Gotham - 'Strike Force'

"I think of it as The Shield, season 8."

There's a new boss at the GCPD: Captain Barnes (I'm not sure who the new Commissioner is, or if there is one yet, but they're obviously not using Sarah Essen's old office,) a tough ex-Marine intent on making a clean sweep. At the same time, the Galavans approach Penguin to be their underworld strongarm, take out the other mayoral candidates and make an unsuccessful hit on Theo for effect. When he refuses, they reveal that they have his mother.

Faced with the death of one candidate and the drive by attempt on Galavan, Barnes and Gordon recruit a team of four talented rookies straight out of the Academy to form the GCPD Strike Force, a no-bullshit, shoot-to-kill team to tackle the worst that the Gotham underworld has to throw at them. Aptly enough, their first encounter is with the GCPD's natural predator, Victor Zsasz. It's depressing that their exchange of flesh wounds counts as a major achievement, given he's one guy with handguns against four armed bastards in body armour, plus Bullock and Gordon.

Gordon knows that Penguin is the candidate killer, but can't act directly because of what Penguin has over him. Barnes has no such compunctions, and wants the Strike Force gunning for Cobblepot. Meanwhile, Penguin and Butch are looking, carefully, for Mama Kapelput.

'Silver St Cloud' is one of those names that screams 'character out of the
comics.'

Elsewhere, Alfred punches Selina Kyle - who has reverted entirely to independent street criminal - in the face 'for Reggie' and tells her to keep away from Bruce, triggering some sort of emotional meltdown in her. This would probably have hit her less hard if she weren't recovering from an extended and inexplicable bout of Minion's syndrome. Anyway, Bruce will no doubt be fine, as on top of a rigorous new training regime of running home through dangerous downtown Gotham, he's been introduced to Galavan's ward, the micro-honey trap Silver St Cloud.

ETA: You know what I completely forgot to mention? Eddie Nygma scores a date with Kristen Kringle by acting all domineering. He drops the ball when the subject of her ex 'leaving town' comes up by saying "I'm glad he's dead," and then starts talking to himself, but apparently she's all kind of into that. Poor Eddie; if only he'd realised sooner that the way to a woman's heart is through her crippling emotional problems.

Gotham continues to max out at okay. Barnes and the Strike Force are a new element, but the Galavans are still frankly annoying. They're like Ra's al Ghul and the League of Assassins, but without the gravitas and credibility. Without a visible support or intelligence network, their ability to work around everyone, identify their weaknesses and lean on them perfectly comes off as the kind of informed brilliance that really, really annoys me. Barbaritha continues to be an annoying piece of fan service, and both Galavans are just so smug you want to see Alfred punch them, or Zsasz shoot them. I know people who want to see some of the larger and more cannibalistic DC villains - Killer Croc or King Shark - introduced to the series for no other reason than to eat them.

King Shark. Man, I miss The Flash. I wonder when it's back on.

Heroes Reborn - 'Brave New World'

A new generation of emo: Clockwise - Conspiracy
Nerd, Aurora Girl, That Guy, Mrs Not-in-Episode-
One, Brooding Hispanic, Mrs and Mr Vengeance,
Katana Girl, Ice Cream Girl and Vanishy Boy.

And speaking of once-great series that I never saw the end of because I lost interest and which have now been relaunched, Heroes Reborn picks up some years after the end of Heroes, and exactly a year after the June 13th terrorist attack on a human/Evo unity summit destroyed most of Odessa (the one in Texas, rather than Ukraine) and sparked a global backlash against Evos (which appears to be Heroes Reborn for metahuman.) This being Heroes, we are first introduced to all the characters.

There's our old buddy Noah Bennett, now selling cars under a new assumed name until an as-yet-unnamed conspiracy theorist tracks him down and tells him his memory has been altered. This leads him to the Haitian, who tries to kill him, apparently on Bennett's own orders, because 'it's coming'. Sadly, in the ensuing struggle the Haitian is shot, just in case he spoiled the pronoun game.

Then there's Mr and Mrs Vengeance (their name isn't really Vengeance, but as with all ensemble shows I will be using nicknames until the show itself tells me what they're really called,) whose son died at Odessa and who are now hunting down Evos, starting with the members of a support group in Chicago. A kid named Tommy escapes, but they track him via his ice cream parlour loyalty card and try to take him out, along with super-perky, nice-but-popular girl... Emmy? I think. She seems decent, but is dating an idiot, narcissistic jock because... rules? Anyway, Tommy makes them vanish and go... somewhere. Somewhere not too far away, I guess, because they're in way too many of the publicity shots to be gone for good.

