Television Reviews

Ballard – Library of Lost Souls

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Ballard – Library of Lost Souls
  • IMDb: link

Spinning off from the Bosch series, the opening episode of Ballard introduces us to Maggie Q as LAPD Detective Renée Ballard who fits the classic mode of a smart and tough cop whose obsessive search for the truth rubs some the wrong way. Something, alluded to multiple times in the episode but not yet revealed in full, got Ballard shunned to the ass-end of the LAPD. Newly demoted to head of LAPD’s Cold Case unit, Ballard works mostly with retirees and volunteers attempting to solve older crimes everyone else has given up on.

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Foundation – A Song for the End of Everything

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Foundation – A Song for the End of Everything
  • IMDb: link

It doesn’t take long into the first episode of the new season of Foundation to remind me of my problems with the series. “A Song for the End of Everything” isn’t centered around the Foundation, although we do get one scene involving a single character (Alexander Siddig) taking with the Hari Seldon AI (Jared Harris), which ultimately doesn’t add anything to the story (other than get the Star Trek actor on-screen), the focus almost entirely on the decaying Empire which David Goyer has used as a throughline for the series continually returning us to the inbred clones of Trantor. While less involved, other than her narration, the show also brings back the overused crutch of Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell) as well who awakes from cryosleep in time to interject herself into events as Goyer’s deus ex machina rather than allow the next generation of the Foundation to fight their own battles.

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Rick and Morty – Ricker than Fiction

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Rick and Morty – Ricker than Fiction
  • wiki: link

After an extreme reaction to the latest sequel in the Maximum Velocitree franchise, Rick (Ian Cardoni) and Morty (Harry Belden) set out to prove they can do better. However, after the pair are pulled into Movie-lizer Rick creates to fix the movie script they are forced to make all their changes make sense and find a way to get back to a reasonable ending which is the only way they can escape the movie. With more of nod to Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s “Elementary, Dear Data” than the movie it steals its title from, a simple misspoken sentence by Rick leads to the trouble the pair find themselves in leaving Jerry (Chris Parnell) to try and right the script from the real world.

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Ironheart – Will the Real Natalie Please Stand Up?

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Ironheart – Will the Real Natalie Please Stand Up?
  • wiki: link

The second episode of Ironheart gives us  Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) freaking out about her successful artificial intelligence which her subconscious crafted off of the memories of her dead best friend Natalie (Lyric Ross). We also get Riri meeting, and blackmailing, a black market tech collector (Alden Ehrenreich) for pieces necessary to patch her armor heading into her first job with the Hood‘s (Anthony Ramos) crew (which is successful, but a bit more complicated than necessary with N.A.T.A.L.I.E.’s continued distractions). It, like the first episode, is largely fine, and Riri’s interaction with a character who is more important than he initially appears gives us some fun moments, but the heist is rather bland and I’m still waiting for things to pick up which we probably won’t get until Riri’s eventual hero turn that seems pretty far off at this point.

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The Wheel of Time – The Shadow in the Night

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: The Wheels of Time – The Shadow in the Night
  • wiki: link

The most memorable moment of “The Shadow of Night” doesn’t come from Egwene (Madeleine Madden) eventually confronting Rand al’Thor (Josha Stradowski) about seeing him with Lanfear (Natasha O’Keeffe) nor the tragedy at the end of the episode where Rand struggles at how helpless the one power is even against death. Instead, the best moment of the episode is courtesy of Elayne (Ceara Coveney), covering for herself after being recognized in the bar, with the help of Mat‘s (Dónal Finn) old friend Thom Merrilin (Alexandre Willaume), by delivering a rowdy rendition of “The Hills of Tanchico” which is so good the episode reuses the song for the outro and credit sequence. Also of note, Perrin (Marcus Rutherford) and Faile (Isabella Bucceri) finally admit their feelings for each other on the eve of an army about to hit the Two Rivers.

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