Episode 4, Raising Hell. Sounds like it will be full of action. And look at this screenshot Hulu is using for the episode. FIERCE.

If you remember, we left off with Simon drooling over Clary’s throbbing neck pulse. Doesn’t that sound hot? This one starts with Clary dreaming of losing her memories I guess, though she’s rolling around like she’s doing interpretative dance in her bed. When she wakes with a start, she sees Jace sitting with her. Except it’s actually Simon. Awesome. I’m glad we’re starting with the love triangle nonsense right off the bat.

Does this look like a freshly cleaned cut to you?

Simon has been in the infirmary of the Institute, except from the looks of things, they don’t even know how to clean a simple cut. Clary tells him again how he’s all she has left, and Jace is conveniently hovering outside her door listening. Always a sign of a worthy romance. You have two amazing options here Clary.

We go over whether Jace is trustworthy again.  Clary rambles on in contradictory statements for a while. “I need to know who I really am. I want to put all of this behind me. Maybe I’ll remember where my mom hid the cup. I’m so lost.”  You said it sister. But it’s true, her mom is missing because of this lost cup, so we might as well try to find it.

“Start with what we know. We know that dreams are remnants of memories.” Do we? I mean, sure, lots of them do pull from real life, but I’m fairly certain my reoccurring nightmare about the vampires, werewolves, and mummies taking over the world was not pulling from anything my 6 year old brain had encountered. Regardless, they remember that Magnus Bane took her memories, and suddenly they have their “first real lead.”  We’ll just disregard the fact that they figured this out already in the last episode, and again in the one before that.

Simon is hallucinating blood on his lip and Camille walking up behind him, and his first thought is, “I’ve got to get out of here.” I’m not really sure how that’s the Institute’s fault, but if you want to run around unprotected where vampires can actually get to you, have at it Simon. You’re annoying anyway.

After the title sequence, we come back to Clary walking into Jace’s bedroom unannounced while he’s punching some workout thing. He doesn’t have a shirt on, and so we can see that he has a lot of muscles and no hair, which is no surprise. I think I would die of shock if they had a normal looking human male shirtless on one of these shows. This also means we get to see all of his runes.

Clary is so embarrassed, which I don’t get at all. He helpfully puts a shirt on for her so she can turn back around and actually look at him. I KNOW.  That can’t have been the first time. Though I guess if you have a 17 year old teenage crush, everything embarrasses you. What I find more interesting is the proposed architectural layout of this abandoned church. Jace’s room has glass panel walls, and through them you can see stonework and one of the cusped windows with some stained glass visible. This is actually a fairly common historic preservation approach to very old buildings/dig sites where you don’t want to restore something so much as reuse it while remembering its past. For example, here’s a picture I took while in a subway station in Athens.

You can see the archaeology there, the yellowish bits. It’s all behind glass walls very similar to Jace’s room. I think this is pretty cool set design. It serves the show in that the outside of the building is meant to look abandoned, and so the actual wall is left as is, while also demonstrating real life historic reuse techniques.

I also did some digging and discovered the outside shots of the Institute are actually the Metropolitan United Church of Toronto, a lovely Gothic church that’s still fully in use today. So I guess if you’re super romantic about this show, you could go get married there or something.

I can’t find any evidence that the window in the shot above (with Jace) exists in this church though. However, I did find a full shot of it being built, thanks to shadowhunterstv.com. I’ve never seen a design exactly like this, but you can tell that it takes many elements from traditional Gothic windows.

Okay, back to the show. Sorry, I actually got interested in something there for a minute.

Jace and Clary have a back and forth about trusting Simon (sound familiar yet?whether Clary’s memories will be useful, whether she’s worth the people risking their lives for her. Typical teenage drama stuff.  Isabelle barges in to tell them the “mundie” is leaving. She has a weird braid across the back of her head, layered over only about 3 inches of space before disappearing again under her hair. Someone must have decided it looked dumb, because a second later, in the same scene, it’s gone.

Simon has decided they’re not safe there, where all the superhero powered people and weapons are, the ones that just kept him from being eaten by a vampire. He actupally calls Jace “Captain America” like it’s an insult, and I guess if Jace were a goody goody it might be. Otherwise Captain America is pretty cool. He also challenges Jace with the ever mature, “Come at me bro!” Seriously Simon. Get it together. He decides he can protect his family, and Clary, and himself, even though he’s demonstrated all of that is untrue. So he leaves, and Clary stays.

The whole Rescue Ranger team has gather around a table in front of one of those massive screens that haven’t been super helpful thus far. They’re just using it to look at pictures of Magnus Bane throughout his 300+ years, a la Doctor Who. Hodge is flicking his finger upwards over the tablet controlling the tv in the dumbest way possible. They can’t even make technology we actually have look normal and cool. Clary refers to him as the “Downworld’s David Guetta,” and after a quick GIS, I’m just confused. [not surprised, he’s a musician – B.]

There’s more stupid rune burning from Hodge, and more terrible technology use from Isabelle, but they decide to lure Magnus out of hiding from Valentine by attending a rave. Apparently it’s a big deal. Their bait is a necklace that alerts its wearing to the presence of demons; he had given it to his lover at the time, Camille. Yeah, that Camille. They’re all super impressed with it, but I think it looks super fake and ugly. That might be my lack of class coming out, I don’t know.

Speaking of Valentine, he’s back after being absent all of episode 3.  There are mostly invisible people in his lair, except for their eyes which are strangely obvious. He has the guy that Dot stabbed with a needle in episode 2 blow some kind of green smoke on the Clave scouts that are hiding there, which somehow kills both them and the guy who did it. I don’t understand, but apparently there was some kind of mutation from whatever was in that syringe. Valentine stabs him with the light sword anyway. I don’t know what’s going on. I did notice that he also has that burned circle rune on his neck though, which seems weird considering everyone thought he died in a house fire and the revolt fell apart. I must either be mis-remembering something from the book, or the show is making stuff up again. He tells the other lackey, “Gather the dead Seelies. Their blood could be interesting.”  We start to get a weird idea of what those unseen creatures in cages and the various syringes were for from earlier episodes.

The other real adult in the show, Luke, also comes back for this one. His partner seems to know who/what he is, and is warning him that his captain is keeping a closer eye on him now that those two witnesses are dead. “Get your act together Luke. Our people need you to keep your shield.”  “If you want me to get the Cup so badly, I need to get Clary alone.”  They’re really painting him as a shifty character here.

Isabelle decides to dress Clary for the party, no surprise there. She gives her a very tight, small black dress, also no surprise. I’m actually more surprised that the first thing she picked up was pink and sparkly and full of tulle.  “You’re so lucky to have such a flat chest. I can never wear that without a bra.” Jace walks in and does some obvious up and down staring, but then they act all embarrassed to be around each other after Isabelle makes an excuse to leave. He gives Clary a “seraph dagger”, which is a smaller light sword.

Elias, a warlock with little forehead horns, doesn’t want Magnus to leave their hideout because it’s too dangerous. Magnus is pretty sure he’s super badass though, and just tells them to all maintain the protective wards until he gets back.

Isabelle finds Alec going over his arrows. He has not dressed for this party. She’s pretty annoyed that he’s not excited about it. As usual, Alec is mad they’re helping Clary, because she’s Valentine’s daughter and everything surrounding her is crap. He’s not wrong. She’s been a cannonball of chaos since she showed up. Ranting cheered him up a little bit though. She warns him to stop bottling things up before he explodes.

Simon gets home, closes all of his blinds because of the vampire thing, and falls into bed just as Maureen storms into his room. Was she just hanging out there waiting for him? He missed rehearsal last night and didn’t call her. He has an excuse about schoolwork, but of course his mom comes in and moms things up. “If you’re going to be out with Clary all night, one of you has to have a phone.” Hahaha, whoops. Maureen’s really only worried that he might be dating Clary, but he admits they’re not. She tells him she’d like to date him, gets flustered, bumps into a picture breaking the glass, and things get weird. There’s a drop of blood on the glass where she cut her finger, and she leaves angry because he’s just staring at it and not answering her. Can you guess what happens next? Yeah, he tasted it.

Apparently they’re back at the club where Jace stole the flying motorcycle; he said that was “vampire night.” There’s stupid banter and sex jokes about Isabelle admiring men’s jewels in reference to the necklace. Inside, people are dancing in a way that does not entice me to ever attend a rave myself.  They’re saying his name awfully loud for a group of people that claim to care whether or not Valentine shows up. Magnus checks that the necklace is authentic, and reads an inscription on the back that they actually showed us wasn’t there. I don’t think anyone proofs this show at all.

Magnus fed Clary’s memories to a “memory demon” so Valentine couldn’t torture the location of the cup out of him. Clary finds out that Dot is dead, and her acting skills are pushed a little too far. But then Magnus does some cool magic to open a portal to his hideout and so I was distracted from her. She refuses to go with him, but then Alec kills someone approaching them with a knife. Magnus does a double take when he sees Alec, which is adorable, but then runs through the portal to escape Valentine’s men.

Clary manages to keep a ring from his finger where she was grasping his hand as he left. She has a bit of a temper tantrum outside, but Jace can use it to track Magnus. Except “the signal isn’t strong enough,” so they have to do “parabatai tracking.” Clary says, “This whole parabatai thing seems oddly intimate if you ask me,” which is funny, because they’re making googly eyes at each other while holding hands. They keep holding and then not holding weapons, and I’m not sure where they’re being stashed from moment to moment…

They get into Magnus’ lair, but it’s already been infiltrated. He’s fighting a shadowhunter who mentions killing Elias and getting his warlock mark. They’re glossing over this a bit, but warlocks always having a distinguishing feature that shows they’re not human. For Elias, it was the horns. Magnus has yellow cat eyes. Alec helps him kill the shadowhunter, which allows them to formally meet and stutter at each other while grinning stupidly. It’s nice to see Alec smile.

Magnus and Clary talk, and he says something about her and her mother helping people from their hearts instead of duty. He’s saying shadowhunters are stuck up assholes. He does some fancy magic that moves the entire lair. Magnus is a little over the top, but his magic is pretty cool.

Simon is trying to call Clary but she’s obviously not answering. He leaves her a message about how he’s sorry and how he hasn’t been feeling right since leaving the vampires. It’s too bad he didn’t say something when he was still with people who could actually help him. “It’s probably just the flu.”  Oh. Keep being dumb Simon.

Back to Magnus. He gives the necklace to Isabelle in thanks for their help defeating Valentine’s men, and takes the opportunity to ask her what Alec likes as gifts. Clary doesn’t have time for this flirting and wants to summon the demon now. Like, right now.

The Best

Magnus warns Clary to trust no one, not even the Clave. That includes him. He gives her a plastic sounding leather holder of colored chalks, because in order to summon the demon she has to draw a fancy pentagram on the floor. He offers his help, but she actually smirks and says, “I got this.” That really annoyed me for some reason.

Jace has to give her a rune because the Memory Demon is a Great Demon. “The rune will be far more powerful than anything you’ve faced so far.” I don’t know what this rune is for, they never bother to tell us. She does scream like a horror movie while he puts it on though.

I have a really hard time believing that she drew that freehand and little enough time has passed that she doesn’t look a bit disheveled. Then again, she wakes up with unsmudged mascara and is supposed to be a magic artist, so maybe I should just go with it.  Magnus compares her to Michelangelo, and mentions he was great in bed while looking pointedly at Alec. Alec is still pretending to not understand what’s happening.

They’re supposed to take their rightful place on the pentagram, but Clary is confused and needs help. Apparently the star point 3 inches from her feet was too hard to find. They’re told they can’t let go of each other’s hands no matter what, which means you know someone will. They also make it super dramatic when they each link up. Or at least, it’s supposed to be, and Isabelle even laughs at them for it, but it’s really unimpressive. Magnus knows that the demon will expect payment, but says he doesn’t know what it will be.

Isabelle seems freaked out that her necklace is pulsing. The one that is supposed to warn her when demons are near. When she’s summoning a demon. As flippant as she is, and as obvious as the necklace lighting up should be, she should have said, “Oh look, it works!” But I guess we’re supposed to be buckling down for the drama now.

For payment, they have to give up a memory of whoever they love the most. Isabelle gives Alec, Clary gives her mother, and then Alec gives Jace. Jace looks confused, and Alec freaks out. They’re parabatai, this shouldn’t be that weird. But Alec makes it weird, and Isabelle tries to reassure him, but he’s really super not ready to come out. Instead, he breaks the circle and the demon gets free. Magnus is trying to contain him, but it grabs Jace. Alec and Isabelle try to pull him free, but they’re failing. Her options are let the demon take Jace, or kill the demon and lose her memories forever. The moment she stabs it is when we get that image of her being fierce that I first posted, though it loses a little of its effect when she’s wobbling on four inch heels and keeping her knees together because her dress is uncomfortably short. Hopefully for her own grace, they’ll let her fight in her own clothes next time.

Clary: Is he going to be alright?
Magnus: I don’t know. Does he normally just lay like that without moving?

She gives him a really dirty look, but considering I have zero emotional attachment to these characters, I found it funny.  They keep telling him to get up until he wakes up.

Magnus: There’s nothing to be ashamed of, Alec.
Alec: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Magnus: You will.

After what looks like a shower and a change of clothes, which is oddly a zip up hoodie that isn’t fully zipped and no shirt underneath, Jace checks on Clary. He compliments himself by telling her she must have had a great sword teacher. When he leaves, she starts trying to call Simon, but now he’s not answering because he’s outside the Hotel DuMort, aka Camille’s lair. She decides to get ready for bed, and stops to touch her ridiculously huge rock necklace. When it glows and shows her her mother, Valentine is leaning over her, and says, “Nice to see you Clary. You want your mother? GIVE ME THE CUP.” She throws the necklace on the bed with the weakest arm I’ve ever seen. And that flippant gesture is our dramatic ending.

