American Gods - 'Git Gone' and 'Lemon Scented You'

The hell of mundanity.

So, we left Shadow walking into a motel room to be confronted with his dead wife. We'll have to wait to see what happens next, because first we're going back to see what happened before.

A bored croupier named Laura meets a thief named Shadow in the casino where she works. He proposes that they rob the place together after she keeps him from getting caught trying to rip the house off. Instead they fall in love and get married. He gets into normal life, but she craves something more exciting and persuades him to carry out her 'perfect' plan. He gets caught and goes to prison, but covers for her. While he's inside, she has an affair with her best friend's husband and they both die in a car crash (while ravens circle overhead, which is a touch suspect.)

"And what do we say to the God of death?"
"Fuck you!"

Laura goes to a desert, where Anubis threatens to seal her into the hot tub where she used to huff bug spray (the titular 'Git Gone') for a release from the monotony of her life. Having believed in nothing, she will go into darkness, he explains. "And then peace?" she asks. "There will be darkness," he replies. Then she is dragged back to the world, where she slaughters shadow's attackers, but loses an arm. Going to Audrey's house to scavenge thread to sew the arm back on, she meets her erstwhile best friend in a surreal and awkward scene which reiterates what seems to be the thesis of the episode: Laura shouldn't be with Shadow because he loves her, and she doesn't love him. She admits that maybe she didn't in life, but in death she does.

After a run in with Anubis/Mr Jaquel and his partner Mr Ibis, who get her all preserved and vital looking before promising to seal her in a hot tub for eternity when she's done, Laura waits for an indeterminate amount of time in a motel room until Shadow arrives.

So... mammoth.

'Lemon Scented You' opens with a gorgeously stylised 'Coming to America' about a stone age tribe crossing the land bridge from Siberia, then follows up on this less-than-cordial reunion (Shadow is angry that she had an affair, but takes her resurrection as par for the course,) which is interrupted when he and Wednesday are ratted out for bank robbery. Laura has a fight with Mad Sweeney, who is a poor match for zombie strength, but manages to force her into a bathtub just as the police arrive, again, to break up the fight.

At the precinct, three of the new gods show up: The Technical Boy, Media (appearing as Seven-Year Itch Marilyn Monroe, having earlier manifested as David Bowie) and their apparent boss, Mr World, seemingly a god of surveillance and/or information. The Boy is forced to apologise to Wednesday and Shadow for interfering with Wednesday's business and lynching Shadow (lynching a black man, his colleagues remind the Boy, is poor public image,) and World offers Wednesday an alliance. An upgrade to become god of military death satellites. Odin refuses, insisting that the new gods just take people's time; they don't give back. They don't give people purpose.

Bowie.

The new gods take this with equanimity, then leave our protagonists to flee from a precinct full of horribly murdered cops, because they lack class and subtlety more or less as a defining characteristic.

'Git Gone' is a strange episode, but by showing us the backstory of Laura's life sheds a light on the character that the novel never managed. There she remained in the conflict between Shadow's idealised memories and the fact of her betrayal, but here she is fully realised as a frankly rather unlikeable character – Mad Sweeney is a jerk, but you can't help feeling for him as he's dragged away from the smirking corpse who is sending him down with her immobility – which is a bold and even brilliant subversion of the dead love archetype.

The story doesn't really pick up again until 'Lemon Scented You', which gives the new gods a chance to flex their muscles and show their hand, which is powerful, if flashy. This too, however, is a curiously immobile episode, and in two hours of television we've only really progressed about that long in real time from the end of 'A Head Full of Snow', and now we're halfway through the season. It's a brave step in the history of pacing to go for such a leisurely gait, and I don't think we'll know until the end of the season whether it will prove to have paid off.

DC Roundup:Supergirl - 'City of Lost Children' and 'Resist'; The Flash - 'Cause and Effect' and 'Infantino Street'; ' Arrow - Honor Thy Fathers' and 'Missing'

Oof. I almost forgot I had this one to do. My bad. Okay, this will be quickish then (although not so quickish as to not add a second episode to each series before publishing.

