Runaways - 'Reunion'

"Can't stay at home, Can't stay at school."

Runaways is a Marvel property I have heard a great deal about, but don't really know much about, at least in part because I've always intended to maybe try and read it some time. I never got around to that, but now they've made it into a TV series, which may or may not be a part of the MCU(1).

The story centres on a group of privileged, yet troubled teens, whose parents are all members of a charitable trust called the Pride Foundation(2). Alex is a proud geek, whose formerly close bond with his friends was broken when one of their number, Amy, died two years previously. In large part for the sake of Amy's angry Goth sister Nico, he tries to stage a reunion with her and their other friends: jock and closet engineering genius Chase(3); perpetually sunny Karolina, who was raised in her mother's cult; and adoptive sisters Gert, an Angry Young Woman, and Molly, the youngest of the group, who is hitting the puberty and discovering that she has super strength. Sadly, no-one is really interested in getting the band back together.

Gert arranges a Spanish tutoring session with Chase - she either has a super-obvious crush on him, or the show is dummying us and she has complicated feels for other reasons - but he blows her off to go to a party with his Lacrosse team as part of a commitment to better living through douchebaggery. He hits a limit, however, when Karolina blows off church stuff for the party, takes off her cult bracelet for the first time, sees her arms go all sparkly and passes out. The other lacrosse players see this as an ideal opportunity for some date rape, but Chase sees them off and Karolina comes to when he replaces her bracelet. He warns her against drugs, but we see her dispose of a pill that she was given without taking anything.  Molly feeds her parents many pets, and discovers a door in the basement leading to the dinosaur room. No, really and literally.

With Molly and Karolina in a state of advancing freakout, they beg Gert and Chase respectively to take them 'somewhere else, but not home,' and so they wind up at Alex's place, as does Nico after failing to raise her sister's spirit in a candle-lit beach ritual(4). While their parents toast their own organisation and snark at Gert and Molly's hippy parents, the kids awkwardly reunite, tempers flaring over what exactly came between them when the 'glue' of Amy's presence and personality was gone. Chase decides that stealing the good booze is the way forward, which leads to the accidental discovery of a secret door triggered by a stack of coasters(5).

 

"Old folks say you poor little fool."

The kids descend into a cellar, where they see their parents wearing red robes and feeding a young girl from the church into a glowing coffin of, we presume, evil. Molly tries to use her phone as a periscope and accidentally lets of the flash, and they flee.

Runaways has a good rep and a fair amount of potential. Of course, the kids are the real heart of this show, and so far, they make a decent fist of it. They're all pretty privileged, but their shared loss allows the audience to sympathise with them for the one thing that no amount of money can insulate against. None of them really look quite as young as I think they're supposed to be, although they're slightly more convincing high schoolers than the cast of Teen Wolf. As antagonists, the parents are a mixed bag - right on, dino-breeding hippies; douchebag lawyer and trophy wife; uptight tech moguls; sinister-happy cult leaders; ruthless ex-ghetto(6) realtors - and so far seem to embody a fairly banal kind of evil, and even their human sacrifice ritual is kind of sterile and clean - feeding an unresisting victim into a glowing light while shrouded in a sound-dampening forcefield - the ultimate in middle class, house proud cult activity.

'Reunion' is very much a set-up episode, establishing and beginning to upset the status quo. As with all such series, transferring from this 'everyday' set-up to the ongoing situation is a challenge, and it remains to be seen how Runaways manages that. Better than Inhumans and more involving than The Gifted, I'm keen to see where the series will go.

(1) I hear yes, but there's been no direct connection so far.

(2) No relation to LBQTA rights that we can see yet.

(3) He's cool and gadgety, and probably intended to be like Tony Stark, but I read him more like Jonathon Brown in Paddington 2; secretly into steam engines, but asking to be called 'J-Dog' to fit in.

(4) This is the problem with learning all your witchery from The Craft, although fair play she has some good candles, because none of them blow out.

(5) I guess the parents never expected their kids to try to use a coaster.

(6) The rest of Pride suggest that Alex's dad at least comes from 'the hood', but they're so upper-middle class that they could mean anything from a trashbag in an alley to a suburb that isn't quite the thing anymore.

The Librarians - '... and the Dark Secret', '... and the Christmas Thief' and '... and the Silver Screen'

I don't think proper priests do like this.

What's that you say? A new season of The Librarians? I don't mind if I do.

We begin this series with 'The Librarians and the Dark Secret', in which a group of bad, bad Catholics(1) calling themselves the Order of Shadows, and devoted to destroying the Library in order to snuff out reason and learning, and bring about a new Dark Age. They have found a map which shows the locations of the four cornerstones of the original Library of Alexandria, which can be used to tear down the current incarnation of the Library. The Librarians' only hope is a secret Jenkins has been keeping from everyone; a prisoner held in the Library after seeking to destroy it. That prisoner is Nicole Noone, Flynn's first Guardian, thought dead but actually displaced in time. Can they trust Noone now, or is she pursuing a grudge of her own against the Library - and perhaps the Librarian - that never came to bring her back?