In this episode, we start with the Rescue Rangers regrouping at the Institute after Simon has been kidnapped by some vampires. Clary is somehow managing to act in charge while also clueless. She pulls out her teen snark, which is sadly some of her most authentic acting; even that is strained.

Clary: I still don’t understand. How can Shadowhunters be better than […] mundanes?
Isabelle: Because we protect humans.
Clary: You’re right. Humans.

Clary has so much attitude. Hello! Simon is human! Maybe get your head out of your asses and do your damn jobs. Alec of course is standing around like he’s trying to put up with a room full of screaming toddlers and he’s the only mature 12 year old in sight. Jace looks constipated, quickly becoming what I consider his standard look, and Isabelle is trying, but I really think her costumer hates her.

Though, I’m not sure what is up with Alec’s jacket either. Are those plastic buckles for attaching things? A diaper bag maybe?

Clary: Why do they think that? Why does anyone think that? What, my mom lies to me my entire life except, “Oh, by the way, there’s this magic cup I hid on, like, the planet Bongo, but don’t tell anyone.”

There’s that snark I mentioned. It’s almost funny even.

Clary: Listen… when you saved my life… I put my trust in you. And now I need you to put your trust in me. I can’t turn into what you are overnight. [which part of that are we supposed to trust? you make no sense lady!]
Isabelle: It’s true. She was raised as a mundane. [stating the obvious there.. super helpful, thanks.]
Alec: What are you, her spokesman now? [Alec, what is your problem dude.]
Clary: I don’t need a spokesman, I need a plan.

And then she storms off while the rest of them are looking like they were just called out for acting like big bad superheroes when really they’re just sulky teenagers who like to sneak out and can’t even protect a single human without bickering and losing him. Duh guys! Trust her! She’s new and terrible at this! She’ll fix it!

Meanwhile, Simon is screaming through a bronze door with a cross shaped window cut into it. He’s saying every cliche thing you can imagine a nerd would say about how he’s not worth it, he’s nobody, he didn’t even see you, surely you can let him go. It’s terrible. And then a vampire shows up and the show makes you think Simon is getting eaten.

Clary: Look at all this stuff, these screens. I mean, can any of this help me find Simon?

Or, I don’t know, the 20 people standing around that none of you will even visually acknowledge much less ask for help. The other three spend some time joking about how Isabelle likes to make out with fairies. Suddenly, they need permission to leave, and permission to have weapons, even though they’ve been running around willy nilly in the weapons shelf since the show started. But it’s okay, Jace has a plan for getting them that is apparently easier than continuing to pretend the other people in the building don’t exist.

Simon is with the vampire in a room full antiquities. He bumps into a marble statue that bongs like a bell. Simon is a hostage, and the vampires can’t sell her their old stuff because they can’t explain where it came from. Their leader is a lady with absurdly long nails who walks like her hips are attached by rubber bands and impossible to keep in line. All of it is ridiculous.

The Rescue Rangers are digging up the grave of a dead Shadowhunter, because apparently they’re buried with a stash of weapons. Alec continues to try to convince Jace this is a bad idea. They attempt a joke when Jace says “Abracadbra” before opening the above ground tomb, basically the only one you can see in the graveyard, and Clary thinks that it’s something they actually say for their “magic”.  Alec can only use a bow I guess, and there isn’t one there, so he runs back to the Institute to get one. Because now he can? Jace stays behind to teach Clary how to use a light sword in the graveyard, and they play this off as a sexy flirt scene.

He tries to explain why he knows Alec will come back to help. “We’re parabatai.” Let me just throw that out there and expect you to understand! Then he tries to explain, and I *think* he’s supposed to be getting choked up with emotion about how close he is with Alec? But he looks like he’s trying not to throw up. Maybe he was really really sick when he filmed this episode.

The vampires can snap their fingers and freeze humans. That’s neat.

Isabelle is having sex with a fairie to learn how to get into the vampires’ lair. They apparently can’t lie. I am again reminded why Disney realized they needed to change the name of this channel from ABC Family to Freeform. They just can’t make a teen show anymore without copious amounts of bedroom time.

Jace and Clary go to some kind of biker bar, and just walk right in because 17 year olds can do that. He teaches Clary to see through some kind of glamour thing so she can tell who the Downworlders are. He challenges her to compliment a guy on his motorcycle and resist his charms, without telling her that he has the power to mess with her brain. Jace is watching this vampire seduce her, and he looks… excited about it. This show is weird.

Simon is making out with the head vampire lady, and she’s trying to get information out of him. Obviously, the only way to question someone in this world is to sex them up. Everyone is doing it. Most of it is not consensual. The vampire finds out that Magnus Bane took Clary’s memories and is angry. She offers Simon a Bloody Mary, which I guess is a vampire joke.

Isabelle’s fairie knows how to get into the vampire lair because he’s been having sex with the head lady.  I’m not sure how her really obvious and over the top questioning session actually got that information out of him. Even he didn’t look like he was falling for it, and he made it clear he doesn’t trust her.

Alec is using his stele, their little LED wands, to look at his arrow shaft. He had mentioned something about runed arrows before, but I guess the special effects people forgot to add them in here. He’s caught by Hodge. “Don’t tell me. I don’t wanna have to report you.” Because that’s not weird. You’re on probation for some really terrible traitor stuff, but sure, let’s encourage the teenagers to continue to break rules. That won’t look weird. He tries to say Clary is Valentine’s daughter, but even that makes his rune burn. He slaps it very dramatically, turning his head so you see it lighting up clearly, just in case you forgot his excellent overacting skills from the last episode. He can say “the monster’s daughter” though, because somehow that’s different.

Hodge: You remind of me of me, Alec. A loyal friend standing in the shadow of the chosen one. Hey.. Don’t make the same mistakes I did. Look where it got me.

Now, maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t this sound like he’s antagonizing Alec into defying Jace and risking everyone?

The vampire and Clary look like they’re about to have sex on the motorcycle, which, if I didn’t mention it, is parked inside the bar. Jace finally decides to intervene. We get a glimpse of how cool the fight scenes in the show could be if they weren’t so incredibly inept at writing it. There are some fun noises when they move supersonic fast. All of this was just to steal the keys for the motorcycle, which runs on demon energy and can fly.  The music swells as they lift off, and she giggles and holds him.  I got a sick feeling in my stomach as I had a flashback to Edward calling Bella his little spider monkey…

Simon and his vampire are still making out. Is it supposed to be hot? It’s really not. So much so that it’s uncomfortable to watch. But they are drawing blood, which is going to work out great for him, I can tell.

Alec and Isabelle are in the basement I guess?

Alec: Okay.
Isabelle: Okay? It was hard work interrogating Meliorn (MEE’-lee-orn) to get this intel.
Alec: Great job Izzy. You have faerie dust on your dress. And I hate being the distraction.
Isabelle: I don’t.

He’s being sarcastic here, but I have to admit, I think he’s rather nice looking when he smiles.

She’s very proud of herself. Own it.

Here’s what I don’t understand. Why are the runes red and black? Why do they look like marker? Why aren’t they all varying shades of burn scars? Why do they have to be HUGE? Why did her makeup artist do such a lazy job with her fairie dust? I have so many questions.

Simon and the vampire are still making out, until she does a really horribly stupid-looking thing where she smells the Shadowhunters.

Seriously, I think one of the biggest problems this show is that it took cues from the first Twilight movie. That really wasn’t something anyone should aspire toward. Though even if they were, at least Twilight is amusingly terrible. Usually this show is not even that. This is where vampire-lady’s acting skills start falling apart. She sounds really silly bossing everyone around. I’m still reminded of bad high school plays. I think Simon is pretending to be drunk now that he realizes Clary is there to get him? Though I don’t think he was pretending to suck face.

It burrrns.

Jace and Clary are on the roof, where he’s giving her two new runes: one to protect her from the “encanto” the biker vampire was doing, and one to make her silent when she moves. These are actually pretty good looking. Clary must have a better makeup artist. Well, for the new ones. The one on her neck still looks like lip gloss.

Jace decides now would be a good time to chitchat about the human fascination with vampires.

Jace: The mundane world is all into vampires. I don’t get it. They see everyone else as an animated sack of meat.
Clary: Yeah, I certainly don’t see the romance.
Jace: That’s ’cause now you know it’s all real. [Dude. You JUST said you didn’t get it. And now you’re explaining to her why she doesn’t?]
Jace: Still, you gotta hand it to them, though. They know how to frame a narrative.

I swear, this is the funniest thing this show has ever done. I’m certain they were not attempting to make fun of themselves, and yet…

Clary asks about the chances of Simon becoming a vampire, and we learn that you have to drink vampire blood, and… other stuff. He doesn’t specify. Don’t be too vague in your foreshadowing now, you wouldn’t want us to miss it. Vampire bites make the victim feel high, “like they’re in love.” Clary says that’s awful, and instead of agreeing that yes, having your emotions stolen from you and controlled is a horrible kind of coercion, Jace decides now is a good time to lay on the “woe is me” shtick because he’s never been in love. Oh boo hoo. Jace seems to believe that love is something that wears off, and then deflects his baby feelings by insulting Simon.

Isabelle is accusing Alec of hiding his feelings from himself, and he wisely points out that maybe it’s not such a good idea to have some kind of deep conversation about our feels while we’re walking into a lair of vampires who want to kill us. “I don’t know, it looks pretty smooth so far.” And so now we know it won’t be any longer.

They open a door and find a clump of vampires standing there that look surprised to see them. It’s like they weren’t even down there looking for intruders. Alec tries to put a rune on the door, but it doesn’t take, so Izzy uses his light sword to cut off a pipe and stick it through the door handle as a kind of lock. Then she makes a stupid joke about the pen not being mightier than the sword. Who writes this? I need to make a list so I never watch anything else they make.

Alec and Izzy are enjoying taking the vampires out one by one. The bow is pretty cool. The vampires explode into what looks like the embers that float into the air when you burn paper. Izzy is using her snake bracelet-turned-whip to drag them to her before she stabs them with the light sword. Her moves are a series of step, pose, special effect. It’s very blocky and boring. This is a good example of how most of the fight scenes are NOT cool.

The four of them meet up, and Clary has to fight the biker dude whose bike she stole. There are more bad jokes, and she kills her first vampire and everyone is proud that she “did awesome”. It’s a bit of an overstatement really, but I guess she’s new. Their expectations might be low. At one point she’s held hostage, and Alec decides to just shoot a hole in the wall so that sunlight will pour in and burn up the vampire holding her. Alec could be so cool if he wanted to be.

Simon is trying to get away when the lackey vampire grabs him. That guy convinces the head vampire, I’ve just realized her name is Camille, she needs to escape while she can. She nearly dislocates her hip as she storms off.

We get a slow-mo shot of the Rescue Rangers walking through the building, flicking their swords, trying to look badass. It’s pretty funny. They come into the room where Simon has a knife to his throat, and now suddenly Alec can’t shoot a hole in the wall and they all put their weapons away. The vampire forces them all out of the building, Clary puts up her best “let me at him!” front, but in the end everyone gets out safely. The vampire asks Jace to remember who his friends are; he’s worried about Valentine and wants to stay on the Shadowhunters’ good side.

Jace is very rude to Simon, who is terrified and thinks they still need to run. But it’s daylight, and Jace points out it means they’re safe. Very rudely. Clary looks like she finally realizes Simon is there, and runs to him.

Clary: I couldn’t live without you.
Simon: Say that again. [He’s very hopeful and excited looking.]
Clary: I couldn’t live without you Simon. You’re all I have left. […] You’re my best friend. *cheek kiss*

Simon is, of course, brokenhearted. Izzy thinks now is a good time to apply lip gloss on her definitely still fully lipsticked lips.

Isabelle: Well… No accounting for taste.
Alec: Yeah, you should talk.

Alec and Jace argue about Clary again, but Jace yells for him to stop, catching everyone’s attention. Alec points out that he’s older, and not in Jace’s shadow. Obviously, Hodge’s little seeds of resentment are sprouting. Jace asks why he bothered to help, but Alec just walks off.

Clary stares at Jace. Jace stares at Clary. Simon stares at Clary’s heartbeat in the vein in her neck. Didn’t expect that at all.

This is what it feels like when I watch this show. Nothing they’re saying translates as real. It’s almost as if they were given the script that morning and told to do their best. We might as well be watching a daily soap opera. And that’s weird, because you would think that Disney money could have gotten better people.  At any rate, I’m very bored watching this. It took me 3 days to make it through 41 minutes of TV.  I’ll try to make this at interesting as possible, but there’s not as much to work with as I had with Reign. I never thought I’d say that when I started watching that show, but here I am still enjoying how nuts it can be three seasons in, and so far Shadowhunters just makes me want to take a nap.

We ended episode one with Clary standing over a dead man, flanked by her “mundane” best friend and the Shadowhunter representing her new life. She convinces Simon to join them in the church, which requires Jace to use his stele to mark a rune on his skin so a mundane can see through the glamour protecting their hideout (“Institute”).

Clary: I know, trust me.
Simon: He’s like, burning himself!

Clary is surprisingly calm considering this is probably the first time she’s seen a rune applied. She was unconscious when she received her healing rune, and so far the other Shadowhunters have just been activating runes they already had. Jace has to touch Simon to bring him inside, and Simon freaks out that Jace is hitting on him or something. It’s not cute or funny.

Ew! Boys!

It turns out, they’re inside to hide from the police, who have shown up because of the dead guy outside. Luckily, the police don’t have Jace’s hand to hold to see through the church glamour. Alec, our resident complainer (Was he this lame in the book? I don’t remember him being this lame. What a wet noodle. [actually- he was lamer. -Beth]), is upset that Simon is in the Institute. This provides a reason for some information dropping, and we learn that the current batch of young Shadowhunters aren’t allowed to know about the Circle. All we find out is that there was a revolt and some Shadowhunters died.