Resistance HQ is a coffee shop entirely distinct from CC Jitters.

The DEO faces a series of seeming random attacks by alien psychics, which turn out to be triggered by the matter transmission tech that Lena is developing in partnership with Rhea, who claims to be seeking a way home and is clearly working Lena's mummy issues like a goddamn boss. Mon-el sees Rhea in the street and thinks he's going mad. James has a wibble when he realises that people are scared of the steel-clad colossus in gun-metal grey (no shit), but gets his mojo back when he is able to connect with a telepathic child when no-one else can, which leads him to rediscover his reasons for being a hero. Lena completes her work and Rhea brings in a Daxamite fleet to create 'New Daxam'. Mon-el isn't able to plug his own mother, so she nicks off with him and Lena, having told him that his father died of grief rather than of wife-related stabbing.

 

Because of course Daxamite wedding dresses are red and plungy.

In 'Resist', Supergirl joins up with the rest of the DEO to form a Resistance against the Daxamite invasion, and Lillian Luthor shows up to offer her help. She and Henshaw have a means to board the mothership and blind its sensors, while Supergirl can fight past their defences. Meanwhile, Rhea wants to cement power on Earth by marrying Mon-el to Lena, on pain of orphanage incineration(1). After much umming and ahing, and Cat Grant(2) and the President getting shot down in Air Force 1, Kara agrees to the deal in order to rescue Lena and Mon-el before Alex can gain control of a supergun on the DEO's roof and shoot down the mothership. Winn and Cat broadcast a message of resistance as a diversion and Guardian saves them from goons, using lead dust to strip the Daxamites of their powers while he punches them. Lena and Mon-el are rescued and Kara pulls off a switcheroo by having Winnset up a counter to Lillian and Henshaw's sudden yet inevitable betrayal. Alas, Supergirl has to give Rhea one last chance to surrender, and the cannon is unfired long enough for it to be destroyed by… Superman!

What!?

 

"Science, bitches."

Barry realises that Savitar is actually one of the time remnants that he will one day make to fight against the past version of Savitar in the future(3), who got monumentally pissed off at being treated like a shabby copy after he wasn't killed in the battle. Barry tries to smack him down while he's unarmoured, but the Savitar suit turns out to do its own fighting and is much easier to put on than to take off. To try to eliminate Savitar's future memory advantage, Cisco and Julian suggest knocking out the connection between Barry's short and long-term memories, so that he can't make new memories for Savitar to recall. Unfortunately, they end up frying all of his non-procedural memories in time for a vital trial presentation, although on the upside he is happier for not knowing his own history and Savitar also loses his memory, pushing Killer Frost to team up with Team Flash to restore them both.

Zap!

Elsewhere, HR and Tracy flirt awkwardly and create the Speedforce bazooka, thanks to her smarts and his naming skills and Dadaist pep talk talents.

In 'Infantino Street', with the very literal deadline approaching, Barry tries desperately to find a way to save Iris. In order to power the Speedforce bazooka, he recruits Legends Season 1-era Leonard Snart to help him steal a Dominator power source from ARGUS, leading to a clash with King Shark and a couple of tough conversations with Lyla about responsibility. This enables the team – less Cisco, who is drawn into his woodland confrontation with Killer Frost - to confront Savitar at Infantino Street, only to discover that the Philosopher's Stone makes him immune to the bazooka.

And Savitar kills Iris, thus setting in motion the chain of events which will result in his own creation and apotheosis.

 

"Well, balls."

Finally, in Arrow, Felicity does some mad pep talking herself and gets Oliver back in the suit. The team comes together to thwart Chase's attempt to gas most of the city. Oliver is unable to take Chase in a fight, but thanks to the family lawyer is able to hit him with the revelation that his dad was planning to completely disown him as a freewheeling nutjob, causing him to surrender. Thea comes back to Star City, Rene blows his court appearance for fear of failing, and Chase is all happy about being in company, presumably because he has Oliver's son and an evil endgame in mind. Oh, and in flashback Oliver returns to the island, pins up Deathstroke's original mask and gets captured by Kovar. SURPRISE!

