Category Archives: TV

What was ‘The Walking Dead’ whisper?

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Here’s one for fans of the AMC series “The Walking Dead” as we wait for another new episode — the second in the latter half of the second season — to premiere Sunday night.

What did Dr. Jenner, the scientist at the Centers for Disease Control, whisper in Rick’s ear near the end of the final episode of the first season?

If you remember, the survivors of the zombie apocalypse made their way to the CDC at the end of the first season but abandoned it when Dr. Jenner, the last remaining scientist, became despondent and decided to blow stuff up real good.

Before Rick led the survivors out, Jenner whispered something in Rick’s ear.

The Associated Press asked Andrew Lincoln, who plays Rick, about the whisper.

Lincoln — who maintains he knows what the whisper was intended to be, but says he hasn’t even told his wife — hints that the whisper was not good news.

“This is a scientist who seemingly held all the cards to what this epidemic is about and I do think, you know, you would imagine he would have something of value to say on that matter,” Lincoln told the AP. “Well, he chose to kill himself.”

Well.

A friend, co-worker and fellow “Walking Dead” devotee of mine, Mark, says he believes the doctor whispered the word “Airborne,” which would not be good news for the survivors.

Having read some, but not all, of the comics upon which the show is based, I don’t know if the whisper was a part of the storyline or if it has been revealed.

I’ve heard other speculation about the whisper, including “No cure.” Also a dark scenario.

Lincoln indicated that the answer would be revealed this year.

As long as the doctor didn’t whisper, “Stay on the farm forever,” I’m good with whatever happens.

‘Justified’ takes a page from Leonard’s book

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A while back I reviewed Elmore Leonard’s latest book, “Raylan,” which featured Leonard’s U.S. marshal character Raylan Givens, played in the FX series “Justified” by Timothy Olyphant.

In “Raylan,” the marshal investigates and runs afoul of a nurse and criminal crew who are stealing kidneys in a manner familiar to students of urban legends: They tranquilize people, deposit them in motel bathtubs and remove their kidneys.

Tonight’s episode of “Justified,” “Thick as Mud,” explores that same story line. In this case, the victim is Dewey, one of Harlan’s least intelligent lowlifes. As the episode opens, Dewey wakes up in a motel bathtub with a couple of incisions and a timeline until his body starts shutting down.

Dewey (Damon Herriman) staggers through much of the episode looking for cash in order to buy back his kidneys. He leaves a trail of knocked-over stores and rifled cash registers. And, of course, Raylan is on the case.

It all comes down to a face-off between Raylan and the kidney thieves.

Also tonight, Raylan’s frenemy, Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) finally meets up with Quarles (Neal McDonough), the Detroit mobster who has come to Kentucky with plans to cut himself into the crime business.

Boyd, obviously sensing a threat, tells Quarles he’s not impressed with the smooth criminal’s style, evening going so far as to call him a carpetbagger.

The episode sets the stage for conflicts among Raylan, Boyd and Quarles. Not to mention Limehouse (Mykelti Williamson), who so far this season seems confined to showing up at the end of the episode and dispensing equal parts charm and menace.

I have to say I enjoyed the way “Justified” treated the kidney-snatching plotline more than the way Leonard — who got a story credit for tonight’s episode — handled it in his recent book.

“Justified” continues to be one of the best slice-of-criminal-life dramas on TV. The show, like its characters, make it all look so easy.

‘Alcatraz’ probes deeper with ‘Paxton Petty’

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After an episode last week that, for the first time, explored what happened when a decades-missing guard returned from … somewhere … Fox’s “Alcatraz” returned to its returning-prisoner-of-the-week format tonight with “Paxton Petty.”

Petty — like the other 300-plus Alcatraz prisoners and guards who disappeared in 1963, only to return in the present day without having aged a day — shows up in modern-day San Francisco and returns to his old hobby. In Petty’s case, that means planting and exploding land mines.

Houser (Sam Neill), Madsen (Sarah Jones) and Soto (Jorge Garcia) track down Petty with relative ease, but the twist this week is that Houser, head of the special task force tracking down the returning “sixty threes” and a San Francisco cop back in the day, gets captured by Petty and stuck on top of a land mine. Madsen and Soto must rescue him.