Jace says there is someone who can help, but Simon can’t go with him because the floor will kill him. We find out later that this is a lie, but you can tell that picking on the human is going to be one of the shows sources of “humor.” We also get more love triangle awkwardness: “He’s/I’m not her boyfriend! … We’re friends. Best friends” *googly eyes*  And then Simon is immediately rendered stupid by Isabelle activating one of her runes. It turns out he’s not repulsed by it when a half-clad woman does it. Isabelle offers to feed Simon while Jace and Clary do their thing, but apparently the others think her food is deadly. Haha, humans die either way!

This is an odd choice of clothing for fighting, but then, it seems to follow the uniform guidelines for the women who fight in this show. I’m also not entirely sure it fits properly, and it’s not the first time I’ve thought this about an outfit in this series. I think perhaps we can add costuming and/or seamstress to the list of things that were inexplicably left off the budget.

Luke shows up to protect this random warlock from this Circle member, who is one of the “witnesses” he was interrogating when Clary was losing her shit in the first episode.  He offers to protect her in exchange for secrets, but they fight instead and she pulls out one of those glow swords. To preserve the air of mystery they have surrounding Luke and his identity and allegiances, the camera pans out so they’re hidden behind a truck. You hear a beast growing, and then flesh ripping, and then what seems like a mini explosion that shoves the truck back a foot.

Next we meet Hodge, a former Circle member that is now chained to the Institute as a weapons trainer who can’t leave. He’s fighting with his shirt off, because of course he is, and then puts a tank top on over his sweaty self to go to talk Clary and Jace. Why bother? If you took your shirt off so it wouldn’t get gross, you just got it gross, and it’s not like that tight tank top was impeding your movement.  His rune makeup looks terrible. How many people are working on this show, and did any of them compare notes at all? No consistency.

He mistakes Clary for her mother, because I guess he assumes Jocelyn didn’t age in 18 years? And also that he’s blind? Seriously, these two people would not be mistaken for each other.

Hodge: She was Jocelyn Fairchild when I knew her. And she was one of my best friends.

You’d think you’d remember what your best friend looked like.

They ask Hodge a bunch of questions about the Circle, and everything he says causes a circle-shaped rune (*eye roll*) to burn in his neck. He tells her, with increasing dramatics, that the Circle had good intentions but basically did not realize that Valentine was crazy until it was too late. Also, her mother has been brought into this because she was also in the Circle, which upsets Clary quite a bit. Funny how he doesn’t mention that Valentine was also her husband! She has to go all the way to City of Bones for that bit of information. Though we do learn that the Mortal Cup is used to make Shadowhunters and control demons, and that Jocelyn was probably hiding the cup from Valentine and his followers. Also, everyone thought Valentine died in a fire ages ago.

Rune Burn

Clary: You might be some kind of emotionless G.I. Joe but…
Jace: What’s a G.I. Joe?

The dialogue…

Clary can’t remember if her mom hid the cup because of her mind wipe. She realizes Dot is a warlock, so these teenage Rescue Rangers have decided to track her down. She goes from being “frail frightened bunny” Clary to “snappy leather in charge” Clary in the blink of an eye again.

Dot runs into Luke, and they don’t trust each other. They’re both looking for Clary and Jocelyn. Luke is gathering up Clary’s things, including a drawing of a cup on a card. *gasp*! There’s a whole stack of them, and I think they’re Dot’s tarot cards.

Isabelle feeds Simon breakfast in her bedroom, which is massive, from a tray on her bed. She’s so subtle I’m not sure how anyone ever understands her. She’s also blunt in her descriptions of Shadowhunter things, which Simon finds unsettling, mostly because all of it involves him dying. She moves super fast, like Twilight fast, which isn’t helping my brain separate her from Rosalie.

Luke’s captain asks about Clary, and he finds out that she isn’t stuck in a portal limbo after all.

Luke: You know guys that age. They’re idiots.
Captain: Just that age?
Luke: Well, some of us transform ourselves and hide the idiot within.

So heavy handed. HEY EVERYONE! LUKE TRANSFORMS!

Clary is given Isabelle’s most solid piece of clothing, which is still to little fabric for her liking. They have some girl talk about Jace (Isabelle thinks he’s a brother, and Simon is “nerd hot”), and Clary gets a blunt Isabelle not-a-pep-talk. It doesn’t seem to be making the right impression on Simon though, because he’s still angling to get Clary to run off on their own.

What the hell is this hand slapping shit?

Alec, of course, does not approve, but they’re all going to help anyway. Could someone please explain to me how they’re doing everything alone and the Clave seems forever away and nearly unreachable, and yet the Institute is always full of people?

Clary is playing with the necklace when she gets a vision of Dot. She’s gone to Pan-Demon-ium looking for Magnus. He’s sending all his warlock buddies through a portal to hide from Valentine and refuses to help Dot. The Rescue Rangers are too late, and Valentine’s men get Dot in an alley. In the dark. It’s always dark. For some reason they run into the club looking for her even though the last vision Clary had was of Dot being jumped in the alley.

They all decide their last option is visiting the Silent Brothers in the City of Bones so Clary can retrieve her wiped memories. Alec and Isabelle freak out, and so you’d think the whole sequence of them going into the graveyard and underground would be more fraught and tense, but as usual, it’s bland and boring. Though their makeup is decent. The places where this show does and does not try are mind boggling. This episode is named The Descent into Hell Isn’t Easy, and yet, it was. Even the words Clary finds there say so. “For Shadowhunters, the descent into hell is easy.”

Jace: You should know, the pain will be excruciating.

You could have fooled me.

Jace: Clary, you don’t keep the silent hunters waiting.

Oh, did we make an appointment? No. No they did not.

Luke’s captain is getting suspicious when that Circle member’s body shows up with massive claw marks. Alaric, the guy I’ve mostly ignored up to now, tells him he needs to find Clary before their “friends” doubt him.

Jace and Clary pause on their strenuous hell journey of walking down a hallway to have some bonding time, and we learn that Jace’s dad died in the Circle revolt. They hold hands into the Silent Brother’s room and they all appear around them. They use the Soul Sword to retrieve her memories, and it can kill her if she’s not strong enough, and since we know there’s no chance she’s dying in episode 2, this entire scene is not even a little tense. The sword comes down and barely touches her head, and we watch one memory of overhearing her mother mention Valentine is her father. Perhaps this is more shocking to the people who have no knowledge of this series, but it fell very flat for me.

Simon and Isabelle are doing their awkward/forward thing in his van to “listen to his band’s music”, and because it’s a teen show, band member Maureen, the other love triangle, starts texting him. And then Isabelle hears something and Simon is snatched by something with gross fingernails while she’s investigating.

Valentine questions Dot, drugs her, in an attempt to get her to help reverse the potion Jocelyn took to sleep. Later she uses her magic to break the locks on her cell.  She’s actually one of the few decent actors in this trash heap. Her struggles actually seem difficult. Valentine’s lackey attacks her after she gets out, and defends herself by stabbing him with one of the syringes he has lying around. Valentine finishes pushing the plunger and it’s implied that he stabs Dot with his glow sword.

Let’s all take a moment to mourn sweet Dot. You were too good for this world.

Back with the Rescue Rangers, Alec thinks Clary must be a Valentine spy, and it turns out Simon has been taken by some “Night Children”, or vampires. They want to exchange him for the Mortal Cup. Everyone seems to think they should keep it safe from everyone else, instead of working together to keep it from Valentine. The talking vampire looks like my brother. Somehow, this makes sense to me.

And that’s it. Will there be a next time? I honestly don’t know. I’ll have to give Episode 3 a whirl and see if I can even finish watching it. Wish me luck. [At this point there is a limit to what I will make my recappers endure – maybe during sweeps week – b.] 

It’s always great when people can do backflips off overpasses without anyone noticing. Oh right, no one can notice. Except our star, who is *special*.

Meet Clary. It’s her 18th birthday and she’s applying to attend the Brooklyn Academy of Art. They’re not impressed with her presented portfolio, but whoops! She’s sketched images for her and her friend’s graphic novel all over her portfolio by “mistake” and now she’s in the advanced program.

She has a guy friend, Simon, who is our classic “adorable invisible nerd who’s obviously in love with her but she doesn’t know it”. And his bandmate, Maureen, is also in love with him without his noticing. Is it really a YA show if there isn’t a love triangle of some kind? (Seriously, does that exist? Let me know if it does.) While they discuss this love blindness, Clary sets down her biscotti on the table, which appears to be covered in white paper. When she looks back down at it, the biscotti has been replaced with a detailed, realistic drawing of biscotti.

Somehow, neither of them question the drawing’s appearance, only the her memory that she had a real one at all. “Hm, that’s weird… I thought I had a biscotti, but now I just see a drawing of a biscotti. But it’s totally not weird at all that this tablecloth has a single drawing of biscotti on it right where I put mine.”  Oh, and it’s her 18th birthday, which she immediately curses by declaring it “the greatest 18th birthday I ever had.” She’s bright, this one.

I’m on a horse!

Oooh! It’s the soap guy. I’m looking forward to imaging his every scene with a hidden white horse under him. This is Luke, Jocelyn’s (Clary’s mother) boyfriend. He seems to be some kind of detective investigating corpses that have been drained of blood and artfully covered in satin sheets before being abandoned.

Does she look exsanguinated to you?

His captain urges him to marry Jocelyn, but he delivers the line, “We’re.. different.” like he’s mocking someone that would have that line on a soap opera. Also, his eyes glow green and dogs just stop barking. That’s a skill I think a lot of people would love to have.

When Clary gets home, we see that her house is fronted by Greenpoint Antiques, which either includes or is next to a tarot reading/psychic shop. Inside is Dot, who I guess works there? She’s playing with tarot cards and joking about her ability to “see the future”. Pretending she didn’t just turn over what appears to be a death card and that she’s not acting weird at all. We get some ominous music there as Dot flips the shop sign to Closed.

Clary heads upstairs and we meet Jocelyn, her mother.

Jocelyn: You did it, yay!!
Clary: You also follow Simon?
Jocelyn: He only has 92 followers. He needs the retweets. Congratulations.
Clary: Thank you. Hashtag, stalker mom.

Just shoot me now. If things don’t get better once all the magic and sword fighting pick up, I’m not sure I’ll be able to stomach this even for the laughs.

Jocelyn gives Clary a stele, which looks like a little crystal tipped wand. Clary has apparently been doodling the symbols that are sculpted on the handle. Her mother obviously wants to tell her some family secret, but clueless Clary [Clueless Clary] doesn’t pick up on it and is angling to get out as fast as possible to celebrate with Simon and Maureen. S&M (lol, perfect) have a band together currently called Champagne Enema. Seriously. This show is great.

While Clary dresses, Jocelyn is daydreaming about 10 years earlier, when some pond monster nearly ate Clary until Jocelyn kicked its ass.  Terrified, she takes Clary to Magnus, a warlock, to take away her memories of the shadowhunter world. Only Jocelyn thinks this is a good idea. Magnus has glowing yellow eyes. Glowing eyes are obviously a thing here.  When Luke gets home (is this his home? I can’t tell), he gives her a set of spray paints, which she accepts as if they were socks even though her words suggest it’s what she wanted. She has the emotional range of a lamp. Luke tries to breach the Family Secret conversation again, and Clary again chooses to believe nothing her parental units could say would be important and cuts them off. Simon shows up then to take her to his gig. He has an interaction with Luke that I think suggests he’s supposed to be a funny character? Instead, I’m just confused as to why he’s pointing at his nose.

For this night out, Clary dresses in her gift from Dot, a striped black tee where with alternating see through fishnet blocks. She puts a plain zip-up hoodie on over it to tone it down and I assume hide it from her mother. She hugs her mom bye, pointing out that she’s “biologically and legally an adult now” and presumably able to make sound decisions regarding her safety in the city late at night, and then illustrates that maturity by getting a piggy back ride from Simon out of the house.

Maureen questions Clary about her family background, skeptical when Clary says her mom doesn’t have any family and her dad died, so it’s just the two of them. “You guys don’t think that’s a little bit suspicious? You not knowing anything about your family? Your mom could be hiding some deep, dark secret.”  Yeah! Like the one she just tried to tell you! When she gave you the family heirloom crystal wand. “My mother is incapable of concealing anything from me.” Seriously, this chick is dumb. You obviously had no idea that a crystal wand was an important family heirloom Clueless Clary! Did you forget that already?? Probably. They drive home the point by showing Jocelyn getting out her shadowhunter sword before dramatically going to commercial.

Shadowhunter central is teeming with people, (and I know this show is already taking liberty with the books, but wasn’t that place basically a ghost town?) and complete with massive hi-tech touch screens. Alex and Isabelle are brother and sister. She’s dressed like an extra out of call girl portions of Pretty Woman, her runes glistening on her bare skin in a way that makes them look like lip gloss. I’m not sure they’re supposed to do that? Alec is giving her crap about her outfit, especially the wig, which is a platinum bob. She explains it’s what demons like, and Jace, our apparent ring leader who walks like a he really really wants you to know he’s the brawn to Alec’s brains, agrees with her. They leave one screen to walk through the house to another one that has a picture of their shapeshifting demon in his current guise. Maybe these screens aren’t as hi tech as I thought if they can’t even pull that picture up on the screen where they started. These demons are responsible for the now 7 murders of “mundanes” that are showing up with all of their blood drained, which confuses the trio because “isn’t that vampire territory?”  Isabelle is sure she can find out why they want it if she can get a sample. They head out to do whatever it is they do after shutting down Alec when he mentioned getting permission for the mission.

Sure, just rudely leave this door of swords wide open.