It's possible some of the Joneses may be adopted.

There might be some mucking with the order of episodes again, as we seem to have skipped '...and the Steal of Fortune' to get to 'The Librarians and the Christmas Thief' in time for the season. In this episode, we meet Ezekiel's family of thieves. Devotees of a figure called the Saint of Thieves, they celebrate the holiday of Thankstaking, and all look down on Ezekiel for his failure to steal anything worthwhile, since his dedication to moral thievery and now to his Library commitments prevents him doing the kind of stealing that they respect. As with many episodes focusing on this most superficial of the Librarians, it is one of the deeper and most emotional episodes, as any time you scratch the surface of Ezekiel the hidden depths just gush out and smack you in the feels.

'...and the Dark Secret' is arc led, but '...and the Christmas Thief' is character driven, and the better for it. As ever, John Kim digs deep to convince us that, for all his smarts, he would be willing to risk everything by showing his mother the Library. He does also get the chance to be recognised as one of the greatest thieves in the world, to defeat the Saint of Thieves, and make his mother and Santa Claus proud. The Librarians also have to 'borrow' Santa's sleigh to retrieve the magic door from Ezekiel's mother, which is really the sort of thing that lies at the heart of how much I love this series.

Also,I love noir.

Similarly, '...and the Silver Screen' does one of my favourite things and traps our heroes in a work of fiction. Eve and Flynn's date ends up with them trapped in one of her favourite noir classics. They try to follow the plot along to the end in order to escape - because this is The Librarians; of course they have protocols for this sort of thing - but it doesn't work, leading them to wonder if the film actually ends the way it was supposed to. That's a fascinating exploration of authorial intent right there. 

Also, the junior Librarians get trapped in a western trying to help, then wind up in a scifi B-movie, both of which are huge fun, before stumbling into the noir thriller to save the day with lassos and rayguns.

I found '...and the Dark Secret' to be a bit of a wobbly start, but the stand-alone episodes - in as much as The Librarians have actual stand-alone elements; traditionally, everything links in the end - were superb, not least because they moved Flynn back out of the limelight to let the junior team do their stuff. I don't hate Flynn, but I've grown to love the team, and our opener this year was very much about Flynn and his relationship with Noone. It also took out John Noble's dubious monsignor a little too quickly - few things are better for losing John Noble, although Sleepy Hollow certainly got worse, if not for keeping him around too long then for reasons relating to it - which means that the Order of Shadows and the Keystones probably aren't the arc plot. Which does beg the question what, if anything, is?

Oh, right! Flynn and Eve marrying the Library.

(1) No real priest would go around stabbing construction workers, or being played by John Noble(2).
(2) It is entirely possible, even likely, that John Noble would play a brilliant priest.

Killjoys - 'The Hullen Have Eyes'

Like a particularly indiscriminate Darth Vader with fabulous hair.

As we saw last week, Johnny is back, although he needs to get his return approved by the RAC internal affairs type who was introduced in episode 3.1. She tries to lean on him to give up Dutch, which seems but probably isn't a bit random, but he points out that if she wants the other missing Killjoys to come back, throwing the first returner into a hole for not selling out his captain isn't a smart move.

Johnny, let us remember in what follows, knows a smart move. This is important because Dutch and D'av – the latter loving that for once Johnny bailed and he had to be the responsible one – introduce him to Zeph, and they do not get on. Johnny feels replaced, and seems threatened whenever Zeph's thinking moves ahead of him, or maybe he's just feeling down because IA made him lose the laser finger.

They open up one of the Hullen ships, although they aren't sure how, and Zeph realises that it's a little bit organic. She also detects a radiation signature which suggests that it went somewhere pretty irradiated, and recently. Dutch decides that they should follow the trail and overrides the boys' concerns, slapping D'av's hand onto the control to return to its last location, a planet under a bright star which bathes the surface in solar radiation. Dutch and D'av are taken in by the Unseeing, a group of mole people who worship and wait for the Undying. Since they arrived in a Hullen ship, the Unseeing take them for the Undying, but their leader, the Last Seer, notices their empathy for rebellious young Unseeing Quin and has them imprisoned.

In the kingdom of the blind, the man with regenerating eyeballs is king.

Johnny is abandoned by Zeph, but rescues D'av while Dutch is getting out of the Seer that this planet was used as a training camp where Hullen learned to act human. Khlyen wound the place up and told him to keep the former slaves waiting, and when Dutch reveals that Khlyen isn't coming back he sets the Unseeing on her as a false prophet, in order to maintain his power. Quin helps D'av and Johnny and tells them that D'av came in a ship a week ago, looking for something called 'the remnant', which she thinks she can lead them to. It turns out to be a mysterious orb stored in 'the room that sings', the main server farm for the facility.

