Writing Blind: Oz S1

Welcome to a feature called "Writing Blind."  In this series, I will be writing about seasons of television that I watched in the past year or so, but failed to write about at the time.  I call it writing blind, because I will be sharing my thoughts months after I have already finished the season.  This is both because I want to write about these seasons, but don't have the time to re-watch them and because it is a challenge to hopefully improve my writing.

Did you know there was a television show called Oz?  You might have, but you probably didn't know it was the first scripted HBO drama television series.  Here's a show that set the stage to allow The Sopranos to happen and become a hit.  If Oz wasn't successful, critically speaking and to a lesser extent in viewership, who knows what HBO becomes?  But because Oz was a critical favorite - if not necessarily raking in the viewers - HBO continued its strategy to making amazing television.  It worked out well.

Oz was created by Tom Fontana.  Fontana more than earned his chance in his nearly two decade career writing for other television shows previous to Oz.  He earned his bonafides writing for St. Elsewhere and later Homicide: Life on the Street.  Though I've seen neither, both are considered among the very best among their time.  He didn't only write for them though.  He was prolific.  For St. Elswhere he was the credited writer in 27 episodes, credited for the story in 61 episodes, and wrote the teleplay in 9 episodes in six seasons.  For Homicide, he was credited with the story for 57 episodes and wrote 10 episodes.  I don't know how generous either show was with crediting their writers, but he helped write the series finales for both shows so he was obviously important.

Oz is his baby.  Barely anybody else writes for that show.  In fact, he's the only writer in the first season.  I can't think of an example of a show that sustained quality over multiple seasons with only one person writing it (Downton Abbey quickly became awful, True Detective's second season wasn't good, and Vikings is a pretty mediocre show though consistent).

The pilot episode is bold.  The majority of the running time is contributed to Dino Ortolani, played by the very capable Jon Seda (The Pacific, Homicide:, and Chicago Fire/P.D.)  Well, majority of the time by Oz standards.  Anyway, he's one of only two characters who gets any character development and they kill him off by the end of the episode.  This is the show announcing it's different than any other show that came before.  He and Ryan O'Reilly (played by the wonderful Dean Winters) are so at odds it's clear one of them will have to die before the episode is over.  Well, most TV shows - probably ALL TV shows in 1997 - would find a way for both to live and if one of them had to die, it certainly wouldn't be the one whose perspective we've been watching for the whole episode.  While Winters makes his impact, he still appears to be nothing better than your average great guest star.  So having him kill off what is at this point basically the main character is incredibly bold.

The other character who gets development is Vernon Schillinger, played by the currently in-demand J.K. Simmons.  He's a Neo Nazi who doesn't immediately reveal he is a Neo Nazi to the audience or the audience surrogate, Tobias Beecher.  Beecher is so much of an audience surrogate, he isn't a character at this point.  (That's not a complaint; most shows will introduce you to a setting through fresh eyes and the fresh eyes are basically there to observe.)  Anyway, Simmons being cast is actually a benefit in 2015 since it's really hard to imagine him playing an awful character.  So when Beecher falls under his command, it's not hard to imagine how.  Simmons though is such a good actor that he portrays just enough menace to make you know he'll reveal his dark side.

Beecher gets abused in the most horrific ways imaginable.  He's ostracized from his family, he feels enormous guilt over killing a little girl, and Schillinger gets off on humiliating him on every turn.  This isn't just for shock value.  It's revealing the atrocities of how hard living in life is in Oz.  Most people are in gangs so when they get to Oz, they have a group of people protecting them, but Beecher has nobody and it was just a matter of time before someone took advantage.

Fontana is an impatient writer though.  He wasn't content to just let Beecher get dominated.  So with the blank space allotted to his character - since he was less a character than simply an everyman - his turn to crazy is unexpected.  Watching him get tortured constantly would have been boring and awful.  Beecher going crazy was much more entertaining.  Before he goes crazy, he goes to drugs.  Basically with Beecher, Fontana presented every possible avenue with how you adjust to life on Oz: get controlled, go to drugs, or go crazy.

