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!
The Flash – “Partners in Time” (S9E08, The CW)
When a time thief tries to steal a gizmo in the far future and almost gets caught, she decides to flee to the present, where a mold inspection is taking place at S.T.A.R.L Labs. Iris and Barry try to guide the multiple testers who came to the building to evaluate it, but they get trapped in the “Flash lab”.
This lead to a very funny episode with Iris taking the lead and the inspectors all acting crazy, they all ended up dressed in weird, time-displaced ways. There wasn’t really much of a story, the episode had very little action, instead, everything relied upon the actors, who embraced the silly of both the story and the show.
I think I’ve said this before, but I like how Danielle Nicolet’s character has been growing within the show, slowly, Cecile became necessary to the team. For example, in this episode, when Chester confesses his love to Allegra and she doesn’t know how to react, it is Cecilia who helps her realize that limiting herself for fear of losing the person she loves is not a good way to live, Cecile encourages Allegra to be honest with Chester and let him know that said love is reciprocated.
Ultimately this episode was driven by its characters, in the end it wasn’t even necessary for Flash to defeat the villain, instead she gave herself up to save the space-time continuum (and her life). Also in the end, Iris and Barry had an honest talk, where she opens up and reveals that she is afraid of stop doing the things she’s used to do as an active member of society. This is a fear that many mothers feel in real life, and I think it is very good that these issues are being touched on in a mainstream television show about superheroes, they are working to visualize these feelings without prejudice or guilt for the mothers, and that it’s awesome.
See you on April 26 for a special couple of farewells, we’ll see the return of Oliver Queen to the Arrowverse with an episode directed by Danielle Panabaker, one last time. – Ramon Piña
The Mandalorian – “Guns for Hire” (S3E6, Disney+)
Read our full review by Brian Salvatore.
Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur – “Skip This Ad…olescence” (S1E9, Disney Channel)
Lunella invents Skipster (voiced by Mae Jemison), an app that fast-forwards through life’s boring moments. When she skips over a supervillain’s speech, accidentally causing her to miss a way to deduce his weakness, and finds herself unable to understand her family’s new in-jokes, she gets second thoughts, and decides to stop using the app. Skipster doesn’t take kindly to this, updating itself so Lunella can’t delete it, starts fast-forwarding over anything she’s previously skipped, and reverses time when she throws her phone out the window.
After causing her to lose out on some quality time with her father, and lose a father-daughter skate contest, Lunella hacks her phone to undo her mistake, causing her to slip haphazardly between the past and future (including a ‘Days of Future Past’ homage.) While she persuades Skipster that she’s realized it’s as important to experience the dull parts of life as the exciting ones, the app’s shutdown risks deleting her along with it. Lunella embraces one of her family’s old, “boring” songs, “Just the Two of Us” (covered nicely by Raphael Saadiq and Briana Lee), allowing her to slow down time just enough to find and escape to the week before. So remember kids: learn to take it slow, and you might learn to appreciate the music of Bill Withers! R.I.P. king. – Christopher Chiu-Tabet
Quantum Leap – “Judgment Day” (S1E18, The CW)
Continued belowRead our full review of the season 1 finale by Brian Salvatore.
Riverdale – “Skip, Hop and Thump” (S7E2, The CW)
Read our full review by Elias Rosner
Star Trek: Picard – “Surrender” (S3E8, Paramount+)
Vadic begins executing the Titan’s crew to goad Jack into surrendering. (Pour one out for Lt. T’Veen, suddenly executed instead of Ensign Esmar to traumatize her.) After an attempt to use his powers to possess the crew backfires, Jack decides to give himself up to buy the time for the others, who decide to task the risk of plugging Data back into the ship, and to deactivate the partition between him and Lore, in the hope he can defeat his brother and retake control of security. In Data’s mind, Lore indirectly admits he was always envious of the love and relationships his brother had, and inadvertently lets himself be taken over by absorbing his treasured memories while dismantling him.
Over on the Shrike, Riker and Troi reconcile, before being rescued by Worf – boy does that Klingon know how to make entrances. (It was also hilarious to see Worf admit how much he missed Deanna – I always felt they should’ve ended up together, and I will die on that hill.) They escape to the Titan with Raffi, while Data activates the emergency hatch on the bridge, blowing Vadic out into space, where she freezes and shatters against her own ship. So long Vadic – you were (no pun intended) a cool villain, but this is the heroes’ last hurrah, and the less time spent on “monologuing protoplasms,” the better.
