he rehearses with his grotesque 'acting troupe'. The children befriend a judge who lives across the road, but all in all are in a very bad place, just as Snicket warned us.

Dodgy beard, child cruelty and singing.

I can't claim to be a great fan of the books A Series of Unfortunate Events, but I think part of that was that I first started reading them while I was teaching, and it's actually kind of hard to read this tale of benighted children surrounded by adults who range from actively malevolent to uselessly well-meaning, all of whom end up as either an active or a passive agent in the long process of making the Baudelaires' lives rubbish, if you're also attending safeguarding training. As much as I didn't care for the content, I did appreciate the arch humour of the first two books, and it's good to see that translated to the screen via a narrative device who feels like something out of a Wes Anderson movie. In addition, the non-naturalistic dialogue is wonderfully performed - most notably by the two older children - so as to convey that the stilted wording and repeated phrasings is an artefact of Snicket's recreation of the events.

Now, it's possible that the style will get old, and I'm not sure this will ever be a series that I at any rate would want to binge watch. This first 42 minute dose, however, helped down with a spoonful of foreshadowing not present in the books, is a gloomy little gem.

Timeless - 'Pilot' and 'The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln'

"Is anyone going to talk about the fact that we're flying through time in a giant
eyeball?"

History Professor Lucy Preston is somewhat taken aback to be picked up by sinister agents and hurried to a lab, where she is asked to be the historical consultant on a trip through time. One of two prototype time travel machines has been swiped by Garcia Flynn, a former NSA agent who killed his own family and is considered well and truly off the res. Flynn has traveled back to 1937 with a group of associates to work some shenanigans on the Hindenberg disaster. Lucy is to work out what he's doing, Delta Force badass Wyatt is to take Flynn out, and technician Rufus Carlin is along to look after the second time machine and report back on what happens if the other two get dangerously independent.

Flynn prevents the destruction of the Hindenberg in order to bomb its return flight, when it will be packed with dignitaries. A reporter whom the team befriends is shot in a confrontation with Flynn, who shows Lucy a journal which she will supposedly write in the future and challenges her to ask the machine's creators about 'Rittenhouse'. Back in the present, they learn that the Hindenberg was destroyed by anarchists (actually a hastily assumed cover that the team used to force an evacuation) with no casualties except reporter Kate Drummond, and Lucy goes home to discover that her mother is no longer a near-catatonic invalid and that her sister no longer exists.

I'm very torn, because on the one side diversity is awesome, but on the other
there is almost no setting in American pre-living history where two whites and
a black guy hanging out won't look sus. I think that all in all I'm happie that
he's there, but hope they will be at least as good as Legends in dealing with the
issue.

The pilot episode establishes a few basic rules of time travel, which are picked up on in 'The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln'. It is not possible, or at least inadvisable, to travel in one's own lifetime (so, the opposite of Quantum Leap.) Changing the past is completely possible, but those time traveling will remember the changes. The lab can detect when the first machine - the Mothership - lands and send the second - the Lifeboat - after it, but crucially all time travelers operate in a parallel chronology to the present, such that temporal events occur one at a time, and there is a fixed window in which to launch an intervention before time is changed. So, although they can travel to any time at any time, when Flynn lands in 1865 to get involved in the assassination of Lincoln, the team have only as long as it takes him to do whatever he's doing to launch their intervention, before they don't have any knowledge of the original timeline to work with.

Due to illness, the part of John Wilkes Booth will be played by Garcia Flynn.

So, yes, the second jaunt is to 1865 and the brief period of optimism for future race relations. This time, Flynn's goal seems to be to ensure that not only Lincoln but General Grant, Vice-President Johnson and Secretary of State Seward are assassinated, but equipping Booth and his co-conspirators with modern firearms. Lucy catches the eye of Robert Todd Lincoln, and snags an invitation to the President's box, where Lincoln and Grant will be, while Wyatt protects Seward and Rufus Johnson.

Rufus has a run in with a group of black soldiers who peg him for a fake, but saves the VP and earns the respect of the soldiers. Wyatt's job is pretty straightforward, but Lucy is left to wrestle with the question of whether she ought to act to protect the President as well, thus - hopefully - changing the future for the better. She clashes with Rufus over whether historical integrity is worth the backstep for black rights, and Wyatt over whether there is a difference between saving someone (his dead wife, for example,) and her determination to reinstate her vanished sister. She also has another run in with Flynn, who tells her she will end up working with him.