The show mythology subplot this week, though, is more intriguing. Dr. Lucy Banerjee (Parminder Nagra), a modern-day expert working on the case, has appeared in several flashbacks to the 1960s and the show seems to be implying that Banerjee — like the mysterious and sinister Dr. Beauregard (Leon Rippy) — was one of the missing “sixty threes” and has now returned.

The show is slowly building its mystery, teasing us with what Houser and other characters who bridge both eras know. Eventually we’ll know as much (or little) as Madsen and Soto.

“Alcatraz” has potential, and very well might be working toward the level of mind-teasing drama that “The X-Files,” “Lost” and “Fringe” eventually reached.

‘The Walking Dead’ reminds us of stranger danger

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AMC’s “The Walking Dead” returned with its mid-season premiere tonight and emphasized that old zombie story truism: Other surviving humans can be more dangerous than walkers.

A lot of people complained when the first half of the hit show’s second season spent so much time on Herschel’s farm. I enjoyed the dramatic and soap opera aspects of the season — Lori’s unplanned pregnancy, Shane’s descent into madness, Glenn’s budding romance with Herschel’s daughter — but I was getting pretty restless too.

And somewhere in the back of my mind, I’m giving the show only so long to get off that farm and back on the road.

Tonight’s episode, “Nebraska,” showed the fallout from the end of the first half of the season. The band of survivors discovered that Herschel’s barn was full of walkers. Some of them were his family members, as Herschel mistakenly believed they might be cured.

Most horribly, Sophia, the long-missing daughter of Carol, was one of the walkers in the barn.

Truth be told, there was still a little too much talk in tonight’s episode, as the survivors cleaned up after the zombie massacre and Rick and Glenn went off to the nearby town to find Herschel, busy crawling into a bottle in what’s apparently the last intact bar in Georgia.

Aside from the zombie burying and zombie burning, not a lot happened until near the end of the episode, when two strangers show up.

There’s been a lot of online speculation that the two might be important characters for the rest of the season, but that’s not the case. They might spark some movement among the survivors, however, and that’s good.

The preview for next week’s episode showed that Rick and company run into friends of the strangers they confronted at the end of tonight’s episode, while a walker gets a little to close to Lori, who had an unfortunate accident tonight.

I’ll be tuning in again next Sunday, hoping that the remaining five episodes of the season get the survivors on the road again — at least long enough to get to their next destination.

 

‘Lost Girl’ has a ‘Buffy” feel to it

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There’s never really been an heir apparent to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” as TV’s most clever supernatural drama. I’ve never gotten into the “Vampire Diaries” or “Supernatural” habit. “Buffy” and spin-off “Angel” were hard acts to follow.

So there’s something very enjoyable about discovering “Lost Girl,” a Canadian TV series that’s airing on SyFy, the former Sci-Fi Channel.

With the exception of “Alphas,” the “X-Men” style series about a group of super-powered government agents, I can’t abide much of what SyFy airs. Aside from a grab-bag of awful and intentionally awful movies, ghost-hunting shows and wrestling — the hell, SyFy? — there hasn’t been much there for me since “Battlestar Galactica.”

So after hearing TV experts like Maureen Ryan praising “Lost Girl,” I decided to check out the show.

“Lost Girl” is about a woman named Bo who works as a bartender and occasionally feeds, somewhat like a vampire, on assorted passersby. Bo, played by the striking Anna Silk, befriends Kenzi (Ksenia Solo), a young human grifter who is saved by Bo from a date rapist.

Bo saves Kenzi by feeding on the jerk, kissing him and sucking his life force out.

Bo and Kenzi are captured by agents of the Fae, supernatural creatures who have been living below the radar among human society for thousands of years.

The Fae tell Bo she’s a succubus, a super tough, super sexy predator. For Bo, abandoned by her parents as a baby, that explains a lot.

They also tell Bo that she must choose to join either the Light or the Dark Fae clans.

Bo proves herself in battle and wins the leverage to decline to join either group.

During the course of the early episodes, Bo and Kenzi move through a tough urban landscape, trying to avoid the Fae for the most part but being drawn into their battles.

The series has a straightforward, even flat look that reminds me more of “Law and Order” or some other police procedural than a supernatural series. The cast, led by the seductive Silk and the pert, spunky Solo, is totally unknown to me — hello from north of the border, eh? — but appealing.

The biggest surprise of the series is the tart, clever writing. Bo and particularly Kenzi are given more than a few sharp, funny lines. “Boy, you don’t know how to read women,” Bo tells one potential love interest. In another episode, a Will o’ the Wisp who seeks Bo’s help is a paunchy, slovenly type. “I struggle with my weight,” he acknowledges.