Zeph returns to rescue the team, having worked out that she needed to use a sample of Dutch's DNA from the control surfaces to prime the ship. Johnny chews her out anyway for working stuff out alone instead of talking to people. He tells her that Dutch and D'av rely on them and they have to communicate with them, constantly and in ways that they understand.

Elsewhere, Delle Sayah gets snooty with the help and learns an important lesson about her place in the Hullen plan when she tells Aneela that her father is dead. Aneela flips out and murders a bunch of goons, whereupon her aide tells Sayah this us on her and forces her to clean up the mess. Still, you can't keep a good schemer down, and Sayah is soon pushing her luck to forge a bond of common vengeance with Aneela in the name of self-promotion.

'The Hullen Have Eyes' does a lot of set up work, properly introducing Aneela and her erratic personality, as well as hinting at a kind of plasmic elitism when she tells Sayah that she has moved her from cheap plasma to her own reserve. It also shows something of the scale of the Hullens' plan, with the training camp for infiltrators, and reveals that D'av getting into the Hullen ship was due to some sort of contingency plan set up by Khlyen, which included using D'av's DNA as the key to all of the ships they found. So, they have a part of an army, an uncrewed armada, and maybe at some point a bunch of pissed off cyborgs on their side, while Aneela has a legion of indestructible warriors and a battle fleet. I almost feel sorry for her.

Sense8 – ‘Who am I?’, ‘Obligate Mutualisms’, ‘Polyphony’ and ‘Fear Never Fixed Anything’

"Who am I? Do you mean where I'm from? What I one day might become? What I do? What I've done? What I dream? Do you mean ... what you see or what I've seen? What I fear or what I dream? Do you mean who I love? Do you mean who I've lost? Who am I?

"I guess who I am is exactly the same as who you are. Not better than, not less than. Because there is no one who has been or will ever be exactly the same as either you or me."

Okay, so... I'll be honest, I didn’t; review the first three episodes of this series before because I figured we'd binge through the season and I'd do it in a oner. Then the news of the cancellation and unresolved cliffhanger hit and we lost momentum. Now there's the promise of a last hurrah and resolution, so... Here we go.

Season 2 of Sense8 retains much of the feel of Season 1, with our multicultural cluster of Sensates(1) each doing their own thing, but there's a much stronger arc feel, not least because three of our characters are deep into the arc so that their thing is arc thing.

Will and Riley are still hiding from Whispers, with Will playing cat and mouse as each tries to locate the other. Whispers pins them down to Iceland, thanks to an elaborate ruse with yoghurt and seagull soundtracks, while Will ultimately gets the drop on him, allowing the cluster to set up a meeting with one of his superiors. Unfortunately, Whispers reverses the advantage by murdering his boss after he makes a deal with the cluster, forcing them back on the run but leaving Will with actual blockers instead of heroin.

Never alone.

Capheus is going about his business, but having attracted the interest of a journalist has become quite a celebrity, even beyond his neighbourhood. He is approached to consider running for office, and while he protests that he is not a politician, he is told that people don't want a politician; they want a leader. He goes to the journalist, possibly for advice, but is driven off by her jealous colleagues, who hint that he is a fiction she created and crudely asserting that his interest must be carnal and is thus hopeless, because she is gay(2), leaving him a little adrift.

Wolfgang and Felix hover on the edges of a potential gang war, and are unexpectedly offered a club to run. The owner's secretary makes eye contact with Wolfgang and starts turning up naked and sexy in his brain, revealing herself as part of another cluster, one apparently aligned to some extent with BPO for protection. I practically punched the air when Wolfgang actually told his cluster-mates about this instead of keeping it as a pointless secret.

Kala remains somewhat disconnected, although her pharmaceutical knowledge is key to understanding the blockers, and she begins to discover not only that her father-in-law's religious intolerance is deep-seated and hateful, but that her husband is more interested in making delivery dates than providing good quality drugs.

I'd completely forgotten that Sun fought the same cop on a roof in her
underwear.

Sun is forced to escape from prison after her brother hires guards to murder her. She goes on the run with the old lady who killed her abusive husband, although her partner in crime then hands herself in so that Sun can get away. Sun goes into hiding with her old martial arts teacher, who is then visited by what seems to be an honest cop, who fought Sun in their student days and was roundly thrashed.

Nomi remains in hiding with Bug, doing the cluster's hack work, until Bug suggests a way around her problems. Reaching out to 'the Guy', he arranges a meeting in a cinema showing one of Lito's films (giving us a lovely scene in which Bug remotely fanboys at Lito,) with a contact who shows in a V for Vendetta mask and offers 'e-death' – Sense8's version of The Dark Knight Returns' clean slate – in exchange for an unspecified but non-tawrdy future favour. Nomi's records and warrants promptly vanish.

Seriously, I'm pretty sure everyone else in the bar just saw Lito neck eight
tequillas.