Next we get to see the end of the gig, complete with lots of awkward ogling from all of the lovebirds, followed by awkward staring when Simon changes shirts by the van later. They’ve decided to rename the band Rock Solid Panda, and so Clary gets out her new spray paints to decorate the van. Instead, she mysteriously paints another rune. This does not scare her nearly as much as it should. She has no memory of doing it, doesn’t know why she did, and it’s even in three different colors so it wasn’t like a small unnoticed hand movement. “Weird, I didn’t even mean to draw that.” Maureen again points out how weird that is.

Jace ends up bumping into Clary on his way into Pandemonium, where he’s following the shapeshifter. She tells him to watch where he’s going, and he’s surprised she can see him. They have a weird conversation where she accuses him of flirting and he’s mostly flabbergasted, while Simon and Maureen watch her talk to thin air. Finally, Clueless Clary realizes something is off about herself, and chooses to confront the issue by going after Jace to prove he’s real.

Subtle Guys

Inside the night club, where Clary has removed her hoodie, she follows Jace through a very large and crowded space. We see Magnus, surrounded by followers on a corner couch, react to what seems to be seeing Clary, but when he moves it’s to force two members of “Circle” to leave his club. Isabelle starts dancing on a table to lure demons, taking off her ill-fitting coat and wig. Why did she need that wig again? Clary sees one of the light swords and attempts to push the shapeshifter out of the way in some of the world’s worse action effects. Then have a choreographed fight scene where demons explode into little bits like the floating embers from burning paper. At one point, Clary picks up a dropped sword, which had gone out (why didn’t they go out in storage?), and it comes back to life right as a demon happens to fall on it. She ends up running away, catching a cab home, leaving her underage friends there with their martinis.

She is frantically retelling all of this to her mother, who is not that surprised. Somehow, despite describing how people were sprouting tentacles from their faces and being vaporized, Clueless Clary is fixated on the idea that she might have killed someone. Is she drugged? Is she going insane? Maybe she should shut up for 10 seconds so her mom can answer their questions. Before she can explain, Dot runs in to let them know the Circle has found them. Jocelyn puts a necklace on Clary, has Dot open a portal, and then pushes her through it to get her to Luke and safety. Dot gives Jocelyn a potion to use “only if you need it.”

While Clary waits for Luke at the police station, Jocelyn sets fire to Clary’s room and heads through the house to fight. Dot has been pushed out the window and is presumably dead. Sorry Dot. We learn that the Circle is looking for the Mortal Cup for Valentine, who she thought (hoped?) was dead. Jocelyn takes the potion and collapses. Clary is listening in on Luke’s “interrogation”, where two people from the Circle are confronting Luke about hiding the Cup with Jocelyn. Clary is confused by that they refer to her mother as Jocelyn Fairchild, because everything confuses her. Luke tells them they can kill Jocelyn and Clary, but if he finds the cup he’s keeping it for himself. Despite what her mother told her about only trusting Luke, Clary is now, perhaps understandably for once, confused and frightened and runs away again. Luke toward where she was hiding like he knows she’s there, but if so they don’t follow up on it.

In Chernobyl (because radiation’s fun!), a man we learn is Valentine is overseeing some growling creatures in cages that we can’t see while holding a syringe of blood. Jocelyn is brought back with the teleporting Circle in some kind of stasis, and Valentine sort of moons over her like a deranged person. One of the people who brought her chides her decision to run from the circle and Valentine kills him with a smile. You have no idea how much I love it that this crazy is played by the same person who humped a woman out a window to her death as crazy King Henry II in Reign.

Mad is what I do!

Clary runs home through some dramatic rain to find her house in ruins. Dot shows up asking about the cup, and when Clary fails to answer her, she turns into a demon. Clueless Clary just stands there and stares. I think she has a death wish. Jace shows up to save her, but Clary was scratched by the demon and faints.

She wakes up to Isabelle sitting on her bed, which is a little creepy. Isabelle is worried about Jace being distracted by a mundane, but as Jace points out, she can’t be a mundane because the seraph blade lit up when she touched it. Isabelle reminds me strongly of Rosalie from Twilight. She walks Alec out of the room because he’s very upset that Clary is there. He claims he’s worried about the mission failing and them not knowing who the blood was for.

Jace stays behind to talk to Clary. She doesn’t understand anything he says to her, and their conversation pretty much goes like this:

Clary: I’m miraculously healed and all of you have magical powers?
Jace: I’m not a warlock.
Clary: Huh?
Jace: I’m a shadowhunter.
Clary: What?
Jace: We fight downworlders.
Clary: Huh?

Poor Clueless Clary. Her listening comprehension is terrible. All she cares about is her kidnapped mother, and she tells us this with her usual lamp emotions.

This is my confused face. And my cry face. And my mad face.

Simon comes looking for her by tracing her phone signal. He’s worried to hear that she needs to get dressed before leaving an “abandoned church.”  We get another glimpse at the potential for Simon to be a comedic character.

Jace started looking through her sketchbook, because that’s just something you do without permission. Clary puts on a tight leather ensemble of Isabelle’s. “She’s very comfortable with her body.” CC’s hair looks like it’s just been styled for the runway, which is crazy, because she was in a fight and ran through rain, and then was apparently passed out for two days. They walk outside together, Jace hiding his sword behind his back while he explains to Clary about his invisibility rune, so I have no idea *why* he’s hiding it. Surely any real threat would notice his awkward “I’m hiding something big behind my back” stance. Naturally, the rune is place so that he can show off his abs when he points it out, and then he makes a joke about how it’s shame no one gets to see him because “of all this.” And then we see that Jace definitely shouldn’t be the comedic relief.

Clary’s suddenly calm and collected like it’s totally fine her house is destroyed when Simon comes to take her home. He’s really worried about her outfit, even though it covers more than her fishnet shirt did. This guy probably should be made the funny friend, because he doesn’t do pearl clutching very well. The guy from the police station comes to get Clary, but Jace takes him out, so now Simon is freaked and really wants to take her away and call Luke. Clary really doesn’t want to do that, but she doesn’t seem to explain why.

After all of this, Valentine has Jocelyn, but not the Mortal Cup, which is what he was after.  One of his minions tells him it wasn’t there, but he replies, “Just because you couldn’t see it, doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.” Is it just me immediately thinking about Clary’s weird ability to accidentally and unknowingly turn real objects into art? The underling is worried about his failure and tries to save himself by bringing up the daughter.  Valentine didn’t know she existed, and he’s weirdly excited and has decided to meet her.

And that’s it! Bad makeup runes, seraph blades that come and go based on rules they don’t even seem to understand, annoying always perfect hair that’s so perfect it looks like a wig, stupid love triangles, bad acting, jokes that may or may not be jokes? I can’t help but compare it to the plethora of similar fare on the CW, though there was less of the “hey! we listen to young, hip music!” that I saw in Reign. We’re in for some terrible fun. See you next time!

Season 12 of Special Victims Unit is simultaneously its worst and best season. Worst because based on all objective measures of analyzing television entertainment it’s atrocious, shittily acted, preposterously plotted with a narrative attention span of a small dog that only intermittently remembers what the fuck its premise is. Best because of all those things I just mentioned. Which end of the spectrum you regard as valid depends on what you seek to get out of the show: those with attachment to the characters and desire to see a primetime program deal with the myriad issues in society that foster and abet sexual abuse in a thoughtful fashion will see Season 12 as cartoonish bullshit; those who contend the show was always shrill, stupid bullshit that at best acted as a spleen drainer for the easily outraged are delighted that the apotheosis of crud is a Grand Guignol of dozens upon dozens of professionals coming together to produce absolute dross.

Sans industrial fires or a money laundering operation that hollowed out the carcass of a TV show, it’s difficult if not impossible to make something this terrible. “Bully” isn’t the worst episode of SVU in year 12, partially because choosing between 24 installments of incoherent gibberish is Sophie’s Choice all over again (only I guess in this case you’d want the Nazis to take all of them). But it certainly plays as a script adapted from a “hey, let’s call the intern into the writers room and make him tell a story extemporaneously for five minutes” situation. None of it makes sense, there’s an homage to splatter artist Budd Dwyer and a wine bottle masturbation catastrophe determined to be a plausible theory for a crime is the thing that requires the least suspension of disbelief. All aboard the stupid train, folks.

“I’m the third most important cast member this week. Yeah, I know, I’m surprised too.”

We open at a pretentious artist’s place (if you write a down-to-earth, thoughtful artist into a script, Dick Wolf breaks your fingers), where one of his patrons is gushing effusively about one of his newest pieces, but the twist is the frankly brilliant “lines of blood on a canvas” isn’t his work at all, it’s the result of blood from upstairs dripping down. Initially the cops think the artist’s behind the death upstairs, because “get this, the show is called Dollars and Death: The Politics of Blood”, but things turn out to be much, much dumber.

Upstairs, there’s a dead woman in the vicinity of a vase, of a bottle of champagne, so Stabler gets the mediocre smash to credits one-liner of “so much for romance”. Jerry Orbach he is not. I imagine in Heaven or Hell or the Negative Zone or wherever he is, Orbach curses whenever someone on a Law & Order show botches a cold opening one-liner. “No, DRYER! DRYER! Not enough world weariness! Put some fucking English on the sardonic!” (He of course sees the show by accessing those eyes he gave up for donation. Check out my horror movie The Man With Orbach’s Eyes, coming in 2017.) What’s common in Season 12 SVU is the numerous false leads that don’t actually do anything to convey a mystery but instead fill up time.

The central premise in “Bully” is lean enough that it needs to be padded with shit that may as well be called “we couldn’t come up with a full episode with this plot element, so enjoy these repurposed scraps”. Take the self-righteous artist. He owns the building and another tenant says he tried to rape her once, but she didn’t file charges because she was drunk and he gave her a break on the rent as a sort of “sorry I tried to commit sexual assault” apology gift. He’s cleared of the murder as Ice-T astutely says “the guy may be a pretentious douche, but he’s not lying” when the artist points to an online interview he was giving at the time of the murder. I love whenever SVU interacts with this “website” “blogosphere” “computertron” world, because you can tell the depictions are dripping with contempt and alarmism. 10 years ago Dick Wolf read an IMDB comment that called him “Dickless Wolf” and he hasn’t had time for the Internet ever since. Well, you know, here it is in 2014, some jerkoff making fun of him for being an untalented, terrible person. He called it!

Fucking Joe Scarborough cameos on the show so often (i.e., more than never) I’m beginning to think Dick Wolf was responsible for the dead intern in his office and Law & Order gigs are his way of saying sorry for causing such a hullabaloo.

That lead exhausted, the detectives find out the victim, Ellen, was in debt to this website called My Leather Fantasy (leather products, no kinky sex shit Stabler finds so repulsive he once punched a 8mm Blockbuster promotional stand until the cardboard Nic Cage grimacing in the chair actually started bleeding) and had been receiving dozens upon dozens of threatening phone calls. As they interview him on the street, an old man comes out of nowhere, shoots the guy and screams “You killed my wife!”. Classic latter day SVU: people come out of nowhere to shoot other people and it’s just to spice things up a bit. I’m surprised the writers showed restraint and didn’t set this shooting at the precinct. By the end of the Stabler era, like nine people are stabbed or shot to death in the precinct a season. Metal detectors? Screening visitors? What the fuck are you expecting, competence? Fucking police stations in Mexico have more security. Old man shot the suspect because one of the harassing phone calls caused his wife’s heart to explode. I don’t know why he’d let his Alzheimer’s afflicted wife spends thousands of dollars buying shit online, but whatever. Who knows if he’s charged with anything; the cops likely gave him a pass, figuring, hey, it’s not like he’s going to have another wife scared to death by crank phone call anytime soon. What clears the phone harasser guy occurs in my choice for the dumbest scene ever on SVU. It’s so profoundly stupid, pointless, incoherent, that I had to include the exchange verbatim. You’re welcome in advance!

Stupid Asshole #1, played by Christopher Meloni: “You hounded Mrs. Gilcrest to death.”
Stupid Asshole #2, NOT played by Christopher Meloni: “No I didn’t. I told her if she wasn’t happy she could post negative stuff about me on the Internet.”
SA #1: “Come again?”
SA #2: “The more comments you get online, good or bad, the higher your Google ranking.”
SA #1: “Scaring people to death is now a marketing ploy?”
SA #2: “For every pissed off customer, 100 new people visit my website. 10 to 20% of them buy something, ka-ching!”
SA #1: “You are some piece of crap, you know that?”
SA #2: “But I didn’t kill nobody!”

(His alibi is he was heckling someone across the street from their house, incidentally.) What is there to say? At what point did episode writer Ken Storer decide his script needed a scathing indictment of search algorithms, a problem people face in their day to day life all the fucking time? A third of the episode is fucking finished and I’m over 1000 words into this shit and we still haven’t even gotten to what “Bully” is about, if it’s even about anything (which is questionable). Ellen worked at a wine company, Luscious Grape, which from the shitty promotional video on their website is said to be a great place to work. The twist is it’s not a great place to work. Again, amazing observation that the advertised image of a company doesn’t reflect what it really is. Did you also know that when Leatherface’s family sold their meat to people they didn’t say it was of human origin? I know! Crazy, right?

Tamara Tunie, who I believe in her contract is paid double if she has a line of dialogue in an episode that isn’t exposition and therefore never paid double ever, reports that Ellen might not have been murdered after all. In life she tore her hair out, and “along with the violent masturbation and binge drinking” that suggests extreme stress. Curiosity piqued by the “violent masturbation”? Tamara Tunie theorizes she might’ve been getting off with a wine bottle. Finally, a sexy sex crime. She had a 1.6 blood alcohol level, which a beautiful pedant on IMDB went to the trouble of listing as a goof, as 1.6 would be 4 times the amount of alcohol that killed Amy Winehouse. It’s okay, no one in the show’s universe is actually good at their job. 1.6, .16, 16, all the same number if you think about it.

