iZombie - Season 3

So... was Blaine's hair always that colour?

Season 2 of iZombie wrapped up an ongoing conspiracy plot involving an energy drink that makes people into zombies, and introduced another, as PMC Filmore Graves was revealed to be a front for the coming zombie state, devoted to staving off 'D-Day' (discovery day) until they are ready to establish a zombie homeland.

Man this review requires a lot of use of the z-word.

Liv and her crew ally themselves with Filmore Graves, while Ravi keeps working on his cure. Major joins FG's zombie strike team, since no-one else will give the Chaos Killer a job, even if he is only the Chaos Kidnapper, and then has to be cured (the first cure having terminal side-effects.) Relief when he turns out not to have lost his memory is tempered by the realisation that ex-pusher turned zombie underworld leader Blaine has been lying about his own amnesia, including to his sometime lover Peyton, who becomes a full-time cast member this season. Also unfortunate is the fact that the remaining stocks of the cure go missing before Liv can be cured, the last having been given away by Major in a fit of do-right altruism. In addition, word of the zombie massacre at the Max Rager party gets out and anti-zombie activism becomes a thing, leading to the murder of a zombie family who turn out to have been old friends of Clive.

iZombie has a lot of good points, although most of them are mirrored in other series. It is, however, one of the very few series where a man (Ravi, in this case) acts like a dick over love and no-one cuts him an ounce of slack. Rose McIver's chameleonic ability to shift persona with Liv's brain-diet remains impressive, as is the fact that when she calls to warn the FG team that they are heading into a trap, their uptight, military leader accepts the word of a proven source, instead of dismissing her as female or a civilian. I've lost track of the number of lives lost to warnings being dismissed that way. I still don't trust FG, and suspect them of stealing the cure. Fortunately, there is a Season 4 on the way to answer lingering questions.

Person of Interest - 'Truth be Told'

It's that woman again.

The past comes back to haunt Reese this week, as a former colleague and an old sin reappear in his life. But let's talk about more important things, like the new opening. Now that the Machine is running again, Finch's familiar monologue about the Government's system is back, but intercut with the competing voice of Greer, telling us that we wanted this, for Samaritan to come along and rid us of the burden of making decisions for ourselves.

'Truth be Told' is an oddly retro number of the week affair, with Reese taking on an identity within a defence contractor to look into the life of Alex Duncan, a man who has been snooping in secure files. The Machine has picked this up because his actions have caught the attention of the CIA, putting him at risk, and the man leading the team that comes after him is Terrance Beale, Reese's former boss and thus one of the few people left on Earth who could identify him. Reese rescues his man, but Beale recognises his tradecraft and comes after them.

"I was in The Thing, you know."

Reese learns that Duncan is looking for the truth behind the death of his brother, who was killed amid accusations of selling arms to insurgents. He and Beale both affirm that his brother was an innocent man who died a hero, serving his country, concealing the fact that he was corrupt, and that it was Reese who shot him for it. Beale agrees to leave Duncan alone, and to leave Reese out of his report, showing the kind of integrity that tends to get members of the establishment murdered by Samaritan assets a couple of episodes down the line, which would be sad because he's Keith David and therefore pretty awesome.

Oh, and this ended.

Meanwhile, Root and Finch identify shipments of electronics being misdelivered to an unoccupied address and then rerouted to their destination, and determine that they are being detoured in order to infect them with Samaritan's pernicious malware. Root runs the malware on an isolated machine and finds that its purpose is essentially to turn any electronic device into an extension of Samaritan's web, funnelling any and all data back to the metaphorical spider(1).

There's a definite sense of endgame to Person of Interest, even in a formula episode like this one. I can't imagine that the makers were expecting a renewal, even going into production on Season 5. Reese's alias is given relatively little workout compared to a face like John Rooney, Assets, and while the flashback reintroduces Kara Stanton and reminds us of Reese's past, it's the coming conflict that looms. For my money, the series is still missing Taraji P. Henson, and this is especially glaring here because Fusco doesn't make a single appearance in the episode, skewing us away from crime drama to the show's latterly dominant espionage hat. Ultimately, I find the Samaritan War interesting, but I liked the crime aspects better, and felt that the moral quandary raised by the Machine was murkier without the looming threat of Samaritan. Nothing makes a protagonist look more just than the presence of a diabolical villain, after all.

(1) Although that's not how spider webs work. Maybe more like an ant lion's burrow, or a whirlpool.

Luke Cage - 'Moment of Truth', 'Code of the Streets' and 'Who's Gonna Take the Weight?'

Smooth operator.

Hot on the heels of Daredevil's barnstorming second season, Marvel Noir continues to make Agents of SHIELD look like a ham-fisted mess with the third Defenders lead in series, Luke Cage.

We first met indestructible bartender Luke back in Jessica Jones, and here find him with a few recurring headaches from their last meeting, working cash in hand sweeping floors at Pop's barbershop and working in the kitchen of the Harlem Paradise nightclub, keeping his head down. Pop's is a cosy sanctum from the pace of modern life, where Pop himself rules over a haven for disaffected youth and Turk Barrett plays chess with resident pro Bobby 'Not Fisher' Fish. Harlem Paradise is a sweet jazz club, whose king is Cornell Stokes, one of Harlem's premier gangsters.

In 'Moment of Truth' Luke directly rejects the call when Pop prompts him to step up and be a hero. We also learn a bit more backstory - framed, subjected to experiments in prison which gave him his powers - and that Pop knew Reeva from way back. Nonetheless, Pop is all for Luke getting back on the bike, and despite being reluctant to call the local-girl-turned-lawyer who keeps leaving him her number, Luke does hook up with a lass he meets at the club while working bar, and whom we later learn - although a bit before he does - is Detective Misty Knight. Also in 'the gentleman doth protest too much theatre', our man steps up when he sees his landlady's restaurant being shaken down. He's not for hire, he tells her, but promises 'I got your back.'

Family.