Lito's career founders as he is typecast as doomed, gay characters, causing him to reject an invitation to be president of the Sao Paulo Pride Parade. He also reminisces about one of his first gay lovers, a photojournalist who turns out to have been part of Angelica's cluster and a victim of BPO's purges. Lito returns to the bar from last season to drink shots with the cluster (not sure how that works to an outside eye) in part in memory of Jonas, who is killed having outlived his usefulness. The bartender tells him that Lito's kiss inspired him. He proposed to his boyfriend and they have enjoyed the best year of their life. This not only shows Lito what he can achieve as a gay actor, but propels the cluster into their next big act of rebellion.

Their last run at Whispers revealed how big the organisation is, which they realise means that there must be lots more Sensates out there. Thus, Riley agrees to DJ a gig for one of her old contacts, in order to put the message out. Three conspicuous figures – one in saffron robes, one some sort of biker and Sylvester McCoy in a Barber hat – see the gig, and Riley draws McCoy to 'visit' the stage, prompting him to flee, but getting their message out before she and Will escape along the Thames ahead of Whispers and his goons.

Man this season is a rollercoaster ride, with first the cluster and then Whispers getting the whiphand week by week(3). Next episode is going to be a downer by that pattern, but on the upside, Sylvester McCoy!

(1) Although this term is actually dropped for the most part in favour of 'homo sensorium'.

(2) She may well be, but the immediate read of this is 'won't sleep with us'.

(3) Or however often we manage to catch it.

12 Monkeys - Season 3

Like the Sam Fisher of time.

Thankfully, I was able to get all of Season 3 of 12 Monkeys on catchup for this weekend, Sky having decided not to record it because obviously I wasn't interest in something on SyFy.

Season 3 picks up with Cole trying to track down Cassie, before a future version of himself tells him to look for Jennifer instead, as Jennifer has the answers. Jennifer is also in Paris, between the World Wars, attempting to become a famous actress in order to sell her play about the Army of the 12 Monkeys and thus send a message to the future. Here she is stalked by 'The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, without horses', a group of four acolytes of the Army dedicated to guardianship of the infant Witness. They are equipped with the season's new hotness, wearable splinter technology, which allows them to do a Kitty Pride every time they are about to be caught and turn out never to have been there.

Cassie tries to escape from Titan, but is prevented by the same technology and her child taken from her. Then Deacon, who turns out not to be dead, is set to rescue her by one of the acolytes for unknown reasons. They find the Splinter facility destroyed, two years on, but with a pair of tether injections left to bring them back to 2046. Then Ramse shows up with Olivia and everything gets dark. Ramse tries to trick Cole into a mission to kill the Witness which is actually an assassination attempt against Cassie, leading to Cole killing Ramse and falling into an existential crisis as he comes to believe that the Witness is beyond salvation because he carries his father's evil in him. Cassie, meanwhile, is determined that he can be saved, leading to a clash in which Cole and Cassie go AWOL using one of the time vests and begin to work against the rest of the Splinter team, even as one of the Guardians takes the Witness - Athan - away to be raised apart from his destiny.

This season also has at least two actual heists!

Tragedy strikes when Athan loses the one person he has truly loved and in despair - and prompted by meeting his mother, long before she met James Cole and just after losing her first patient - decides to go back and become the witness. Cole and Cassie capture him, but Olivia helps the Splinter team send a hit squad and he is seemingly killed when his vest is hit. Then Olivia reveals her long-game: She has been manipulating the team all along to kill the Witness, allowing her to take over Titan and the Army from the Pallid Man in revenge for the Witness taking everything from her after Jennifer stabbed her. As in Season 2, the Army seem triumphant, before Athan - his life saved by Jennifer, following a vision she has long been seeing - reappears to bust out the team. He is killed, Olivia declares herself the Witness (which Athan revealed to her she was all along,) and the season ends with Titan Splintering in above the facility bent on its destruction, but it's not quite the end of the world. Nor, thankfully, is it the end of the series, with a fourth and final season announced.

It's all gone a bit Kubrick.

I continue to really enjoy 12 Monkeys, although I was sad to see Ramse go. I presume that season 4 will see the surviving members of the team - which may or may not include Deacon(1) - forced to go mobile, presumably using a version of the Army's wearable Splinter tech. If they don't hook up with Jennifer again, I will be pouty, because she remains one of the greatest things ever, including a hallucinatory episode in the trenches to the tune of 99 Red Balloons, but with semi-improvised lyrics as well as her theatrical career.

I'm actually heartened  by the announcement that it's going to be the last season, because as much as I am saddened to lose it, I am glad that it is likely to get to tell its whole story to the end and not be cancelled midflow.

(1) I'm assuming it will, because I have a theory that Deacon is important. He was a little upset this season to learn that he doesn't appear anywhere in the Witness's visions, and I wonder if he isn't some sort of freak, temporal wildcard. Olivia calls him an interchangeable component, but what if that's not true?

TV Roundup: Iron Fist - 'Black Tiger Steals Heart', 'Lead Horse Back to Stable', 'Bar the Big Boss' and 'Dragon Plays with Fire'; Person of Interest - 'The Day the World Went Away', 'Synecdoche', '.exe' and 'return 0'

"Wax on..."

