Episode five takes True Detective 's idea of temporal play and turns it into yet another aspect of horror that the show’s been so adept at delivering, delving into existential time-space contemplations and having its characters relive the nightmares contained in their lives.
This week, Hannah gets a new job at GQ and has to struggle between following her heart, or her dollar-less pocket. Should she give up a new job she's great at that offers lots of delicious food? Meanwhile, the awkward sex Girls is known for is back in spades.
This is Girls at its self-aware best. The episode starts off with the funeral of David Pressler-Goings, Hannah’s salt and peppered little publisher. It’s like Four Weddings and a Funeral ! Except the closest thing we have to a young Hugh Grant is Adam, who has far too much unfortunate facial hair and far too little British come-hitherness
This week we get a clean cut A-B-C plotted episode of Community that promises to showcase the new cast’s dynamic. This is exactly what we needed after two episodes of farewells and a David Fincher parody.
This week's episode of Girls starts off with Hannah tripping and spilling the entire contents of her purse, because she’s now either Carrie Bradshaw in that one Paris episode of Sex and the City or every rom-com protagonist ever. She’s klutzy! She’s lovable! She’s Hannah Horvath! But seriously, it was great to have a unified theme for this episode just to see how each character related to the topic of death.
An episode in which we see how Community can take something as cartoonish as a 22-minute game of hot lava and craft it into a strong and emotional story about how shitty saying goodbye to a friend can be.
Girls consistently places its characters in dark and amusing situations that make us reflect on our own terrible choices and awkward experiences. At the end of the day, however, a lack of character growth and self-awareness will exhaust even the most loyal fan. To combat this, Dunham and co. have transformed several of the show's supporting characters into surrogates for the viewer who confront the main characters about their behaviour.
The six surviving Greendale Seven and Chang all agree to submit to what Abed describes as ”the pie fight of cop movies,” and we all buckle down for 22 minutes (plus commercials) of what Community does best: A bottle episode.
Thanks to its self-reflexive nature, Community has managed to return to the status quo in three episodes while still respecting the event of graduation itself, essentially saying everything that happened mattered (even the gas leak last year), but nothing ever really matters (including the gas leak).
The stories of episode three continue to be removed from the flash-forward mystery conflict seen in the season two premiere of The Newsroom . Much like last week’s episode, the show forces us to ”˜...wait for it’ without even knowing what ”˜it’ is. That being said, there are still some fun moments.
The new season of HBO’s The Newsroom is up and running, and the second episode, "The Genoa Tip," is principally spent maneuvering us towards the season’s larger ongoing stories. We get some long-overdue progress in the Jim-Maggie-Don love triangle, more of intrepid-as-opposed-to-incompetent reporter Neal Sanpat, and more than one genuinely fun scene featuring Sloan.
While The Newsroom 's first season often mistook ripped from the headline fact for character and simplistic moralizing for profundity, having watched the first four episodes of season two we are happy to report that showrunner Aaron Sorkin seems to have fixed many of the problems that plagued the first season... and in a few cases replaced them with all new problems.
Episode four of Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom , "I’ll Fix You," is a fairly engaging episode which delves the furthest into Will’s personal and emotional life thus far. Despite the strong character moments for McAvoy though, it's beginning to seem as though the female characters on The Newsroom exist pretty much only to instigate plot.
In many of the series reviews I've read of The Newsroom , critics unanimously declared that the pilot, "We Just Decided To," was the strongest of the first four episodes. For me, however, this Sunday's episode, "The 112th Congress," is easily Sorkin's strongest stuff thus far, at least partly because of the episodes effective structural reliance on a device that Sorkin memorably used in David Fincher's The Social Network .
After a promising but problematic pilot, the second episode of Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom should have brought things together and smoothed out some of the rough edges. Instead, it's very clear that the series is still struggling to find its feet. Worse, it almost squandered what interest we had in the series by repeating itself in just the second episode.