Meanwhile, Stokes and his cousin, Councilwoman Mariah Dillon, are setting up an arms sale to the Puerto Ricans to cover money Dillon stole from the city to pay for the club. Three gunmen rob the exchange, but things go south and all but two of the stick-up guys are killed. These two are Pop's kids - not biologically, but among the ones he has tried to nurture - as is Misty, which draws Pop into the business.

Stokes visits Pop for a shave accompanied by Shades, an enigmatic messenger for the even more enigmatic Diamondback, Stokes' weapons supplier, and Tone, his right hand man. Stokes is arrogant, but treats Pop with the respect due a craftsman. Pop is respectful to Stokes even though he knows that he just beat one of the stick-up boys to death with his bare hands. Tone drops money at Pop's feet. When Tone learns from Turk that Chico, the last stick-up guy, is at Pop's, he ignores Pop's offer to parley with Stokes and Shades' suggestion that they wait for Chico to step outside and instead machineguns the barbershop, killing Pop and wounding Chico while Luke covers a young customer with his own body.

The thanklessness of mentoring.

Stokes gives the money to his cousin, but trouble is brewing with the Puerto Ricans, who claim to consider him inconsequential, but not so much so that they won't go to war with him over the money he's got and the guns in police lockup. Stokes is also pretty pissed about Pop, tossing Tone off a roof for being a jerk with one hand, and offering to pay for the funeral with the other. "Believe it or not, there's supposed to be rules for this shit," he notes.

Luke, meanwhile, decides to make a stand. He gets Chico to give him some details on Stokes' operation, gleaned while planning the stick-up, and goes to war. He busts into the mob's safe houses so that Stokes moves everything to the new Crispus Attucks building, which Luke then goes through like a bullet through butter. Through all this, however, he only takes enough money to make sure Pop's doesn't go under, his goal being simply to see the cash end up in evidence, out of Stokes' reach.

The Crispus Attucks attack is the first big set piece of the show and is everything that Daredevil's hall fights aren't. Luke never dodges, barely has a technique; he just ploughs in like a tank, indestructible and unstoppable. In the earlier restaurant skirmish he simply takes a punch on his chin and lets the force of the swing break his assailant's wrist. And Matt Murdock claims he knows how to take a beating.

Unbreakable.

Through all this, Misty and her partner are seeking to get Chico's testimony. Unfortunately, Misty's partner Raphael turns out to be a stinking dirty cop, and we close out episode three with Luke trying to shield his landlady as Stokes blows up her restaurant with a rocket launcher.

Luke Cage takes us away from Hell's Kitchen and quickly establishes a unique identity, but retains many of the strengths of Daredevil and Jessica Jones, including from the latter the cyclopaean presence of Mike Colter. There is something of The Wire in the complex underworld - although it is more hinted at than shown - and something of Fargo in the rambling digressive discussions of sports and black authors, and there are layers and layers of unspoken or implied communication, only some of which are Marvel Comics Easter eggs.

Even Pop's flashback features Stokes and Chico's dad. It all links.

Pretty much everyone in Luke Cage talks about family, and legacy. Luke is a man without family and, at the top of the series, without any thought of a legacy. Stokes and Dillon are all about the legacy, however, each in their own way. Stokes wants to build an empire and Dillon wants to immortalise her name. Pop grew up on the streets as a mean-as-anything banger, but wants his legacy to be the kids he saves from going that way. And family? It's telling that only Stokes and Dillon really equate that with blood. Pop's family is one he made himself, and one which - in his eyes - Luke entered when he married Reeva. Luke describes Pop as his wife's people, but again there's no suggestion of a blood tie.

Other recurring themes include respect and image. Stokes wants respect and purports to give it, but although angry at Tone's blatant disrespect was happy to walk out without paying, taking it as his due that Pop would shave him for free. Luke and Misty hide their identities from each other even as they are hooking up, and no-one really sees Luke, colossus that he is, until he starts to act. Shades is clearly something serious, you can see it in Luke and Stokes' reactions, but most people just treat him like he's some dickhead who wears sunglasses at night. Dillon is obsessed with her name, and she and Stokes each have a nickname that trips their berserk button (Cottonmouth and Black Mariah, their comic equivalents, both of which are just loaded with unfortunate implications.)

The ultimate expression of Stokes' ambition and desire for respect comes when he stands in front of his poster of a becrowned Notorious B.I.G., the crown appearing to rest on his head, and announces 'everybody wants to be king.' As far as Stokes is concerned, he is the King, but he struggles to maintain that image and besides, to paraphrase Tywin Lannister, if you have to tell people you're the king, you're not the king. It is telling that among the floral tributes to the murdered Pop is a handwritten sign that reads: 'THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING.'

Houdini & Doyle

PC Adelaide Stratton (Rebecca Liddiard), Harry Houdini (Michael Weston) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Stephen Mangan)

Playing fast and loose with history, Houdini & Doyle is an historical detective procedural with a paranormal twist, set roughly in the period of the friendship of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes stories and many other works, including the 'serious' ones that he mistakenly believed were the ones he would be remembered for, and American escapologist and showman Harry Houdini. It's an obvious choice really, since the two men were close friends and later rivals, falling out over their diametrically opposed views on the paranormal: Houdini becoming a dogged debunker of spiritualists, media and psychics, while Doyle increasingly hewed to a fairly generalised belief in 'something'.

Houdini & Doyle gives us both men at the height of their powers in London, 1901. Doyle has killed off his millstone, Holmes (a decision which everyone seems to have an opinion on,) and Houdini is the toast of the town and an inveterate ladies' man. Of course, Holmes was written out in 1893 and by the time he became famous Houdini's constant stage assistant was his wife, but why let fact get in the way of a good story. On that front, when the two celebrities start to interest themselves in police cases with a potential supernatural twist as part of their drive to settle their dispute over the existence of the paranormal, they are assigned as liaison Constable Adelaide Stratton, a non-nonsense female officer determined to be taken seriously. In real life, the first female PC was Sophia Stanley in 1919.

