Capsule TV Show Reviews: Prison Break, Heroes, Smallville
The show’s 4th season premiere has set an intense pace where the action was taken from Panama, where the last season ended, and taking the new season in Los Angeles. Here, Michael (Wentworth Miller) cornered the trio of Gretchen (Jodi Lyn O’Keefe), Whistler (Chris Vance) and Mahone (William Fichtner). But, as he is going to exact revenge, they revealed to him that Sarah (Sarah Wayne Callies) is still alive and that they needed his help to bring down The Company.
The series, as it appears on the the first episodes, revolves on retrieving Scylla, the so-called “black book” of The Company, taking all of the characters to work together in doing so. Needless to say, there are many things going on and it is made in typical Prison Break style where viewers are left breathless with every new twist and turn in the story. But the truth is the concept of the show has been stretched so far from the original series. The story lines were expanded to lengths in a bid to keep us viewers captivated. It’s entertaining, really, and that’s the only thing that’s keeping me to watch this show’s last season.
For me, the show should have ended in Season 3. Each of the characters were given a sort of poetic endings: Michael driving away with a gun and origami, Lincoln (Dominic Purcell) reuniting with his kidnapped son, Sucre (Amaury Nolasco) sacrificing his freedom for a friend and T-Bag (Robert Knepper) becoming the “King of the Jungle”. I know it didn’t answer questions about the company and its conspirators, but at least it has given a closure to its characters.
Season 4 is too implausible for me to enjoy. It’s fiction I know, but i just hoped that it should have at least met the expectations of its dedicated audience. I would say the 4th season is more like a spin off of the original Prison Break and not the continuation of the series.
The final episode of the 2nd season had a bang of a finish. It was very much of a cliffhanger that I was left asking for more. As I hoped, the momentum was carried on to Season 3. I was very excited on the season’s premiere and watched the succeeding episodes. Tim Kring has accelerated the pacing of the story that in a few episodes time, so much has happened. There were so many revelations that it still keeps up to have that “wow factor” in it.
Since then, we’ve met yet more super-powered characters (despite creator Tim Kring stating there would be no new characters this season) including a female version of The Flash, a guy who gains super-strength from people’s fear, Nikki’s (Ali Larter) twin who has a freeze power. And of course we have Suresh (Sendhil Ramamurthy) turning into the TV version of David Cronenberg’s The Fly.
We also have two versions of Peter (well, we’re back down to one), Sylar (ok, Gabriel) partnered with Noah Bennet aka “HRG” (Jack Coleman) as well as discovering our skull-slicing pal is the brother of Peter (Milo Ventimiglia) and Nathan Petrelli (Adrian Pasdar). Then we have future Claire “saving me didn’t save the world” Bennet (Hayden Panettiere) all decked out in black leather and acting like a bad-ass assassin. Oh, and now Peter has Sylar’s power and slices skulls, too! Of course Hiro and Ando are still flailing about like a couple of Keystone Cops.
The only issue I have in the Heroes plot is the presence of time-travelling and cannot-be-killed characters at the same time. I have always assumed that Heroes is based in a comicbook guy’s point of view and of the comics genre where heroes are presented a problem and they solve the problem during the whole course of the story. I was wrong. With these characters present, the story could just revolve in going back in time, defying logic and changing the rules of the story. I just hope this going-to-be-boring type of plot will not hurl the very good start of the show.
Less Lana and Lex, my most anticipated 8th season of Smallville finally pushed through. The season premiere opens in a makeshift camp in the Arctic set up by LutherCorp in order to find Lex (Michael Rosenbaum). We soon meet a woman who is destined to take the place of Lex on the show as the manipulative baddie: Tess Mercer (played by Cassidy Freeman). Clark (Tom Welling), on the otherhand, ended up in Russia, without his powers, and is being held captive as slave labor. He tries to escape but was no match for a bunch of armed men. In a spun of the moment, Oliver Queen showed up, fakes a fistfight with Clark and figures a way to get him out of there.
Meanwhile Chloe (Allison Mack) decides to help her captors, by decoding an encoded satellite transmission, pulling out cell phone numbers. When she gets to the third one, she recognizes it as Oliver Queen’s and refuses to help further (and figures out this isn’t the government). Clark is determined to rescue Chloe, powers or not so he and Queen head to the facility in Montana (where Aquaman and Black Canary are being held after Chloe helped track them down). It turns out that the “control” aspect of the Veritas device that was so much the focus of last season was that it would just remove Clark’s super-powers, not turn him into some super-automaton.
Queen was dosed with a drug that makes him obey commands. He was told to look for Lex and immediately confronted Clark. He shot him just above the heart with an arrow as a warning. When Clark says he doesn’t know where Lex is he is shot straight through the heart. Clark saw his life flash before his eyes: His mom and dad, Lana, the farm, etc. Just as he fades, Martian Manhunter shows up out of nowhere and whisks Clark into space, towards the healing power (for Clark) of the Sun.
After his near death experience, Clark decided that it’s time to leave the farm behind – so at long last, we do seem to finally be moving towards the Superman mythos we know and love. Overall I’d say this season is starting off as a vast improvement over last season, and the ending actually left me with a sense that just maybe we’ll be blessed by having less soap opera-like crap on the show. I really don’t have much to nitpick about this episode that I haven’t already mentioned, and considering my critical eye towards Smallville, that’s really saying something.
My only real concern at this point revolves around the fact that they must put some closure on the Lex/Clark situation: Lex is missing but we know he’s not dead – and he finally knows about Clark’s powers. I’m hoping this final season opener was not a fluke and the show holds up to a better standard of quality than it has recently. I’m actually looking forward to watching it this season with a little bit of excitement and anticipation.
