Welcome back to Boomb Tube! Here, we will be catching you up on the week in comics TV, both through micro-reviews, as well as links to our full-length TV reviews. We also tend to review series that are dropped all at once weekly so there are a few ‘older’ shows mixed in for good measure. Are we missing your favorite show? Let us know in the comments!
Dragon Age: Absolution – “The Price of Salvation” (S1E6, Netflix)
Read our full review of the season finale by Laura Merrill.
The Flash – “Hear No Evil” (S8E02, The CW)
We begin exactly where we left off last week, with the introduction of a new character played by Danielle Panabaker, she was born after Caitlin entered the machine to bring Frost back to life, but it failed, and now she also is dead (and kind of unmourned).
Mark Blaine asks Team Flash for help so he can revive Caitlin (and secretly, Frost). They make one attempt, but it is painful to the new Snow, and they choose to stop until they discover what the problem is, they learn that only one can come back and now they have the ethical question, which of the sisters should come back?
Meanwhile, a new music-related villain appears on Krakatoa Club, owned by Hartley Rathaway, a.k.a. The Pied Piper; this meta calls herself the Fiddler and wants to get something from the Piper, given that they both can manipulate sound, chaos ensues, but the Piper manages to flee.
Hartley enters S.T.A.R. Labs and they just let him stay, all casually, so he talks to the new Snow, and we learn that she is highly empathic, she immediately relates to the Piper’s frustration and even helps him calm down. Barry asks her what she wants to do, given that she’s her own independent person, and she decides to keep living as herself: Khione, a fully realized human.
At the end, the Fiddler attacks again and although she ends up defeated, she manages to steal the Piper’s gloves, which are used to “stabilize” and fully reveal the new main villain who is gathering rogues: The Red Death, who, if you remember, in the comics is a version of Batman who stole Flash’s powers in “Dark Nights: Metal.”
I liked the new character, it’s a nice continuation of the tradition formerly held by Tom Cavanagh and all his versions of Wells, although it’s still a little convoluted and I’m weirded out that they didn’t even mourn Caitlin, they even went dancing at the end! – Ramon Piña
Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur – “The Borough Bully” (S1E2, Disney Channel)
On Moon Girl/Lunella Lafayette and Devil Dinosaur’s second outing, our young heroine gets tormented by an online troll, whom she becomes unhealthily obsessed with combating, constantly downvoting and arguing with their comments. Said troll turns out to be a literal troll under the Williamsburg Bridge, a symbiote unlike any we’ve ever seen in Marvel canon called Syphon8r (voiced by the Spectacular Spider-Man himself, Josh Keaton), who feeds on negative emotions.
Lunella eventually learns to defeat Syphon8r by not being fazed by his comments, causing him to shrink and eventually detach from his host, Angelo, a boy who she inadvertently wronged at the start of the episode. The climactic rap battle between them was fun, since it’s not often you see one combatant respond nicely, although I do worry that every episode’s final fight will turn into a music video, since it might get old pretty quick – still, lovely messages all round.
As well as the opening credits, this episode marks the first appearance of Laurence Fishburne’s narration as the Beyonder. It also has a fun subplot where Lunella’s grandmother, Mimi (Alfre Woodard), becomes similarly chronically online when she gets curious about what people are saying about her. Lunella and Casey pull her away by suggesting learning a new dance routine, which they joyfully practice over the end credits – hopefully it makes you feel like joining in too. – Christopher Chiu-Tabet
Star Trek: Picard – “The Next Generation” (S3E1, Paramount+)
Read our full review of the season premiere by Christopher Chiu-Tabet.
Continued below
Star Wars: The Bad Batch – “The Crossing” (S2E9, Disney+)
With Echo’s departure in “Truth and Consequences,” Clone Force 99 feels off-balance. And, like someone with an injury that leads to feeling unstable, there’s overcompensation and a lack of sturdiness to the way the Batch operates in this episode. When Omega literally loses her balance in the caverns, it feels like the inevitable moment that the episode was building towards. But even before then, the ‘family’ dynamic is clearly thrown off by being a man down.
That, coupled with their realization that Cid, for all her talk, doesn’t really care for them in any substantive way, allows the episode to really hammer home the idea that the Batch are really alone out there. Tech mentions Echo’s departure in the same breath as Crosshair’s, but the two circumstances couldn’t be any more different from the perspectives of the ones leaving. However, for Omega, it is just further eroding the safety and comfort of a family.
And so, at the end of the episode, Omega, Wrecker, Hunter, and Tech are left with a few realities: one, Cid may or may not be willing or able to help them. Two, Echo and Crosshair are gone. Three, there are forces – geological, meteorological, existential – that are putting them in harm’s way. And four, the only ones who are really going to help them are each other. That’s a lot for Omega to process, and so it’s not surprising that, at least initially, she can’t do so.
This season has been light on Hunter and Wrecker, but the extra time spent with Tech has been well worth it to build his character up from simply “emotionless clone” into something more nuanced. His speech to Omega that, although he processes differently, he feels the same as she does was a really well-written bit of dialogue. While this episode didn’t reach the heights of last week’s two parter, this did a lot of work to get the Batch into a place where things don’t feel quite as rote. – Brian Salvatore