So, it's not accurate, is what I'm saying, and I think it's inaccurate in a way that doesn't do it any favours. Unmarrying Houdini is supposed to create an opposition with tragic family man Doyle (I have no idea if his tuberculitic first wife spent the last several years of her life unresponsive, while Doyle tried to contact her unconscious spirit via media,) but also practically forces a romantic tension with Stratton which does neither character many favours. It also turns Houdini into a mummy's boy on an almost Norman Batesian scale, and for some reason leaves out the real-life soap opera of Doyle's 'other woman', his future second wife towards whom he maintained a chaste love until his first wife's death.

So far, the three leads are fairly even, even if one of them doesn't get to be in the credits, and that's all to the good. Doyle is imaginative and observant, Houdini questioning and pragmatic, and Stratton thorough and determined. It would be easy for Doyle to become the butt of the series, especially as maintaining the central dispute more or less requires that every case turns out not to be paranormal. Two episodes in, the show's determinedly skeptical stance is probably its greatest weakness, turning the central conceit into a huge red herring.

There may be a follow up at the end of season 1, but no episodic reviews on this one.

Powers - 'Devil in a Garbage Bag' and 'Paint it Black'

Who's afraid of the big, bad Wolfe? Everybody, apparently.

For the most part Powers has been a cop show with hints at superpowers, but with 'Devil in a Garbage Bag' things get a little more epic.

Wolfe asks Johnny Royalle to kill him, which Johnny fails to do, instead fleeing with the intent of continuing to flee. He explains to Simons, his self-multiplying right hand man and lover (I literally only realised this episode that he isn't Somebody Simons, but rather Simons plural) and Calista that Wolfe was able to break free because he has been harvesting Wolfe's brain to make Sway, and by doing so hyperstimulating Wolfe's regenerative powers. He's all for running, until Calista persuades him to man up and do what his teacher has asked him to do three times.

"Tall and tan and young and lovely..."

Meanwhile, Powers Division assembles at the containment facility, the Shaft, to deal with Wolfe's escape. Despite Walker's warning, a tac team goes in and gets eaten, because it turns out that's what Wolfe does. He eats people, and by doing so grows stronger. This is especially so if he eats another Power, so Walker advises against sending in other Powers to contain him. Instead, the plan is to sweep in pairs and use sustained, heavy fire to drive him back to his cell, where Triphammer has set up the Drainer.

So, in they go, but Wolfe locates the power lines and cuts them, putting the Shaft into lockdown. As Wolfe begins to take out the cops, Walker tries to gain an edge by taking Sway himself, causing him to go into some sort of seizure. He recovers enough to lock Deena in a cell for her own safety, then confronts Wolfe, which fires off some sort of mental rapport between the two of them, manifesting as glowing red eyes and a shared hallucination of a field under a red sky.

"You are walking through a red forest and the grass is tall. It's just rained.
Most of the blood has washed away."

As we move into 'Paint it Black', Walker tries to reason with Wolfe, as the hallucinations progress, making it clear that this is a memory of Wolfe's first kill on which Walker is intruding. At the same time, we get a lot of flashbacks to the early days, with Wolfe as an effortlessly charismatic philosopher-guru with his crowd of disciples, and Walker torn between Wolfe's proposition that there are no heroes and his desire to be one.

Calista spends time with a young man who thinks that Powers are intrinsically harmful, a relationship that is remarkably amicable given her admiration for the thing he despises. Johnny returns to the Shaft, but blinking into Wolfe's cell is caught in the drainer and trapped.

Pixels.

Wolfe tells Walker that there is nothing left of his powers, all digested and excreted long ago, but Walker manages to draw something out of his old teacher before Triphammer intervenes, battling Wolfe until he loses his cybernetic arm. The young Power Zora then drops in and manages to slow Wolfe down, then Retro Girl shows up, but Zora's inexperience lets Wolfe overpower them both. Walker wrestles with Wolfe, both in the Shaft and in the flashback, and apparently manages to draw back his powers, but once he gets Wolfe into his cell and into the drainer, those powers desert him, allowing Johnny to escape undetected. In the unanimous confusion, Zora takes credit for the capture by dint of being the first one conscious.

The flashback concludes with Walker and Johnny finding Wolfe in the slaughtered remains of a crowd of Powers Kids. He begs them to kill him, but Walker chooses to take him in and claim to have stopped him, jumpstarting his career just as Zora is jumpstarting hers. Finally, we see Retro Girl open up to Walker about her grief at failing to save the victims of a hurricane, a human moment which strips the formerly unlovable character of her armour and makes us feel for her.

"You've got red on you."

By upping the action, Powers starts to show its limits, with the flight in particular looking more like something you'd expect in a Peter Pan stage production. The dramatic content is more effective, with Wolfe a surprisingly effective villain considering he's a half-naked Eddie Izzard, alternating between pitiful confusion, easy charisma and animalistic rage.

"I used to have Wolfe nightmares," Calista confesses to her new squeeze, Krispin. "Everybody's had a Wolfe nightmare," he assures her, and I can see why.

Limitless - 'Sands, Agent of Morra'

If the whole episode had been a
motion comic, it might have been
the best thing ever.

Brian's quiet evening of watching and rigorously analysing Game of Thrones ("So, if the cute guy with the beard and the sword beats the ice zombies he still has to beat the other cute guy with the beard and sword?") with his sister Rachel is interrupted by the arrival of Sands, with a bullet in his side.

Thus begins 'Sands, Agent of Morra', a blockbuster romp as Brian is dragged along on a trail of murders with a single commission from Sands: Find his old MI6 handler before he can be blackmailed into murdering all of his old teammates. In the meantime, Rebecca and the team are tracking a kidnapped child; there couldn't possibly be a connection, could there?

Apparently Rebecca is punching a Russian bear. Not sure why.

This episode does a lot to humanise Sands, while still portraying him as a dangerous bastard. As ever, however, the highlight of the episode is its narrative device; in this instance, the comic book covers and pages which illustrate Sands' backstory and incidental aspects of the story. They are a perfect way of framing Sands' larger than life history and cold brutality.

Second Chance

Tech Genius, PA, People Genius, Bad Cop, Granddaughter, Good Cop (I'm not good at character names in my initial binge watching.)

