The Simpsons - 4x12 - Marge vs. the Monorail

    A scam artist visits Springfield, and persuades them to spend a recent windfall on a monorail.  It turns out that the monorail is built as cheaply as possible, creating an emergency.
    Like all of the fourth season, the episode is solidly fantastic.  The performances are perfect.  The script has gags that are wonderful little detours, but they build the Simpsons universe.  The squirrel with laser vision and lizard tongue is a perfect example.
    To be honest, as much as I love this episode, there are some gags I just don't like as much.  The exposition given by Sebastian Cobb seems unnecessary, and could have been handled in a different way.  The only joke he delivers that I like is the bit about Gallagher.
    My favorite bit - Mr. Snrub, and Smithers with the Batman escape.  The fact that we see it in the background of the next shot with Apu speaking is part of what sells the joke. 

The Simpsons - 4x10 - Lisa's First Word

    In this flashback episode, we see Bart living with Marge and Homer, Marge's pregnancy, and Bart having difficulty with having a younger sister, all set against the 80s.
    This episode is just about perfect.  I have one minor reservation, which is the repeated audio loops when Bart is worrying about his bed and Grandma Flanders.
    I love some of the deliveries, particularly the stereotypical voices at the beginning of the flashback, talking about MASH and "Youse guys wanna play stickball?"  And the performance of Bart banging the pots and pans and singing "I am so great" is so spot-on that it's scary.

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic - 1x14 - Suited For Success

    Rarity makes dresses for the Grand Galloping Gala for all her friends.  No one likes the dresses at first, so Rarity remakes all of them, accommodating all their suggestions.  This leads to a fashion critic dismissing her work, until her friends get the critic to see her original dresses.
    I never liked Rarity that much.  She's too preoccupied with fashion, and her focus on being stereotypically high-class and girly make her into a character I would normally hate.  But she comes across as being patient, and willing to deal with criticism, which is a difficult thing.
    The episode features a song - The Art of the Dress.  It's split into two passages, as she makes each set of dresses.  While I don't care for Rarity's singing voice as much, the song is better written than, say, Winter Wrap Up.
    There are lots of nice moments - Fluttershy being bullied into being honest, as well as being surprisingly knowledgable.  Pinkie Pie wanting lollipops and streamers on her dress.  And during the second fashion show, the poses they strike are great.

Futurama - 7x03 - Decision 3012

    It's an election year, and Nixon's head is running against a challenger who is too honest to get away with being a candidate.  With Leela's help, Travers, makes his way to being a viable candidate.  Except there's an issue about his birthplace.
    For an episode dealing primarily with Birtherism, it's a really pretty good.  I'd be curious how it plays to someone who believes in birthed nonsense, but the story feels a little more sci-fi than many of the more recent episodes have.  In fact, this same plot, if played more straight, could easily have been a Ray Bradbury story.
    Most of the characters don't get much of an opportunity to shine.  But Nixon's head does an excellent job.  Plenty of jowl-shaking, and his evil side is nicely handled.
    Of course, the episode ends on a down moment, leading the viewer to accept that the future is effectively lost.  This is peculiar, although they did the same thing last election episode - Nixon ended that one rampaging around, and no one seemed to mind.

Ray Bradbury Theater - 2x11 - There Was an Old Woman

    An old lady, who refuses to die, is bothered by her body being claimed.  She - or her ghost - heads down to the mortuary to reclaim her body.
    This was a decent idea for a story.  But the performance of it wasn't worthwhile.  It's remarkably boring listening to an old lady talk about how she resents the idea of dying.  And her appearance is inconsistent.  This isn't a serious problem, but it's strangely distracting, since I can't tell if it was done on purpose.

Ray Bradbury Theater - 2x02 - Skeleton

    Stars Eugene Levy!
    A man is convinced there's something wrong with his skeleton.  He talks with a specialist who encourages this belief.  After losing some weight, he meets with the doctor again.  This time, the doctor seems to remove Levy's skeleton, leaving him a pile of flesh and hair.
    I saw this ending coming.  It's telegraphed pretty early on.  But it's not a very interesting episode.  The pacing is slow.  But the images are strange enough that I could imagine a younger kid having this episode stick with him.

