Gotham S:01 E:12

Posted on by Bubbawheat

Episode Title: What the Little Bird Told Him
Original Airdate: 1-19-15

After a week off last week, Gotham comes back with the first villain that really feels like it could have been one of Batman’s villains, and after doing a quick Google search turns out that he actually is a Batman villain when he goes by the name he is given in this episode: The Electrocutioner. But even though that aspect of the episode was the one that was played up the most in the previews, it didn’t actually take up a great deal of the actual episode. A large chunk of it dealt with wrapping up a good chunk of the grand conspiracy between Fish, Falcone, and Penguin. Overall, I thought it was another good episode with a few nice touches and once again a few real eyerolling moments that didn’t feel like it furthered the plot or the characters in a good way.
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Filmwhys Extra #21 Channel: Superhero

Posted on by Bubbawheat

If you didn’t know, this site is a bit of a spin-off of Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights where Bubbawheat hosts a weekly podcast, and this episode just so happens to be announcing this site right here! So if you would prefer to be able to hear some of the writers for this site, you’re in for a treat. Alongside Bubbawheat are Rachel Thuro, Shah Shahid, Bruce Leslie, and Todd Liebenow. They discuss what shows they will be covering here at Channel: Superhero as well as some of the superhero shows they grew up with and ones they’re watching this season.
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Welcome to Channel: Superhero!

Posted on by Bubbawheat

Thank you for taking the time to visit our brand new site! Feel free to take a look around, much of the earlier posts are taken from my (Bubbawheat) earlier posts over at Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights. And if you are familiar with that site where I have been trying to watch and review every superhero movie out there, this site will be fairly similar, only instead of movies my team and I are seeking out, watching, and reviewing superhero and comic book television series. While our main focus will be the current shows in one of the biggest prime time superhero television booms in decades, we will also be taking a look back at earlier television series. Both live action and animated from any decade even going as far back as some of the earliest movie serials. We will be looking at the past shows in the same way we are looking at current shows, one episode a week, season by season. Make sure you check out our About page where you can learn more about all the great people that have agreed to join me in this venture. Because there is a lot of ground to cover and there’s no way I could do this all on my own. So sit back, pull up a chair, and check out the shows along with everyone here at team Channel: Superhero! If you want to know what our current schedule will be, just check it out right below.
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Constantine S:01 E:09

Posted on by Bubbawheat

Episode Title: The Saint of Last Resorts Part 2
Original Airdate: 1-16-14

Constantine comes back after a rather short hiatus with the second half of the cliffhanger which left him shot, bleeding out, with a demon coming after him. John being who he is, instead of asking for help he does the first thing that comes to mind and releases the demon king Pazuzu into himself in order to heal his wounds and chase off the demon. Unfortunately he will only be able to contain the demon for a few days before Pazuzu takes control of his body completely and his soul is pushed out into hell. But meanwhile, Pazuzu still manages to have a little bit of fun when John’s defenses are down and dismembers a handful of Mexican gang members while Chas is left in the cold. It’s a race against time with John’s soul on the line and his friends have to take matters into their own hands to perform an exorcism before it’s too late.
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Gotham S:01 E:11

Posted on by Bubbawheat

Episode: Rogue’s Gallery
Original Airdate: 1-5-14

I’m not going to call this episode a “midseason premier”, but Gotham does return from its brief hiatus with a bang. I wasn’t entirely sure what was going to happen with Gordon being knocked down a peg working security in the newly re-opened Arkham Asylum where his boss knows that he’s doing doggy duty and lets Gordon know it every step of the way. It’s not quite One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest but it does have its share of crazies for the sake of being crazy as well as a few more interesting and psychotic characters. What this episode does do well is the mystery aspect of the crime at hand where someone in Arkham is performing electro shock experiments on the inmates and it’s up to Gordon to figure out who it is. There were several twists and turns as well as several red herrings and couple nice bits of comic relief to round it out. What the episode did not do well, which it often doesn’t do well with is the rest of the characters.
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Constantine S:01 E:08

