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!
Dead Boy Detectives – “The Case of the Crystal Palace” (S1E1, Netflix)
Read our full review of the series premiere by Christopher Chiu-Tabet.
Dead Boy Detectives – “The Case of the Dandelion Shrine” (S1E2, Netflix)
Edwin’s use of magic on Esther’s cat incurs a punishment from the Cat King (Lukas Gage), who places a caging bracelet on him, rendering him unable to leave Port Townsend, unless he sleeps with him, or counts all the cats in the town. Edwin was certainly tempted by the trickster spirit, so that swiftly answers the question of him being someone struggling with his sexuality (not that he proves forthcoming about it to Charles, who can tell something’s up with his friend.) It also provides as good a reason as any for the gang to stay in Washington, where Esther and the Night Nurse will be preying on them, so that’s also vital for the rest of the season.
Anyway, the boys and Crystal become preoccupied with Niko’s illness, deducing she’s been infected by Dandelion Sprites, who feed on adoration, and will make her explode unless they receive some for their colorful secretions. Crystal struggles with keeping Niko safe while keeping her secrets from her and Jenny, while the boys inadvertently smash the vase that kept the sprites contained, awakening the skeletons of their previous victims. It’s all campy good fun, capped off by the reveal the sprites are literal (foul-mouthed) fairies, played by Caitlin Reilly and Max Jenkins, whom Charles traps in a jar given to him by the cursed walrus Tragic Mick (Michael Beach), after Crystal offers herself as a new host.
Niko’s near-death experience grants her a shock of white hair, and the ability to see the boys, which is convenient, as ghosts are now lining up, seeking their help in Crystal’s apartment. Meanwhile, Esther slowly, gruesomely transforms her crow familiar Monty into a handsome lad (Joshua Colley), who’s very pleased about his new lease of life. Two episodes in, Dead Boy Detectives is proving to be a macabre delight, that revels in generating laughs by grossing out its leads instead of us, and with some genuinely sweet and vulnerable leads – it’ll certainly be interesting to see how Niko’s grief for her late father will be affected by seeing the dead now. – Christopher Chiu-Tabet
Star Trek: Discovery – “Mirrors” (S5E5, Paramount+)
As Discovery heads to its next clue, they come across a type of wormhole that is the door to a pocket dimension, and the location of the clue. Like a clenching…fissure, the wormhole is somewhat unstable, so Burnham and Book take a shuttle in rather than risking all of Discovery. A hellish, stormy stretch of space, Moll and L’ak’s ship is floating in pieces. And it also ends up being the same universe as the ‘Mirror’ one we’ve seen many times throughout Trek. This reveal is sort of unclear and shaky, but it seems this universe had some sort of epic-scale disaster, like the Burn, causing this.
After passing the remains of the ship, our heroes come across the I.S.S. Enterprise, in which Moll and L’ak have taken refuge. We get a brief glimpse into what happened to the Terran Enterprise crew. It feels a bit forced and also gives Michael another bit of closure with never seeing Spock again, and adding to their connection at the same time. In tandem with this, the Disco crew is attempting to boost comms utilizing every system in the ship to reach Burnham and Book.
And these scenes once again delve into some emotional beats which this show insists on having, but execute in ways that have never felt realistic. I know it’s the future, but every person on this ship emotionally over-reaches when it comes to their colleagues and peers dealing with something. It always comes off as eye-rolling fiction. Tilly, get back to the urgent task at hand and stop asking Dr. Culber if he’s doing OK while he has nurses and multiple patients around him. That is an after-hours question. Jumping to the end of the episode, what Culber is dealing with makes total sense, and works for his character, but that doesn’t help these poorly timed discussions. No one acts like them in real life or in any other era of Trek. And while this is in the year 3000-something, we must remember that these people are from the same time as Kirk and company, so there is no basis for their interactions looking like this. The people of this future are even less in touch either their emotions than the Disco crew.
Continued belowAnd, of course, we get scene of Adira being mopey blaming themselves for bringing aboard the time bug. I know it’s essentially a matter of deduction, but how do they know it’s their fault? Because we, the viewer, knows? There were other crew members on Trill – Michael, Book, Culber. Daddy Stamets gives some reassuring words, and that’s where we leave it.
After a brief, but action forward encounter between our two power couples, we get the reveals that L’ak is a Breen! How did I not see this coming?! Five mentions of the Breen while the show was keeping his species a secret. I feel dumb. The episode then jumps to a flashback at a Breen space station with one of Moll’s early encounters with them. Because the last time we saw a Breen was approximately 800 years ago the costume re-design should come as only a mild shock to long time Trekkies. The fact that the original version of their helmets on DS9 was literally an enlarged version of Princess Leia’s Boushh bounty hunter disguise from Return of the Jedi probably had nothing to do with it…
Unsurprisingly, this gives us Moll and L’ak’s first encounter. Flirty, dangerous, and full of slick fun, the scenes reveal that their relationship began with their past bad decisions leading to them making secret deals and having to trust each other. Normally learning what the Breen look like would feel like hollow fan service giving us an answer to a question we only thought we wanted. And maybe that is still the case, but this relationship and Moll’s connection to the Breen is engaging and interesting enough that this reveal does feel like a necessary lore addition rather than simply a weak way to push the plot along. Why do Breen faces (and their physical makeup) change in and out of their refrigerated suits? Previously we were led to believe that they couldn’t survive outside them. Not only was that a lie, it seems to be both a cultural and a medical reason. And, probably why they so desperately want the Progenitor’s tech.