Carlos is a dead-beat former war hero. He learns that his brother Oscar is the superpowered masked hero El Vengador when Oscar is caught in an ambush by another group of anti-Evo vigilantes. Oscar dies, leaving Carlos to look after his son, who may also have powers.

Miko is a Japanese girl who does a lot of origami and doesn't know where she went to school. A gamer named Ren tracks her down based on clues in a game called Evernow, revealing to her that a sword hidden under her father's study is the key to her destiny. She finds the Kensei sword and is transported into a computer game; which is a hell of a thing.

And then there's some girl who is either making eyes appear in the Aurora Borealis or preventing more of a face appearing or something.

So, all the Heroes ingredients are there - lots of characters, varied powers, big arc mystery - but I have to say that the fact that apparently there are people who know and are purposely concealing the truth for reasons makes the whole thing more annoying. Still, I'm watching for now, which is a step up from Season 4 and 5.

Agent Carter - 'Better Angels'

It's that man again.

Peggy Carter is feeling bad for not being able to keep nice Dr Wilkes safe, which visiting SSR chief Jack Thompson naturally interprets as a surfeit of womanly feels when she argues that the sudden glut of evidence against him - Russian passport under the floorboards, Russian pistol under the bed - are as obviously planted as they are. Thompson shows up, rewrites Carter's report to implicate Wilkes and tells the West Coast agents to drop the case.

With official channels temporarily clogged with testosterone, Peggy turns to Howard Stark for scientific support on the Zero Matter question, which means we are treated to another round of the truly marvelous (no pun intended) three-hander between Hayley Atwell, James D'Arcy and Dominic West. As the retroincarnation of his son, there is the danger of Stark running roughshod over the regulars, but once more he's worked in perfectly, rocking his science mojo and getting our unsuitable leads into the "strictly pale and male" Arena Club, not by pretending to be one of them but by dragging a crowd of girls into the masculine preserve as cover for Peggy planting bugs.

When evidence proves hard to come by - the bugs are shorted out by the Club's security protocols and she can't swipe the future newspapers that the club uses to lean on people - Thompson locks down on further investigation and orders Peggy back to New York. He also hands over the Zero Matter film to his dodgy mentor. Interestingly, he does this because Peggy comes at him hard, pushing his frustrated masculinity into a corner, and it will be more interesting still to see how he reacts to seeing that her accusations were true in the closer. Sousa points out that this is no way to handle Thompson, although he later turns down a drink which might have been a good way to get inside Thompson's armour.

Original science bros.

On discovering that Peggy is being stalked by a manifestation of Zero Matter, Stark uses a special photographic emulsion to make the manifestation visible (and audible)... as Jason Wilkes. So far intangible, he none the less bonds with Stark over shared technical language as they work on his... condition.

Elsewhere, we see Whitney Frost manipulating her husband into ordering a hit on Peggy after Carter questions her, then Zero-Matter-eating her touchy-feely director. It comes as little surprise to learn that Frost is the Hedy Lamarr of evil, a brilliant scientist whose work during the war hasn't prevented her being serially undervalued afterwards (when she suggests retiring from acting, her husband promises that after the election she can retire and have 'all the babies you want.') Like Dottie, but in a completely different way, Frost is a dark reflection of Peggy Carter, choosing to embrace instead of fighting her invisibility.

So, Season 2 now has a clear binary antagonist: The Arena Club, striving to maintain their white, male deathgrip on power (it's so sad that we basically know they'll get their way) and Whitney Frost, who is using her husband - and through him the Club - to further her scientific work, and her obsession with Zero Matter. With Thompson teetering between antagonistic ally and part of the problem, the season is shaping up well.

Sleepy Hollow - 'Blood and Fear' and 'The Sisters Mills'

"What did I do last n... oooh."

Pandora's latest attack comes in the form of a knife called up from the Box. Given to a Nice Guy (as distinct from, you know, a guy who is nice) called Nelson, it feeds on his resentment and drives him to expressions of violence and bloodlust. It happened in the time of the Norman Conquest, and has emerged all through history, including at Eton during Ichabod Crane's schooldays, and in Whitechapel about a century after that.