Oh yeah and die, which Beecher doesn't do, but enough characters do in this season that we understand that's one of the possibilities.  Ortaloni's death sparks a gang war in the prison, which leads to deaths from both gangs almost every episode in this season.  By episode four, one of the other major characters, Jefferson Keane dies.  Keane was played by Leon, and he's honestly not a good actor so his death both added the sense that anybody could die and removed a weak character.

One of the big weaknesses of Oz is that it churns up story so fast, we barely have any time to register why the characters are doing it.  Most of the cast is strong so when they randomly change heart, they sell it.  Leon does not and he's not the only weak actor on the show.  A lot of the time, the show seems to skip past the part of where the character decides to do something.  It never explains why, though usually that's not a problem as it's either self-evident (Beecher going to drugs) or it's easy to imagine happening (most of Said's plotlines)

Like I said before, this is one hell of a cast.  Lee Tergesen is an effective audience surrogate, but he really shines when he's batshit insane.  I already praised Dean Winters above and he kind of does the Dean Winters shtick (see: his Mayhem commercials) but it's hard not to love the Dean Winters shtick.  He hasn't quite mastered it in this season and he looks surprisingly young, but he finds his character sometime in the middle of this season.  Harold Perrineau (Lost) was apparently hired for his oratory skills, but he seems to love narrating the episodes and he's good enough to make me wish he was better used on Lost (WAAAAAAAALT!)

The biggest revelation from Oz though - because most of the good actors I've seen in other things ala Simmons or Winters - is Eamonn Walker as Kareem Said.  He's pretty fantastic.  He's good in a way where I imagine that this specific role is so perfectly cast to his talents that I imagine I won't find him that good of an actor in anything else he's in, but he's truly an amazing actor if I'm wrong.  B.D Wong gets his audition for his long-running role in Law and Order: SVU and he's pretty much the same character, except that he's a priest.  Rita Moreno is another actor who is really good in this role as Sister Peter Marie.  It doesn't seem like she gets that much to do honestly - not like there's much to give her since she counsels the inmates - but she certainly makes the most of it.

There's also Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as Adebisi and he's appropriately sick and twisted and enthralling.  Edie Falco gets her audition for Sopranos (though she's nothing like Carmela, but it's hard to think this role didn't get her an audition at least), and J.D. Williams as Kenny Wrangler is literally his audition tape for his role on The Wire (essentially the same character, though oddly enough he's older in 1997 here than he is in the beginning of The Wire in 2002.  The man didn't age).  Lastly, Lauren Velez is effective here and is just straight up depressing if you've ever seen Dexter and what they gave her to do.

Oz's first season is not exactly an experiment, but a test.  A test to see what viewers would watch and a test on the sensibilities of your average viewer.  It turns out that viewers could stomach the painful, the hard-to-watch, and most importantly, could watch awful people doing awful things.  This is certainly not the first show to have as horrific of people as Oz does, but it might be the first to feature as many of them on the same show.  I can't possibly put myself back in 1997 when this first aired, but this aired two years before The Sopranos.  Oz most likely let Sopranos happened, which arguably influenced nearly every great television show that came after it.

With that said, this is not an A show.  I don't think I'll be giving any of the seasons an A.  There's either too many weak actors, too many weak storylines, or too frenetic of pacing.  This doesn't make it a bad show by any means, it just means it never can quite become a truly great show.  It's mostly great for what it did for television more than as an actual show.  That's ok.  I'd still recommend people watch this show, but after first making sure they don't have any problems with violence of course.

Grade - B+

Writing Blind: The X-Files S4

Welcome to a feature called "Writing Blind."  In this series, I will be writing about seasons of television that I watched in the past year or so, but failed to write about at the time.  I call it writing blind, because I will be sharing my thoughts months after I have already finished the season.  This is both because I want to write about these seasons, but don't have the time to re-watch them and because it is a challenge to hopefully improve my writing.

I'm about to finish season five of The X-Files and I really hope I can write a review soon after finishing it, because I am tired of trying to recollect episodes I haven't seen in months.  There is however one thing I am certain about with the fourth season of The X-Files: it's the best season.  I guess a better way to put it is that it's the most cohesive one.  Season four is the first season to really feel like continuity matters.  