Posted on by Bubbawheat

Episode: The Saint of Last Resorts
Original Airdate: 12-12-14

And onto the final cliffhanger midseason finale of the year with the on-the-bubble Constantine. I have been enjoying this show for the most part since it started, it has one of the more morally ambiguous leads than any of the other shows so far aside from possibly Arrow which I don’t actually watch. The monster of the episode this week is one of the Garden of Eden’s Eve’s sisters who is more or less some type of vampire demon who steals a couple babies from the same family. And of course, it turns out that this family has ties to an ancient horror that has been thought long extinct, so much so that Constantine has no idea how to fight it. So of course, that is what is apparently responsible for the rising darkness which aims to destroy the barrier between the spirit world and the real world. Which is unfortunate because that is one of the most cliched storylines when it comes to these types of demon hunter or spirit hunter stories and most of this show has felt better than that. I imagine there’s still a way to spin that story into something interesting, but if I’m not that interested in the impending doom that’s supposed to befall our mighty heroes, then I’m less interested in the show overall. Meanwhile, there’s also the story of Zed who has been left behind while Constantine and Chas goes off to Mexico, even though yet another one of Zed’s talents is the ability to speak fluent Spanish. Or at least passable Spanish as she only speaks a couple lines to Constantine to show off. Anyway, it’s been hinted at in previous episodes that someone close to Constantine will betray him and last episode we saw that there is someone after her. And they finally come to get her here, even though she supposedly would have been safe if she had listened to Constantine and stayed inside the house. We also get to meet another one of Constantine’s old mates who was with him during the botched Exorcism in Newcastle. Anne Marie has a few tricks up her sleeve, though she has since joined a convent and is now a nun in the service of the Lord. Once the monster has been revealed and the plan is in place, Constantine once again tries going the same route he did with Gary in the Feast of Souls episode, but Anne Marie is a bit too smart for that and sees what he is trying to do immediately. And in fact, she actually turns the tables on him near the end of the episode, leaving him shot while some sort of weird looking demon is making his way towards them so that she can escape safely with the two babies. It’s a decent cliffhanger but for whatever reason, I just wasn’t as into the episode as I had been so far. And it didn’t help that it is a two part episode, though it’s helped a little bit that this seems to be one of the first shows out of the gate next year along with Gotham, coming back in the second week of January while the other shows don’t start up again until late January or February, and there’s still no date set that I know of for the new show iZombie. But hopefully the latter half of Constantine is able to pick things up because I still think it has promise and is worthy of more than just 13 episodes.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. S:02 E:09 & E:10

Posted on by Bubbawheat

Episode: …Ye Who Enter Here
Original Airdate: 12-2-14
Episode: What They Become
Original Airdate: 12-9-14

I know, I’m a week behind on this, but it just slipped my mind. It’s not because of the lack of interest because I’ve been enjoying the second season quite a bit. The characters have really meshed well together, the story arc is getting interesting, and I keep hearing good things about what’s going on. I will be combining these two episodes as I watched them back to back and am not entirely sure where one episode ends and the other begins anymore in my memory. This marks the return of Rayna who was left to run off into the wild so that she could more or less lead S.H.I.E.L.D. to Whitehall because he was after her. One of the best parts of the moment where Rayna gets recaptured by S.H.I.E.L.D. is the return of Patton Oswald as the Koenig triplets who are down to two, though there’s a question as to whether there are more brothers out there that we haven’t been introduced to yet. With all of the action going on and the politics between Hydra and S.H.I.E.L.D, the comic relief of Patton Oswald is worth the minor budgetary special effects used in order to sell the twin effect. I loved the little jokes that he kept doing like when he said there were thirteen of them, and then later when his brother was off screen he joked that he had to recharge his batteries. There’s also a great moment of return of Agent 33 who still has the technology that gave her Agent May’s face and voice, although because of the electrocution from their earlier fight it apparently is permanently fused to her face, only there’s a large burn scar on one side and the voice modulation isn’t working correctly. Although I imagine that part of that is so that Ming Na can get a little bit more screen time as well as the chance to play a villain because she is so great at being the badass. And now that the team dynamic has shifted in season 2, she hasn’t had nearly as many opportunities to be that badass, especially since Skye has started to transition more into that role herself. And she gets a great chance to kick some major ass here during a fight with Agent 33, though she doesn’t come through it completely unscathed. But some of the major relationship issues get resolved here in the midseason finale portion. Skye gets one of the greatest moments with Ward when he starts working with her again, and she just shoots him the moment she gets a chance to, even though he does manage to survive. It really shows a lot of growth for Skye’s character compared to how she started out in the first season. There’s also the slight surprising moment where Whitehall gets shot by Coulson, not only that, but he shoots him right before Skye’s father gets his moment of revenge for the death of his wife and Skye’s mother. Or technically Daisy’s mother. I must say that I almost expected during the moment when Skye’s father starts humming “Bicycle Built for Two” and Skye says that she had heard that song before, I totally expected her to say something along the lines of “that space movie with that psycho HAL computer”. And we finally get to see what’s inside the buried alien city which is mainly just a lot of weirdness, and we do earlier get to find out that the aliens definitely are the Kree who play an important part in the Marvel universe, though I personally don’t exactly know what that part is. It’s sad to see Agent Triplett go, but I am curious to see what the future holds for Skye and Rayna in the latter half of the show.