Lance takes the fact that they hid Black Siren's existence from him
surprisingly well, considering.

In 'Missing', nuTA assemble for Oliver's birthday, but first Rene and Dinah, then Curtis, Thea and Lance, and finally Diggle and Felicity are kidnapped by Artemis – who clearly just wanted to work for a plain-dealing villain, because Prometheus is no better than Olly at his worst – Black Siren – who has some wobbles of conscience over abducting her father's doppelganger – and Talia al Gul – who kills Diggle's SUV with a sword. Oliver refuses to release Chase, but then he gets sent video of his son and so he has to team up with Malcolm Merlyn to save his friends and his former arch enemy's daughter. Realising that they are all being taken to Lian Yu, Olly also recruits Nyssa al Gul and, on arriving at the island, opts to bring in a real wildcard by springing Slade Wilson from the ARGUS blacksite.

In what may prove to be the penultimate Arrow flashback, Kovar spiked him with a Chinese torture drug that brings all of his pain back into the present. Given a gun with one bullet, Yao Fei appeared and urged him to kill himself, but Laurel Lance told him not too and instead he shot out the lock on the door, symbolically choosing a path into the future instead of letting the past define him, a lesson which - in true Arrow style - would not truly be realised for five years.

We're in the downhill stretch now, with just the finales to go, and so of course everything is fear, pain and confusion (albeit a little lighter in The Flash.) Arrow is all child endanger-y again (never like that,) and that never makes me happy. Supergirl is setting Lena up to go full villain when she learns that Kara has been lying to her about being Supergirl. I hope that she will be revealed to have worked it out on her own, but I'm not sure. I'm glad we're catching up to season 1 of Arrow in the flashbacks, however, because I for one am heartily sick of the things. We're also getting a shit-tonne of returning characters for this wrap up, of which my favourite is Snart. This version of Captain Cold has a way of messing with Barry's self-image that is always prime value for money. Olly's own version of the Suicide Squad is interesting - especially Manu Bennett's Deathstroke - but not quite as cool(4). Cat Grant... Much as I liked her in season 1, and felt her spiky presence was missed in this season, she felt somewhat extraneous (although her effortless piercing of Guardian's identity was, fair play, hilarious.)

(1) And I thought Arrow would be heavy on child endangerment.

(2) Contract fulfilled.

(3) I know, right.

(4) If you will.

Doctor Who - 'Extremis' and 'The Pyramid at the End of the World'

Poster (c) Stuart Manning

"Goodness is not goodness that seeks advantage. Good is good in the final hour, in the deepest pit, without hope, without witness, without reward. Virtue is only virtue in extremis.”

This review will contain some spoilers.

As the Doctor adjusts to his blindness, with the aid of the telepathic circuits in his sonic sunglasses, he receives a message labelled 'Extremis'. Sometime later, he is visited by the Pope, who asks him to investigate a book called the Veritas, which drives those who read it insane. Dogged by mysterious monsters, Bill and Nardole stumble on a mysterious system of portals with a sinister implication. And long ago, the Doctor is called upon to act as executioner for the only other Time Lord in the known universe.

The Good
Three-parter! We like those.

The big reveal of the episode is slickly done, looking at first like a trick before the truth becomes clear.

Nardole got to be kind of awesome, not just with his badass speech, but by being one of the quickest to work out the trick. I also like that the people who realise the truth of the Veritas killed themselves to save the real world, rather than in pure despair.

The Bad
The Doctor telling the executioner to look him up under cause of death is again a bit reminiscent of Forest of the Dead, while his little fuck you to the enemy harked back to Babylon 5.

The Ugly
Nothing to report.

Theorising
Well, I've already seen the next episode, so I'll just admit I was trying to be too clever about the contents of the vault and leave the rest for below.