I appreciate that in the first three seasons, the show would have enough continuity to make it worth watching in order, but it's not really vital to watch it in order.  (Except for mythology episodes I guess, but I've never been that invested in them, mostly due to the incredibly widespread reputation the show has for shitting the bed with the mythology.  It's kind of hard to care when you know it's leading you nowhere.  And really here's every mythology episode: you learn something, but nothing actually changes.)

That changes in this season, starting with the last five minutes of "Leonard Betts," when we find out Scully has cancer.  It's a pretty bold move, a move the show would need to back out of one way or the other.  The rest of the season either addresses it directly or knowing she has cancer changes how you might perceive certain scenes.

There's also the fact that Gillian Anderson is a fantastic actor and nailed every emotional beat.  David Duchovny has grown on me the more I've watched the show, but I have zero doubt he would not be able to do what Anderson did in this season.  In fact, I don't think I've praised her enough in these reviews.  She makes this show.  This is pretty impressive considering the writers frequently write her as a wet blanket who gets in they way of Mulder's theories or simply don't give her anything to do at all.  So keep that in mind when I say that the smartest thing the writers ever did, besides maybe picking Vince Gilligan's spec script in season two, was giving Scully cancer so Anderson could finally play something up to her talent.

Duchovny isn't left hanging as this is the first time he's confronted with the possibility that the government is behind everything.  The writers wrote themselves into a corner here.  There are two possible scenarios on how to deal with the government conspiracy. One is that the aliens are real and the government is hiding it.  It's implied that the world of The X-Files is essentially the same as our world where most people don't believe in aliens or supernatural things.  Of course, presenting it as this version makes it hard to believe people aren't more accepting of things like aliens when there's been at least 100 or more instances (in other words, the episodes) where the impossible is real.  You'd think that bleed into everyday life.  But suspension of disbelief and what have you.  

The other scenario is that the government wants you to believe in aliens so that you ignore the other shit they do.  That's not what this season comes to because the show is far from being over so they can't make any conclusions yet.  But it certainly makes it seem like that's a possibility.  Which makes no sense in a world where we've seen so much evidence of crazy, impossible ghost shit happening.  You can't really say aliens aren't real and then have an episode on this ancient demon who is totally real.  (Relating to a previous point, it's frustrating to have Scully constantly reject Mulder's theories with common sense and science and then he's nearly always right.  Seriously it's not hard to imagine someone not named Gillian Anderson playing Scully and Scully being TERRIBLE to watch.)

Anyway, the fourth season still has good mythology episodes, though much like last time, I couldn't recite to you any plot points.  I read the episode descriptions and synopsis and still barely remember them.  Mythology episodes are exciting at the time (well some of them), but they leave nearly no lasting impression on me.  Am I alone on this?

This season has a ton of great episodes.  There's a lot of episodes that I knew were great before I even watched a minute of it.  "Home" is creepy and maybe one of the most fucked up things the show ever presented on screen, especially when you stop and think about it.  "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man" has CSM killing John F. Kennedy, which is awesome.  "Paper Hearts" presents an alternative explanation for the disappearance of Samantha, Fox's long-missing sister.  "Leonard Betts" through "Memento Mori" are great as we discover Scully has cancer (though it came at the end of Leonard Betts and is a great episode before that), she has her own adventure (where cancer isn't mentioned, but certainly colors his actions), and then "Memento Mori" has both Scully and Mulder deal with the news that Scully has cancer.  There's also the awesome "Small Potatoes," meant by Vince Gilligan in the vein of Darin Morgan script, and "Zero Sum" where Walter Skinner gets framed for murder.

Combined, this season is a combination of long-form storytelling, season-long storytelling, and simply standalones.  It succeeds at all three.  Only the first season really has as clear of a season-long arc in my mind before this fourth season came along.  I feel confident in saying that the fourth season of The X-Files will be my favorite and my pick for the best season.

Grade - A

Review: Jessica Jones S1

It's hard to write about Jessica Jones after you've spent one weekend watching all thirteen episodes.  Hell it'd be hard to write about any show, ignoring the fact that I wouldn't be able to actually do that for most shows.  There's not a lot of time for reflection, on how you feel about the show, and on how you feel about what the show accomplished.