Yes, this killer is the latest in a long line of Rippers rendered virtually indestructible as the blade fuses with their flesh. Thankfully, the Witnesses are able to determine that it has a weakness: It is destroyed by sickness and can not withstand tainted blood. How it managed to last as long as it did cutting up the none-too-hygienic prostitutes of Olde London Town is a bit of a mystery, but Crane and Abbie acquire to vials of tainted blood as their weapons. The Ripper proves resistant, the knife extruding a metal skin to deflect Ichabod's dart, but when Nelson stabs Ichabod, our resourceful Witness infects himself with malaria - fatal to the knife, but something he has already weathered once.

Evil tree. Like, totally.

For the most part, the Witnesses did their job well this week, holding in the fear that Pandora is seeking to elicit. Back at Chez Evil, however, Abbie's fear for Ichabod's life does feed the tree a little more.

In Plot B, Jenny takes Joe under her wing as they pursue the Anubis Shard, finding bounty hunter Randall pantsless and shardless, before finally tracing it in the possession of Sophie Foster, a newer player who uses some of the tricks that Sheriff Corbin taught to Jenny.

Finally, in his quest to save the Archive, Ichabod decides to apply for American Citizenship, and finds an ally in Zoe, the representative of the historical conservation committee who was briefly in last week's episode and is so into Ichabod it hurts.

Nope! Nopenopenope!

In 'The Sisters Mills' a monster that only children can see is preying on Sleepy Hollow's young. Specifically, it hunts out those who have just lost a tooth, because the Abysou is the real tooth fairy. Enter dentist, silversmith and midnight rider Paul Revere to treat Betsy Ross's niece and temporarily cock-block colonial Ichabod.

As an aside, this demonstrates that Betsy Ross knew about the whole supernatural war thing. Apparently everyone except Ichabod and Colonel Dickhead was in on this secret, including British Major General Summons Shadow-Assassins. Gosh darn Ichabod must have been a rube. This time it's Abbie's turn to take a fall, and the Abysou puts the Leftenant in the hospital before Ichabod is able to get hold of Paul Revere's dentist bag and assemble his tools into a silver-nitrate projector used to render the tooth fairy visible so it can be stabbed up by Jenny.

While the monster of the week is a pretty stock effort - gruesome, but stock - there is some interesting action surrounding it. The Witnesses have worked out that Pandora is after fear, and go to some lengths to keep panic from spreading when a child is struck down. Pandora, on the other hand, is working overtime to spread fear, even encouraging the first victim's sister to try to go toe to toe with the Abysou and so ensure more victims. She also engages in a little psyops against Abbie, dropping by her hospital bed for a villain speech and dropping the word 'destroyer' in Sumerian.

Conclusions: Pandora is not the Greek first woman, but a Sumerian occupying a similar archetype, perhaps choosing the name Pandora because of the box (after all, the original Pandora would have a jar, right?)

Despite their efforts, a rose blooms on the evil tree, and the Mills sisters have sussed that there is a little more than citizenship betwixt Ichabod and Zoe. Given a) Pandora's tendency to spy on the Witnesses via magic pool and b) the historical averages for Ichabod's other women, I'm worried about Zoe's long term chances. I think she'd feel safer if she had more personality traits.

Season 3 continues its arcisodic path, with discreet episodes each concluding with a arc-related wrap-up. I am curious to see where it goes once the tree is finished; whether it will up the stakes or drop the ball.

Gotham - 'The Last Laugh'

Gnah! Called it, damnit.

With the GCPD working overtime to track down Jerome and the other Maniax, Lee twists Gordon's arm to join her for a gala at the Children's Hospital (of which, naturally, the Waynes were big supporters, thus bringing Bruce to the show.) Before things get started, Jerome and Tabitha (who is indeed making out with Barbara now, because whats more fun than trashy lesbian bad girls, amirite?) pay a call on the former's father to frame the old man for masterminding Jerome's breakout from Arkham, because clearly Gordon is going to believe that's something a frail, blind fortune teller could do. Actually, in Gotham I'm quite surprised that he doesn't. Bullock suggests going to Penguin for information, but Gordon is skittish.

"How about a magic trick? I'm gonna make this pencil disappear."