Rape? Well, at least the newspapers remember Special Victims Unit is supposed to be about rape cases.

A stressed out violent masturbator drunk doesn’t fit with the Luscious Grape seen in the video, and her boss and co-workers all parrot the same party line that the company is great and so is working there, which I agree with if a wine company is what I think it is (getting money for drinking in an office building all day). Some of the co-workers include: a British wine taster whose accent renders a line of dialogue “her death is a terrible bleow”, aka fucking hilarious; Gale from Breaking Bad; a beefcake traveling salesman; and some girl whose job is to be pretty and answer the phones I guess. Gale was closest to Ellen; they’re in Alcoholics Anonymous together and Ellen was considered a ‘fruitfly’ for socializing with Gale and people of his ilk. Yes, of course Gale is gay! (I used to have a roommate during the middle seasons of Breaking Bad who always rebuffed my contention that Gale was gay. “No, no, he’s eccentric!” Let’s just say I was vindicated when that karaoke video happened.)

The detectives sorta sit on their thumbs until outside circumstances move the plot along. Someone breaks into Ellen’s apartment and roughs up the place. Stabler finds a little panda near Ellen’s computer that is a flash drive containing videos of the CEO and Ellen’s supposed “best friend” Annette verbally abusing the entire staff. “Bully” loves calling Gale a fruit. It’s always fruit, never another slur that, you know, starts with an ‘f’ that people actually use. I kept waiting for that specific word choice to pay off, like Gale screaming “THIS FRUIT IS RIPE!” when he inevitably falls off the wagon, but no. If you expect anything from SVU, you really ought to stop doing that. The employees still won’t badmouth their boss, though they all have hooks in them. Gale got a new car, Limey Bleow’s children got into a posh private school, the young girl goes to therapy (I love how Ice-T tails her to a therapist and basically yells at her for going to therapist and also assuming she has sessions due to her job instead of, I don’t know, being molested by her stepfather) and the ladies man still lives with his disabled mother. She’s my favorite character, because she never appears onscreen and her line of dialogue is “mother needs her juice!”. Fuck it, retool the show and make it all voices screaming from offscreen. Saves money and it’s not like the directing is anything special anyway. The investigation catches a break when Ellen posthumously leaks the abusive videos to the media and to the Internet. Why yes, the murder victim is better and more proactive at solving her own murder than the goddamn cops.

They actually got Mariska Hargitay to say “evah”. I imagine after that she politely but firmly told the showrunner “double my pay and I’m still not saying that ever fucking again”.

Shit goes viral, putting the kibosh on the company buyout that would’ve made everyone rich and allowing for the interns responsible for coming up with funny headlines for SVU’s litany of fake New York Post ripoff newspapers (cartoon TV show only acknowledges cartoon newspaper as an influence) the opportunity to go hog wild. Annette holds a press conference that starts off as humble and apologetic until she bitches everyone out and blows her brains out in front of the cops, the press, her employees. It’s great and not just because her actions mirrored my feelings by that point in the episode. I love that the public suicide is good enough for both the cops and the DA’s office. They charge a dead woman for the murder. Justice has been served and the characters we follow did fucking nothing.

If Stabler, Benson and Ice-T called in sick that week, Ellen’s videos would still go public, Annette would still plaster her brains all over the wall. Strong message, “Bully”: the cops are so stupid and worthless they make a negligible impact. Usually SVU is unintentionally about an overreaching, corrupt unit of self-righteous psychopaths who never learn anything from the unintended consequences of their actions, but with “Bully” they’re as necessary to the story as the voice over in Blade Runner. Oh wait, there’s another fucking 10 minutes. You may ask how do you top a Budd Dwyer. Well, you don’t. George Costanza learned to go out on a high note, why can’t these people?

I hope Filter haphazardly releases an Annette Cole version of “Hey Man Nice Shot”.

SVU swoops in when Gale is hit by a car, as I suppose their jurisdiction is both sex crimes and any crimes that branch out from that crime, whether it’s hit and run, illicit CFL gambling, the Mars rover program or Ice-T’s father using a time travel belt to prevent MLK’s assassination but whoops he fucked up and now Chicago is ruled by giant ants (special guest star Kirk Douglas voices the King Ant). Surveillance footage establishes Gale knew the assailant but more importantly allowed me to spend hours of my time reinstalling programs so I could make an animated gif of him hilariously getting run down. The cops finally do something of value, running down the car’s registration and finding out it belongs to the Luscious Grape little girl’s grandfather. Again, the interrogation scene that results sorta falls apart into her and Gale, rushing into the room on crutches, yelling at each other a lot of exposition. Benson and Stabler are glorified fucking stenographers. The employees had a pact to keep quiet about the abuse so the buyout would go through and they’d all be rich, and Gale went over to Ellen’s apartment to talk her out of releasing the videos, and she was already dead when he got there. Annette exonerated by their discussion, we’re left with three candidates for the murder: the British guy (who disappears halfway through the episode presumably to chimney sweep Parliament or whatever the fuck those inbred snaggletoothed empire envy-heavy Limeys do), the ladies man and the little dog that inherited Annette’s estate. You know, by Season 12, a dog orchestrating a murder and pushing someone to suicide in order to obtain ownership of a wine company is a plausible explanation. I wish they’d gone with the dog.

Tamara Exposition pops up again to walk back her “violent masturbation mishap” theory and confirm Ellen was truly murdered. DA maybe should’ve waited before charging the skull fragments the cleaning crew put in a little ziploc bag labeled “Annette Cole” with murder. Again, everyone sucks at their occupation. See, Ellen didn’t get drunk in the conventional way, she got champagne through the anus. I was wondering when butt chugging was going to make an appearance on SVU and I’m not disappointed. Pretty boy sales rep did the deed, since his mother (a former opera singer, current juice hound) imparted the secret of butt chugging to him one night, surely not unlike the night Ma and Pa Kent revealed to little Clark that he came out of a spaceship that landed in Kansas. Can’t sing opera while drinking from your mouth, like a plebeian. Classy ladies sip sparkling champagne with their asshole.

I’m never going to stop watching this.

We’ve got yet another instance of SVU deciding “you know, fuck it, we don’t have to rent those courtroom sets for the week” and it got me thinking: Gillian Hardwicke may well be the worst ADA SVU‘s ever had. Sure, Greylek is much more intolerable, but at least I can remember things about her. A stonefaced dolt played a terrible actress is better than nothing. Hardwicke, who’s mentioned multiple times in the episode but not shown, I don’t know if I could pick her out of a lineup. The Dick Wolf method of casting pretty white women of questionable ability reaches its apotheosis with this character. She’s so pretty and so vacuous she doesn’t need to physically exist! The only better thing would be pulling a Trudeau and representing the characters with abstract objects or symbols. So much of SVU Season 12 lends itself to an apocalyptic metastory, what with the ever frenzied approach to make every other scene a twist and the body count that’s somewhere between Jeffrey Dahmer and the Green River Killer; really, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the finale was Dick Wolf with a gun, killing the execs of NBC subsidiary Spectacular Optical and then turning the gun to his temple, a “Long Live The New Flesh!” before the blam.

Cragen and Munch are absent from the episode too, meaning the most senior officer at SVU is Stabler? That can’t work! No wonder the case is shaggier than goddamn Finnegan’s Wake. No one gives a fuck about anything in “Bully”, from the characters to the actors to the writers to the director to the special guests to the set dressers to even the lighting guys. If I may, crazy garbled nonsense in SVU works best if it’s coming from a sincere place, regardless of if that sincerity is coupled with competence, subtlety or intelligence. When a patchwork of “what’s in the news today” hackery that would give Jay Leno pause emerges and takes the form of an hour long timeslot filler to later air on USA Characters Welcome marathons on 3 AM that will surely give America’s gun cleaner aficionados some inspiration, you wonder why NBC doesn’t just shut everything down and exit TV for a business they’d be better at, like street umbrella sales.

I wish just once on television, a dipshit investigator would go “hey, looks like we got a hidden flash drive” and then rips apart a little rubber knick knack a person would put on their desk.

It should be noted that Season 13 repositioned itself from the nadir of the prior year, changing not just by losing Stabler and gaining Hispanic Stabler and Hotlanta Gambling Lady Stabler. The new showrunner, Warren Leight, toned down the excesses. No more magic robots. Only half as many out of nowhere murders. Leight went so far as to execute noted “really, someone named that is on the credits of a show that has nothing to do with Snoop Dogg” legend Speed Weed in front of the entire writing staff, just to show there was a new, more melodramatic sheriff in town. While Season 13 wasn’t, um, “good”, episodes like “Bully” illustrate why changes needed to happen. I had a rough go of trying to summarize and explain whatever the hell they intended this to be because it all sounds like somebody telling you a half-remembered story about something that happened to a buddy of yours while he was on peyote three years ago. Instead of smooth transitions between separate events or proper linking for repercussions of an inciting incident, inevitably the best one can do is “yeah, I guess, fuck it, I don’t know”. Somehow blood falling onto a canvas turns into an evidence obfuscating postmortem anal imbibing a man learned from his mother. Your guess is as good as mine.

In a way, that poster image says more about the film than I ever could. Also, “one of America’s most wanted”? DID THAT MONKEY KILL JOHN WALSH’S SON?!

If Dunston Checks In was a clusterfuck of Marxian slobs v. snobs farce mixed with an orangutan that got fucked up on champagne, then Monkey Trouble is a full-length lesson from asshole parents to stupid children that technically qualifies as a film. Much like in real life according to indisputable news gathering service Internet Movie Database, Eva really wants a pet, in this case a dog. But Susan Sarandon (played by Mimi Rogers) doesn’t think she can take care of a pet on her own, especially since she refuses to help out with her baby half-brother she totally never asked for. To make matters more narratively convenient, Tim Robbins (Tappy Tibbons from Requiem for a Dream, the supervillain Hourglass in Superhero Movie) is allergic to dogs. Tim Robbins is always having sinus problems in this movie, even when there are no dogs in the vicinity; combine that with his occupation as a police lieutenant and I’m thinking there’s a whole other plot going on with Tim Robbins being Bad Lieutenant. I say a family friendly flick about a kid finding a monkey and getting into shenanigans needs a gritty police drug addiction subplot, just like a gritty police story about abuse of authority and spiraling vices could use an interstitial about a Capuchin monkey creating lighthearted mischief. Speaking of which, I learned two major things from Monkey Trouble: people in California are never, ever surprised or shocked by the presence of a monkey outside of the traditional confines (zoo, circus, preserve, Greek restaurant, etc.) and the 90s was rife with adorable primates posing as entertainers while actually operating as thieves. First Dunston Fucks The Prime Minister’s Wife or whatever it was called and now this. Did I miss something? Did the 90s feature a persistent crime spree of old world ethnics using apes and monkeys to bilk people of their valuables and it’s just been overshadowed in pop culture by things like Monica Lewinsky, the Unabomber and Surge? I feel like there are two distinct periods in American history: the period of organ grinders and the period of civil rights. The two do not and cannot crossover. In the same year he played The Wolf in Pulp Fiction, Harvey Keitel portrays Azro, the aforementioned alcoholic organ grinder Gypsy who lives in a trailer/caravan with his monkey accomplice and I guess he has an estranged wife and child, the film is rather vague and I’ve not yet tracked down the fabled 187 minute director’s cut on Criterion laserdisc. When it comes to villains of kids movies, Azro is really fucking low on the list. The Wet Bandits are the Hillside Stranglers compared to him. I get that you can’t make them too imposing or too complex and they’ve got to be susceptible to pratfalls Michael Richards would call broad and simpering, but I felt embarrassed for everyone every time Harvey Keitel appeared on screen. Keitel also claimed he took the role for his daughter’s sake. Monkey Trouble should qualify as child abuse.

The soundtrack features some of the most atrocious white boy rap of the 1990s, which is a feat worth noting. Remember Quo? Of course you don’t.

So Thora Birch hooks up with this monkey (“hook up” in the friend sense, not in the Thora Birch and her father sense) and the film becomes a collection of scenes of the kid learning how to take care of a monkey while going to elaborate measures to hide the monkey’s presence from her friends, family and outsiders. I guess there are what UN inspectors would determine are “jokes”, like the monkey shitting in the sink and pissing on the floor, but it’s still rather tiresome. She names the monkey “Dodger”, because Eva wears a red baseball cap (unofficial, mind you) representing the Los Angeles Dodgers. Dodger is a terrible monkey name. His original name was Fingers and that’s even worse. You name a mobster Fingers, not a monkey. Possibly a monkey who’s a mobster. Christ, that gives me a bad flashback to Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation… The film depicts 90s California as facilitating an easy and readily available support system for monkey ownership, as evidenced by a pet store that allows Eva to leave the monkey there during school and a librarian who doesn’t even charge the kid for photocopies (although for that last one, the librarian’s clearly intimidated by Dodger, no photocopies might’ve meant no more face in her situation). The need to hide Dodger from everyone forces Eva to become the opposite of what Susan Sarandon complained about at the beginning, as she cleans up her room and feigns interest in her family to deflect attention away from her and the monkey who’s literally on her back. (I bet one of the writers thought of that, smiled and jerked himself off for 5 minutes.) She’s defensive and paranoid all the time, at which point I realized that owning a monkey was a metaphor for street drugs. Playing with a monkey also results in a lot of giggling and a weird smell on your person. Monkey Trouble is the new Reefer Madness.

A true professional, Harvey insisted on real whiskey in these scenes, no matter how many takes they had to do.