Ultimately, I think Jessica Jones was a little more ambitious than the quality of the writing.  Make no mistake: Jessica Jones is a good show.  If you're reading this and you haven't seen it, I recommend it.  There weren't really any bad episodes, except one of them that strained credulity (which I hesitate to call bad - more on this episode later)  And as far as superhero properties, this has more than a few "Fuck yeah" moments, which really isn't that why we all watch them and continue watching them even when we are bludgeoned to death with the 50th iteration of a superhero.

The star of this vehicle and no doubt the reason it's as good as it is is Krysten Ritter, a pitch perfect casting choice.  If you've seen here in other things, you already knew this.  If you've read a review of this before, someone has already told you this.  But it's true.  She's an antagonistic, sarcastic alcoholic who nonetheless very much cares about what happens to other people despite her best wishes.  She's pretty much the ideal person to play a "don't give a fuck hardass who clearly gives a fuck."

Her casting also presents one of the necessary components of a good show, at least in my opinion: a sense of humor.  This show isn't all darkness, all of the time.  There are some funny moments sprinkled in and most of them come from Ritter's sarcasm.  But the show is very dark.  A brutal murder takes place at the end of the pilot that is hard to fathom.

The majority of Jessica Jones is Jones trying to prove the innocence of a young girl who was mind-controlled into doing something awful.  The only way to do this is to capture - and not kill - Killgrave, the aptly named season-long villain.  And after you capture him, you somehow have to get evidence of his powers or an admittance of guilt.  Making matters more interesting and removing the question of why the villain doesn't just kill her, he wants to torture her through the people around her.  There's more depth to him, but that would be a spoiler I will not spoil.

Pretty much the whole season revolves around Killgrave.  This is one of the examples of it being a "bit much."  The premise of this show - a hard-drinking private detective set in a noir setting - was barely utilized because of the intense focus on Killgrave.  That's kind of what sold me on the show, so it was a bit disappointing in that respect.  I hope in season two that there are more "case of the weeks" because I just want some good ole' private detective work, Veronica Mars or Magnum P.I. style.  I'm definitely not asking for it to become a procedural, although this is certainly the first time I understand the artistic reasoning for why it's useful to have a case of the week at times.  I think the show could benefit from that.

This show has a strong supporting cast, and my favorites aren't the obvious choices.  The heart of the show is the relationship between Jones and Trish Walker.  This isn't made evident for a little bit as they start off the series on somewhat rocky terms, but by the end, they are the heart.  Another stealthy heart of the show is Malcolm, the drug addict neighbor.  I am certain Walker will be there for season two, assuming there's a season two.  I'm more hopeful than certain about Malcolm.

Killgrave, as I'm certain anyone mildly interested in watching this show already knows, is played by David Tennant.  He plays him as an annoyed brat more than an overpowering supervillain.  He definitely succeeds at that.  You feel for him at times, and then he goes and tries to make someone kill themselves (I say tries like he isn't successful at it, but he very much is).  I could go into more depth, but again I'm trying to avoid spoilers.

Lastly - and lastly because I don't want to individually talk about every important character - there's Luke Cage, who I can't possibly go without mentioning.  Have no fears for his future TV show - he'll be up to the task.  I was probably least impressed with Mike Colter out of the leads, but he was charming and he was menacing.  I think he was less successful at playing righteous anger, but I appear to be mostly alone in that opinion.

Grade - B+

SPOILERS BELOW FOR EPISODES 9 AND 10

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SERIOUSLY STOP READING IF YOU PLAN TO WATCH THIS SHOW

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Ok I think that was a big enough warning

I had major problems with the tenth episode of the series, because it involved a ton of contrivances that basically seemed to exist so the writers could maneuver their characters from where they were to where they wanted them to be.  

The first one, which I could forgive if it was on its own, is Simpson, the rogue cop.  So in this episode, he decides to kill Lester Freamon (Let's face it; that's basically who his character is.  Might as well just call him what he was hired to play.) and burn down the building.  The show handwaved this away with the fact that he was on drugs and was willing to kill anybody who didn't want to kill Killgrave.  Lester in no way impeded his ability to kill Killgrave in the way Jessica did.  Killing him was stupid and so was burning the evidence.  It made no sense.  His further character detonation in the later episodes somewhat justifies this though.