Grumpy, disgraced ex-sheriff Jimmy Pritchard is killed in a break in, but his body is swiped by scientific genius Otto Goodwin for use in an experimental cellular regeneration treatment intended to save his sister Mary, his only link to the world. The regenerated Jimmy appears to be his son's age and is built like a brick shithouse, with added super science badassness, so on learning that his killer was a corrupt Fed and his son's partner, he breaks out of the lab to help in the case, with his new super-physique and old-fashioned perp-punching methods.

I guess the casting call asked for 'Male, late 30s, really comfortable floating
naked in a tank a lot.'

Thus begins Second Chance, a Frankensteinish new crime series, in which Jimmy partners with his son, Dupre, to use his new life to bust scumbags. He is backed up by the Goodwins' tech and money, in return for donating his blood to treat Mary's cancer. It's not terrible, but it doesn't quite stand out from the herd, which is presumably why it was cancelled. I'm three episodes into the only season and will probably watch, but not review, the rest.

Powers - 'Mickey Rooney Cries No More'

Retro Girl (Michelle Forbes), Christian Walker (Sharlto Copley), Deena Pilgrim (Susan Heyward), Calista Secor (Olesya Rulin), Wolfe (Eddie Izzard) and Johnnie Royalle (Noah Taylor)

Walker and Pilgrim, kind of oblivious to their rather symbolic names, continue to search for Calista, the sole witness to the death of Olympia. As the case progresses, they learn of a link to a power-enhancing drug called Sway, and things come to a head in a clash for Calista's loyalty in Johnny Royalle's club in which Retro Girl and Walker both spectacularly lose their shit and thus the argument.

"No one escapes from Chorh-Gum Prison!"

Meanwhile, in supervillain jail, Iron Man expy Triphammer and the captain of the Powers Division are experimenting with a power-suppressor, but it tends to make people explode more than is entirely desirable. They persevere since the current best model is that being used on super-regenerative power-stealer Wolfe; performing an aggressive prefrontal lobotomy once a month in order to keep him from regaining control. In the long term, this method works out about as well as it deserves to, and we close on Wolfe Tai Lunging his restraints and eating his doctor.

Not just a dickhead.

Powers exists in the uneasy interface between
superhero and gritty crime fiction, and so far is holding its own. Supers range from wannabe kids to a-list celebrities and out and out villains. So far there is no Mr Fantastic or Superman to unbalance the whole order of the world, so the Powers just change the way certain things are done. Despite the insistence of some of the characters, however, there aren't many actual heroes on show. Everyone has an angle.

In fact, easily the best scene in the episode comes when Walker and Pilgrim confront a young celebrity power, Zora, over the death of a minor power who was using sway. She loses it when Pilgrim and her agent argue across her, and Walker has to talk her down. There's a lot of dickishness all around in Powers, and it's nice to see a moment of kindness and empathy; perhaps the most heroic action we've seen thus far.

Also, Eddie Izzard is eating people. How weird is that.

Powers - 'Like a Power'

Ah, the glamour of superpowers.

Full disclosure, I'm not hitting Powers, an adaptation of a Marvel Icon (the company's creator-owned line for keeping top writers in-house) comic series about a world where superpowers are just part of the status quo, at full speed. I missed the first episode, so I was sort of playing catch up through this one.

Charlie Walker is a detective with the Powers Division, a section of the LAPD dealing with superpowered crimes. Himself a former power, he is partnered with a rookie named Deena Pilgrim to investigate the murder of a superhero named Olympia, linking his death to a drug named Sway and a young woman named Calista Secor. Also involved are superpowered criminal Wolfe, who among other things stole Walker's powers, Walker's former partner Retro Girl, and dodgy teleporting power Johnny Royalle.

Powers is a grungy, street-level superpowers story, with noirish elements of constructed identity and mysterious pasts. Across these mean skies a man must fly who is not himself mean and all that. The characters are pretty much cyphers so far, but a lot of that is deliberate - we're kind of coming in in media res after all - and some is probably due to missing the pilot. The cast are pretty good, but the sense of the plot is as yet sketchy (again, that's partly the noir influence and partly missing the murder of Olympia, on which much of the current movement hangs, entirely.) It's got definite potential, anyway, and is better than the first original drama commissioned by the Playstation network necessarily deserves to expect.

Limitless - 'Undercover!'

And Undercover! means sweet three piece suits.

Someone has hacked a list of undercover operatives, and the FBI needs Brian to help pull out the agents who are so deep that even their handlers can't get in touch with them. The most elusive of these is Lucy Church, closing in on a corrupt hedge fund. Unfortunately, the hedge fund is just the tip of a white slavery iceberg and Church is unwilling to come out until she knows that the 'inconvenient' women caught in their business are safe from disposal.

In an episode bookended by talking head, after action interviews, Church co-opts Brian to help her scope out a party, then infiltrate an office as a temp, in order to steal back the trafficked women's passports. This he does, and for good measure goes on to spend an afternoon at the racetrack, so that he can slip enough money into each passport to ensure none of the women fall back into the poverty trap that led them to where they are. It's a perfect Brian idea, and moves Lucy to become... demonstrative.

So... that happened.

The ensuing Bollywood dance fantasy lasts about thirty seconds, but features a lot of the supporting cast and to judge by my own experience of Indian dance lessons for eight year olds, probably represents a solid day of pure joy for the production.

It's not all fun and games, however, and with Brian running out of NZT and the NOC list in the open, it's up to pilless Brian to talk Church down from eliminating the group's hitman, and persuade her to come out of cover and embrace her own life for the first time in years. Moreover, while Brian is out of the office, Sands - who has already told Brian it is his fault that the evidence clerk had to be killed - approaches Rebecca and offers her a job with Morra. She refuses and pretty much tells him she's coming for the Senator, so that one's going to blow up on someone.

Limitless continues to deftly juggle humour and darker tones, although it's definitely at its best as a caper show, with the serious aspects providing necessary contrast. 'Undercover!' is as caperlicious as they come, as well as introducing Lucy Church as a potentially recurring character; not just an old flame for Brian, but also an old foil from Rebecca's academy days.