“Lost Girl” has been running for a couple of seasons on Canadian TV but has only just started on SyFy. It’s pretty cool to discover a sexy, funny series with more than a few episodes to air. If the show works out, it could be a longterm relationship.

 

‘Justified’ ‘Devil You Know’ brings back some favorites

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When you’re playing with as enjoyable a cast of supporting characters as the writers of “Justified,” you can spread the attention around.

In “The Devil You Know,” the episode of “Justified” that aired on FX tonight, the great supporting cast of lowlife bad guys — Dickie Bennett, Dewey Crowe and Devil, the Boyd Crowder subordinate who took a cast iron skillet to the puss a few weeks ago, all have plenty to do.

Dickie and Dewey get broken out of prison — well, Dewey comes along for the ride — when a group of crooks want Dickie to lead them to a cache of money that belonged to Dickie’s beloved late mama, Mags Bennett.

Meanwhile, Devil decides he’s going to rebel against Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins), the series’ wild card and strong suit. Devil learns, the hard way, that crossing Boyd in favor of Quarles — the slick new out-of-town crime boss who wants to muscle in on Kentucky crime — is a bad idea.

I haven’t mentioned Raylan Givens, the U.S. marshal and central figure of the show. He’s seen here tonight doling out some justice with his federal-issue vehicle and visiting Loretta, the youngest and smartest of the Bennett clan that dominated the show’s second season.

There’s also a nice scene with the marshals and Limehouse, the leader of a black community and his own prosperous criminal organization.

“Justified” is having a lot of fun this season, setting up a new pack of bad guys and strengthening old favorites like Boyd. It’s a lot of fun to watch.

‘Alcatraz’ widens its mystery

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I’ve got my fingers crossed.

Tonight’s “Alcatraz” — the Fox show about how 300 prisoners and guards disappeared from the island prison in 1963, only to reappear in the present without aging a day — took the show in a new direction, and that’s a good thing.

As intriguing as the first few weeks of the show have been, “Alcatraz” threatened to turn into “returning prisoner of the week.” A guy shows up in modern-day San Francisco, commits a crime, the team of investigators recognize him as one of the former prisoners, they track him, catch him and throw him in a creepy modern-day version of the prison, out in the woods somewhere.

In tonight’s episode, “Guy Hastings,” the first returning guard shows up. Hastings is a good guy but initially seems as bad as the escaped prisoners, roughing up and kidnapping investigator Rebecca’s (Sarah Jones) beloved Uncle Ray (the equally beloved character actor Robert Forster).

Thanks to the change-up and an expanded role in the story for Rebecca’s grandfather, an Alcatraz returnee who’s up to something, the episode felt pretty fresh.

And the series benefits immeasurably from the presence of Forster, a veteran of B-movies and cult classics like “Jackie Brown.” It’s startling to see how Forster has aged — gracefully certainly — but his appealing mug and gravelly voice are reassuring as anything on TV right now.

The show has apparently been doing pretty well in the ratings and the producers have recently promised that future episodes will continue to mix things up, deviating from the prisoner of the week stories.

“Alcatraz” still has me hooked.

Elmore Leonard’s ‘Raylan’ a new take on the ‘Justified’ cop

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If you’ve been watching and enjoying “Justified” the past couple of years, you probably know that the FX series about the U.S. marshal dealing with hillbillies, meth dealers and killers in the hills of Kentucky is taken from the work of Elmore Leonard, one of the most beloved writers of crime drama.

The lead character in the show, Raylan Givens, has appeared in a couple of Leonard novels, “Pronto” and “Riding the Rap,” and “Justified” itself is based on a Leonard short story, “Fire in the Hole.”

Leonard has returned to Kentucky and the world of Raylan Givens in “Raylan,” a recent novel that some “Justified” fans will find familiar.

“Raylan” follows Givens as he deals with a marijuana-dealing family, a double-dealing coal company representative and a card-dealing poker player who happens to be a Butler University student from Indianapolis.

A couple of those plot points should seem especially familiar if you’ve watched the show, but Leonard — who apparently shared some storylines with the writers of the series — threw in a few twists. Marijuana-dealing brothers Dickie and Coover don’t answer to their mother, Mags Bennett, but to their father, and they’re involved in organ-snatching. And Carol, the coal company executive sent to Harlan County to persuade property owners to give up their mountain, is more dangerous here.