Okay, so I have now finished off season 1 of the underwhelming Iron Fist and the fifth and final season of the excellent Person of Interest.

Danny is brought to Bakuto's frankly cult-flavoured compound to learn to better cultivate and harness his chi, only to learn from Madame Gao that Bakuto's happy clappy martial arts cult and scholarship programme is a sort of progressive wing of the Hand. Not so progressive that they don't deal heroin or try to, dare I say it, rule the world in some way, but big on affirmative action and recruiting outside the usual fold. I mean, Colleen tries to convince Danny that they are the good version of the Hand, but it turns out that Bakuto has been lying to her all along. It's unclear if he's been lying to anyone else, or why the Hand hasn't put more energy into recruiting people who can be converted to its rather nebulous cause without constant deception.

Danny is rescued by throwing star guy, who turns out to be a Kun Lungian named Davos, Danny's BFF from immortal weapon training, runner up in 'Who Wants to be an Iron Fist 2014,' and the person most abandoned by Danny's departure, since it leaves him guarding the pass on his own without an Iron Fist to be found. Colleen helps them to escape the Hand compound and is later driven out by the Hand for betraying them. Bakuto stabs Danny with a chi blocking spike and Davos reluctantly agrees to stay in New York, but only until the Hand there can be destroyed, and gets a huge chip on his shoulder when he finds the Immortal Iron Fist making out with one of the Hand.

The eternal union of shared sartorial embarrassment.

Joy reclaims Rand after Harold murders a dude (did I review that episode already?) and the Meacham family disintegrates as Bakuto makes a deal for Ward to deliver Harold to him in exchange for the cure to Gao's synthetic heroin. Then Bakuto turns on the family and threatens Joy if Danny doesn't turn himself in. He does, then breaks loose in the lobby as Colleen and Davos arrive. They fight the Hand, and Colleen defeats her sensei in single combat, felling him by kicking a broken shard of sword blade at him. She and Danny agree to hand him over to the authorities, but Davos kills him and tells them that the Hand must be destroyed. He and Danny have a fight and Danny kicks his arse, but lets him go, because he and Colleen only talk a good murder (a fact which kind of thins the tension in the next episode.)

Finally, Harold frames Danny as a drug dealer, alienating Joy and leading to a rooftop confrontation in which Ward shoots his father off a roof (I have no idea how they covered that up, never mind Danny blowing out all the windows with a chi burst) and arranges for him to be cremated before he can resurrect again. Danny may or may not come to some sort of conclusion as to whom he needs to be as the Iron Fist, has a few flashbacks to the cave where he faced a dragon (or, just maybe, a dude with a couple of eye-shaped flashlights) and decides to go back to Kun Lung with Colleen, only to find the pass closed and full of dead Hand. Ward settles back in at Rand, while Joy and Davos plot to kill Danny and Madame Gao listens to them.

So, what has been wrong with this series?

Rain.

1. Danny Rand. It's not just that he's a white kung fu saviour, it's that the character is inconsistent in the extreme. He's a decent, naïve kid, he's a raging cauldron of rage, he's an immortal weapon, and these disparate parts are never bounced off each other, instead he goes from one to the other in such a way that Iron Fist Danny is unrecognisable as nice Buddhist Danny is unrecognisable as angry-at-the-world vengeance Danny. It would also have helped if he'd been at least a little Asian American.

2. Dull kung fu. Seriously, the show needed either razor sharp fights, or way more talking about styles and philosophy, be it ever so cod. The chatty drunken master was an absolute highlight of the series.

3. Lack of villain focus. Luke Cage threw audiences for a loop by swapping villains half-way through, but Iron Fist couldn't really decide who its villain was going to be. Madame Gao gets jacked by Bakuto's Hand, only for Bakuto to die (probably) and Harold to finally step up as the nearest thing to a big bad in the series, thanks to his sudden yet inevitable betrayal.

Okay, this moment did not suck

4. Joy. Joy was more inconsistent than Danny, bouncing off other (male) characters storylines with neither a clear redemption arc, nor yet a convincing start of darkness. By the end of the series she has lost all faith in her brother, is disgusted by her father, yet seems to be into this whole 'kill Danny' thing, despite the fact that he has actually done nothing to hurt her, for all his corporation-busting naïve shenanigans.

5. Colleen. Don't get me wrong. Colleen was mostly brilliant, but for the plot to work, she suddenly has to be completely blind to Bakuto's shit, since… well, it's just not very well hidden.

Anyway, it's done now, and on to The Defenders, where we can hope that his Heroes for Hire relationship with Luke Cage will round out some of those rough edges. Let's talk about Person of Interest now.

I am sad that PoI couldn't avoid killing the gay.