Limitless - 'Fundamentals of Naked Portraiture'

Meet Spike.

After many interviews, Mike and Ike recruit a new member of their team, Spike, a seemingly perfect Brian minder who likes the same music he does and is willing to go the extra mile in any circumstances; something which makes Mike and Ike increasingly suspicious.

Meanwhile, a researcher at Brian's favourite think tank is murdered and a set of valuable data tapes carrying replicas of some of the most valuable minds in the country stolen from her research. It's up to Brian to find out who done the deed or deeds, but at the same time Rebecca is getting closer and closer to uncovering his switch with the Morra coats.

Just adorable.

Mike and Ike use a Brianesque presentation to prove that Spike is a pant, working for ADIC Johnson. Brian traces the crimes to the researcher's ex-lover and is saved from discovery when the evidence clerk who could have identified him turns up dead. This of course does not make him feel good.

'Fundamentals of Naked Portraiture' is an odd little episode, which highlights the increasing disconnect between happy fun Brian and the conspiracy he is mired in. On the flip side, watching Mike and Ike adopt some of Brian's approaches gives one hope that Saeson 2 - if it happens - won't be all grimdark.

Gotham - 'Into the Woods'

"I wish..."

Once upon a time, in a far away land, there lay a crapsack city on the edge of the woods. And in that city lived a mostly honest cop, an orphaned Penguin, and a lonely boy and his friend the cat.*

Gordon begins the long and difficult road to proving his innocence and, as it happens, finishes it as well. His ace in the hole is that Harvey Dent once told him IA records all of their incoming calls. With Bullock's help he secures the recording of the tip that led to his arrest, and takes it to his old pal Eddie to clean up. Of course, he realises that Nygma is in fact the man who framed him after killing Miss Kringle, and only narrowly escapes being kiled because Nygma prefers an audience. He goes to Selina for help, and she and Bruce take him to Alfred to get patched up. Selina then takes a message to Barnes in order to bait a trap, letting Nygma hear her tell Barnes that Gordon is lookingfor Penguin who 'knows where the bodies are buried.' Gordon tails Nygma to Kringle's grave and lets the entire department listen in on his unforced confession.

Bruce is continuing to learn the streets from Selina, until Gordon stumbles into their lives. While visiting Wayne Manor, Bruce learns that the computer in the Wayne Cave is up and running again, but Alfred warns him to keep Selina at arm's length, lest she be hurt. Following this advice leads to a split in the teenagers' friendship.

He's back.

Following the death of his father, Oswald is threatened with eviction from the family home by his stepmother, but kept on as an abused and essentially free servant, forced to bear the cruelties and insults of his 'family'. Then he finds the decanter of poison and goes full-on Andronicus, cooking his step-siblings and serving them to their mother before stabbing her to death. Once more, pointless fuckwittage = death. You'd think fewer people would take the time and effort.

Oh, and Barbara is declared sane out on the streets again, because apparently being unconscious in Arkham Asylum for three months satisfies the statute of limitations for murder in Gotham State. She pays a call on Jim. Hurrah.

Like 'Prisoners' before it, 'Into the Woods' serves mostly to get us back to the status quo. Gordon is reinstated, but refuses to talk to Lee until he finds out who hired Malone to kill the Waynes because... I don't know. Maybe he really can't handle multitasking. It still feels like the writers are getting the players in place for something, which is odd since nine times out of ten, this involves undoing something that was done to them just a few episodes ago.

* The reference is de rigeur given the episode title.

Gotham - 'Prisoners'

Gotham does Prison Break, but Ben Mackenzie is no Wentworth Miller.

After a spell in protective detention, Jim Gordon is moved to F-Wing of Blackgate Prison, general population, with love from ex-commissioner Loeb.

The Warden commissions an inmate to have Gordon killed, but the intervention of a young offender named Puck and the one honest guard in Blackgate sees the first attack deflected to just a beating. Bullock visits and promises to get him out, but also has to break the news that Lee has moved south after losing the baby, so fuck you Gotham for that little offscreen development. Still; at least they weren't eaten by hounds.

Elsewhere, Oswald's new family unravels, as his father's wife and - as it turns out - step-children plot to see the interloper off. They reveal his past as the Penguin, but he has already confessed much of that, and attempt to have the daughter seduce him, and finally attempt to poison him, succeeding only in poisoning the father when he decides to have a glass of sherry against doctor's orders. This does prevent him passing on his inheritance to Oswald, and I suspect that the legacy's destruction may trigger the Penguin's return.

ITMA

Back at Blackgate, another attempt to murder Gordon is interrupted when he is murdered by someone else. The honest guard spirits the 'body' out before Jim recovers consciousness after this little masquerade (good thing too, as throughout the proceedings he's just adorably clueless,) and then coshes the bent Warden when Jim insists on going back for Puck, who has also received an aptly prison-style beating. Bullock gets him away from Gotham to meet with the architect of his rescue, Don Falcone, who offers to help him get away, or to get him safely hidden in Gotham.

On discovering that Puck has died of his injuries - I actually thought he was going to turn out to be some sort of horrible criminal, so now I'm the asshole - Jim decides that he has to make things right. He won't run; he's going back to Gotham.

'Prisoners' is a weird episode, as it seems to exist largely to get the series out of a corner that it painted itself into by having Jim sent to jail. There was clearly no interest in giving him any kind of prison storyline, and indeed he basically sleepwalks through this whole episode. I guess it's supposed to be a kind of shock, but it doesn't make for a very interesting protagonist. Mind you, that's Gotham's troubles in a nutshell.

Limitless - 'Stop Me Before I Hug Again'

The subconscious is a scary place.

Brian is let out into the field this week, as the task force picks up the tail of the notorious serial hugger, Mr Pralines and Cream.