Top Quotes
"When I’m on a date, when a rare and special thing happens in my real life, do not, do not, under any circumstances, put the pope in my bedroom!" – Bill

"Particle physicists and priests. What could scare them both?" – The Doctor

"Okay, Bill. Miss Potts. [removes his glasses] I’m the only person you’ve ever met or will ever meet who is officially licensed to kick the Doctor’s arse. I will happily do the same to you in the event that you do not align yourself with any instructions that I have issued which I personally judge to be in the best interest of your safety and survival. [puts his glasses back on] Okay, Bill?"

Alien: What are you doing?
The Doctor: What everyone does when the world is in danger -- calling the Doctor!

The Verdict
'Extremis' is very good Who, channelling all of the series' strengths and falling back on very few of its weaknesses. In part this is because it is the lead-in to a three-parter, allowing it to spend proper time on set up without needing to rush in a conclusion, but it also benefits from limiting the action to a confined space and playing with ideas more than with special effects or set-pieces.

Score - 8/10

---

Poster (c) Stuart Manning

"The end of your life is already begun. There is a last place you will ever go, a last door you will ever walk through, a last sight you will ever see. And every step you ever take is moving you closer. The end of the world is a billion, billion tiny moments. And somewhere, unnoticed, in silence or in darkness, it has already begun.”

This review will contain some spoilers.

The Extremis email has been received. The Doctor is preparing for the worst. Bill receives another unexpected visitor and the President of the World returns. The Monks have arrived in an incongruously ancient pyramid and promising to save the world from inevitable destruction. All they need is for someone in power to give their valid and unforced consent; someone with authority to represent the UN, or the bulk of the world's land armies… or the Doctor.

The Good
The Monks are a surprisingly interesting enemy; godlike beings with the power to simply conquer the world, but some pressing – nay, overriding – need to be accepted and loved instead of ruling through fear.

I liked the slow burn doom; that's the kind of thing that longer form Who excels at, cutting back to seemingly unrelated events as the episode unfolds.

Temp companion Erika was scrappy. I liked her.

The scene where Nardole and the TARDIS are overcome by the pathogen was heartbreaking.

The Bad
I'm not sure how I feel about Bill's decision to hand the world over for the Doctor. She's been travelling with him for half a season and we haven't had time for them to get really close; not 'give up the world' close. On the other hand, if she was playing a longer game, why was her consent valid? I don't think it makes her super-selfish, but I don't think it played as well as it could have done.

The Ugly
Was that the entire payoff of the Doctor's blindness? Conversely, especially after the Extremis email, how does the Doctor not have a reading mode in the sonic sunglasses?

Theorising
Okay, so apparently Bill's consent has allowed the Monks to create an AU in which they always ruled the world (unless this episode and the next turn out to be alternative Veritas scenarios, which I'm not ruling out but would border on 'it was all a dream' levels of narrative bullshittery,) which will only end if Bill – the one who made the deal – dies. We're back to the Doctor risking all for one then, apparently, but maybe it will be smarter than that. It does seem to be Bill after the Doctor, so there are a lot of twists possible (especially on guidelines set by Missy.)

My big prediction, however, is that Missy will save the day, knowing that no-one will ever remember it, thus fulfilling the quote from 'Extremis': "Goodness is not goodness that seeks advantage. Good is good in the final hour, in the deepest pit, without hope, without witness, without reward. Virtue is only virtue in extremis.”

Top Quotes
The Doctor: How’d you get [the TARDIS] out of my office? The windows aren’t big enough!
UNIT Commander [awkwardly]: Oh… They are now.

Colonel Brabbit: You don’t look much like guardian angels.
Monk: We have chosen this form to look like you.
Colonel Brabbit: You look like corpses.
Monk: You are corpses to us.

The Verdict
Another really solid entry, with effective villains and an interesting thread, as well as plenty of disposable figures of temporal authority.

Score - 8/10

American Gods - 'Head Full of Snow'

Anubis.

Shadow ups his game and Wednesday runs a con, and there's surprisingly little blood this week, although I can't honestly say that no-one gets hurt.