Star Trek: The Next Generation - 3x24 - Ménage à Tro

    At a conference, Troi's mother catches the eye of a Ferengi.  That Ferengi decides to kidnap Troi's mother, whose name I hate to write - Lwaxana.  This means that the Ferengi kidnaps Troi, Lwaxana, and Riker.  The Enterprise investigates, Wesley helps them figure out where to find them.  Then Lwaxana needs to get Picard to fake being her lover in order to be freed from serving her captor.
    This episode has a bad reputation, but that's because it's simple.  It's not an especially clever story, the Ferengi are usually annoying, and easy to deceive.  But to be honest, it's a lot of fun.  It's fun to hear Lwaxana and Troi having their arguments.  Riker has a limited role, but he gets to have some fun in tricking the Ferengi.  And then at the end, Picard gets a nice run of dialogue.  A good time is had by all.  For a sci-fi show, it's not too interesting though.  Not enough technobabble.

Futurama 7x02 - Farewell to Arms

    Another episode focusing on Fry and Leela's relationship.  In this case, the problem is that every time Fry tries to do something for Leela, it winds up causing problems.  In this case, it leads to discovering a prophecy that involves Earth being destroyed.
    This episode doesn't explore anything too new.  It does have a few good laughs though.  I love seeing Nixon's head, and there's a moment of completely unexpected, and fairly dark, humor toward the end of the episode.
    The problem may have been that the show concluded the primary arc of Fry wooing Leela, and now they've gotten stuck in a rut.  They can either break them up, or they can keep them together and hope that it can work.  Honestly, they should probably develop the other characters unless a heartbreaking episode can be written.

Futurama 7x01 - The Bots and the Bees

    Bender fathers an illegitimate child with a vending machine.  Fry drinks a lot of Slurm, gradually turning him… incandescent?
    Ever since Futurama went to Comedy Central,  I've had a harder time telling how I feel about the episodes.  There are some that are really good - like last season's The Prisoner of Benda.  The new episodes aren't bad at all.  But they don't make me feel as satisfied as the earlier episodes did.  Maybe this is the same problem as Family Guy had.
    The stories are handled fine.  I enjoyed seeing Fry get addicted to Slurm again.  I didn't care for Wanda Sykes handling the vending machine.  But the relationship between Bender and his son was handled nicely.  It didn't feel like much of an ending though.

The Simpsons - 11x18 - Days of Wine and D'oh'ses

    Barney decides to stop drinking, and takes advantage of a coupon for free helicopter piloting lessons.  Bart and Lisa work on taking a photo for the cover of the new phone book.  And Homer is bothered by the loss of Barney as a drinking buddy.
    By the 11th season, the Simpsons wasn't doing great.  There are some really weak episodes in the season, and this is one of the mid-level ones.  There are some really good gags, and most of the Bart & Lisa plot is very enjoyable.  The Barney plot is good… but not great.  I don't care for the way the helicopter is animated in this episode either.  It looks a little too two-dimensional.

The IT Crowd - 4x05 - Bad Boys

    Probably my second favorite episode of the 4th season.  The whole episode is framed as a flashback.  Moss and Roy skip out on work after lunch, and Jen tries to cover for their absence at a company party.
    The really fun stuff is in Moss's performance.  He plays a lot of the episode as a big kid, excited to be skipping school.  Plus, it's very satisfying to see him punch a rude co-worker, and kiss the girl who was flirting with him.