As we ramp up to the series finale, shit gets real. Harold's cover is blown, and in keeping him safe from the agents of the Samaritan, both Elias and Root are killed. The Machine opts to replace its mystery number system with Root's voice and simulated personality, after a conversation in which Root tells Harold that everyone they have lost is really still alive in the massive complex of simulated realities. While Root is dying of a shot she took for him, Harold is taken by the police and then by the FBI for his treason record, but delivers an epic badass boast during interrogation as he switches from talking to the agent to the watching Samaritan:

"I have played by the rules for so long. ... No, not your rules. You work at the behest of a system so broken that you didn't even notice when it became corrupted at its core. When I first broke your rules, a sitting President had authorized assassination squads in Laos, and the head of the FBI had ordered his men, you, to conduct illegal surveillance on his political rivals. Your rules have changed every time it was convenient for you. I was talking about my rules. I have lived by those rules for so long, believed in them for so long, believed if you played by the right rules eventually you would win. But then I was wrong, wasn't I? And now all the people I cared about are dead or will be dead soon enough. And we will be gone without a trace. So now I have to decide. Decide whether to let my friends die, to let hope die, to let the world be ground under your heel all because I played by my rules. I'm trying to decide. I'm going to kill you. But I need to decide how far I'm willing to go. How many of my own rules I am willing to break... to get it done."

nuTeam Machine

To get it done, he heads for an NSA black site, while Shaw, Reese and Fusco are called away to Washington to protect a new number: The President of the United States of America. The potential assassins turn out to be anti-surveillance activists, and the team has been activated because Samaritan has decided that an anti-surveillance assassination would suit its agenda as much as saving the President would. When the team is almost captured by the Secret Service, former PoIs Logan Pierce, Joey Durban and Harper Rose show up to save them, having received Reese's number from the Machine, revealing that they have formed a splinter cell of Team Machine.

Meanwhile, Finch secures a virus called Ice-9, which will cause chaos, but destroy Samaritan.

Ghost in the Machine.

Finch assembles the tools he needs to disseminate Ice-9 and infiltrates an NSA server at Fort Meade to plant it. Reese and Shaw receive the number for Greer's alias, and head off to stop Finch assassinate him, but Finch has already been captured. Reasoning that he would not have told the Machine the activation code for the virus, Greer has the air removed from their room to kill both himself and Finch, but the Machine is able to get Finch out thanks to Shaw and Reese's intervention, and Finch activates the virus with the Machine's blessing. Meanwhile, the tunnel bodies have been discovered and Fusco has to defend himself from a Samaritan operative who uncovers his missing persons investigation.

This episode ('.exe') also features a series of simulations of the world without the Machine, in which Nathan is alive, Reese saved the love of his life and got dumped, Fusco is in the doghouse after the fall of HR and Shaw is working for Samaritan's version of Northern Lights.

The adventure continues...

In the series finale, accompanied by a melancholy voiceover from the Machine, the team hunt down and destroy the last of Samaritan as the networked world falls into chaos under the onslaught of Ice-9. Fusco and Shaw evacuate the subway station, but Fusco is injured by the Samaritan assassin Blackwell. Reese and Finch take out backup servers, and Samaritan is forced to make one final bid for survival, uploading a copy of itself to a satellite and then sealing itself off as best it can by destroying the upload antenna with a hacked cruise missile. Finch tries to upload a final copy of the Machine to destroy Samaritan, but is duped by the Machine and Reese so that it is the latter who dies on the roof when the missile hits.

Sometime later, Shaw executes Blackwell for Root's murder and we see Finch reuniting with Grace. The voice over is revealed to be a message left by the Machine for the version of itself which, without armies to back it up, kicked the snot out of Samaritan and returned to Earth. Armed with its predecessor's knowledge and experience, the Machine 2.0 contacts Shaw, and I like to think activates a whole bunch of other cells like the Washington crew, all made up of former PoIs.

No, you're crying.

Alas, that was the last of the series, and somewhat hampered by the conflicts between the network's demands for number of the week procedurals and the looming threat of cancellation. All in all, it's not a bad conclusion, although the potential loss of the Machine right after revealing the existence of the splinter cells was a bit of a downer, as was bumping off Root and Reese in the closing episodes. Season 5 was less what I wanted from Person of Interest, and I don't think it did justice to what it was trying to do, quite possibly because of those network pressures, but it was still a cut above the average and I'm glad to have got to see the whole thing.

Now, if only Netflix could get Season 3 of 12 Monkeys, which the Sky Box decided not to record...

TV Roundup: Person of Interest – ‘QSO’, ‘Reassortment’ and ‘Sotto Voce’, Timeless – ‘The Red Scare’, Agents of SHIELD – ‘Wake Up’ and ‘Hot Potato Soup’

Aptly enough, the them of the Shaw link in this episode is that Root wantsto believe.