Now, I know the question at the front of your mind: what’s the Italian mafia is up to? In easily the most superfluous subplot in cinematic history, Harvey Keitel receives a contract from the mob to use his monkey to fleece a dead woman’s belongings during an estate auction. I’ll admit my mafia information is limited to The Sopranos, some true crime books and The Godfather Part III, but do they regularly outsource to performers they find at the boardwalk? Was the infamous Iceman originally a caricature artist who impressed some goombahs with his detailed and precise huge headed small bodied people driving a dune buggy sketches? Ostensibly entanglement with the mob gives Keitel more incentive to track down his runaway monkey, but he doesn’t need more incentive. There’s a hard R version of Monkey Trouble from his perspective; he’s an alcoholic dresses like a gay pirate just struggling to make ends meet, his own self-destructive and controlling nature destroying all his personal relationships to the point of his own son having neither respect nor pity for him and now his fucking monkey is missing. What I’m saying is strip out the Thora Birch scenes and Monkey Trouble is The Wrestler. Anyway, these goombahs are Corky Romano level of nonthreatening and intelligence insulting, with a frequently alluded to “boss” that’s never actually seen. It’s built up a bit and goes nowhere, which is a recurring theme in this piece of shit. There are so many things left unexplained, ambiguous or confusing, like the character of Tessa. Tessa is a teenage girl who appears most often to push the baby’s stroller, so you’d think she’s the babysitter, but she also attends the family meals, suggesting she might be Tim Robbins’ daughter from a previous marriage, though no one explicitly treats her like a daughter, a stepdaughter, a stepsister, etc. Whatever role she served in the plot must’ve been excised in the scripting process or the editing process, leaving her a vestigial presence. Maybe she’s their live-in female sex companion. They do live on the left coast, after all, and the Sarandon/Robbins coupling was known for their hatred of America and its values…

This was originally even more risque, but the MPAA threatened to give it an NC-17.

I’ll give the filmmakers credit over Dunston Checks In: they seem to actually give a fuck about the primate they’re portraying. Dunston was basically a hairy human with Christlike agility; he smoked, drank, wore clothing, and people consistently failed to address him as an ape or orangutan, instead slurring the guy with a litany of “monkey” and “gorilla” references. Right off the bat Azro corrects the mobsters that call Dodger an “ape” and Eva learns actual information about Capuchin monkeys in how they live, what they eat, how they behave, all delivered in a voiceover that downright threatens to be educational. Amurri does right the ship before that happens, though, with the beloved kids movie contrivance of the kid and her monkey pal managing to get a weekend by themselves when her father’s busy flyin’ whirlybirds on his weekend visitation and she fails to tell Susan Sarandon that. Uh oh, the dad’s fridge is empty and Eva’s got no money! Thus, Monkey Trouble teaches children a lesson: if you’ve got no food and no money, busk on the boardwalk until you drop. It’s at this point Eva realizes her pet’s been lifting wallets and shiny objects the whole time, including the improbable early scene where Keitel has Dodger ransack the Sarandon apartment as a good faith demonstration for the mobsters. The predisposition Dodger has towards thievery is the titular monkey trouble of the movie, and Eva solves the problem in the equivalent of a one day sexual harassment or sensitivity training seminar. Years of pickpocketing undone by a nine year old girl who’ll grow up to be the best and least successful actress in Ghost World. Cult deprogrammers and sexual reorientation therapists have nothing on this little girl. Unfortunately, Azro traces their steps with little difficulty, finding witnesses to the monkey’s adventures and easily obtaining personal information from a disgruntled grocery clerk. There’s also a sequence within Eva’s foray into busking that involves a man/monkey chase culminating in Dodger on a hang glider…I think if I explained it any further I’d kill brain cells I plan on sacrificing to a glass of Pinot Noir later tonight. Suffice it to say, you can all cross “seeing a monkey on a hang glider” off your bucket list. You’re welcome.

I’m pretty sure this was how Cory Lidle died.

You have to admire Azro’s detective skills; few men who smell of bourbon and feces (some monkey, some not) manage to do so much with so little. I’d like to take a moment to talk about my favorite non-hang gliding scene, which is when Azro confronts Eva at her father’s house. All throughout, when people ask where she obtained Dodger, Eva’s said she got him from the Carribean, the land of pirates. (Monkey Trouble predicted the Johnny Depp/Al Gore Disney franchise.) So when she sees Azro peering through the window, she screams “A PIRATE!”. Of course. I don’t know why I didn’t make the connection before. See, I always considered Gypsies to be Jews with worse publicity, but in fact they’re the pirates of the land. Or maybe we ought to rename pirates “Sea Gypsies”. “Watch Tom Hanks struggle to fend off Sea Gypsies in Captain Phillips!” In the lowest stakes and least propulsive chase sequence of all time, Eva discovers that much like Samson losing his hair, a Gypsy loses power if you unhitch his caravan. When Thora Birch is rebuffed by a cabbie who doesn’t accept fare from minors, she has the wonderfully terrible line “I’m not a minor, I’m in a major hurry!” and the nose picking 7 year olds in the audience learn that cab drivers worship the almighty dollar, with speed determined by how big a wad of cash you shove in the guy’s face. Other lessons learned from the film: 1. Boardwalks are employment centers for grifters. 2. 80% of taking care of a monkey is providing a steady supply of diapers (in one glorious continuity fuckup, Dodger leaves the gypsy caravan wearing little monkey diaper pants but when Eva finds him he’s starkers. I imagine a night on the mean streets of LA forced the little guy to chow down on his own pants for sustenance). 3. To teach responsibility, a child should be given an exotic animal with several open warrants. Fuck sending your little tax break to “public school”; make ‘em watch this shit until they know every Quo song by heart.

Thora Birch has been caught in much more compromising positions with her father. Not only was/is he her manager, he’s a former porn…well, not “star”… He was a porn character actor. Sort of a James Rebhorn of getting blown.

Much like JFK’s assassination, the chickens come home to roost when Susan Sarandon uncovers Eva’s lies and the cache of stolen valuables from Dodger’s crime spree. She and the dad compare stories, holes are apparent, they try to pull a quick intervention on the kid, who blames all the discrepancies on a monkey that’s now been kidnapped by Azro. Look, maybe a found monkey is believable, maybe a Gypsy in an urban area is believable, but combining the two into one explanation sounds like a not very good Michael Crichton novel. In a show of blatant favoritism to the new kid on the scene, Sarandon only buys Eva’s story when the little brother says his first word, “monkey”. While the dad sees it as the kid referring to the little monkey doll on top of Eva’s bed, Sarandon takes the word of an infant as bond and is proven correct when Dodger comes out of hiding. This is another problem with the picture; to accurately convey a sense of danger or suspense in the mean old Gypsy, he needs to be able to successfully capture Dodger. Here the monkey seems to be on par with Anthony Fremont, and it wouldn’t have strained credibility had Harvey Keitel ended up in a fucking cornfield. Indeed, the climax of the film sees Dodger having to save Eva from the clutches of the Roma Menace. How, you ask? Well, things are back to one with both her and Keitel at the park where she met the monkey in the first place. It’s a real Lassie situation where Dodger leads the family and a decent contingent of the LAPD there, with Tim Robbins realizing he can’t find his gun. CUT TO THE FUCKING CAPUCHIN WITH A HANDGUN, FIRING THE HANDGUN AT HARVEY KEITEL SUCCESSFULLY. Tim Robbins is fucking spending the next two years at a desk, if not outright fired. There’s degrees of fucking up as a law enforcement officer; excessive force earns a “eh, probably deserved it”; killing an unarmed black guy means some TV appearances and fat stacks donated by the KKK; losing your firearm to the goddamn 2 foot tall monkey who previously burgled your house without your knowledge is a one way ticket to the unemployment line. Fuck, Mike Logan got exiled to Staten Island for a decade for punching a politician who he knew murdered someone! If Logan had lost his gun to an adorable little primate McCoy would’ve gone for the death penalty. Wisely eschewing an homage to the finale of Reservoir Dogs, Amurri has the cops arrest the Gypsy (amusingly before the two worst mobsters can, I don’t know, give him a swirly or whatever) and a custody dispute over the monkey between Eva and Son of Gypsy that lasts 90 seconds, isn’t earned narratively or emotionally and seems to be the product of someone on set pointing out “hey, uh, that monkey actually belonged to someone before…”. Good on Dodger for picking Thora Birch, because if Gypsies aren’t using monkeys to steal they’re using ‘em for a damn fine stew.

I know what you’re thinking. “Did he fire six shots or only five?” Well, to tell you the truth in all this excitement I kinda lost track myself. But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world and would blow you head clean off, you’ve gotta ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky?” Well, do ya, punk?

As Tim Robbins lacks an allergy to South American monkeys, Eva’s allowed to keep Dodger and uses him to resolve a long running subplot of such importance I’m mentioning it for the first time now: the show and tell presentation. That seems to be Eva’s main impetus for wanting a pet, to wow her fellow third graders (the fucking Dragons of prepubescence) with a creature of verve, grace and majesty. If not a rottweiler, why the fuck not a monkey? Dialogue suggests she’s put off her turn for a while, as the teacher tells her she can push it back to next month. The suggestion to use the baby brother is rebuffed; Eva notes the infant’s a “nerd”, which goes to illustrate anti-Doctor Who prejudice existed in the 90s too. By the final scene of Eva introducing her brother AND her monkey to the class, Amurri is trying to tell the viewer that the main character has changed, has grown. The tenuous family of Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Eva, the baby and whatever the fuck Tessa’s supposed to be has solidified thanks to the glue (or “Phil Hartman”) of the family, a monkey who likes brightly colored hats. (Note: Turning Capuchins into glue is illegal in all states except Virginia.) I like that the director left shit open for a sequel, and given the skillset the movie gives Dodger the possible paths are numerous. Dodger could heal the wounds of the 1994 strike by joining LA’s starting rotation after Ramon Martinez falls victim to a Gypsy curse. I think he and Hideo Nomo would have great comedic chemistry. Maybe the government shutdown gets resolved when the monkey shows Clinton and Gingrich how to really have a good time. Monkey Trouble 2: Dodger Conquers Mars Because Why Not. It could still happen, a sequel. Thora Birch probably needs the money and the public is primed to accept a new primate actor for Dodger. Speaking of which, the monkey actor Finster is one of the few such thespians to have a multi-credit IMDB page. He (or she, there’s no dong shots) was uncredited in Cutthroat Island. Probably did it as a favor to Renny Harlin.

“And so, with the successful show and tell presentation, Eva was accepted into Harvard.”

I love that at one point Ridley Scott was going to direct Monkey Trouble (indeed, he’s an executive producer on the finished product). Sandwiched between 1492 and White Squall would’ve been a fucking comedy about a kid learning with great monkey comes great responsibility; doing that would’ve likely put him on Tony Scott’s path. Even without Ridley behind the camera the cast and crew is wildly overqualified for this sort of thing; usually the point of “a kid and his or her animal” movies is to spend all the capital on making sure the animal hits its marks and doesn’t bite anyone and everything from cinematography to acting to music can be slashed to garbage because, hey, cute little monkey. One of the mobsters played the beat cop in Harvey Keitel’s Bad Lieutenant! (Those between between take conversations must’ve been fun. “So, Argo, what you got? Some shitty little nephew who’s not old enough for Taxi Driver?”) Keitel shouldn’t have to debase himself like this; nothing would change if you replaced him with Carrot Top or repurposed clips of Charles Grodin from Beethoven’s Second Round of Rabies Shots. Nobody can save the embarrassing script so why bother hiring the likes of Mimi Rogers? Even little Thora Birch was taking a step down from Patriot Games and Hocus Pocus. The monkey’s the only one who doesn’t come out looking lousy, and even then he suffers from a shitty voice performance from Frank Welker. The production appears to only have been able to afford about six monkey sounds, robbing Dodger of the required emotional range for the character to resonate.

Wardrobe borrowed from the short-lived “Cruising on the Seven Seas” off-Broadway show.

In spite of the above vitriol, Monkey Trouble is worth a look if you have literally nothing else going on in your life. Finster the monkey is cute as shit (RIP) and somebody uploaded it in full on YouTube. I imagine a reboot of the movie would have Dodger bootlegging movies, since no one expects a monkey to hold a digital camera steady. Those interested in seeing the underlying causes behind the recent upswing in anti-Roma sentiment in Europe owes it to themselves to watch Harvey Keitel’s performance. Otherwise, just go play some Donkey Kong Country, coincidentally also originally released in 1994. You play a gorilla who rides around on rhinos and frogs and kills lizards who stole your hoard of bananas that never seems to start rotting.

It never happened, which was okay, because Smallville had the tendency to really mess up when it came to the storytelling toward the end.  It used characters from all throughout Superman’s canon and transplanted them to his formative years, leaving me to wonder just what the hell he was going to do when he finally donned the cape anyway.

But I digress.  Back to Gotham.  The closest thing to Batman on TV since the animated series that formed many people’s opinions of what the Dark Knight was, or could be.  But where the cartoons took their initial influence from the Tim Burton movies of the 1990’s, this new show has Christopher Nolan’s baby batter all over it.  Not only did Nolan create the template for DC Comics to follow in the modern era with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, he might as well have lent the creative team the costumes and sets for the new show.

That’s one great thing about this new show- Gotham has an epic feel and look to it.  Where Starling City in Arrow is cinematic, this not only feels like a sprawling metropolis (hehe), but it has the added Batty quality.  It looks like a movie almost, and it works better than some movies do (cough*Fantastic Four*cough*Green Lantern).

Being a big old Bat-fan, I’m gonna watch this show and recap it for all of you, and give my thoughts on it every week.  We can go over questions, comments, concerns, and in this first recap touch on more of the overall impressions I got watching the thing (I promise, not all recaps will be as bloated and self-important as this one).

What’s it called:  Let’s give it up for whoever names these things.  Episode one is called “Pilot.”