The IT Crowd - 4x02 - The Final Countdown

    This might be my favorite episode of the 4th season.  Jen wants to find out what's going on at high level meetings she no longer is invited to.  Roy wants to let an old friend of his know that he isn't a window cleaner.  And the A plot is Moss, having achieved renown on Countdown, a quiz show, is inducted into a secret club for noteworthy Countdown players.
    I don't care much about Roy's plot.  It's actually a bit annoying, since it seems to be so closely modeled on Seinfeld plots, but his character doesn't work for it as well.  Jen's plot is mildly funny, not so much for her performance, but for Matt Berry's work as Reynholm.  He doesn't get too much dialogue, but we get to see him dance, which is entirely worth it.
    Moss's story is just fantastic.  All of the performances, the direction, everything is just perfect.  There are memorable jokes all over the place, including a fantastic word - tnetennba.

Ray Bradbury Theater - 2x10 - Tyrannosaurus Rex

    A stop-motion animator is hired to create a dinosaur movie for a producer.  The producer is cruel, and demands redesigns of the T Rex.  Gradually, the design of the dinosaur looks a whole lot like the producer.
    Not exactly the same sort of tone as the other episodes.  it's not bad, it's nice to see some of the stop-motion work, but it plays more light than those…except for the bullying of the producer.  As a result, the whole thing doesn't feel as good as it could be.

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic - 2x07 - May The Best Pet Win!

    After discovering that the other ponies have a pet play-date each week, Rainbow Dash decides that she should have a pet.  Fluttershy offers her a variety of choices.  Rainbow wants something that emulates her - she wants it to be a very fast flying, agile, cool, clever creature.
    So they go through a variety of tests to see which animal meets her criteria.  The last one is a race through a canyon.
    When Rainbow is caught in an avalanche, all of the other animals are well ahead.  She's trapped, with one of her wings pinned under a boulder.  Eventually, the pet she had ruled out, a tortoise, arrives, and helps her get out.  They cross the finish line together, and she names the tortoise Tank.
    It's a fun episode.  There are plenty of good sound effects, lots of interesting things to animate.  But there isn't as much with the other main characters.  This can be a little disappointing, since it's so fun to see Applejack throwing a stick for her dog, or Gummy the alligator latching onto Pinkie Pie in different locations.

Mission: Impossible - 3x09 - The Play

    The mission is to discredit a propaganda minister behind the Iron Curtain.  In order to do this, they use a play that appeals to their sense of the relationship between the UCR.

    It's only just now that I've realized how difficult it is to write a review for an episode of Mission: Impossible.  There are specific sequences that I can point out, and say they did a good or bad job handling them, but most of the fun in watching an episode is seeing how the mission unfolds.  The episodes are so carefully structured, and the audience is just barely given enough information to make the whole thing satisfying.
    To make it simple, this episode is good.  It's not a great one, but it's pretty fun.  It isn't clear how the technology we see introduced early on is going to be used in the episode, and they hold off on it showing up until the last couple minutes.
    I've seen a few episodes that I would put above this, but I'd say this one falls solidly into the upper-middle end of the curve.

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic - 1x10 - Swarm of the Century

    Fluttershy runs into a tiny, cute creature (a colored sphere with eyes, a mouth, and wings).  It multiplies, and her friends adopt their own.  Then those ones multiply, and the whole episode turns into The Trouble with Tribbles.
    There are a lot of fun things in this episode.  Pinkie Pie gathers instruments, and pulls a pied piper to get rid of the infestation.  She's fantastic in that part - she looks really determined as she's playing a one-pony-band ensemble.  There's other fun though, the sense of menace that the creatures pose.  First, they eat all of the food they can find.  Then a spell makes them only eat non-food, which causes further destruction.
    My favorite moment is the last shot, when we get to see Pinkie play a short bit on the trombone.

Ray Bradbury Theater - 2x01 - The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl

    To contrast with the last one, this one was excellent.
    A writer murders his publisher, angry at being told to work on a project for most of a year, under the impression that it would be published.  It's also strongly implied that the publisher is sleeping with the writer's wife.
    The episode begins with the publisher having just been murdered.  The writer gradually starts to try to cover his tracks, wiping up fingerprints.  We get a series of flashbacks mixed into present time, which focus both on what items he touched, as well as what the publisher has been like.  Gradually, the writer has developed a whole lot of paranoia, and is cleaning things he's pretty sure he never touched.
    There is a bit of a twist ending to the episode, but it wasn't needed.  The story reminds me a bit of the Tell-Tale Heart.  Still, solidly the best episode of this series I've seen.