We open with a Somewhere in America, as a Muslim woman who once loved stories of Ancient Egypt is escorted to her final rest by Anubis, who is lovely(1). 

Shadow encounters the youngest and least pronounceable of the Zorya sisters on the roof, while Wednesday turns on the charm with the oldest and least bullshitable. Zorya Polunochnaya asks Shadow for a kiss, something she has not had before, in exchange for a coin plucked from the moon. Wednesday kissed Zorya Vechernyaya, provoking a massive and portentous storm. During this storm, Shadow challenges Czernobog to another game of checkers on the same terms, offering a second blow in case the first isn't enough. He wins, because Czernobog plays the same game as before, forcing Czernobog to accompany Wednesday to Wisconsin, although the first blow of the hammer still stands, to be delivered after Wednesday's business is concluded.

"You're going to start off in that suit and I'm going to start off in this sweater
and it's still going to be sexy as all hell."

There is another run in with Mad Sweeny the Leprechaun, whose luck has turned bad after accidentally giving Shadow his lucky coin. No Bilquis this week, so the sex quota is met by the Djinn's story, in which a mild-mannered salesman has a passionate encounter with a djinn who drives a taxi, and the two end up swapping places(2). Props to the series for not skimping on the book's m/m sex scene having gone all in with Bilquis, with the resulting x-ray fire transference being hailed as one of the most powerful and graphic non-porno gay sex scenes of all time.

Wednesday then takes Shadow to rob a bank, which he does by swiping a load of deposit slips and pretending to be a security guard taking night deposits in lieu of a broken ATM. Shadow reluctantly helps out by visualising a snowstorm, which promptly appears in defiance of all meteorological predictions, and by answering a payphone when the police call to check Wednesday's less-than-bona fides. Despite his reticence, he shows a bit of a flair for the game.

Zorya Polunochnaya brings the ethereal floatiness this series was missing.

Mad Sweeny digs up Laura's grave to find his coin, but there is only an empty coffin with a coin-sized hole burned in the lid. Elsewhere, Shadow enters his motel room to find his dead wife waiting for him.

'Head Full of Snow' is an important episode, because a) this is not a series that deals in filler, and b) it represents Shadow's first conscious steps into the weird. Up to now he's been dragged into the divine realm a time or two, but when he steps up with a second challenge for Czernobog and later accepts that he might have made it snow, that is when he accepts that perhaps the world is mad, rather than him. Odin shows his dark side as he puts his moves on Zorya Vechernyaya, which is starkly at odds with the smiling conman image he works hard in the latter half of the episode.

American Gods continues a strong run, with not a god miscast so far (which is no small thing with an ensemble this big.) I can't help comparing it to the book, and I think it compares well. So far it's running very close to the original text, and in as much as I picture characters at all (for whatever reason, I rarely have strong images of book characters, which is a huge help when watching adaptations,) they all seem to fit.

(1) I'm not sure if Neil Gaiman has ever met a personification of death he didn't think was a sweetums.

(2) The Djinn appeared briefly in the last episode, wearing the salesman's suit for a meeting with Wednesday, so presumably this is a bit of a flashback.

Doctor Who - 'Oxygen'

Poster (c) Stuart Manning

"That is my theme tune, otherwise known as a distress call!”

This review will contain some spoilers.

Despite Nardole's best efforts to immobilise the TARDIS and convince the Doctor of the merits of earth-bound adventures, the Doctor takes Bill – and Nardole – off on another spree, this time homing in on a distress signal from a space mining facility. Here, they find that most of the crew have been killed by their own space suits, and are facing an imminent shortage of the oxygen that the corporation which runs the station sells to their workforce by the breath.

The Good

As Doctor Who anti-capitalist tracts go, this one is pretty good. It eschews the identity politics of 'The Rebel Flesh'/'The Almost People'(1) in favour of a straightforward people vs. profit narrative (a similar theme to that in 'Thin Ice', in fact.)

While less ambitious in its scope and as ever forced by the nuWho format into a more frenetic pace, it compares not unfavourably to classic Who's 'The Caves of Androzani', which is pretty good going.

