recap

The Manstag in the Mirror: Hannibal Season One

Hannibal’s greatest strength, the one that produces the most gut-wrenching moments, is the most viscerally sterile: Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham in a room trying to destroy each other while falling irretrievably deeper into a mad sort of love.

Community Episode 5.7 Recap

A heart-filled examination of friendship that starts with Jeff and Duncan scheming selfishly, and ends around the Table Mk II with warm assurance, the bondage of honesty, and the best reference to The Shining since The Simpsons had a crack at it in the early 90’.

A Girl on Girls: Episode 3.7 Recap

Marnie desperately wishes that the girls had the same bonds they did when they were in college. In an attempt to reconnect, she organizes an epic, adult weekend, packed with everyone's favourite thing: Rigid planning! To no one's surprise, the weekend goes horribly wrong when the girls start resenting being boxed into Marnie's idea of how their vacation and their relationships should work.

True Detective Episode 1.5 Recap

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.

A Girl on Girls: Episode 3.6 Recap

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.

A Girl on Girls: Episode 3.5 Recap

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

Community Episode 5.6 Recap

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.

A Girl on Girls: Episode 3.4 Recap

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.

Community Episode 5.5 Recap

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.

A Girl on Girls: Episode 3.3 Recap

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.

Community Episode 5.4 Recap

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.

Post-Graduate Studies: Community Season 5

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 Newsroom Episode 2.3 Recap

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 Newsroom Episode 2.2 Recap

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.