Year: 2010

I haven’t watched this week’s episodes of Archer, 30 Rock, Community, or Modern Family yet, but:

• Being Human: Mitchell’s stuff very good. Loved it, including the flashback to Herrick, but George’s storyline was loopy and what’s up with Annie? That’s not a storyline at all. I’m worried they can’t really think of anything for her now.
• House: If you don’t love Cuddy already, you will by the end of this Cuddy-centric episode.
• Chuck: Stupid in all sorts of ways, particularly the romances and the end scene, but reasonably diverting and I’m liking the continuing darkness that Chuck has gained this season.
• Burn Notice: Excellent episode. Glad to see they’ve steered away from “client of the week” stuff in favour of proper spy stuff. Tim Matheson was epic and the twists were very clever. Still not convinced by Chris Vance’s accent or that the Chris Vance plot is in fact going anywhere decent.
• Supernatural: The producers really have mastered the art of writing an episode so that it looks like a trivial, funny one, then twisting it into something far more important and interesting. A few duff moments, very gruesome, but really enjoyed it.
• Leverage: Very enjoyable and the team chemistry seemed more like it used to be. Glad to see they’ve now jumped onto a story arc with good old Mark Sheppard again.
• Archer: Still pretty funny, but losing it a little.
• 24: Finally, some action! Didn’t last long though, but at least we have Jack front and centre this week.
• Lost: Although you could see a lot of things that are actually poised to become answers being laid down, this felt a lot like a filler episode. The flash-sideways, complete with cameo by Ethan, was enjoyable, as was the sudden return of feral Claire at the end. But if they’re going to start raising more questions now, they’re going to need to start answering them soon, because this is answers season, okay? We don’t need any more mysteries. We have quite enough already.
• Newswipe: Every week in every way, Newswipe is becoming more and more like Screenwipe, which is good, since when Brooker’s trying to educate us about the news, he’s only okay to good – when he’s pastiching, he’s great. Brilliant work by Adam Curtis as well.
• Being Erica: Finally, after two months of having season two sit in the backlog, we started watching some more of season two, starting with episode five, which was dreadful. Fortunately, episode six – in which we went to 2019 and discovered Kai was from the future – was a whole lot better and the proper arrival of Dr Frank as a character for Dr Tom to interact with has definitely made the show more interesting. Even the publishing storylines are getting more interesting.
• Life Unexpected: Talking of Being Erica, how odd. We appear to be on famous female guest star rotation duty here, since although Alex Breckenridge wasn’t in this week, Erin Karpluk has mysteriously added herself to the cast list as Cate and Ryan’s radio producer. As with 24‘s Nazneen Contractor (who starred in The Border), the rule appears to be “star in your own show in Canada, get a bit part in the US” but Karpluk managed to shine in her semi-Erica role all the same. The episode as a whole though was a lot closer in tone to the enjoyable pilot, although as someone recently pointed out, despite Lux being integral to the whole scenario, the show would be a whole lot better without her. She’s just so whiny and bitchy.

But what did you watch?

As always, no spoilers unless you’re going to use the <spoiler> </spoiler> tags, please. If you’ve reviewed something on your blog, you can put a link to it here rather than repeat yourself (although too many links and you might ge