Ray Bradbury Theater - 2x08 - On The Orient, North

    This has been the worst episode I've watch of this show.  Two peculiar characters meet on a train.  Eventually, it comes out that the guy is a ghost, that he needs to be around people who believe in ghosts in order to continue his "existence."  At the end of the story, the lady he met dies so she can accompany him as a ghost as well.

    It took about 15 minutes for the episode to move beyond long, boring exposition.  There was one notable sequence, when the ghost levitates himself in front of a bunch of schoolchildren.  This was just…. nearly unwatchable.

Ray Bradbury Theater - 2x06 - The Small Assassin

    Lots of spoilers ahead.
    This one pushed the envelope.
    A lady gives birth.  She immediately dislikes the baby.  Her husband thinks this is a phase.  The doctor agrees.
    After complaining about the baby for awhile, (three weeks?) she explains to the doctor why she can't possibly keep this baby around.  She explains that she remembers her own birth, and that it was horrible.  As a result, she grew up hating her mother.  She can tell that her own baby is the same way.  But that this baby is too powerful, and too smart.  It's planning to kill her.
    She goes back home from that appointment, and takes a nap.  When the doctor comes by the house to check up, he finds the husband dead at the foot of the stairs.  There's blood coming from his ear.  The doctor goes upstairs, and finds that the mother is dead.  It looks like the bed frame was wired to electrocute her.
    The doctor looks around the house until he finds the baby.  When he does, the ending shot has him pulling out a scalpel.

    Violence involving children is always kind of difficult for movies, and is even more difficult with TV shows.  While we don't see anything too specific, hinting that the doctor is willing to kill the baby is a difficult thing.

    Reading the summary I've written, it's hard to express how seriously taken the story is.  It's not a funny episode at all.  It's dark, and the son being evil is treated as a reasonable fear.  It reminds me of Richard Matheson's stories.

Ray Bradbury Theater - 2x05 - The Man Upstairs

    An annoying little boy, staying in a boarding house in France with a relative, is concerned about a new visitor.  He has suspicious behavior, and may be a vampire.

    While I wasn't bothered by this episode, I was disappointed with how little development the story had.  There doesn't seem to be much tension, since it moves too fast to care about what's happening.  The protagonist is a pest, even if you weren't the vampire he was out to annoy.
    The ending is strange.  The boy decides to perform some surgery on the vampire.  This seems to involve cutting out his heart, which is a strange organ.  It looks like it might be two hearts connected by a chamber?
    When police come to look at the body, which has been sewn up, I think it's implied that the vampire is dead, even if we see his eyes twitch.  Then it's revealed that the boy dumped a collection of silver into the cavity left in the chest.
    What's peculiar about this is that the police don't seem to care that this boy cut up someone on a hunch that he was a vampire.  Even if the police agree that he was a vampire, does that mean he doesn't have rights?

The Simpsons - 16x17 - The Heartbroke Kid

    After a new vending machine contract goes into effect at Springfield Elementary, Bart is sucked into eating lots of junk food.  After he has a heart attack, Bart is sent to a fat camp.  To make ends meet, Homer and Marge open their house up to be a youth hostel.
    Like most of the more modern Simpsons episodes, it's a mixed bag.  Certain things work very well, like the tryouts for vending machines, and even the design of the winning vendor.  Hibbert yelling that he won't bury another patient… or some of the stuff with the German travelers they put up.
    Albert Brook guests as the voice of the fat camp director.  He's using a voice that is roughly the same as his Scorpio voice, but he doesn't seem quite as funny.
    I don't think there's anything that stands out as being especially bad.  I guess my reservations are mostly that the jokes don't feel as solid and speedy as I like 'em.  And it probably hits a bit close to home.