Secondly, the support group is maybe the biggest contrivance of them all.  So Malcolm decides to confess about Ruben's murder.  Wouldn't happen.  For some reason, Robin follows him to his support group even though he's been on her side this whole time.  Ok fine she's crazy I guess.  Then this crazy lady somehow convinces this group of otherwise reasonable people to go to Jessica's house and turn violent basically out of nowhere.  Confront her?  Sure.  Start attacking her?  Why?  Then she gets taken down by Robin with a weapon she must have pulled out of her pocket because I sure as hell don't know how she got it.  It's kind of bullshit that she's so hard to take down and then fucking Robin gets to take her down so easily.

Lastly, WHY THE FUCK DID HOPE KILL HERSELF?  Ostensibly she kills herself to motivate Jessica to kill Killgrave, but that doesn't make any fucking sense.  She didn't kill Killgrave because she wanted Hope out of prison.  Mission accomplished.  Hope is no longer a reason not to kill Killgrave.  She kills herself because the writers went for shock value.

Oh yeah and there was that whole violent Jeri Hogarth subplot that seemed violent for violence's sake.  I mean here's an episode where a guy kills a cop, a scorned ex-lover cuts her ex with a knife multiple times, the "other woman" knocks her dead on a table, four people try to commit suicide by hanging, and a woman slits her own throat.  Seems excessive.

Rewind: Alias S3

I forgot what made me start Alias.  Looking at it now, I'm not sure I would currently pick to watch the show off the available information I have.  It doesn't have a great rating on IMDB.  It's not exactly well-known for being a great show.  I don't think anybody recommended me the show before I started.  In any case, I certainly don't regret my decision to watch the show.

At the beginning of the season, Alias was coming off a fantastic second season.  I have a hard time imagining it wasn't one of the best shows on television at the time (The Wire just began and The Sopranos was in the middle of its run so not THE best).  It ended on a hell of a cliffhanger, with Sydney waking up two years later in a foreign country.

The crazy thing is that I didn't immediately watch the next episode.  In fact, when I watched the first episode of season three, a year and a half had passed.  What is really interesting about the third season is that it has a lot of great ideas.  On a storyboard, how they ended up responding to the cliffhanger - which I'm sure they wrote without actually knowing the next step - is strong.  She lost her memory because she was abducted by the Covenant, became a double agent (again), and then when she held valuable information, wanted to make sure nobody would be able to learn it by volunteering to erase her memory.

All strong ideas and it led to a few great, gripping episodes.  Just like the second season, they set up a season-long arc only to dismantle it halfway through the season.  Granted, it wasn't the same, but I wasn't expecting to get concrete answers on what happened to Sydney so soon.  Then they made Lauren Reed a secret agent and emphasized the love story between Vaughn and Sydney.  

Look, Michael Vartan is a perfectly capable fourth supporting character who gets his one episode to shine in a 22 episode season, but the man has no range.  There used to be a time when television actor was an insult.  Vartan is the epitome of that.  He's just so out of his depth in this season.  He needs to navigate so many emotions between finding his original love back from the dead, his current love, and then finding out his current love is actually a traitor.  And he pretty much acts the same way for all of these situations.  This is some MEATY material for an actor.  Why the fuck did they think he was a better option than Bradley Cooper for this part?

Worse yet, Cooper, who asked to be written out of the show he was so unhappy with where his character went despite having no job offers at the time, gets an episode feature and it's probably the best episode of the season.  WHAT A MISSED OPPORTUNITY.  I'm not even a person who thinks Cooper is a fantastic actor or anything.  I have no idea how the hell he has three best actor nominations to be honest.  But he brought a lot to Will and I missed him in this season.