What the hell it’s about: It’s kind of the white bread version of Training Day, except there’s no one as charismatic as Denzel.  New detective James Gordon is hot on the case of finding criminals and new ways to intently stare at people, while making a promise to a young boy.  Being a police procedural in a comic book world, Gordon’s first case is the most famous of them all- the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents, and his promise is to young Bruce to find the killer.

Gordon’s partner, Harvey Bullock doesn’t want the case, because it’s too much of a hassle and he’s kind of involved with the people who might’ve ultimately been behind it.  Renee Montoya does want the case (like seeing her in this!).  Long story short, gangsta Fish Moony (way to name one of the only women, Fish) helps Bullock frame a big dude without shiny shoes (watch the ep) so he can close the case faster.

Gordon is onto it, but Montoya thinks he’s in on it, and they should have had a scene where everyone pulls a guy on each other in some kind of standoff.  Oh, and Montoya goes to warn Gordon’s fiancée he might not be on the up and up.  Apparently Montoya and Barbara Kean have a past, but there are not many clues.  I’m thinking lesbian love fest, and Barbara was maybe a little criminal…who needed to be cuffed.

Through trying to find out who really killed the Waynes, Gordon ends up almost butchered in a hog plant with Bullock (who has a shining knight moment or two), until saved by Moony’s boss Carmine Falcone.  Falcone kind of gives us a little info that he knew Gordon’s dad, and the guy might have been in the mob’s pocket.  Gordon is told to later prove himself to make it look like he’s on the take already by shooting a lackey and dumping him in the river.  Of course, he fakes it, and he’s safe for now until he intently stares down another mob guy in what I’m guessing is the next episode.

Jr Super Villain(s) of the Week:  Oswald Cobblepot, who later in Gotham life becomes The Penguin.  First glance from the commercials he reminded me of the younger, creepy brother in the movie Wedding Crashers.  I pictured him running around whining, trying to bang Gordon, all the while his monocle stays firmly attached to his eye socket.  Instead, he ends up being a kosher looking meth-head with a slight prosthetic for a nose, and a major anger management problem.  And no monocle.  Yet.  He’s the lackey of Fish Moony who Gordon is supposed to kill.  Oswald was the dude who snitched to Montoya about the frame up, see.  Apparently the man who walks like a penguin (which he is called because of a disabled walk, and a name he doesn’t like) has designs on pushing Fish out.  Get it?  Penguin?  Fish?  See what they did there?

The episode starts out with Selina Kyle, your future Catwoman, stealing milk for some giant ass alley cat.  Coincidentally, she’s in the alley in which Bruce Wayne’s parents bite the big one.  Her role from there on out is to look like the best dressed homeless stalker as she goes where Bruce goes, slinking around like a, you guessed it, cat.  Must have been an easy paycheck.  No lines?  Sign me up!

There’s also a brief appearance by Riddler as his former self, Edward Nygma.  He’s the resident CSI weirdo at Gotham Police Department, and he’s already speaking in riddles.  Bullock hates them, and Gordon figures it out.  There’s some brains behind them intent stares.

The last little cameo is wee Ivy Pepper, who is already fawning over flora.  Or is it fauna?  Anyway, the chick likes plants.  She is the future Poison Ivy, whose name should be Pamela Isley, but the producers felt they apparently had to knock us over the head with ‘ivy’ and wouldn’t get who she was by her petting leaves her whole screen time.  Ivy’s dad is the guy who gets framed for the Waynes’ murder.  She apparently has a tough life, given her hair is messy and her mom has a black eye.

Bruce Wayne grows body hair, becomes (Bat)man:  Might be a little disrespectful to speak ill of Brucey and his situation this week, since this part of the story is the death of Ma and Pa Wayne at the hands of Nameless Street Thug (or is he?).  Every Batman story, even if it’s not about Batman, starts with the death of the rich doctor and his pearl-laden wife.  Here, we get the cable version of the Batman Begins scene in which Gordon puts his coat on Wayne’s shoulders to comfort him.

We see Bruce once or twice.  There’s his parents’ funeral, and later when Gordon stares intently, and tells the kid his parents’ murderer is still out there.  I actually think the episode would have worked with slightly less Bruce.  And he kind of rubbed me the wrong way.  What 12-year-old talks like that?  Better figure out the dialogue for young Bruce a little better, and please try to change him from the version of Bruce that’s a dick to Alfred.  I would have slapped the shit out of that kid if he snapped at me the way he snapped at Pennyworth.  Snapped.

Foreshadow like it’s going out of style:  This thing is already running long.  See all previous sections for oodles of foreshadow.

What the hell is next: A lot from the looks of it.  If the preview for next week is to be believed, just about every character’s arcs from this episode are continued in the next.  Let’s hope they don’t scatter themselves to much by trying to follow too many threads at once.  Pick a theme or subject or character and run with it for an hour.

The true test for this show will be the ratings.  Even being about Gotham City, and the best rogues gallery in comics, Fox as a channel is never kind to genre shows.  The premiere of this, and the continuation of Sleepy Hollow on a night not meant to kill programs is encouraging, but nerds should never forget the likes of Firefly or the recent Almost Human.

The one drawback of this show is the focus, like I said.  If I have to follow eight plot lines every episode, I think I might abandon ship.  It’ll be too cluttered, and the narrative will suffer for sure.  We’ve seen it before so many times.

Also, it’ll be a fine line creatively, serving up any kind of whimsical story or humor in a setting we know is only destined to get worse.  None of these characters are on a good path, and despite the trend to “go dark” in comics related stories, this town is gonna have to go REALLY dark to necessitate the rise of the Dark Knight (the rise of the, get it?!? Cause…of the Nolan…oh nevermind).  Point being, it could be one depressing ass program.

Here’s a quick catch up of the Johnson clan’s latest adventures; Zeb learned that Axl and his family are gods, Anders was irritating, Mike was really boring, Rob woke up from a coma and Gaia has a boyfriend now. For reference; Mike is Ullr, god of games and hunting, Anders is Bragi, god of poetry, Olaf is Baldr, god of light, Ty is Hoor, god of winter, Axl is Odin, allfather of the gods, Stacey is Fulla, Frigg’s handmaiden, Michele is Sjofn, goddess of love, Eva is Frigg, marriage goddess, Eva’s dad is Loki, the flimflammer, and Ingrid is Snotra, goddess of wisdom.

Episode 9, “Hunting Reindeer on Slippery Rocks,” starts with a montage of Michelle and Stacey prepping Eva for a special date. Anders is prepping his baby brother, Axl, for a special date. I wonder if these two totally different events are related. Axl and Eva have dinner at Dracula’s abandoned New Zealand home. It looks like a set from the Hannibal series. Their date starts out a little awkward. She complains about her dad being a prick, he’s basically Anders but the same, so naturally Axl decides to approach her dad for her without telling her. Her dad is a lawyer, a charming, trickster, Norse god lawyer. A Loki-like lawyer if you will. He scares Axl away, who scurries back to his grandpa/cousin, Olaf.

The brothers are curious about how Ty and Dawn have relations. It’s a little strange. Ty’s skin is cold all the time thus she assumes he has a health problem. So he sleeps and does other things in a winter coat. They can’t go for too long though because she’ll freeze to death. I wonder if this will return in anyway. Back to the main story, Loki visits his daughter, Eva, which upsets her. She assumes Axl made caused this. Axl tells her dad is a little bit of a sly trickster with a terrible soul patch. To spite him they get engaged. Gaia and Zeb are confused as they should be. Ty and Dawn are planning a tropical vacation but he loves the cold. How will they resolve this? They are still great and adorable. They get down to some sexy business. Afterwards she lays her finger on his neck as they fall asleep and nearly freezes to death. Ty discovers the horror in the morning.

Things get real boring here. Mike has to do boring Mike stuff. Loki gives him a marriage contract (a trick mayhaps) because of silly god stuff. Mike is skeptical. Olaf the oracle can’t read it, it’s in runes. He calls them ‘dancing trees.’ Olaf has to ask Ingrid but his brothers don’t trust her. She also thinks the runes are ‘dancing trees.’ Big problem who can read runes, Ingrid’s former boss, according to her it’s a perfectly, not suspicious at all, no tricks, safe ordinary marriage contract. It’s a bunch of traditional Norse god stuff. Ty is flipping out over Dawn. Zeb sneaks into Axl’s marriage contract signing. It’s a bunch of weird god stuff. Mike knows Zeb is there (then he gets nearly incinerated by the grill), the end.

Axl and Eva’s date. Hannibal was nice enough to let them use his home.

Episode 10, “Like Jesus, Only Cooler,” Gaia and Axl patiently wait to see Zeb. Ty walks by with flowers. He breaks up with Dawn after giving her flowers. You know the classic, not confusing thing everyone does when breaking up. Ty walks out in a very dramatic fashion. Gaia and Axl finally act on their vigorous, regressed passions. Axl has reservations about the wedding, what will he do? The gods and goddesses are getting ready for a wedding party but while Mike is prepping, Val drops a truth bomb. She’s pregnant with Rob’s baby, the twist that no one saw coming.

The party is a formal affair where even Olaf is dressed up. Ty is very intense and cold. It gets worse when Eva arrives. They see each other and something happens. There’s a special connection between them, this won’t come up later. Every time Axl tries to talk to Eva, something keeps getting in the way. Axl lifts Anders ban on sex and he instantly goes for Michele. Ty and Eva argue very passionately but something weird happens. All the food around her decays as if it’s dying. That’s weird, is it a sign, yep. The boss goddess is finally given a name…Freya, goddess of prosperity. Axl cancels the wedding but that contract had a twist if a Johnson bro doesn’t marry Eva, Mike will die. I don’t see the problem but they want to save Mike for some dumb reason.

Eva is not Frigg, she’s Hel, goddess of the underworld and death. She’s overjoyed. Now, she’s queen of the Goths. Loki knew this the whole time, typical Loki. Ty has furious sex with Eva. Gaia and Axl’s magic is fading unfortunately, she leaves with Jacob to sort things out. Val and Rob leave to start a new interesting life together. Zeb is back. Ty marries Eva because they’re the same; moody and cold. Olaf, Axl, and Mike keep searching for Frigg. Mike decides to use his powers finally and stop being lame. Anders meets with Freya. He tries to bang her but she reveals herself to be…his mother, the end…of season 1.

The Bros leaving Loki’s. Ty is the vampire in the middle.

I have a few thoughts on these episodes. By far the best episode so far was the finale. It was the type of crazy insanity I was hoping the whole show would have been. Tonally the last episodes felt like Big Trouble in Little China, where it started out relatively sane but things get exponentially crazier as it went along. The rest of the season however was like a rollercoaster with a couple of small, vaguely exciting hills every so often but not very often though. Mike finally wasn’t the blandest person on the planet. The big reveal of Eva being Hel wasn’t the shocking reveal they would be; given she’s a Goth, she’s a butcher, looks like Robert Smith, and wears exclusively black and fishnets.

Don’t get the wrong idea there were problems. The main thing that irks me is the mystery of who pays for Axl and Zeb’s rent is still unsolved however there’s a crack in the case. Zeb casually mentioned he flips burger all day but Axl is still a mystery. Axl’s behavior in these doesn’t fit a 21 year old. I get it’s about him growing up and accepting responsibility but he could of maybe gotten a job at same point to pay his fuckin rent. Who pays his rent? I just want to know who pays his bills. WHO?! This can be solved with just a line of dialogue, that’s all! At one point Ty was wearing a Jay Leno suit, denim on denim on denim. That being said, Ty and Dawn’s romance aka my favorite thing about the show was killed by the death goddess appropriately. It was clever but a little on the nose. There was too much Zeb. No one likes Zeb. He adds nothing. I don’t see the point of him. Axl’s flat should have been just him and Gaia, slowly falling for each other. There was too much story. Too much happened too fast. It felt like building up to this point, they suddenly remembered that they needed to wrap up the story with the last two episodes left and threw out too many ideas. That would explain the tortoise crawl of the first 4/5 of the season morphing into the rocket ship to Nicholas Ca-ageville.

Eva, Queen of the Goths.

It took me about 6 episodes to finally get into it. I liked it but it wasn’t great. That being said, it moved at a good pace. It never slogged too bad. My favorite characters were Dawn and the goddesses, specifically Eva. Where the brothers Johnson (don’t be gross) are stupid and petty. They don’t look like brothers at all. The goddesses, Michelle, Stacey, Freya (her human name wasn’t said), Eva, and Ingrid were actually cunning, smart and far more interesting than the dude bros ever were.

Anders being a douchebag can’t be stated enough, he’s a terrible person inside and out. I barely scratched the surface of him being a horrid, borderline sociopath. The overall story was dull and not fulfilling. It just dragged and felt empty. I never felt any dread or fear for the characters besides Ty and Dawn. There were spots of interesting stuff happening but it always veered back into stupid pretty quick. For example in the 9^th episode Zeb saw the contract ceremony from many feet away in the bushes but he knew exactly what was happening and saw every little detail. It made no sense and was never mentioned again. The acting was good enough except for Zeb. My final verdict on the series…I enjoyed it but won’t revisit it anytime soon.

Now, the real question, the most important question of all…Will I recap the rest of the series? I won’t say it’s a definite no. However, it’s not likely but maybe in the future. All seven of you loyal readers that actually read these, thank you.