The Flash S:01 E:09

Posted on by Bubbawheat

Episode: The Man in the Yellow Suit
Original Airdate: 12-9-14

It’s probably been discussed quite a bit in the other TV circles that I don’t quite follow myself over who Dr. Wells really is considering the rather big, and yet somewhat unsurprising reveal at the end of this episode. From the very beginning of the show, it’s been leading up to the reveal of who the man in the yellow suit is, and even though we get to see him, and we know that he is very closely tied to Dr. Wells, we still don’t really know anything about him at all aside from the fact that he is essentially the Reverse Flash. He’s faster than Barry, he’s much more experienced at being a speedster than Barry, and he’s obviously much more ruthless than Barry. And yet, he doesn’t seem to want to see Barry dead either or else he likely would have killed him fairly early on in the episode. I absolutely loved seeing Amanda Pays reprise her role as Tina McGee. One of the things that I loved about Smallville was how they would give actors from previous incarnations of the character new roles in their own timeline, like Christopher Reeve and Dean Cain. Here, the main characters from the 1990’s Flash are returning to play essentially the same characters, only with a bit of a spin on them. John Wesley Shipp has had a recurring role as Barry’s father, Mark Hamill is set to reprise his role as an older Trickster already in jail, and here Amanda Pays reprises her role as Tina McGee. Only instead of working for Star Labs, she’s working for rival company Mercury Labs, which is obviously a nice little play on things as Mercury is the messenger god known for his speed. As far as the episode as a whole, it was generally great though it felt like it didn’t answer enough questions, or have any real resolution. I suppose that’s the intention of a midseason cliffhanger style finale, but it was still a bit of a letdown. I haven’t read further into it, but I imagine that the best theory is that Dr. Wells is in fact a speedster, but he’s not the man in the yellow suit, instead he likely wears a red suit just like Barry, which could mean that he is one of the other Reverse Flashes as there are several, or he could be connected in some way to Bart Allen since he is likely from the future. But in general, that is the kind of thing that this show is good at, creating theories that may or may not be correct, it’s quite fun to guess at what direction this show is going to take next and I can’t wait until its return.

Constantine S:01 E:07

Posted on by Bubbawheat

Episode: Blessed are the Damned
Original Airdate: 12-5-14

After last week’s relatively mediocre episode it was nice to get back to something a little more interesting as well as something that I hadn’t seen much of before here. While I said last week that it was nice to have an episode without Zed, I was actually glad that they didn’t spend much time away from her and brought her back right away. The case of the week here was actually quite interesting where they follow a reverend of a small, backwater church of snake handlers who gets bitten by a venomous snake but comes back to life holding the feather from an angel’s wing. While the angel herself wasn’t quite as majestic as Tilda Swinton’s wings from the movie version, they were still quite impressive for television. I also thought the twist was very well done when they find out that the angel wasn’t actually one of the ones from heaven, but instead she was a fallen angel working for hell. And after several episodes of just popping up and giving Constantine some infuriatingly vague advice, the actual angel Manny finally comes around to finally picking a side and helping Constantine a little bit more, and a lotta bit more at the very end where he does something that he says he will have to face consequences for. But he doesn’t yet say what those consequences might be. And the final tease shows some further possible darker motives for Zed even though I have no idea what it actually means for the future of the show. One thing outside of the episode that I thought was really great was the fact that for some reason William Shatner was livetweeting the West Coast feed.

Arrow S:03 E:08

Posted on by Bubbawheat

Episode: The Brave and the Bold
Original Airdate: 12-3-14

As essentially the other half of the Flash/Arrow crossover episode, I had to watch it. Especially because they teased Captain Boomerang via the first half of the episode. One of the first things I noticed about Arrow is that I had no idea that they introduced a sidekick for him already and throughout the episode I don’t think I ever caught his name, though I do believe “Speedy” was referenced. I’m not entirely sure if that’s what they actually call him, or if that’s what his sidekick was named in the comics back in the day. I also thought it was interesting that the title of the episode was also used for a Batman cartoon series several years back. It also was great to see the Flash really act like the Flash that I’ve known from those kind of cartoons. The cocky, flippant character that is absolutely a blast to watch. He felt more like the Flash here in Arrow than he has so far in any episode of his own show. There wasn’t any bothering with the serious love story or the serious backstory of his parents, or anything else. All the serious stuff was kept with Arrow while the Flash just got to spend the entire episode being the Flash and I absolutely loved it. Even though I didn’t really have any idea what was going on with several of the other characters like Diggle and his love interest, or anything to do with Amanda Waller. I am slightly familiar with the Suicide Squad and I knew that it had been referenced in Arrow but I didn’t quite know to what extent. Coming into it blind, there was quite a bit to take in, but it was still a nice episode and companion piece to the Flash’s half of the crossover episode, especially the end tease with the full blown practice fight between Arrow and Flash.