At the party, poor Alfred gets a crush on Lee and Bruce spots Selina working the crowd, which seems kind of odd since we last saw her apparently on salary with Penguin. Things take a downward turn when Jerome and Barbara mug the magician for the gala and take the party hostage, with Lee in pride of place. There's a lot of stand off, Alfred is a bit badass and Bruce gets to man up. Barbara menaces Lee and tells her that totes for certain she'll end up with Jim, because he's got darkness in him too and they're, like, so perfect for each other and one day they'll laugh about how Lee tried to come between them.

I am so ready to go back to tedious villain of the week procedural now.

In the end, it turns out the whole thing is just theatrics. While he has explained to Barbara that she will be at the forefront of phase 2 of his plan, Jerome was just the warm up. Theo offs Jerome to 'save the day', thus earning the gratitude of the city he claims his family built, but were denied their credit*. Since he's stabbed someone now, Barbara is way into him when they get home, and Tabitha gets jealous. For a meticulous planner and psychological chessmaster, Theo seems utterly blind to potential emotional disruptions to his inner circle, or maybe Barbara is supposed to be some sort of irresistible sex goddess now she's a wicked, depraved bisexual? I'm starting to suspect that this show has some serious bad girl issues.

Never mind the sex, peoples; here's the Bullock!

Gotham: Rise of the Villains continues to be hampered by, well, its villains. Jerome has a certain panache, and the scenes at the end where his laugh becomes almost an infectious, psychopathic meme sweeping through Gotham plays nicely with the whole 'everyone is the bloody Joker' bit they've got going on, but dear merciful God in Heaven Barbara and the Galavans are tedious. Penguin, meanwhile, is doing very little; resting on his laurels and waiting for Bullock to warn him off messing with Gordon (aww!) while his henchlings apparently seek more rewarding employment in the field of high-society pickpocketing.

* He had this whole rant, but since he opened with 'We built this city...' I just blanked most of it and assumed the foundations to be made of a combination of rock and roll.

Agent Carter - 'The Lady in the Lake' and 'The View in the Dark'

The sincerest form of flattery.

A dark-haired lady in a red hat moves through a crowd of grey-suited men, but this is not Peggy Carter, but her nemesis, proto-Widow Dottie Underwood. She's robbing a bank, but oh, snap! Peggy's waiting in the vault to see what she's stealing (a fancy tie pin.) Scuttlebutt at the SSR is that if anyone cracks this nut, it'll be Agent Carter, which is perhaps why insecure action man Chief Thompson sends her to Hollywood.

Nice guy agent Daniel Sousa is the Chief of the new West Coast station, and he's asking for someone to help out his rookie agents in the case of a woman found frozen in a lake during a heatwave. The cops think she was done in by the Lady in the Lake killer, but the ice is a bit of a mystery. Fortunately, Sousa isn't the only one to have made the move to California. Howard Stark is getting his Hughes on, making moves and making movies, which means that Edwin Jarvis is at a loose end and eager for adventure.

"I think I broke him."

Back in New York, the FBI takes over the Dottie Underwood investigation. Thompson's mentor warns him that the SSR is a wartime outfit and its days are numbered.

In California, as more bodies start to freeze, evidence points to the shady labs of Isodyne Energy, eccentric physicist Jason Wilkes, and his high profile boss, Calvin Chadwick. But is Chadwick really the mastermind? Is Wilkes really into Carter, or does he have eyes only for the wibbly evil in the lab? Why does Mrs Jarvis have a garter belt with a gun holster? And what will Jarvis do with that flamingo?

This is pretty wild for the 40s.

'The View in the Dark' picks up pretty much where 'The Lady in the Lake' left off, as a hired gun murders two SSR agents to steal the body of the Lady in the Lake. As dead ends follow dead ends, Peggy gets a note from Wilkes, asking her to meet him. They talk and experience prejudice together, and he agrees to help her retrieve evidence of Isodyne's experiments into Zero Matter, a mysterious substance that fell through a rift in reality after a nuclear test and which, quite frankly, wobbles and sloshes like a Kree portal monolith at high tide.

Unfortunately, Isodyne is cleaning house. Chadwick's cohorts in the Council of Big White Money have pulled the plug on Zero Matter. They flatter him that his Senate campaign is more important, but his actress wife Whitney Frost is clearly livid as hell. She goes to retrieve the Zero Matter at the same time as Peggy and Wilkes. Wilkes is seemingly killed in an explosion, but Frost shows up at home with a strange, black scar on her brow.