The character Dahh'ren appeared to assure us that harmony among the races of Earth just means racism against the blue.

The collapsible helmets were a nicely understated piece of supertech.

This episode is a whole new level of peril for Bill, who comes within about two percent battery charge of permadeath. That's like checking your email and a round of Kandy Krush.

The Doctor also has a lesson in consequences, as his abuse of his robust Timelord physiology to save Bill results in the permanent – or at least prolonged - loss of his sight.

The Bad

Having pitched in as the galactic black man, Dahh'ren promptly dies early, although not first. I legitimately don't know if this is awful or genius.

The Ugly

No ugly this week.

Theorising

Next week's episode has Missy, so I'm ruling out her being the Vault's occupant. I'm inclined to think that it won't prove to be any incarnation of the Master then, although it could well be someone that Missy inadvisably wants to try to manipulate in the name of universal domination.

Top Quotes

"Space, the final frontier. ‘Final,’ because it wants to kill us." – The Doctor

"The universe shows its true face when it asks for help, we show ours by how we respond." – The Doctor

"What if I throw up in my helmet?" - Bill

“I’ve got no sonic, no Tardis, about 10 minutes of oxygen left, and now I’m blind. Can you imagine how unbearable I’m going to be when I pull this off?” – The Doctor

"They’re not your rescuers. They’re your replacements. The endpoint of capitalism. Bottom line. Where human life has no value at all. We’re fighting an algorithm. A spreadsheet. Like every worker everywhere, we’re fighting the suits!" – The Doctor

The Verdict

Well, this is a turn up for the books. Yes, it's a lot of running from slow-moving monsters in corridors – monsters that are literally people in suits; how fucking meta is that? – but it's good running from slow-moving monsters in corridors, and let's face it, that is one of the few arenas in which Doctor Who competes on an equal footing with other, larger budgeted SF shows. Its running from slow-moving monsters in corridors game is strong. 'Oxygen' is also a boldly political episode in a fairly political season, although presumably it was written and filmed long before the announcement of the election. More importantly, however, this round of running from slow-moving monsters in corridors has real stakes and serious consequences, rather than the nebulous threat of bad shit happening if the Doctor doesn't get back to the Vault. Things happen and have lasting effects; that's so rare in Doctor Who. Just look at 'Hell Bent', which went to absurd extremes to make sure that the death of a companion had no significant consequences beyond another inter-companion grump.

Score - 8/10

(1) I don’t know if this series is being particularly heavy on recycled ideas/homages, of if I'm just becoming sensitised.

DC Roundup: Supergirl - 'Alex'; The Flash - 'I Know Who You Are'; Arrow - 'Underneath'

"I've got a great idea! Let's name the episode after a character to fuck with
anyone trying to find screen shots!"

Okay, so it makes sense in my freaky head to combine each week's DC Arrowverse reviews into a single post. It may not last; I guess we'll see.

Mad season spoilers in the review of The Flash, by the way; you have been warned.

First up is Supergirl, and in the episode entitled 'Alex' one of the people closest to Kara is kidnapped. Hint: Not Winn. After the tension that has never really existed at all between Kara and Maggie regarding the role of the superhero in routine crime erupts, Alex goes missing. Kara receives a call from a man telling her that he has Alex and knows that she is Supergirl, and threatening to kill Alex if she doesn't bust a certain inmate out of prison. Hank refuses to play ball, knowing that the revelation that Supergirl can be leaned on would bring more danger on her loved ones, leaving thirty-six hours to find Alex.

The kidnapper turns out to be one Rick Malverne, a student at Midvale High with Kara and Alex. He wants his father, Peter Thompson, broken out of prison, believing his sentence for murder – he insists it was manslaughter – to be unjust. Malverne is a weird character. His motivation is his utter devotion to the father who rescued him from an abusive mother, but no-one ever really addresses this from a psychological angle. They to trick him, and appeal to his childhood good nature, but never offer a shred of sympathy for someone whose path was set by brutal circumstance. I'm not saying he's a right guy, just that the episode is fairly black and white on a grey subject.