Richard Belzer and Ice-T are essentially the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the SVU Universe (SVUniverse if you want to be an idiot, and Rosenmunch and Guilden-T if you want to be what’s wrong with America). In earlier seasons they have more of a role, but as time goes on they’re marginalized in order to focus on such shitty storylines as Stabler’s rage issues, his daughter’s crazy affliction, Benson’s angst about being a rape baby of a drunk and her nonsensical connection with a half-brother whom she met while he was under suspicion of rape. They’re in the space outside the panels and it makes their appearances all the more appealing. Watching SVU is a war of attrition and you have to take all the little victories you can get. “Anchor” is one of the few spotlights on Ice-T’s character, Odafin Tutuola and it, obviously, deals with the murders of minority children. You want nuance? Fuck you. Black guy gets black guy stories, just like Munch is on hand whenever the Jewish community is involved in something. That’s the only reason to have minority characters. “Anchor”, a Season 11 joint, is stupid as shit, but it’s a welcome change of pace from the Aryan Glower Hour.

What do you do if you have a black supporting character and want to devote an hour to him? If you’re Dick Wolf and his merry band of spider monkeys, you make it race-based hate crime case. Sure, Stabler and Benson would be mad about these murders. But Ice-T cares even more, expressed through anger. Who a particular case focuses on has to do with who’d get the most righteous indignation out of it. So Stabler usually takes the lead in child cases (he’s a father and can reflect on the case via his shitty kids), Benson’s got vanilla flavored rape (dead alcoholic mother, plus she’s a rapebaby), and Munch has assisted suicide and Jewsploitation ripped from the headlines. Cragen gets nothing because he’s devolving into a tortoise and those winter months get him pretty slow and sleepy. This choice also allows for some soft social commentary without having to actually make a point. A prostitute attacked by her pimp (whoo gratuitous violence towards women!) stumbles upon a little girl dead body. That her shirt says “Jesus loves me” allows for a perfect disaffected cop one-liner to close out the cold open (“Somebody else sure didn’t”). Give ‘em a joke before the credits, and if the joke doesn’t work it’s still a grim reminder that Ice-T sees horrors every day, except for when he just hangs around the precinct house to offer color commentary on the main detectives’ investigation.

I want to see an episode about this panda. Pandaemics are serious matters.

So some dude is going around and killing anchor babies with a chain in an ill-conceived effort to speed up the deportation process. It’s a hot button topic SVU covers, whether or not being born in the United States should guarantee you citizenship. I like to think that whether you’re on the compassionate, emphatic side or the stupid, racist side, we can all agree that Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is not the place for a thoughtful examination of the issue or even a vaguely competent understanding of the issue. But I won’t get ahead of myself, because much of “Anchor” focuses not on the sociopolitics of immigration but Ice-T’s mounting frustration that no one gives a fuck about these murdered kids. But since the show doesn’t want to intentionally make any of the principal characters look bad, the apathy about the case comes from “the brass”, “the suits”, “the authority who treats us cops like we treat citizens suspected of a crime”. It feels less like a comment on how minority victims aren’t as publicized as white victims and more playing to Ice-T’s two modes of acting: anger and confusion. Sit him in front of a roomba and he’ll demonstrate both at the same time.

A squirrel in the first week and now a raccoon in the third? What is with SVU’s obsession with mischievous small mammals?

Through a couple montages of policework rarely shown on the program, like canvassing the neighborhood with fliers and looking through paperwork and pushing paperwork off a desk in frustration, Fin finds a name that matches the name of a guy he busted earlier but let go because that hippie liberal lawyer John Larroquette (Night Court, alcoholism) didn’t want to press charges. The cops find his apartment riddled with Carrie Matheson crazy walls and prevent him from killing a Muslim kid, truly the Unicron of immigrants to Mexicans’ Galvatron. The way Joe Thagard tries to explain his actions is pretty great. First he says he had some beers and went into the wrong apartment, then he says the Muslim parents might’ve been tied up due to their “terrorist pals”. From there it’s a hop and a jump to “I only got one word for you: coon”. Alexandra Cabot of Conviction infamy thinks Ice-T’s gonna Stabler the guy, but Cragen is certain he won’t do anything. I like that this presupposes that Fin is routinely hurled racial slurs and behaves like one of the Queen’s Guard.

I’m certain at Dick Wolf Writing Summer Camp, writers for any Law & Order branded show are taught “sensationalism before sense”. That’s the only explanation between John Larroquette deciding to use a racist serial child killer as a means to show the corrosive effects of objectionable political speech on cable. It’s like a lawyer wanting to get Son of Sam off just to prove the existence of talking dogs. It’s completely asinine. John Larroquette is a great actor and the first season of his eponymous show is a gem of a sitcom, but he does not do himself any favors by cranking up the Southern accent from “mild” to “Foghorn Leghorn”. So he argues Thagard was not responsible for his own actions, and Gordon Garrison, a thinly veiled version of everyone on FOX News played by Bruce McGill (Animal House, the fat Kremling in Donkey Kong Country), is the real responsible party. Look, TV can make you hate things, buy things and write fanfiction about things, but a premeditated plan to become a racist Cenobite who chains small children in bondage until they’re dead enough to put in rainwater barrels would require some Manchurian Candidate-esque level subliminal brainwashing. The thing is “Anchor” doesn’t explicitly say Larroquette’s defense is “not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect”, which would still confine him to a mental hospital after trial if the brainwashing gambit worked.

Cragen’s just happy he’s finally got a case of non-Stabler police brutality coming out of his precinct.

“Anchor” uses the courtroom much more extensively than the first two episodes I’ve covered, and this episode goes a long way towards explaining why SVU eschews the second half of the Law & Order formula with every passing season. This ‘law’ we speak of is more difficult to write than police detectin’, so they have two options: eliminate it altogether or make it as cartoonish and stupid as the cop side of shit. While becoming a cartoon, a caricature of reality, makes for some good fun, something to watch while drunk or stoned, it doesn’t mean good television. Gordon Garrison, who’s basically J. Jonah Jameson without subtlety, becomes subject of an extended Cabot rant that calls him an insignificant loser incapable of doing anything to incite violent action, which is not so much asking a witness questions but… I don’t even know what! Cabot destroys a rock solid case with forensic evidence, circumstantial evidence and a confession by stumbling into proving Larroquette’s point. She baits Garrison enough that a street brawl breaks out in the courtroom between his supporters and his detractors. More evidence that having glasses doesn’t make you smart. Other evidence: me.

I want that Bruce McGill background in my apartment immediately. LOOK AT THAT SHIT.

John Larroquette’s character is all over the place. I’m not sure what they were going for, but giving him a backstory about a Klansman for a father doesn’t help much. He says the contradiction between his father and his KKK beliefs is what made him believe good men could be taken over by evil through no fault of their own. A guy who regales his kid with lynching stories isn’t some fucking adrift sheep, he’s an asshole who cared for his son because his wife didn’t step out on him with a Negro. I think Larroquette showed up to set with his “I say I say” routine and the dimbulb writers wrote around it. The guy may not be beefcake, but he’s burly. He could get some punkass Ivy League dweebs in a headlock if he wanted. The jury gives a not guilty verdict on all counts because they’re idiots, but since this is SVU anyone guilty who receives the “not guilty” verdict is apt to be murdered on the courthouse steps or not long after. Tis Larroquette slays the Cenobites, telling Fin that after the verdict Thagard said to him “thanks, now I can kill more of those kids”. So, you know, vigilante justice steps up with SVU fucks up. I wonder what form of media John Larroquette’s lawyer will claim enticed him to commit murder. Oh man, I hope he doesn’t have two or more Marilyn Manson albums. One you can explain away, but once you get to Antichrist Superstar that’s fantastic brainwashing material.

Ice-T is no one’s idea of a great actor, but him taking the lead is still a breath of fresh air. In some ways he’s better than Mariska Hargitay, as his schtick is less tiresome and he starred in the superior horror film, Leprechaun in the Hood to Hargitay’s Ghoulies. I never saw Hargitay having the guts to portray a kangaroo mutant monster person! It says a lot that by Season 11 an episode can earn praise solely by not doing another fucking week of Stabler’s shitty kids and Benson’s inability to find a man or a baby or a man to put a baby in her. Yet “Anchor” could’ve gone in more interesting directions had the writers not decided the Ice-T focus was a trojan horse for incoherent, nonsensical political commentary about the immigration issue. Establishing FOX News personalities as bombastic shitheads isn’t exactly H.L. Mencken. For example, they could delve into why all the authority figures in the NYPD are all tortoise-men. Have the police determined turtles make the best administrators? Do all captains and higher eventually become turtles, due to a Gypsy curse? This shit isn’t the least bit realistic anyway, might as well become an X-Files for gluestick collectors.

“Thank Christ psychopaths refuse to give up on print!”

In general column news, my copy of Love is the Law: Book One (how presumptuous!), wrapped in the classiest of bags (a Target bag), arrived a few days ago. It’ll take me a while to read through its 105 pages and countless spelling errors and even longer for my mind to recover from reading it, so don’t expect it anytime soon, though it is inevitable. Somehow more distressingly, NetFlix is yanking all Law & Order shows from Watch Instantly, starting on the first of October. I do not know if they will return. Those who wish to join me in a ritual mass suicide protesting this offense are welcome to join. Oh wait, Sons of Anarchy won’t be over by then. Well, do the ritual mass suicide anyway and I’ll write about it, maybe.

I’ve not found any stuck together pages yet.

Episode 7 aka “Bad Things Happen,” starts where the last left off. Axl and Mike are building a house. Axl is interning there and not making money thus furthering the mystery of who pays for his rent. Some dude steals Mike’s truck but who cares Mike is boring. Axl and Zeb are hanging out later then Gaia shows up with a handsome man. It’s her boyfriend, Jacob the Jeweler. Apparently they hooked up the weekend when Axl was busy with Thor’s daughter. Gaia and Jacob go spend a lover’s weekend together. Axl and Zeb decide to drink their feelings away for the weekend instead of find jobs to pay their rent.

Axl can’t get drunk so they break into Anders apartment. Axl uses his powers to rip off the front door. Zeb is suspicious. Mike and Valerie got in a fight over money stuff. He goes to a bar and gives in finally does something interesting, uses his powers to win money. His god power is winning at games. He plays darts a little too well. Seeing people play darts is extremely boring. They did a five minute montage of not exhilarating darts.

Axl and Zeb hang out and keep drinking at Anders place. Axl still can’t get drunk enough to forget about Gaia. Suddenly three very attractive ladies stop by. They’re looking for Anders. They noticed the door was broken and saw that as an invitation, the classic sign. Zeb tries to hook up. Axl is too sad. They party for a bit. One of them pulls out a white powder. It’s “like coke” apparently. Axl and Zeb without question snort lines. Mike moved from a bar to a casino and wins a bunch of money. He gets questioned for cheating and ends up getting the cute redhead blackjack dealer fired. They hang out for the rest of night. She wants to know his secret.

The blackjack dealer challenges him to numerous arcade games and he always wins, in another boring montage. Valerie calls he ignores it. The cute redhead dealer invites him back to her place he honorably declines. Back at Anders’ place, Zeb is partied out. Anders shows up, they party. The ladies reveal their plans. They were wronged by Anders and will neuter him. Anders snorted the “coke” which was horse tranquilizer; Anders is out. Axl is still sober and handcuffed to a chair. He breaks free and saves Anders. He declares that Anders will be celibate since he’s Odin. Zeb learns Axl’s secret. Mike learns that Rob woke up from his coma, the end.

Episode 8 aka “I Can Give You Frigg,” the goddesses are having a meeting. Ingrid is late, she had a surf lesson date with Olaf. They debate on what to do about this stupid scam thing that Anders started to find Frigg, it’s not worth getting into. Basically it will expose who is of Norse blood thus finding Frigg. Olaf, Anders, and Axl are hanging out, Anders shows off his plan. I have a feeling Frigg will be important to this episode. Mike is stressed about the Rob thing. After the coma, he married Rob’s fiancée, Valerie. Anders has a plan to make money off of Rob waking up. It’s vaguely defined. Basically Valerie and Rob will be hanging out a lot and maybe rekindle their romance.

Rob and Mike hang out at the bar where the coma happened. Rob is adjusting to new technology. They talk about boring Mike stuff. The goddess Stacey visits a butcher’s shop and is mystified by the clerk. It’s Frigg. Her name’s Eva, a goth singer-songwriter/butcher. Rob moves into Mike’s home so now Olaf needs to find a new home. He goes to Anders. Michele and Stacey go see Eva perform and she’s a special lady. She might be Frigg. They keep Eva a secret.

Mike, Valerie, and Rob watch home tapes from when Val and Rob were together. Mike leaves it’s weird. Stacey, Michele, and Ingrid quit and go solo. Michele offers Anders Frigg. Ingrid sees Eva and faints. She accidently reveals where Eva is. The boss goddess tries to find steal Eva away but fails. Anders and Axl go see Eva perform. It’s Frigg. The boss goddess goes to Eva’s estranged father, Loki aka a lawyer dude.

These episodes were boring. I don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other. Mainly it’s because too much Mike. I don’t want to see his boring life anymore. I want to see Ty and Dawn’s romance grow and develop into true love. That being said, Ty and Dawn only show up once during these two. The goddesses are finally relevant to the story but too little too late the fun vacuum aka Mike is right there. I can’t put into words just how boring Mike is. I understand he’s the responsible one aka Dan McCoy aka Cyclops but at least make him interesting. I don’t care about his marriage problems. Valerie is just as boring as he is. I want her to cheat with Rob then at least something happen. The mystery of how Zeb and Axl pay for anything continues. I want answers, Who Pays Their Rent!? There still is no mention of a job or anything from them. I’m now realizing I want the show to be The Notebook or an Amanda Seyfried rom-com but replace Ryan Gosling with the Norse Winter god vampire named Ty and Rachel McAdams with the adorable and interesting Dawn. They’re the best part of the show easily. However, I can honestly say that I like this show. I never thought I would, anything is possible. It’s not great but it moves at a good pace and is interesting enough to keep my attention. I now have two episodes left of Season 1.

Next up the conclusion of season 1, “Hunting Reindeer on Slippery Rocks,” and “Every Good Quest Has a Sacrifice.”