So, for the first time in two decades, the main Next Generation cast are finally together again, and it’s a surprisingly subtle moment: it didn’t dawn on me how historic it was that they were all talking in the conference room like old times until halfway through the scene. It was great Troi’s reunions with Beverly and Data weren’t underplayed, but by far the loveliest part of this episode was seeing Data become the best possible version of himself. Being on the autistic spectrum, Data was always the most relatable character in the series, and to see him alive, old, happy, reunited with his best friend Geordi, and becoming charismatic and witty, caused me to shed tears of joy.
But as Troi senses, there is also darkness, and our counselor continues to be perhaps the most valuable player, by taking on Jack as her newest patient, helping him finally conquer his visions of the red door, and find out why the Changelings want him so badly. Well, that’s what I assume we’ll see next week. Regardless, this is why it was good Vadic got written out so soon after her backstory episode: she would’ve just waffled on into the finale before answering our questions at the rate she was going. – Christopher Chiu-Tabet
Superman & Lois – “Too Close to Home” (S3E4, CW)
The ensemble nature of Superman & Lois pays off in this fourth episode as Smallville’s personal, down-home drama in the local diner is juxtaposed against the spectacle of John Henry Irons saving his sister, who has a bomb strapped to her chest! And the former annihilates the latter in terms of dramatic intrigue.
The John Henry sequence isn’t even poorly designed; it has all the melodramatic hooks this genre is built on. A man from another earth saves his sister(Angel Parker) from his one while investigating the death of his doppelganger. All while using a suit the endows him with phallic masculinity realized through contemporary VFX . Even the staging of it being in a random Metropolis car garage is the kind of smart B-movie making the Arrowverse is built on. And yet it didn’t hold a candle to the sequence in the diner, and not because it’s basic form is the damsel-in-distress we’ve seen since the Fleischer Superman era. The writers have done too much work with Dr. Irons(Angel Parker) to be just that. She may be a supporting recurring character, but the show has treated her with care that recognizes her needs as a person first and not just a plot device.
The Smallville diner sequence is more the byproduct of good television craftsmanship. Over the course of the episode, the Kent family has run-ins with the shitty dad of John’s current love interest, Emmit Pergande (Adrian Glynn McMorran – who also played Murmur on Arrow). Culminating in Clark finally going to confront him for hitting his son, pulling a gun on Lois, stealing their truck, etc. At the same time the C-plot for the episode, the continuing drama of divorced parenting in the formerly Lang-Cushing residence, is having its own cathartic moment as parents and daughter try to figure out the rules of the road for this new era of the relationship. That thread was the audience’s way into the setting; Emmit is just there in the background in a nice bit of realist local flavor. And then Clark walks into the frame and Superman & Lois gives audiences this moment of convergence the way only television is really able to. Suddenly this thread isn’t about healing the Lang-Cushing’s but also about the Kent family! The show’s ability to use the space of Smallville to house the overlapping family drama is plainly good television writing. Suddenly there was the chance that perhaps Kyle could get involved but also with the added angle that Clark cannot publicly go too far lest he reveal himself – as if no selling another man shoving you before smashing their head into the countertop didn’t give stuff away.
It’s interesting watching and writing these after the episode is first broadcast. There has been a fair amount of talk about how this scene is a repudiation of the diner sequence from Man of Steel. Which I don’t quite understand; in the film, people rag Clark for “destroying the livelihood” of a misogynist shitty patron. When this, Clark does the same thing, albeit without the property damage. What comes across in the film sequences is the awareness of Power and Clark’s ability to use that power to punish people (the kind of vigilante justice this genre is premised on.) The difference between the two is the spectacular excess of ruining a truck forces the audience to consciously be aware of it and to a degree, question any use of that Power. Was it an ethical exercise? Superman & Lois tries to justify this self-righteous traditional masculine exercise of power by framing the Kents are just a “good family”. Look at how nice they are taking in Candice after they took away her stable place of living by threatening her Dad! No, this Clark Kent didn’t smash a man’s face through a countertop, but that doesn’t mean it was better. It wrapped itself in the meta-text of a traditional cinematic gender role to justify ruining a family life personally, instead of getting State authorities involved and in that execution reinforced their own ethical claim to Power. It made people feel good and not have to think about if what they watched was actually heroic and perhaps not counter to the Nice Guy Clark image people need to believe in. – Michael Mazzacane