Sound weird? Welcome to 'Stop Me Before I Hug Again', an outwardly lighthearted episode of Limitless which speaks to the depth of distress afflicting Brian's drug-enhanced psyche. Faced with the brutal reality of a murder scene, his subconscious - in the form of a defunct children's TV presenter and a cartoonised rendition of his childhood bedroom, persuades Brian to replace scary words with nice words, and to swap out the BAU's undeservedly cool serial killer nicknames for ice cream flavours. He then proceeds to crack a case which has defied the FBI's rock star profiler, David Englander, in less time than it takes for Englander to ball him out for researching suspects on his phone during the briefing.

Portrait of a Serial Hugger.

Impressed, Englander makes a bid to poach Brian for the BAU, who are basically the opposite of their Criminal Minds incarnation, being a pack of swaggering, shrewdly political self-promoters more interested in book deals than justice; especially Englander. During a visit to their HQ, he cracks a few outstanding cases, but also stumbles on what seems to be an inconsistency in the case that made Englander's career.

Even as he sets out to prove the innocence of a man on death row, however, Brian is distracted by Rebecca's investigation into Morra. He persuades Sands to provide a duplicate coat to swap out for the one in evidence, impregnated with NZT-free Morra blood, but discovers a discrepancy in the buttons that he is unable to fix (an oversight his subconscious suggests was a deliberate attempt to get caught and end the lies.)

'Stop Me Before I Hug Again' is actually a pretty creepy entry into the Limitless canon. Thanks to Brian's NZT super-filtering ability, we run through the entire episode hearing his substituted words (much as in Mr Robot everyone calls E-Corp 'Evil Corp',) and it's... not very comforting, and in fact may cause sensitive viewers to think very differently about ice cream, hugging, tickling and cuddling, let alone 'playing cowboys and Indians.'

iZombie - Early thoughts

Detective Babineaux (Malcolm Goodwin), Olivia Moore (Rose McIver), Major* Lilywhite (Robert Buckley) and Ravi Chakrabati (Rahul Kholi).

Olivia 'Liv' Moore is a gifted resident doctor with a gorgeous fiance and generally perfect life, until she is persuaded, against her usual inclination, to attend a boat party, where she is scratched by a zombie drug dealer and becomes one of the undead.

Five months later, Liv is working at the morgue and consuming the brains of the innocuously deceased to stay compos mentis. The senior ME catches onto her secret and wants to study her to find a cure, while she struggles to keep her family and now ex-fiance at arm's length due to the risk of accidental brain eating. Things take an interesting turn when she partners up with newly transfered homicide detective Babineaux, in order to exploit her ability to access - albeit sporadically - the memories of those whose brains she consumes.

As an ongoing plot, the dealer who scratched Liv is still around and running what basically amounts to a zombie racket, scratching people and then charging them a fortune for designer brain chow harvested from the homeless and otherwise largely unmissed. Major, the ex-fiance, is a social worker, so he's gradually tracking down the racket.

Clearly someone in the publicity department was all 'you
know, from the right angle she looks hella like Emily
Deschanel.

iZombie - a very loose adaptation of the comic of the same name** - is a fun, quirky cop show; essentially cop and psychic, with added brain eating. Actually, that's not accurate, as it dismisses the real meat of the show, which is that the side-effects of the brain eating include absorbing aspects of the meal's personality, allowing Rose McIver to really stretch her range by essentially playing an entirely different version of Liv each week.

So far (I'm on about Episode 5) she's been a sensuous artist, a fact-obsessed sociopath, a daredevil free spirit and a paranoid gangster. Each week has also featured an instance of 'full-on zombie mode', wherein Liv becomes possessed of superhuman strength and an irresistible drive to kill.

* Name, not rank. I was so disappointed his surname wasn't Major as well.
** The protagonist has a different name, backstory, set of friends, and the series is clearly aiming for a pseudoscientific zombism instead of the comics' overtly metaphysical approach.

Gotham - 'This Ball of Mud and Meanness' and 'Mad Grey Dawn'

"For identification purposes, I am not Harley Quinn."

In Arkham Asylum, the Penguin is facing his nightmares in a series of virtual reality therapies, while Hugo Strange looks on and is super creepy.

Bruce sets out to find Matches Malone, beginning with a man named Cupcake who runs an underground fighting ring. When Bruce jumps on Alfred's style, Cupcake offers the information for $50,000 and a fight with Alfred, who takes him down through sheer tenacity, imparting an explicit lesson to his charge: "To beat a big man, all you need to do is outlast him."

Damn this kid has grown.

Cupcake points them to Jerry, a Harley Quinn-looking Lori Petty, who runs and sings at a retro, Maniax-themed punk club called the Celestial Garden, which is not a sentence I ever expected to write. With Alfred laid up in bed, Bruce goes to Jerry, who despite claiming to be a friend of Matches tells Bruce 'the childish hand of fate' where to find him. With Gordon on his trail, Bruce goes to Matches' apartment under the guise of wanting to hire him, then questions him about the murder of his parents. Malone won't say who hired him, that code being all the decency he has left, and essentially begs Bruce to kill him and remove the burden of crimes unpunished.

Make no mistake; this scene, as Bruce realises that his quarry is not a monster, just a man, and that revenge is truly the most worthless of causes, is a tour de force; one of the best in the series and a huge escalation from David Mazouz's early work as the boy billionaire. As he sets the gun down and walks away, you can really start to see that this kid could be Batman.

"Riddle me this..."

We end up with Nygma looking askance at Jim's frankly half-arsed pursuit of Miss Kringle's disappearance - prompted by Lee - Penguin declared sane and released from Arkham to live as a good and normal person, and Bruce leaving Wayne Manor to live on the streets with Selina for a time, deciding that he needs to fight injustice where it lives, and that means knowing those places, not looking on them from afar and on high.

In 'Mad Grey Dawn', Nygma sets out to settle his Gordon problem. An anonymous report reopens the Galavan case, and at the same time a riddling bomber marking his work with a question mark begins to stalk the city. With considerable style, Nygma acquires an officer's signature and a weapon with Gordon's prints on it, and then guides him into a trap which ends with Barnes arresting Gordon as a cop killer. And he goes to Blackgate for it, without a reprieve in sight.