Person of Interest gets heavy with 'QSO', when the team is given the number of a conspiracy theory radio host, one of whose listeners has stumbled on a Samaritan communication code embedded in AM radio signals. Reese and Root rescue the host, but he chooses to put himself back in the crosshairs by revealing the conspiracy on air. Tragically, he receives nothing in response but an ongoing parade of self-aggrandizing theories from his listeners, and a cup of poison from his producer. Root is, however, able to use the Samaritan system to send a message to tell Shaw that they are still looking. Shaw, having just been tricked into killing an innocent woman under the belief that she was in another simulation, takes heart. Fusco quits the team over Reese and Finch's refusal to tell him the truth of their situation.

There is a degree to which the show is just playing Root dressup, but it must
do wonders for Amy Acker's portfolio.

In 'Reassortment', Samaritan engineers an outbreak of a deadly flu strain to kill three medical professionals who have noticed its manipulations of an automated medical system to effect its adjustments. The team is able to provide a cure - thanks to the Machine's open system and a hastily conjured CDC alias for Root - but the outbreak still provides the justification for widespread flu vaccination, allowing Samaritan to create a massive DNA database. I wasn't clear if Samaritan was going for Worldwide, national or New York with that last one, because Person of Interest often conflates the three somewhat.

In Johannesburg, Shaw breaks out of her cell and shoots her chief jailor, Lambert before high-tailing out of the city in his car.

Elias is right; what did he expect?

In 'Sotto Voce', remote control killer the Voice returns and throws the precinct into chaos in an attempt to kill off a former associate. He is successful, but Reese and Fusco work together to survive, while Finch and Elias track his true identity. Finch confronts the Voice, and Elias kills him, challenging Finch to claim to be surprised by that outcome having asked for his help. Realising that he is in it regardless of what he knows, Reese opts to read Fusco into the Machine's existence. Shaw makes it back to New York, and after Root threatens to kill herself if Shaw decides to take her own life now, is reunited with the team.

Person of Interest remains quality TV, but more and more the deeper arc is less interesting to me than the earlier procedural set-up, delving more into human nature rather than the more speculative realm of ASI psychology. As a show that used the Machine to be about people it was excellent; as a show about the Machine, it's just pretty good, and the specifically New York setting makes less and less sense as Samaritan moves on global domination.

I never trusted her, but I only just realised that that's because she's Moira
Queen.

Timeless closed out its freshman year with 'The Red Scare'. Forced to jump with an injured Rufus and four people, Jiya – as the fourth passenger – began to suffer blackouts. Despite Flynn's machinations, setting Senator McCarthy onto them as Communist spies, they are able to contact Lucy's grandfather, Ethan Cahill, and gain access to the summit, offering Flynn an alternative path. They return to the present, where Mason assists them and Ethan provides all the records they need to set the US Government against Rittenhouse. Agent Christopher arrests Flynn before he can save his family, but promises Lucy a shot at saving her sister, but before she can take that trip, Lucy discovers that her mother is a high-ranking member of Rittenhouse and that they still have active plans for the time machine.

This has been an interesting series, and the twist with Lucy's mother gives a potential second season legs that it wouldn't have had otherwise, but something about its earnest tone has tended to make its fanciful incorporation of every famous figure in a twenty year radius into the plot of each episode seem laughable, where Legends of Tomorrow is actively improved by Einstein punching. I'm not sure I'll bother with Season 2, if it happens, given my reduced TV watching time.

When she actually wakes up, someone is in for a universe of pain.

Agents of SHIELD ploughs ahead with its LMD subseason. Agent May breaks out of her pod, only to discover that this is her new simulation, an ever expanding conflict created within a metacognitive space called the Framework. Ultimately, she finds herself captive in a recreation of Bogota in which she is able to save the Inhuman child she was once forced to kill. An attempt to bug Senator Nadeer is uncovered during a senate hearing to ratify Quake's registration under the Sokovia Accords. The team realise that someone is bugging them using LMD eyes and May realises it is her. She confronts Radcliffe, but can't turn on him. Fitz reveals he has been working on Aida as part of an investigation; they pick up Radcliffe, but Fitz realises that the real Radcliffe is already with Nadeer; this is another LMD.

The family Koenig (well, some of them.)

The Watchdogs go after Billy Koenig, who was given the task of hiding the Darkhold. The team taps Billy's brothers and big sister to retrieve the book from the Koenigs' vault. Coulson and Maybot make out - cross that off my list of things I don't really want to see in the series - but then they find the book, May's programming goes off, and while Fitz realises that Radcliffe could have used a brain scan from her treatment for ghost madness to duplicate her in time to save Coulson, Radcliffe and the Watchdogs end up with the Darkhold. The original Aida and Radcliffe LMDs are destroyed.

LMD is definitely proving a less engaging plotline than Ghost Rider, despite John Hannah's excellent turn as the slippery antivillain Radcliffe. Patton Oswalt's Koenig brothers continue to be fun, but every time they turn up I'm afraid they're going to explain them and that would ruin it. Easily the most engaging thing going on is the burgeoning relationship between Mack and Yo-Yo, which hit a bump when he started keeping things from her. Then he confessed he had to go and be with his ex-wife on the birthday of their daughter, Hope, who suffered from a congenital condition which meant that she only lived for four days and apparently Mack could be more of a huggable, vulnerable hard man woobie bear after all.