Ultimately, she tries to save Lincoln, and while Flynn - replacing Booth, who refused to switch his 'more dramatic' derringer and dagger for a Glock and got knocked out for his dramatic principles - is able to shoot Lincoln, she does save Grant. On their return they learn that a mysterious actress saved Grant's life and has a school named after her, while Johnson was reported saved by one of his (white) bodyguards. Rufus reports to project head Connor Mason on behalf of Rittenhouse, while a friendly tech explains that Lucy's sister has gone because her dad married the granddaughter of a Hindenberg survivor and never met her mother, which also means that the man she thought of as her father wasn't. She then returns home in time for an engagement party to a man she has never met.

Timeless shows considerable promise in its opening episode. Its characters are currently a little generic (my current prediction is that Flynn is Lucy's real father, but I hope they'll do something more interesting,) but I do like that the team seem consistently unable to prevent any change to history. Also, next week is JFK but not the grassy knoll; props for that.

The Librarians... - '... and the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy'

"Am I Abraham Lincoln?"

It's deadly danger and amnesia for Eve Baird this week, as someone summons a deadly Reaper to kill her in accordance with a prophecy locked in a glass box. Not that we know that to begin with, as the episode begins in media res with Eve, Jake and Ezekiel trapped in a labyrinth with a mysterious hourglass and no idea how they got there. As they piece together their memories in morning after style, they remember the threat of the Reaper and leaving the library to escape the terms of the prophecy. They find that they are also trapped with the principal, swim captain and cleaning woman of a high school, who were apparently transported to the labyrinth with them via a swimming pool dosed with magical waters from Mount Parnassus.

While they struggle to both make use of and escape the prophecy, Cassie and Jenkins are looking for an out from the outside. The only ways are, apparently, 1) outside intervention, and 2) get a bigger prophecy. Option 2 turns out to be a no-no, as the prophesied death of Eve outranks that of several Librarians(1), and in fact has already been invoked by the Oracle of Delphi to escape her own foretold demise. Things come to a head when the Oracle reveals that they are inside the prophecy cube, which is inside the library, prompting Baird to signal Jenkins to throw the cube outside, thus breaking her own prophecy (option 1) and invalidating the Oracle's option 2.

'...and the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy' plays cleverly with the tropes of prescience and destiny, and is one of the best episodes yet this season, not least because the show has built up to it with Eve training the Librarians to manage without her, meaning that there is a very real sense that she could die. There is also a pretty moving scene where the Librarians admit that they are worried that she may be feeling lonely, what with her SO vanishing once more.

MVL of the Week
You know what, the former Librarians in Training have all become good enough that I feel able to throw everyone into the hat for this award now, so this week I'm giving the title Most Valuable Librarian to Jenkins. Not only does he give Eve the (unfollowed) best advice of the episode - not to leave the Library - but knows Morse code and, when Eve wonders where the pocket mirror she signaled with came from, explains in his Jenkinsy way that the Guardian protects the Librarians, but the Library protects the Guardian.

(1) I guess Jenkins might be a bigger deal, but he can't die so...

DC Catchup: The Flash - 'The Present', Arrow - 'What We Leave Behind' and Legends of Tomorrow - 'The Chicago Way'

Hey kids! It's Mark Hamill!(1)

It's mid-season finale time in the Arrowverse (apart from Supergirl, as Earth-38 apparently breaks a week early,) which obviously means DRAHMAH!

In 'The Present', Barry seeks advice from Jay Garrick on Earth-3 vis a vis Savitar, which gives a chance to drop in a Mark Hamill cameo as the Earth-3 Trickster. Jay explains that Savitar is a Speedster legend, not actually a god, but the first man ever to tap into the Speed Force. His appearance in Earth-2 suggests that he fear's that Barry is about to become powerful enough to challenge his dominance of Speed (which implies that Zoom was just a wannbe, but read on.)

Alchemy makes a big push to restore all of the Flashpoint metahumans at once, but is stopped and captured, revealing his identity to the team. They soon learn, however, that Julian is little more than a vessel for Savitar. He was drawn to seek out a relic, the Philosopher's Stone, by visions of his dead sister. Opening a box he released Savitar; closing it banishes him. Of course, Cisco is lured into opening the box again by visions of Dante, but Caitlin talks him down and they use Julian's connection to question Savitar and learn that he is seeking vengeance for Barry trapping him in the box in the future. He predicts that one will die, one will betray the team and one will suffer 'a fate worse than death' before being cut off and lobbed into the Speed Force. Unfortunately, this slingshots Barry into the future, where he sees Savitar murder Iris before his future self can react, although Jay tells him that future visits are unreliable; the past should be fixed, the future is in flux.