The rest of the episode smartly goes back and forth between the Mirror Enterprise and the origins of Moll & L’ak. It’s all really satisfying and keeps tensions high. The Disco crew gets to roundtable a solution with Rayner in command, Moll & L’ak burrow into our hearts a little more as sympathetic scoundrels, this Enterprise gets a heroic return, and some major reveals about the Terran universe and its inhabitants drop by episode end. This is exciting Trek in one way or another until the end credits roll. Another top tier episode that is so layered it’s impossible to keep things brief when discussing it. – Chris Egan
Star Wars: The Bad Batch – “Flash Strike” (S3E14, Disney+)
As The Bad Batch careens towards its end, the lines are drawn in “Flash Strike.” Rampart, an unlikely ally, is on board, as is Emerie Karr, a less unlikely ally, but one that still cannot be fully trusted. This episode did a good job of stitching the three stories together – Echo’s infiltration, Omega’s planned escape route, and Rampart and co. trying to get into the Tantiss station – but all of this still feels a little too compressed at the end of the season. I wish we got to see Emerie struggle more with her role, specifically, and not just see a face turn happen conveniently in the penultimate episode of the series. Emerie wanting to help Omega and the captives makes sense, but it only makes sense because we’ve seen these stories dozens of times before; there’s very little in the show’s internal logic to really get us to understand her position.
This episode also drops another Zillo Beast reference, because why not?, and introduces another weird creature outside of the station. The outside scenes had some fun moments, but again, feel like there could’ve been better use of this time than showing another big, scary monster.
But ultimately, this is the show we’re getting, so in taking that in stride, this episode was, perhaps, the most effective of the back half of the season. There are stakes for literally everyone involved, and unlike so many of the stories set in the prequel/original trilogy era, we don’t know what happens to these characters, so the series could end in any number of ways and not be surprising. To get to a satisfying experience with the finale, I need to let go of the hopes for more clones rights moments from season 2, or a desire to get more information about why Hemlock is the way he is, and instead just focus on what’s in front of us. Let’s hope the finale doesn’t disappoint, even on that truncated scale. – Brian Salvatore
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X-Men ‘97 – “Bright Eyes” (S1E7, Disney+)
The tragedy in Genosha is having a dark effect on the team, with Beast finding himself fed up with humanity’s conditional tolerance, although it appears to be healing the wound between Cyclops and Jean, with him reciprocating her attempt to comfort him after confirming Madelyne’s death. Rogue’s so consumed by her anger over Gambit’s death that she skips out on his funeral to hunt down Henry Gyrich for answers, butting heads with Thunderbolt Ross and Captain America (Michael Patrick McGill and Josh Keaton, reprising their roles from What If…?) along the way. Thanks to Cap, she finds Gyrich under house arrest in Mexico, but she proves unable to seize the information she needs from his mind, injuring herself. The others manage to find her, and it’s there amidst the Day of the Dead proceedings with Nightcrawler, that Rogue finally allows herself to grieve.
Trask contacts the team, alerting them to a clandestine facility in Madripoor, where they discover cyborg Sentinels being created. Rogue lets the doctor carry out his suicide attempt, which proves divisive among the team: it’s then Trask demonstrates why you shouldn’t kill people, especially in a superhero universe, as his death activates the nanites in his body, transforming him into a cyborg Sentinel too. The team are overwhelmed, and only persevere thanks to Cable’s intervention, and it’s then at long everyone realizes Cable is Future Nathan. Alas, no one can spend much time on this, having learned of the new threat: as good as this episode was, I would’ve liked it if Rogue’s catharsis and Cyclops’s revelation were dwelled on more, even perhaps being split off into their own episodes.
Elsewhere, Jubilee persuades Sunspot to come out to his mother, who reveals she already knows his secret, but is wary about the impact it will have on her shareholders; Emma Frost (Martha Marion) is revealed to have survived the attack on Genosha by unlocking her secondary diamond form mutation; and Bastion (Theo James), the leader of these advanced Sentinels, emerges from the shadows, murdering Gyrich for nearly compromising their operation, before assuring Sinister his plans will still work despite Trask revealing their existence, revealing he will use Xavier’s survival to ferment a backlash. It’s then we see Magneto is alive, and being held hostage by Bastion, who sadistically demonstrates his power over him by subjecting him to a close shave. Sweeney Bastion, the Demon Barber of Genosha Street, anyone? – Christopher Chiu-Tabet