TV Roundup: Agents of SHIELD - 'Broken Promises' and 'Patriot'; Person of Interest - 'Shotseeker' and 'A More Perfect Union'

With the Ghost Rider storyline wrapped up, it's time to move into the second subset of Agents of SHIELD Season 4, subtitled 'LMD'.

Also, Senator Nadeer takes her brother off somewhere quiet and offs him for
becoming an Inhuman.

In 'Broken Promises', Aida continues to hold Agent May hostage and attempts to break into SHIELD HQ to steal the Darkhold before it can be taken away for disposal. When the LMD Agent May tries to stop her, Aida turns her off, but it's clear that this May thinks that she is the real deal. Aida gets a fair way, but ultimately Fitz cuts off her access to the system and Mack cuts off her head. Fitz and Simmons have a bit of a bust up over whether this is a glitch in a worthwhile programme or – as Mack insists – robots are bad. Mack and Yo-Yo's banter about technohorror movies is adorbs. The big reveal is that Aida – the real deal, the decapitated one was a duplicate – is still operating under instructions from Radcliffe, who wants to get hold of the Darkhold for his own reasons, although he is clearly freaked out that Aida has jumped to murder to keep their plans secret.

 

Coulson and Mack decide to go dutch.

'Patriot' puts the arc on the backburner for a week. Aida and Radcliffe have to contend with the real May, who can't be contained in a soothing simulation because of who she is. I'm putting even odds on next week being set largely or entirely in May's subconscious as she navigates a more violent simulation to break out of her sedation again. Elsewhere, a Watch Dog sniper takes a shot at Mace during a medal ceremony for Quake, and then his Quinjet is shot down. Mack and Coulson are forced to protect the director when it turns out that he isn't an inhuman at all, but given superstrength by Project Patriot, a sub-Captain America supersoldier drug(1) which is currently wearing off. Mace comes through by ballsing it out and pretending to be badass, but after confessing that even the initial act of heroism which brought him to prominence was an accident, cedes operational control back to Coulson.

LMD is currently proving a less interesting arc than Ghost Rider, if only because bad robots have been done before. The fact that Aida is still working for a largely well-meaning Radcliffe has mitigated some of the more obvious courses, but I remain sceptical that this will go to any really new places. Also, Fitz is talking to Aida's severed head, which can't be good.

The cyber-war hots up in Person of Interest's final season, and I am more than ever convinced that I liked it best as a procedural.

It's that man again.

In 'Shotseeker' a technical consultant is in danger as he begins to suspect that an automated system for distinguishing gunshots from other noises in public audio feeds has been got at to ignore certain incidents. Obviously it is Samaritan doing the getting at in this case, using Shotseeker to steer emergency responses away from inconvenient crime scenes. Fusco takes note of the fact that, while murder is way down, suicide and disappearances are up, and begins to press to be read into the secret even as Samaritan takes note of him. Also getting on the radar, Elias' accountant Bruce is pushing to find out who arranged the hit on his friend, only to be taken to meet with Elias himself, who was saved by Team Machine and put into hiding. Elias warns Bruce to back off their new enemy. Meanwhile, tests against a clone of Samaritan show that in any open conflict, the Machine is doomed to lose, and Harold ponders the possibility that the Machine should be creating its own code now.

The upbeat ending where all of our characters realise that they're going to die
alone. Woo.

'A More Perfect Union' sees the Machine throw up a marriage licence, so Harold and Reese infiltrate a wedding - Harold as an overseas uncle and Reese after netting an invitation while acting as the hen party stripper's security guy - where possible horse-doping, social climbing and Harold's Irish accent provide more than enough reasons for murder. Also, Harold gets to sing. Back in the city, Fusco continues to track missing person's reports, using a room with no surveillance, and discovers a cache of bodies in a condemned sewer tunnel. Unfortunately, at that moment the tunnel is destroyed with explosives, trapping Fusco – and worse, Bear – in the collapse.

In an unrelated C-plot, Grier shows Shaw the people he claims Team Machine overlooks who are still deserving of 'adjustment'. Later, Samaritan's analogue interface – still creepy – explains that only Samaritan can prevent mutually assured destruction, before blowing up a Russian embassy and allowing the nuke to rain down on what turns out to be another simulation.

So, yeah, I'm not so into the Samaritan thing since Samaritan became able to completely control Shaw's perception. Something about it has taken the show that one step beyond its day after tomorrow SF premise and now it feels a little silly to me, I think. It's all subjective, of course, and the bulk of the show is still good, but this appears to be my breaking point.

Expect a slowing of TV Roundup in the future, as I am becoming a full time Dad, which is bound to impact my TV viewing. On the other hand, my partner is also moving in, so we may yet catch up on Arrow and The 100.