There was one episode which was the perfect distillation of the worst parts of Alias, combining three awful elements that made it the worst episode of the series so far and the only episode I outright hated.  "Crossings," which ruins what is an otherwise perfectly good Isabella Rosselini appearance, is just bad television.  First off, the episode ruins any tension by showing the ending first.  Vaughn and Sydney kiss in a prison, get taken outside, are set up to be put down by a firing squad, and the camera focuses on one gun which starts firing bullets.  *72 hours earlier* WOW I WONDER IF ANYONE FELL FOR THAT.  The worst part is that it turns out it was a gun from an inside man who works as a guard.  It was literally a random person.  That's legitimately the worst deus ex machina I've ever seen.  It was just lazy writing and the forced romance of Sydney and Michael made it worse.

Funny enough, the next episode almost made me quit the show, but I didn't hate it.  The problem was that it repeated like six minutes of the same footage over a 42 minute episode.  It was showing it from different perspectives, which is an interesting idea.  But when they went back in time and repeated it, they showed far too much of the same exact scene before going to something original.  It might cut to the point of view of the character we are supposed to be watching more, but otherwise it seems like we rewinded the episode.

This season created all the interesting dynamics that season two did.  Arvine Sloane, who is now a humanitarian, could be good or bad now.  Ron Rifkin is so damn good that he just makes the show ten times better when he's on screen.  While I appreciate the way they kept him in the show and how they made him thematically interesting, he just wasn't on screen enough.  I'm not even complaining, because they wrote him in as best as they could after he was the clear villain last year, but he was the most consistent part of the season.  The revelation that he could be Sydney's father makes sense.  He's always seem to have a fatherly instinct for her to an unhealthy degree and the only way that makes sense is if he thinks he's the father - which he does.

What I didn't love about this season was Lauren Reed.  She was fine.  I liked her a lot more before she turned out to be evil though.  I don't think Melissa George could quite pull off what the show needed her to in order to make her character work.  She's just too many different things at once, playing whatever character the plot needs her to be.  She plays a character who is no way morally conflicted, which is fine, but she doesn't project any menace (perhaps because she's not capable of it as an actress).  She works for an evil organization.  You kind of need to be able to be menacing.  Plus she seems like Sark to me in that she's not necessarily beholden to any organization, but then before she attempts to kill her father, she says she really believes in what she is doing.  So she really believes in... Rambaldi?  Or was she just saying that to appease her father?  She never comes across as a crazy Rambaldi fanatic in the way Arvin Sloane does.  Or at all really.  (At least the mother is also a double agent, which answers why she's a double agent.)

The third season of Alias was like a big dumb and fun summer blockbuster movie.  Unfortunately, the things you can easily ignore in a 2 hour film tend to come to the surface in a season with 22 episodes.  The writers took some shortcuts, the actors didn't quite work as well as they probably hoped when they wrote it down, and the end product was an entertaining season, but not much depth to it.  Plus, the suspension of disbelief tends to get removed when every other episode Sydney and team member get bombarded by freaking machine guns and nobody ever dies.  I feel like the show was more realistic before about that type of thing.  This season?  Machine guns all the time with minimal casualties to the good guys.

In essence, there was no Lena Olin and there was no Bradley Cooper.  There was more for Michael Vartan to do, which he responded to by playing everything the same.  Marshall seems to get more unbearable with his fumbling of words and annoying tendencies (which the characters do NOT have time for in this season. Holy shit they all look ready to punch him in every scene with him.)

I could list every problem I have with this season and yet I enjoyed this way more than this post would probably make you think.  It just went from a critically sound, engaging show to a basically 24.  It does it better than 24 in most seasons actually.  I just think I had higher expectations because this was attempting to be something else, while 24 is not.

Grade - B-

Writing Blind: The X-Files S3

Welcome to a feature called "Writing Blind."  In this series, I will be writing about seasons of television that I watched in the past year or so, but failed to write about at the time.  I call it writing blind, because I will be sharing my thoughts months after I have already finished the season.  This is both because I want to write about these seasons, but don't have the time to re-watch them and because it is a challenge to hopefully improve my writing.

Back in the day - you know as early as 20 years ago - TV shows necessarily created a safe haven for viewers.  You can watch this Thursday, skip next week's, and be none the wiser when you turned back in for the next episode.  They needed to not alienate new viewers in order to gain viewership.  So talking about full seasons of any show that was mostly procedural and you could mostly just drop in on an episode without much issue is difficult.  Because the quality varies week-to-week.