...

Also, Peggy discovers that former admirer Sousa is dating a nurse and plans to propose.

The plot of Agent Carter season 2 is, so far, nothing all that new, but it scores over big brother Agents of SHIELD in the strength of its characters, relationships and sheer joie de vivre. New faces like Ana Jarvis (a wonderfully bubbly, tactile presence, flitting between the ramrod figures of her husband and new bestie and generally getting the hell out of them both) and old hands like Rose the receptionist, who has transferred from the New York office's telephone exchange to run the front desk of the alleged Auerbach Talent Agency and thus forced to deal with all the wannabes who find them despite their appalling publicity, mesh and bounce off each other. The whole thing bloody scintillates.

Sleepy Hollow - 'The Awakening', 'Tempus Fugit', 'I, Witness' and 'Whispers in the Dark'

This is a copy of the Liberty Bell, which means I get to say...

Sleepy Hollow ramps up to the season two finale with 'The Awakening', in which Katrina goes full evil and joins Henry in his rather sudden crusade to bring about the Renaissance of the witchbreed, a concept that has barely been mentioned before 'Spellcaster', but which now apparently dominates their thinking. You see, you have to be born a witch to use magic (like, proper magic, rather than the other kind of magic that any bugger can apparently knock out with the right spell book, as in 'The Kindred',) and then you have to awaken to your power. Young Jeremy/Henry did that all on his own, but you can also force an Awakening on those with witch blood by ringing the right bell; the Liberty Bell, naturally, which was cracked because Washington sent Crane to blow it up to prevent an army of dark witches overthrowing humanity.

So anyway, Henry has a replica bell, but can't do the awakening spell, thanks to his mortal father. Katrina, on the other hand, is pure witch (because witches, who have been nothing but goodies previously, are now magic Nazis with a hard on for race purity) and after the tribulations, reversals and confusion of the last, oh, week and a half, is right on board the eugenics train. She even switches out her awkward goth get up for some proper evil swishery, forcing Abbie and Crane to come at the mother and son duo, guns blazing. They get captured, but come up with a plan to shoot at Henry and a chunk of C4 Abbie attached to the bell simultaneously, noting that he can be wounded now that his armour is gone, and bargaining on him only being able to Sith lord one bullet at a time.

...and now for something completely different!

Unexpectedly, however, he stops the bullet bound for the bell and takes a 'greek fire bullet' to the torso. Henry has a rather sweet moment with his dad as he passes, but Katrina goes into meltdown. She blames Crane for all her woes and decides to use the Traveler spell to go back and not save his life after his fight with the Horseman of Death. Abbie tackles her at the threshold of the portal, however, and finds herself in Ye Olde Sleepy Hollow to the strains of an olde timey instrumental of 'Sympathy for the Devil' just to round out the parallels to Episode 1.

"Fuck yeah we got buttons."

Thus we come to 'Tempus Fugit', as Abbie struggles to drag Crane out of the path of Hurricane Katrina (too soon?) Getting him pulled off the field saves his life, but mucks up the future. Fortunately, Benjamin Franklin is able to send Abbie to her ancestress, Grace Dixon, who knows how to reverse the Traveler spell and banish the Darkest Timeline to an ontological cul de sac in the back of Abbie's memory. First, however, she needs to convince Crane, which is made harder after the Horseman decapitates Franklin, the only man who believes her (another parallel, to the fate of Abbie and Jenny's mentor, Sheriff Corbin.)

Katrina is working with Abraham, the Head-Having Horseman, and the rest of the Continental Army thinks that Abbie is a spy and Crane a traitor of some kind, but at last a video on her phone convinces Crane and he runs to save her, only to find her well and truly saving herself. They find Grace Dixon and Abbie reverses the spell even as Crane is about to take an axe to the neck. Thwarted, Katrina aims to fry Abbie, but Ichabod stabs her to death, leaving the Witnesses, Jenny and Irving (now free of War's hold) to carry on the good fight, renewal and contract negotiations allowing.

Betsy Ross - relegating Ichabod Crane to second most ubiquitous badass of
the Revolutionary War.