Despite this, Gordon is still about the least interesting thing in what was once his show, as the all-new Bruce Wayne gets roped into a scheme to steal cash from mob mushroom farmers working for Butch Gilzene's nephew. We get a reappearance by creepy Ivy Pepper, the gang's shroom cultivator, and a chance for Bruce to put his lessons to use, letting Sonny Gilzene whale on him until he starts to wear out. Also interesting is that when Sonny blindly insults Bruce's parents, this hits Selina's berserk button.

Paul Reubens? Did we wander into a Burton movie?*

Meanwhile, old Penguin is out and about and visiting old friends. He first drops in on Butch and Tabitha. The latter wants to kill him, but Butch insists that an eye for an eye has been served, although he does allow that some punishment may be in order. Later, coated in tar and feathers ('They talked about killing me, so... this was actually pretty nice of them, considering,') he shows at Nygma's house mid planning session, only to be asked to leave because 'the new you is kind of freaking me out.'

It is a Burton movie!

Thus the Penguin wanders to his mother's grave, where he encounters a dapper man laying flowers, who turns out to be - dun dun duh! - his father! Son of Edna's old employers, he invites his newfound son back to the family pile to meet his new family. A happy ending at last! Perhaps Hugo Strange was right and good things do come to good people.

Or, more likely, Strange is a creepy monster who manufactures semi-human weapons in the basement of his ghoulish sanitarium and Penguin's new family are a collection of terrifying, bloodless social parasites.

Oh, and Barbara wakes up. My joy be unconstrained.

All in all, the 'Wrath of the Villains' sub-season benefits greatly from the absence of Theo Galavan and an increased focus on the revitalised Bruce Wayne subplot and, in general, the many, many characters who are more interesting than Jim Gordon. Will prison give Gordon the edge that he's been lacking (as well as serving as just punishment for the murder that he did commit, at least until he is acquitted of the one that he didn't)? I doubt it, but at least the rest is looking good.

* I don't know why I associate him with Burton; I think he as only in the one.

Limitless - 'The Legend of Marcos Ramos'

Fun with shredders.

A former FBI agent and Rebecca's mentor is shot dead in broad daylight and suspicion falls on Mexican drug lord Marcos Ramos (whose backstory is revealed in one of Brian's fantasy sequences including cheap eighties film filters and a swimming pool full of piranhas.) As the team works to track down Ramos and his favoured shooter, Brian runs into an old flame and seeks to rekindle the relationship, but wonders whether it is Brian or Brian-on-NZT that she likes.

'The Legend of Marcos Ramos' also reveals the darker side of Brian's deal with Eddie Morra, in the form of Mr Sands (Colin Salmon), a frankly sinister figure who explains that Brian does not work for the FBI; he was placed with the FBI to work for Eddie Morra, and by extension for Mr Sands. Should he refuse, his stabilising treatments will be cut off, and his father or anyone he loves could suffer. Morra might be a slightly shady benefactor, but Sands is clearly very bad people when he needs to be. Ultimately, despite great progress and Rebecca's advice that Brian and Brian-on-NZT are the same guy, and any girl who distinguished isn't worth his time, Brian breaks up with his ex to keep her away from Sands.

Sands and all that he represents bring a little darkness into an otherwise fluffy scenario, and I think that's a good thing. I don't want the show to get all brooding, since its strengths are its lightness, charm and the goofy fantasy sequences that Brian invents for the parts of an investigation he isn't allowed to participate in, but a little shade is important.

Sleepy Hollow - 'Dead Men Tell No Tales' (and Bones - 'The Resurrection in the Remains')

Okay; I see what you did there.

And so we come to the Bones/Sleepy Hollow crossover; or as I like to think of it, proof that Brennan is a blinkered idiot. I mean, seriously, she prides herself on detached observation without assumption, which means that she looks like a bit of a pill every time Angela's psychic or a random ghost pops up to establish that the supernatural is totes for real even in the Boniverse, even without a massive supernatural hotspot in upstate New York; a mere four hours drive from the Jeffersonian. Actually, this makes Christopher Pelant make a lot more sense, because clearly he was a motherfucking wizard; I bloody knew it!

Anyway, it is the Ween of Hallows, and a group of revelers setting up a kegger in an abandoned church stumble on a dead med student lying atop the iron coffin of a headless redcoat. Cue a visit from a certain informal investigative duo still pondering the ultimate fate of one Abraham van Brunt, patriot captain turned Hessian demon cavalier and better known as the Horseman (Headless). Of course, we know that he was actually sucked into Pandora's Box, and sure enough they soon learn - thanks to an extra awesome turn from the Angelatron, reconstructing a face from a missing skull - that this was in fact the nefarious redcoat General and probable diabolist General Howe, of shadow assassin-summoning and Ichabod-torturing fame.

"It's not nonsense, it's a spell book."

In the dead student's digs, Booth - who was, it turns out, and old mate of August Corbin's - and Abbie discover a book of spells in runic script, which contains a hidden message - This book shall lead the Witness to the skull that grants the power to resurrect the dead. Cutting ahead to 'Dead Men Tell No Tales' this suggests to me that OMFG, by her lights, Pandora is a Witness. More prosaically, the student wanted to do some Flatliners style shit with near death experiences, and so nicked the skull of a British Army necromancer from his secret grave as a good luck charm, which notably is the kind of shit that seems a little outre in Bones, but is par for the course in Sleepy Hollow.

Anyway, back in Bones Ichabod produces an authentic letter from the Jeffersonian archives; an order from George Washington that Howe's body be returned to Sleepy Hollow (even if it is mysteriously in Ichabod's handwriting.) Of course, by now the skull has turned out to be the murder weapon, and Crane breaks the case by revealing that a missing tooth had in Howe's lifetime been replaced with a French-made porcelain prosthesis (and honestly I would have watched the episode just for his disdain at the concept of fancy porcelain teeth.)

"Franklin invented sex on the beach?"

Mystery solved, the corpse is packed off for Sleepy Hollow and the four investigators retire to the Founding Fathers for a celebratory drink before Abbie and Ichabod return to Sleepy Hollow (and to Sleepy Hollow.)