It's also kind of hard to swallow, even in a superhero show, that this random kid from Hicksville went on to become a better hacker than Winn, capable of shadowing Kara and Alex for a good year without either the alien with superhuman senses or the trained spy (or her cop girlfriend, or her superhumanly alert, mind-reading boss) noticing, devising a strategy to defeat the entire DEO, and find time to develop a means to resist Martian mind-reading(1). We are looking at Christopher Pellant levels of frickwizardry(2) here.

Of course they rescue Alex, with minutes to spare, and Malverne is mind wiped to protect Supergirl's identity. Unfortunately, all of this means that Kara isn't in the emotional place to take a call from Lena Luthor to ask if she should team up with an alien named Rhea. This is presumably setting up the finale, but what's really interesting about it is that Lena makes what we know to be a bad decision in absence of Kara's advice, but is not motivated by spite at Kara blowing her off. In fact, she picks up on how upset Kara is and actually calls back later to check she's okay. One of the reasons that I want Lena not to end up villained is that, actually, she and Kara share a rare instance of a really healthy friendship between two women(3).

I like this character. I hope she doesn't die.

On then to The Flash, and an episode which begins with Barry confronting Savitar with the episode's title: 'I Know Who You Are', before flashing back to establish this knowledge.

Team Flash move to contact grad student Tracy Brand, whose academic career is in freefall thanks to the rejection of her theoretical derivation of the existence of the Speed Force, but who will one day be a Nobel-winning physicist and inventor of the speed trap. As the team struggles to protect her from Killer Frost, who has been dispatched to fulfil the first part of her name, they are increasingly confronted with the fact that Savitar seems to know all of their plans in advance, as if he were present for everything that has and will happened(4). When Cisco overcomes his fear of killing Caitlin sufficiently to incapacitate Frost, Savitar appears to rescue her.

Well, someone's been shopping.

Tracy hypothesises that they could use the energy which Savitar's suit was made to protect him from against him, while the team ponders the source of Savitar's knowledge and the fact that he didn't kill Tracy himself. This tips Barry off and he runs off for a confrontation with Savitar, who of course knows that he is waiting, because the obvious answer, and the answer to the question I asked last week – 'Who would have such a profound effect on both Caitlin and Wally?' – is that Savitar is Barry Allen. I'm so ashamed I didn't realise earlier; it's not like the theme of the season from 'Flashpoint' onwards has been about how Barry is his own worst enemy.

Finally, Arrow picked up directly from last week as 'Underground' began with the Arrow Cave in lockdown after Prometheus hit it with an EMP. This leaves Oliver and Felicity trapped, Felicity paralysed from the waist down as the EMP took out her spinal implant, and oxygen rapidly running out, but on the upside gives them a chance to hammer out their grievances, in particular that Oliver doesn't trust Felicity: or anyone else for that matter. In the end, he always feels that it's up to him to get the job done, even if that means calling in a mob hit.

"To sum up the situation, we're blue, ba-ba-dee baba-doo."

Outside the bunker, John and Lila get frosty over ARGOS' activities: Mostly running that illegal black site for the detention of US citizens without warrant, indictment or trial, but also – as it turns out – knocking off, and indeed sprucing up, Curtis' T-sphere design, which comes in handy as his original spheres are down and out in the bunker(5). The team works together to rescue Oliver and Felicity before their sanctum turns into even more of a death-trap, but this gives Chase the time he needs to find Oliver's son.

So, this all feels as if we're ramping up to some finales (as indeed we are.) We've got Kara vs. Rhea, Barry vs. Barry, and Oliver vs. Chase, with the usual stakes of global domination, cosmic destruction and… Star City? William? Oliver's feels? Yeah, Arrow always feels a bit… meh when it comes to the stakes. I mean, I'm not insensitive to the peril to Oliver's son, but for all he's actually been in the series, I will ultimately be less pissed if they kill him than I am about Sara Diggle(6).

(1) Hell, that he even knows that Martians can read minds. I'm assuming that's not in any of the press releases that the DEO doesn't make.