And then Christmas happens! Wally is given his suit, having done good this week. Julian joins the team plus Joe's girlfriend for nog. Barry presents his gift to Iris: He's signed the lease on a sweet apartment for them both, which is... I want to say presumptuous and probably fraudulent, but I think they're going for sweet. A lot of people wander how he can afford it, perhaps forgetting that he is Harrison Wells' sole heir, and that clearly 'Wells' (actually Thawne) had enough capital knocking about to keep the STAR Labs building and his own sweet pad post-accelerator accident.

It's all about the legacy.

'What We Leave Behind' is far less merry than 'The Present', and that featured our leading lady getting future-shanked by a self-proclaimed god. Prometheus attacks Curtis in his civilian identity, and this catalyses a growing rift between Curtis and his husband. Evelyn's betrayal is revealed, and turns out to have been prompted by learning that Oliver was also the murderous Hood. In a similar vein, a series of revenge acts lead the team to conclude first that Prometheus is a businessman whom Oliver killed in Season 1(2), then that he might be the man's son. Either way, it's clear - not least from the fact that his fighting style shows he trained with the same people as Oliver - that he is seeking to punish Oliver's high-handed actions, as Diggle basically predicted at the time.

Seeking a swift and final confrontation, Oliver charges into a building after Prometheus, who has staged a scene identical to Oliver's earlier assault on the same building. He shoots a masked man dead, only to discover that it is Felicity's cop boyfriend, with his mouth duct taped under the mask. This is Prometheus' message: Everything Oliver touches, he destroys. Felicity refuses to be turned against Oliver, but as we close for mid-season Curtis has been chucked, Diggle is surrounded by police after an apparent SOS from Lila, Oliver has hooked up with vodka-drinking reporter lady (which is bound to end badly, not least because...) and Laurel Lance turns up. Alive. Apparently.

"I feel like one of us is not pulling his weight when it comes to the roaring 20s
theme."

And in Legends of Tomorrow, our heroes set out to take down their enemies 'The Chicago Way'. Chasing an anomaly in 1920s Chicago, they barely save Elliot Ness from assassination, leaving Nate and Ray to attempt to live out their Untouchables fantasies. Unfortunately, the two are having a bit of a spat over which of them is the redundant second nice guy on the team and they stuff it up. Okay, in part they stuff it because they are facing not just Al Capone, but also the unholy trinity of Damien Darhk, Eobard Thawne and new recruit Malcolm Merlyn.

In fairness, the team do okay, but it turns out that their foes are working way, way ahead of them. Stein is kidnapped and a disguised Thawne infiltrates the Waverider in his place, ultimately forcing Sara to make a deal for Stein's life. This also resolves Sara's anger at learning that Stein, the man who taught he not to kill Darhk and so save Laurel (redundant as that would apparently have been,) is hiding the existence of his daughter the time aberration. Sara trades the amulet they have for Stein, allowing Thawne to combine the two amulets into a single compass which points the way to the Spear of Longinus, which can rewrite reality.

So, Arrow takes the prize for biggest mid-season jaw drop by a country mile. I mean... the Spear of Destiny is cool and all, but Laurel Lance trumps the Holy Lance for reveal shocks. I'm not sure what to make of it, although I don't think it's time travel. That would be something of a betrayal of all the vowing not to shenanigan with history that our peeps have been doing of late, and also would not explain why Olly is as shocked to see her as he is. If she never died, he wouldn't be surprised. Further to this, Evelyn wouldn't have tried to be the Black Canary, been recruited into nuTA and been in a position to betray them to Prometheus. Most pressingly, it's too much of a crossover to form a foundational part of Arrow. All in all, it's a punchy close to a decent half-season and we're definitely wanting to know what gives.

The Flash has had a rocky half season, following from a rocky second half to its sophomore year. 'The Present' is pretty good, but Doctor Alchemy was honestly more interesting than Savitar (because honestly, we've already had one faster speedster from the future who considered himself done wrong by Barry. The potential death of Iris and the threatening predictions of Savitar are moderated by the promise of a mutable future, although Iris' death would be the ultimate test of Barry's resolution against temporal shenaniganning.

Legends is possibly still the weakest of the bunch, but it's hard to be sure when it's come on by leaps and bounds since last season. It's big shock ending is actually not the Spear, however, but the revelation that Rip Hunter appears to be alive and well, and directing low budget SF films about himself in 1960s Hollywood. What's that all about?

(1) Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back was not a good movie, but it had some good bits.
(2) Flashbacks to Season 1; I fucking called it!