Unfortunately, Pandora hijacks the transport carrying Howe's remains and uses a runic medallion to transform the decapitated skeleton into a very active zombie, promising him revenge against an old enemy: "Crane," the general hisses, in case we thought that someone might have encountered Ichabod in his patriot days and not fixated on him in an unhealthy fashion. Truly the greatest trick that Washington ever pulled was keeping Crane out of the history books.

Gotta love that 18th Century shooting stance.

Howe's hijacking interrupts the team costume bowling match - at which Ichabod runs into Zoe, who is dressed somewhat disconcertingly as sexy (seamstress) Betsy Ross, but who is the only one to recognise his natty, hand-embroidered waistcoat as a John Adams costume - especially when the General resurrects a force of redcoat zombies who prove impervious to bullets. The books eventually identify them as Draugr, virtually unstoppable undead shock troops, and the only hint of a weakness is a reference to Howe's 'primal tomb'.

With no other means of identifying Howe's original burial site (clearly not Twickenham) our heroes turn to the country's foremost forensic analyst. While Christine's Jane Goodall costume still needs finishing touches, Brennan agrees to look over the bone and determines it was originally interred in Washington's secret, unused tomb in the Capitol building. Insisting on coming along for the archaeology, they find a tomb with a Masonic lock and a booby trap fueled with unquenchable Greek Fire, prompting Ichabod to realise that the Great Manhattan Fire was caused by (not just a seamstress) Betsy Ross putting down Howe's original Draugr regiment with a multi-barreled, rapid-repeating, Greek Fire crossbow; an instrument of pure gratuity that I chose to dub the Betsy Rossbow.

"We're here for a massacre or an Iron Maiden photo shoot,
whichever comes first."

Leaving the indomitably skeptical Brennan ("She would dismiss Moloch as a tall man with a skin condition") to coo over the anthropological ramifications, Ichabod and Abbie set about planning a means to dispose of the Draugr without, you know, burning Sleepy Hollow to the ground. Their plan is to use Ichabod as bait, lure the Draugr into the stone tunnels under the city and incinerate them there, where the Greek Fire can burn itself out without taking too many houses with it.

The plan is enacted just in time, as Pandora - displaying a scary snake face which may or may not be her real visage - and Howe plot to unleash the Draugr on the unsuspecting Halloween crowds, thus reaping the fear that Pandora needs. Even with the Witnesses successful, enough fear is generated to bloom another rose (this one white) and leaving just one, a red flower, to open. The fact that Pandora is talking about fear and love at about the same moment Abbie is pushing Ichabod to ask Zoe out on a date makes me fear for the new love interest even more.

Meanwhile, Jenny and Joe have been pursuing the B-plot and trying to get a meeting with the mysterious buyer who wants the Shard of Anubis. This man, the kingpin of illegal artefact shipment, turns out to be an old military buddy of Corbin Snr, and also the target of Agent Reynolds' big investigation, leading to a clash of Abbie's worlds.

Limitless - 'Pilot' and 'Badge! Gun!'

Regular Brian and Smart Brian; Brian Brian and Brain Brian, if you will.

Brian Finch (Jake McDorman) is an amiable slacker; not dim, but unfocused, frittering his youth away on his dream of becoming a musician while the rest of his family grow up around him. Then one day, while working as a temp, he runs into his ex-bassist Eli, a financial analyst who offers him a notropic drug called NZT-48 which allows him to access his brain's full potential - every connection working together, every memory in perfect recall. He completes his two week temp assignment in hours, gives his supervisor advice on dumping her deadbeat boyfriend and diagnoses his father's mystery ailment before the pill wears off and he crashes hard.

Then he tries to get another pill, only to find his friend murdered and the FBI chasing him for the crime. With the help of Eli's emergency stash he escapes and sets out to prove his innocence, with some help from sympathetic FBI agent Rebecca Harris (Jennifer Carpenter). The side-effects of NZT begin to bite, but Senator Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper, reprising his role from the original movie) appears basically from nowhere and offers him the solution - an occasional injection which eliminates the side-effects of NZT - if he never tells anyone that they had contact. It seems like a small price to pay for not having his brain catastrophically, even terminally, rewire itself.

I'm a sucker for a fantasy sequence.

With his innocence proven, the FBI is keen to study Brian's immunity, as the volunteers for their own NZT trials were killed by the drug. Harris insists that, rather than drag him in and make him a lab rat, they should use him as a resource. She explains that her father was a drug addict. He showed up promising to be better with the NZT shine in his eyes, and a few weeks later was dead.

In 'Badge! Gun!' therefore, he kicks off his new job; sadly not by playing Baccarat with master criminals (and Uno cards), but by sitting in a small room learning Farsi. This doesn't really fire his enthusiasm, so he gives his minders - whom he names Mike and Ike, although the NZT means that he must actually remember their names and is just being a bit of a dick - the slip to work on cases, much to the anger of the Chief (played by former Maid Marian, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio,) whom I've just realised is called Nasreen Pouran, so go inclusion even if she is played by an Italian.

Around the procedural elements of the episode - Brian helps to track a bomber by building models, then postulates the existence of a bio-weapon targeting descendants of Genghis Khan and obtains vital evidence against a CEO by appealing to the hatred of a workforce - we continue to build our characters. During his excursion to build model bombs for comparison, Brian takes a bus, gives one man advice on connecting with his son, helps a young couple work out their problems and generally makes friends with everyone, establishing him as a slightly maverick soul, but basically a good man. Harris continues to bat for him, while Pouran and Harris' partner Boyle are grudgingly impressed and Mike and Ike clearly hate his guts.

Most interestingly, when he tries to search for the connection between Morra and NZT, just associating them in a search window crashes his computer. Showing up like a blue eyed Jesus in the Pilot, Morra's influence now adopts a decidedly sinister cast, and his explanation that Brian will soon be in a position where he needs someone rather threatening. Just in case this wasn't enough to question his motives, the nurse who administered Brian's injection suddenly shows up as his Dad's visiting nurse.

Limitless has definite potential. I like the leads, and they're soft-pedaling on the whole '10% of your brain' bullshit, which is good.