To be honest, the book feels a little half-baked. Is it because I knew and loved the TV versions of these stories and characters first? Maybe. But the coal company story goes nowhere and the storyline about the card-playing college student feels truly tacked on.

As much as I loved seeing Boyd Crowder, Raylan’s longtime friend and sometimes nemesis, in the book, he doesn’t have a lot to do.

And frankly I can’t imagine the Raylan Givens I’m familiar with doing some of the things Leonard has his character do in this book.

What happens when an author’s characters take on a life of their own? Well, Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes when he became something more to readers than to the author.

I’m sure Leonard — who wrote genre classics like “Get Shorty” and “Out of Sight” — can live with the TV incarnation of his Kentucky lawman. And thanks to the TV show, viewers can embrace whichever they prefer.

‘Justified’ scores with ‘Harlan Roulette’

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The third season of FX’s “Justified” continued tonight with “Harlan Roulette,” mixing equal parts humor and backwoods mayhem.

U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) was almost a supporting character in tonight’s episode, and that’s okay when you consider the strength of the Kentucky lowlifes who routinely pass through this great series.

And the emphasis on bad guys is perfectly in keeping with the work of Elmore Leonard, the crime fiction author upon whose work “Justified” is based.

Tonight’s episode featured Pruitt Taylor Vince as a cold-blooded pawn shop owner who is cornering the market on painkiller Oxycontin in Harlan County, Kentucky. He’s working for Quarles (Neil McDonough), the unflappable Detroit mobster who’s come to Kentucky to set up shop.

Besides Vince, who is funny and vicious, and McDonough, who is cool enough to smile when Raylan is taking his picture, the episode features not only Walton Goggins as everybody’s favorite, Boyd Crowder, Raylan’s longtime friend and frenemy, but Mykelti Williamson as Limehouse, a cold-blooded homegrown crime boss.

“Justified” continues to have a strong, strong season. The show is sharp and funny and appallingly violent at times. Raylan and Boyd are great antagonists and protagonists and the show’s bad guys — from meth heads and Oxy addicts to guys like Quarles, who alternates between talking on the phone with his kid and showing off the gun literally up his sleeve — are the best on TV.

 

 

‘Alcatraz’ developing key mythology?

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True fans don’t have to be reminded, unfortunately, of TV series that loaded up on their own mythology only to disappoint fans before the end.

How bizarre was it that “The X-Files” — once one of my favorites shows — spent several seasons establishing that FBI agent Mulder’s sister had been taken by aliens … only to throw all that out the window with a late-in-the-series revelation that Samantha Mulder was kidnapped by a plain old human killer?

How inexplicable was it that “Lost” — once one of my favorite shows — spent several seasons laying out what seemed to be an intricate backstory for the island and its occupants … only to ignore most of it, explain the rest away and, most mind-bogglingly of all, prove its early Internet critics right by declaring in the final episode that the characters we had grown to love had been hanging out in limbo after all.

So upon watching “Alcatraz” tonight, I found myself hoping that the series’ makers really do have the key to the mystery they’re developing.

If you haven’t watched this show, which aired its fourth installment in three weeks tonight, the basic plot is that more than 300 prisoners and guards disappeared from the island prison of Alcatraz in 1963. They’re reappearing in modern-day San Francisco, they haven’t aged a day and most seem to be on some kind of quest. Not to mention that they’ve returned to their old habits of bank robbery, kidnapping and murder.

Tonight’s episode, “Cal Sweeney,” introduced a bank robber whose objective seems to be an old-fashioned key. It’s the second of these keys that have shown up. Now they’re in the hands of federal investigator Hauser (Sam Neill) running the inmate recovery project.

I’m really hoping there’s some meaning to the keys, just like I’m hoping there’s some meaning to investigator Rebecca Madsen’s (Sarah Jones) discovery that her grandfather was a convict and is now roaming the present.

As for researcher Diego Soto (played by lovable “Lost” grad Jorge Garcia)? I’m just enjoying his amiable presence.

The show is teasing us with several little mysteries, including characters who seem to be represented in both time periods.

But if those keys mean something now … they damn well better mean something later.

Or Samantha Mulder’s ghost just might step out of that flying saucer and open up a can of suspension of disbelief.