'I, Witness' picks up the story nine months later, with Crane gone walkabout, Abbie having finished her training at Quantico and working in the near-as-damnit Sleepy Hollow field office of the FBI, and Irving vanished into the night like an old oak table
. Ichabod returns with a mystery tablet and word that something has happened to the Horseman. The tablet looks set to illuminate the 'second tribulation' (since they blew up all the good material last season) and falls in with Abbie's investigation of a series of beast-like murders.

Despite the threatened demolition of the archive and the pressures of FBI fieldwork, the Witnesses slowly get the old mojo working and determine that the killer is a yaoguai, a fear-eating demon of a type that troubled the patriots at Bunker Hill until Washington sent word that it was vulnerable when feeding. At that time, its eyes turn white, hence 'don't shoot until you see the whites of their eyes.' Oh, Sleepy Hollow; this is the kind of secret history bullshit I love you for. This warning was conveyed by Washington's top agent. Not Ichabod Crane, but his way more badass partner Betsy 'Flag Lady' Ross, joining as a regular despite being firmly in the past.

Theme restaurants are the Devil, but I can't help loving this menu. Croissant
the Delware indeed.

The beast is stopped, but at the cost of Abbie's mentor's life, and she accepts that this is probably part of a new tribulation, especially as the Sumerian tablet that Ichabod found in his English family crypt is headed 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' and apparently refers to them as 'the Destroyers'. We also meet our new arc villain, a woman named Pandora, who has a box (into which she sucked the Horseman to give it the power of Death) and is apparently harvesting fear to water a tree with. Probably an evil tree.

Next up, in 'Whispers in the Dark', Pandora summons a shadow beast to reap more fear for the tree. This gribbly preys on guilty secrets, which means that when it gets a swing at Crane and Abbie we learn their dark secrets: That Crane once thought for about five seconds of selling back out to the British, and that Abbie is stalking her absentee father and trying to summon the courage to speak to him. It's nothing all that sensational.

Tentacles!

Meanwhile, Jenny is looking for a new sidekick, the last two having left town suddenly. What she finds is Joe Corbin, or rather he finds her (remember? Sheriff Corbin's boy who was a Wendigo for a bit?) and then promptly gets kidnapped by another relic hunter in order to make her hand over an artefact she picked up last week called the Anubis Shard.

Once more, the answers to the A plot come from Grace Dixon's journal and the adventures of Betsy Ross: This gribbly killed the other members of Betsy's spy ring before Crane could exfiltrate them, but Betsy named the would be killer - a fellow spy who sold out, as Crane did not, and was turned into a shadow-assassin by a British general for his trouble - and by naming him rendered him vulnerable. Thus Crane is able to un-spook Marcus Collins enough for the Witnesses to kill him.

Also, Abbie's new boss is an old boyfriend from Quantico, the Witnesses have identified their nemesis from security footage of a coffee shop that shouldn't have existed, and Ichabod has secured funds to save the Archive; if only he were a US citizen. Pandora's tree is looking pretty healthy; evil, but hale.

As we transition into Season 3, we have ups and downs. Shannyn Sossamon's Pandora is no Henry Parrish, but on the other hand she's no Katrina Crane, and she clearly has an arc plot of a masterplan, facilitated by the monster-of-the-week nature of her box, so everyone is happy. Well, unless they were hoping for some sort of resolution between Crane and the Horseman, because that ship would seem to have sailed in the name of establishing Pandora's badass chops. Similarly to the Horseman, Irving's departure is a bit of a let down, and similarly to Pandora, while Joe Corbin is no Irving, he's definitely no Nick Hawley, and it's good that Jenny has someone to work against, and someone who ties back to the long shadow of Clancy Brown's all-too-brief time on the show instead of being some cool-haired, moody loner with nothing to do with anything.

Don't you just want to punch that smirk?

I've yet to make up my mind about SAC Daniels, but he seems a bit... smug.

And then there's Betsy Ross, who honestly could get very tiresome very quickly. I get that they need someone to stand in for Katrina in flashback land, but so far she's way too awesome. She makes Crane look like he was sauntering through the War of Independence and not doing much. I hesitate to cry Mary Sue on a competent female character's first outings, but there is a touch of it about her. Hopefully they'll calm down a little and establish a stronger relationship between her and Crane, because if she's going to be a regular it needs to measure up to the chemistry Nicole Beharie and Tom Mison have going on.

Also, just three episodes to go until the Sleepy Hollow/Bones crossover. Whee!