Family Guy - 10x23 - Internal Affairs

    Over the last year or two, I've gotten more sloppy about watching Family Guy.  The episodes have been increasingly experimental, trying all sorts of tricks involving our expectations of how an episode will play out.  This can mean stuff like unexpected emotional resonance, playing some especially dark plots, and ending with things resolved in ways we wouldn't expect - or not resolved at all.
    Sometimes, I like these tricks.  The problem isn't in those tricks, the problem is that despite this effort to be cutting edge, the show is still very predictable.  The rhythms that appear, the types of references.  The types of humor.  This is what led to the show becoming stale.  This, combined with a reluctance to frame the stories within more traditional messaging.  (Strangely, the efforts to avoid messages worked perfectly for Strangers With Candy)

    So this episode deals with Joe.  In his celebration of a drug bust, it's made clear that Bonnie doesn't really like him.  Joe cheats on her with a rookie cop that likes him, and it seems that he's heading toward a divorce.  Then Peter gets involved and tries to bring them back together.

    There's a single highlight to this episode, and it's during an extended chicken fight.  While those gags are predictable, it's usually pretty fun to see how far they go, and in what direction.  In this case, it does got into space briefly, but the part that I liked was in the cloning research lab.  They fight their way into a chamber, and then clones of them appear in another chamber.  Clones of the pair, all fighting, flood the room.  Their destruction causes some explosion, which kills off all of the clones, but propels the original pair on to their next locale.

    The rest of the episode wasn't noteworthy at all.

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic - 2x25-26 - A Canterlot Wedding

    This two-parter finished out the second season, and it was an ambitious episode.

    The whole crew is invited to participate in a wedding at Canterlot, between Twilight's brother and a princess.  The princess happens to be Cadence, who was Twilight's foal-sitter.
    Something's wrong, since Cadence doesn't remember Twilight.  Other suspicious behavior encourages Twilight to make efforts to stop the wedding.

    I'll try to avoid spoilers, but the two-parter was a mixed bag.  I didn't feel as firmly positive about everything.  First, the bad stuff.  Some of the songs were weak.  The first one was pretty good.  But the villain's songs were absurdly simplistic.  They seemed to be doing what they could to allow her to proclaim "I'm evil!"  Second, the solution to the problem was too simplistic, and felt too much like a deus ex machina.
    Then there's the good stuff.  All of the characters got some good moments in.  The battle sequence was just fantastic.  They didn't make it solid action, but they built in enough character moments.  I love seeing the real Fluttershy being approached by a gang of fakes.  And Pinkie deals with the battle in appropriate fashion.  I hope we see more of the party cannon, especially the way it's used here.

    It was a good story though, and it felt like an effort was made to build the universe a little, and give the characters an opportunity outside of their usual adventures in Ponyville.

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic - 2x24 - MMMystery on the Friendship Express

    I could write a whole lot more on my feelings about Friendship is Magic.  It's just so f**king good.
    This episode was a lot of fun.  Pinkie Pie is charged by her employers/landlords to transport a huge, fancy cake to a dessert competition.  Moving the cake safely is a difficult task, so all of the other core characters help out.  Twilight uses a forcefield bubble, Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy hold ropes in the air from the sides to prevent it from tipping, and Applejack and Rarity bring up the rear with a net to catch it if it falls.
    Most of the episode is on a train.  While the train is mostly empty, it does carry a few other competitors for the dessert competition.  After some bites are taken from the cake in the middle of the night, Pinkie starts an investigation.

    This is a Pinkie Pie heavy episode, and it's a fun one.  It's a great pairing of Pinkie's nonsense contrasted with Twilight's focus on a normal investigation.
    The ending is cute, and everyone was handled well, so I didn't feel like anything was out of place.