Even on a season as consistent as the third season of The X-Files, they still have possibly one of the worst episodes in the series that I've seen in "Hell Money."  To be honest, I don't remember much about that episode except that it was dreadfully boring and terrible.  (It's either that or "Teso dos Bichos" - I don't remember which, but both were just terrible.)  But that just serves to strengthen my point.  How the hell am I supposed to grade a whole season of a show that is designed to allow you to skip episodes.

Now The X-Files is one of the rare shows that rewards people who watch it in order.  It doesn't reward you THAT much.  But it's clear the writers want to maintain some continuity even if it's just in the subtext.  You can only notice that if you watch it in order and probably only if you watch episodes over the course of days and not say the normal TV schedule of a network show.

If there's anything I take away from this season, it's that this is the season where I will re-watch the most episodes.  If I'm being honest, right now at this date, I'm probably watching the entirety of The X-Files and then not returning to it after I finish watching it.  I'll sometimes come back and re-watch maybe 10-20 episodes that I really, really liked.  More than a few will come from this season.

Because this is the season of Darin Morgan.  I read X-File episode reviews/recaps after I watch each episode and the comments always list their favorite writers of the series.  Morgan is almost unanimously the first name that is mentioned.  Sometimes he's listed second, because his episodes comment on the show itself in a mocking tone and none of them are the essence of X-Files.

I'm not in a position to pick a side of the debate on that yet, but I will tell you I will return to every one of his episodes in this season.  "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose," "War of the Coprophages," and "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" are all classic X-File episodes.  As a Scully fan first and a Mulder fan second, I like how these episodes usually good-naturedly mock Mulder.  (As a side note: Am I the only one totally not shipping Mulder/Scully.  She's too good for him)  They're also cleverly written, entertaining as hell, and they bring the best out of the two leads.'

This season also features Vince Gilligan's first great script.  Remember when I said Morgan was the first name mentioned on top writers.  Gilligan is the second name.  Sometimes, he's first because his episodes represented the typical X-Files while still being original and spooky.  "Pusher" is that episode.

Another challenging thing about writing about a season for a show like the The X-Files months after I've seen it is that I can't really go into detail about specific episodes.  I'll try to write the fourth season soon, because it's relatively fresh in my mind, but most of these episodes I don't remember from just the title.  Anyway, I think that could work to my advantage because I don't want to go just describing each good or bad episode anyway.

I've seen written that the third season is the best mix of the Mythology and the standalone.  The fourth season comes close, so close I'm not willing to make that determination.  But the third season certainly has the best standalones of any season so far, and probably of the whole series judging by what I've heard about the later seasons.  I mean the four episodes I mention are all standalones and not at all required for the mythology.  (The Morgan episodes somewhat need you to be familar with the standard tropes of X-Files and the Mulder/Scully dynamic so they aren't typical)

I'm going to go by memory that I enjoyed the mythology episodes, because wow do I don't remember any details about any of the mythology episodes in this season.  Like the Indian saying mystical stuff in the first episode and... Mulder and Scully on a boat in one of the best scenes.. and uhhhh.... Yeah, in ten years, I won't remember anything about the mythology probably.  Doesn't matter.  I liked them when I watched them.

In conclusion, The X-Files third season is a model of consistency with only one or two duds in it.  The usual price for consistency is that the show will just re-hash the same formula over and over.  The X-Files changes it up enough to keep it interesting.  Not to mention, it's not only consistent, but has some of the best episodes of the entire series.  I'm not sure if I think season three or season four is better, but I can feel reasonably confident that this season is a solid lock for at least the second best season of the entire series.

Grade - A

Rewind: 24 S7

I watch 24 in a way I don't watch other shows.  I'm never going to think it's a great show so my expectations are simply that it be entertaining.  For it to be entertaining, it needs to keep the show moving, limit filler, and avoid unbearable storylines.  In that sense, season seven was an undeniable success in my eyes.