(2) Frickwizardry – Allegedly mundane abilities that reveal the fact that the possessor is in fact a fricking wizard.

(3) They never fight over boys, never get pointlessly bitchy at each other, have each other's backs, occasionally argue about stuff that matters to them in different ways. I mean, okay, Kara is lying about a few things, as is Lena's other bestie Supergirl…

(4) To the point of briefing Frost on Barry's script.

(5) He calls them Koto and Poto after The Beastmaster's ferrets, and he and Dinah both turn out to have had some revelatory moments over Marc Singer in a loincloth. Thankfully neither of them saw Singer's appearance in Season 2 as a grizzled, genocidal general, or they'd never be having sex again.

(6) Join in with the chorus: "No, not letting it go."

Arrow - 'Dangerous Liaisons'

Nothing good ever came of a sudden switch to double the mascara and a shirt
with no shoulders. Not on TV anyway.

And we're back to keeping pace with Arrow, at least for this episode.

Prometheus is exposed, but in the wind, and the city is unimpressed that the throwing star killer turned out to be the DA. Team Arrow are determined to catch him, roping in ARGUS to help in the hunt, but Chase continues to give them the slip and wrecks up some priceless vintage arcade machines in the process(1). Helix tracks a warning sent to Chase from inside ARGUS, but the leak is killed when Alena hacks an elevator in order to steal his security key. She explains that she is trying to rescue Cayden James, the greatest hacker evor, from ARGUS custody and that the death was an accident due to her not understanding physics and anatomy as well as she does computers. She seems sincere, hiring a mercenary snatch team to get a second key without accidents. She also explains that James created a biometric tracking system that can find anyone based on their heartbeat(2), which prompts Felicity to ask Oliver to let the mercs get away with the Key.

ARGUS try to set a trap for Helix, but Lyla's double-blind bait and switch backfires when Helix figure out where the extra-secret illegal black site is, but Team Arrow aren't in the loop. Helix hack the black site's automatic defences, disable the guards and rescue James. Team Arrow almost stop them, but Felicity puts herself in front of Oliver's gun – not loving his 'not ready to Arrow yet' look; it's sort of Spartan lite – and allows Helix to escape. They promptly decamp, deeming her connections too risky, but leave her the biometric tracking programme. She and Oliver have one of many super-tense conversations, then run the programme, which reveals that Prometheus is, like a serial killer in an urban legend, in the building with them.

Alena is definitely rocking a Root vibe.

And then the bunker asplodes.

Also, Quentin 'persuades' Rene to get back in touch with his daughter(3) and start the legal process to regain custody, which is lovely. Also also, John and Lyla have a falling out over her basically turning into white Amanda Waller, which is less lovely.

'Dangerous Liaisons' is a troublesome episode in a lot of ways. It pushes Felicity's turn to the dark side, but so far Helix still doesn't look that dark and indeed the show goes to great lengths to paint Alena as driven, but basically decent. She's not that cut up about the dead guy, but he was working for Prometheus, so no-one else is exactly weeping, and honestly it comes off more as a disconnect from the reality of the action. Alena is used to working remotely with precise systems and predictable outcomes; it's easier to read her as 'in shock' than 'a psychopath'. Since Team Arrow make few bones about their disapproval of illegal, unsanctioned black sites established by anyone other than themselves or STAR Labs, it's not like ARGUS's concerns over Cayden James seem that irrefutable either. Lyla calls him 'more dangerous than Snowden', linking him with a figure hailed as a hero by as many people as call him a villain, and whose actions many incarnations of the Green Arrow (I'm thinking especially of the Justice League cartoon version) would have lauded as admirable. At present, Helix has sinister implications, but are looking way less dark side than ARGUS.

(1) To the sorrow of Curtis, Felicity and Alena, which I think may have been thrown in just in case this episode cast too many doubts on her geek girl credentials.

(2) So, apparently he's a wizard then.

(3) And by persuades, I mean invites her to the office then calls Rene for a meeting.