Ray Bradbury Theater - 2x03 - The Emissary

    A young boy with some chronic illness (although he never looks too sick) has a dog that runs around the neighborhood.  The dog brings things back to him, usually trivial; a flower, a piece of wood, and so forth.  He tags the dog with an invitation to come back and visit him.  This invitation brings a teacher that the boy would have if he were going to school.
    They build a relationship, reading books and such.  It's implied that the boy has a crush on her.  Then one day, she dies.  Then the dog goes out, disappearing for a few days as he digs her up to bring her back.
    And that's where the episode ends - an ambiguous note of what sort of thing comes through the door into his room.  A rotting corpse?  An angel?
    The truth is, it's hard to care.  I've never had much interest in stories of people trapped in bed, yearning for companionship.  (Now that I think of it, it's hard to come up with another example)  But I just don't care about the boy.  I don't find the teacher very interesting.  I would say that the centerpiece of the story is the dog, but I didn't even find the dog's behavior acceptable.  Early when we see it, it runs down a sidewalk, and across an intersection.  Even if I didn't care about leash laws, I don't feel like a dog that runs into intersections would live too long.  Then the dog also has a serious problem with barking.  While the implication is that he's trying to find a friend for his boy, the dog would be aware that barking at people isn't an effective way of getting them to like you.
    Meh.  Not much of an episode.

    And it appears that the DVD set of this show has the episodes in a different sequence.  I don't know if this is by production code or what, but I'm watching them in the order they appear on the disc.

Ray Bradbury Theater - 2x04 - Gotcha!

    I bought the complete series of Ray Bradbury Theater on a whim.  I believe the price for the whole series was around $9 on DVD.  I hadn't heard of it before, but reading a little about it implied that it was pretty close to Twilight Zone.  I like Ray Bradbury's work, so it seemed worthwhile.
    The DVDs are cheap.  The menu design is junk.  The episodes are really compressed - there are over 10 episodes on the first disc (I'm doing this from memory, but I think there are something like either 13 or 18 episodes on that first disc) and each episode seems to range from 23-30 minutes.

    I was a little puzzled by this episode once I finished it, but I think I just needed a little more clarification.  The story has stuck with me, and I think it's an important one.

    A couple meets, they fall in love.  It's an idyllic relationship.  Eventually, the woman says that she wants to play a game called Gotcha.  While he never explicitly agrees, he's willing to follow her.
    They go to a cheap motel.  He changes into some silk pajamas that she's brought for him, during which she makes reference to a Chinese funeral.  We clearly get a sense that she's planning on killing him.
    She moves the bed to the middle of the room, and has some candles lit up.  She explains the rules to him.  He's not to leave the bed, and he isn't supposed to talk or make noise for the next half hour.  She sets a clock nearby to count down the half hour.  Right as the timer starts, she disappears from the front of the bed.
    For the next half hour, odd things happen.  Candles sputter out, the shower turns on in the bathroom, steaming the room.  A light in the bathroom starts flickering.  At one point, the woman appears and asks how he likes the game, immediately followed by demanding that he not speak.
    The tension builds.  Eventually, the man sees the ceiling fan transform into a very creepy version of the woman, which swoops down and chokes him.
    At that point, the alarm goes off, and the woman jumps up from the end of the bed, and she says "Gotcha!"
    The man breaks down, and starts crying.  She doesn't really understand.

    There's another scene after this, but it only serves to indicate that their relationship is ruined.

    I've detailed this episode more extensively than I normally would.

    The game just destroyed the sense of security and trust he felt with her.  While she thought the game would provide a fun scare, he found it truly frightening.  Combined with her inability to understand his reaction, it's a very sad story about a relationship that can't possibly work out.

Why a second blog?

    Ever since I started to record all the movies I watch, it's given me motivation to focus on watching more movies, and it makes me feel hesitant to watch episodes.  When I would be in the mood to watch a Mission: Impossible episode, I'd keep thinking that I could spend that time getting halfway through the next movie I had queued up.

    I don't intend for this blog to change my motivation to watching more movies and less episodes, but I'd like the episodes to count for something.

    There are plenty of episodes I've watched this year that I will have missed out on recording.  And there's a good chance that I'll miss some of them, since I often watch an episode right before falling asleep.

    But I'll try to catalog these entries in a similar way.