Most 24 seasons feel basically the same to me.  So I'm curious at what makes the seasons that I didn't like (2 and 6; and to a lesser extent, season 3) different from the ones I did like (every other season).  I think the answer lies in the show simply having as few clear space-filling plotlines as possible and when they do have a clear space-filling plotline, keep it short and entertaining.  I hated season 2 because literally every Kim scene was completely pointless, which meant 24 episodes of clear space-filling plots.  Season 3 was simply repetitive.  I was bored of the show by the end.  And Season 6 was terrible in every way as clearly all the writers just forgot how to make the show any good.

Season 7 doesn't fall trap to this.  Sure, you have a few plots that clearly are there just to fill space, which is really all of the presidential stuff.  More specifically though, I didn't really care if Henry Taylor found his son's killer.  But it was short and entertaining at times.  I didn't care about Olivia wanting John Hodges dead and later on, whether she was caught.  Actually that kind of sucked, but it was still only a plot for about five episodes.  (Sprague Grayden, who plays Olivia, is actually quite terrible in this season.  I don't remember her being bad in Sons of Anarchy, but she is awful here.  And I was kind of excited to see her in this!)

Now, this season is different because it actually analyzes Jack's actions and looks at torture.  Now granted, the show ultimately ended up pro-torture most of the time, mostly because 24 is a television drama which presents hypothetical situations that don't happen in real life.  And because everyone he tortures is definitely guilty and never gives him false info. (Last point on this: Torture is ineffective and obviously inhumane)

Anyway, Jack has never looked like more of an asshole than he does here and it actually seems like the writers did this on purpose.  It actually gives weight to the things he's done, which the show usually brushes off as nothing.  It culminates in the final scene where Jack confesses to Muhtadi Gohar about the things he has done.  He knows he's not a good person.  (which he isn't - I'm sorry you can't be a good person with the things he's done, for the good of the country or not)

Interestingly enough, the mirror of Jack is Tony Almeida, whose motives are more bent on revenge than Jack, but ultimately similar.  He goes undercover to kill the man responsible for killing Michelle and many more people for years.  He does despicable things.  He does it for revenge.  But in his mind he had rationalized it as things he needed to do for justice.  How does that sound different than Jack?  Jack is just on the edge of being a bad guy, something Tony has crossed, but it's really easy to imagine Jack following him sometime.

Lastly, his protege of sorts, Renee Walker - previously a cop who followed the rules - ends up following in his footsteps.  Obviously, she didn't completely fall victim to Jack Bauer, but she did need a push.  She was willing to get his advice even though that probably was a bad idea (you know in real world logic, not Jack Bauer is a superhero 24 logic).  By the end of the season, 24 ended on a surprisingly dour note as she clearly intends to torture Will Patton's character.  (He doesn't get much screentime, but he's so effectively smarmy that you it's hard to blame her)

Then there's Senator Blaine Mayer, played by the awesome Kurtwood Smith.  Initially presented as a person just out to get Bauer, he turns out to be extremely sincere in his intentions.  He and Bauer reach an argument to do this right and... he gets killed.  That was one of the darkest moments of the show.  In hindsight, I should have expected it because Bauer going through files and legally catching the bad guys just isn't that interesting.  (It could be in theory in the right hands, but the writers definitely aren't good enough for that to work at all).  However, it surprised the hell out of me and devastated me.

So while this season went through the usual beats (nothing really original was written except for the torture conversation), the Jack Bauer and Tony stories REALLY worked.  The presidential stuff didn't at all.  President Allison Taylor basically exists to be dumbfounded and to get expositional info thrown at her (and the audience).  But I have a higher tolerance for this when it is new characters.  Season 8 could be rough.  As awesome as President Palmer was, I was bored by his predictable character by Season 3.  Allison Taylor isn't really a character yet, much as Cherry Jones tries.  (She's like a less interesting President Palmer who doesn't know anything)

Other Notes
- I think this is Kiefer Sutherland's most impressive season, acting-wise.  His scene at the end of the season in the hospital when he breaks down crying saying "You don't the things that I've done" is extremely impressive acting.

- How could I forget Bill Buchanan, who has an appropriately patriotic death, and never did sacrifice his values, refusing to torture someone when Jack wanted him to do it



Grade - B+