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 – “A New World, Part Two” (aka “The Blues”) (S9E11, The CW)
This week’s episode complemented the one from last week and showed us what happened in the present while Barry was in the past. With the disappearance of the Flash, the rest of the team is on high alert.
They feel pretty much powerless and exposed to an attack by the new villain, and they are somewhat relieved when Mark Blaine returns, the problem is, he’s possessed by the Negative Speed Force.
After the evil-Chillblaine neutralizes the team, the only person standing between victory and him, is Khione, who has been developing her powers these last months. She has to defeat the Negative Speed Force by removing the crystal from Blaine’s hand, and she does so effortlessly, by simply disintegrating Mark, Thanos-style. By the way, the effects in this scene were surprisingly great, you know, for the budget of the show.
The day is saved, Barry briefly returns just in time for Iris’ labor but disappears again; and Khione reveals that she’s a goddess, setting up the pieces for the finale.
Back in the show after being absent for a few episodes, Jon Cor gives again a great performance, and the rest of the team does so too; I think that it was influenced by the fact that this time, co-star Kayla Compton was on the directing chair for the first time and they wanted to give their best for her friend.
Speaking of great performances, back in the future, Dr. Gilmore is going crazy, he sees flashbacks from Eddie Thawne’s life and is desperate to know the answer to what’s happening to him, until he realizes that Thawne is not a different person, it is him, but somewhere in the way, he lost his memory and was transported to the future.
The end of The Flash is coming fast and this last story promises to end with a bang, let’s see how they deliver it. – Ramon Piña
Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur – “Coney Island, Baby!” (S1E14, Disney Channel)
The Beyonder gets his Pennywise on as we uncover Devil and Lunella’s greatest fears: turns out the dinosaur’s afraid of getting stung by jellyfish, while Lafayette hates the thought of going to Coney Island after a bad experience there as a five-year old, when she lost her grandma Mimi, and accidentally entered a scary funhouse. Mimi decides to take Lu and Casey there for an occasion celebrating Granville T. Woods (good to know the show always remembers to honor Black STEM pioneers), where the Beyonder is trying out the food, and it’s then the trickster offers Lunella a wager: if she can get through the day without getting afraid of the rides, he’ll simply let her enjoy herself.
Lu avoids showing any fear, prompting Beyonder to escalate events by damaging a piece of the rollercoaster Mimi and Casey (and many others) go on: cue a terrific silent movie homage, where Moon Girl is essentially Mickey Mouse or Buster Keaton, frantically saving the day. Beyonder realizes what Lunella is truly afraid of though, is losing a loved one, and freezes time on the island while abducting Mimi, giving Lu only ten minutes to find her. The setting becomes literally and figuratively dark and sinister, as Lu finds herself hounded by eyeless duplicates of the tourists, and the realization Mimi is in the funhouse that terrified her eight years ago.
Dang: Disney Channel cartoons can get pretty grim, but what a creepy contrast to the prior shenanigans. Devil crashes the horrifying proceedings, showing up with a load of jellyfish stuck to his tail after mistakenly taking the Staten Island ferry, reminding Lu fear isn’t an emotion you need to get over, but one you need to get through. She enters the funhouse as herself to avoid revealing her secret identity, and punches the Beyonder’s recreation of the clown who scared her as a little girl right in the face. Gratified he could help Lu reach her realization, he gives up Mimi, and the three get to enjoy the rest of their day. However, when Mimi has a moment to herself, the Beyonder flippantly tells her “they” are coming for her. – Christopher Chiu-Tabet
Continued below
Riverdale – “Dirty Dancing” (S7E7, The CW)
Read our full review by Elias Rosner
Star Wars: Visions (S2, Disney+)
Read out full review of the full season by Brian Salvatore.
Superman & Lois – “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (S3E8, CW)
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is a key film in the history of film in the United States; that title automatically evokes something, the particularities of which Superman and Lois do not really evoke in this episode. Outside of awkward teen romances where your daughter is dating the son of the man who killed your doppelgänger. It feels kind of strained, but that is an emotion that runs throughout this episode. Peia can’t keep up with being Onomatopoeia. Jonathan is consistently getting caught up in Jordan’s burgeoning superhero career. The lies that sent Lex Luthor to jail for the past two decades appear to be failing to constrain him. It’s almost like this season is in the back half and headed toward a finale.
The show isn’t always perfect when it comes to integrating the high school/kids element of the series with the main plot of the titular characters. It can feel more like these are two threads siloed away from one another in the name of a generational family melodrama. More specifically, the Jordan stuff can feel a bit Smallville-lite. In this episode, however, the Smallville energy was perfectly in sync, with a twist. Young Clark Kent rescuing someone from a fire and raising suspicions of a meta-human is the kind of low-level hero work that the show did when it was still back in Kansas. The twist, though of it potentially blowing back on Jonathan, our perpetually caught-in-the-middle normie (until Natalie builds him a cool super suit at least) is a good twist and one that helps to further the sibling dynamics between the two.
The specter of Lex Luthor, played by Michael Cudlitz, has hung over the season since he was first announced. Just how would he arrive in Smallville and seek terrible vengeance? We even got a spooky trailer trumpeting his arrival a few weeks ago. What could’ve been an unexpected free radical into the Mannheim-Superman-Irons feud now comes in with clear purpose and furious anger. It wasn’t Superman who put Lex Luthor away, as had been alluded to throughout (before and after Crisis), it was Mannheim framing him for the murder of Boss Moxie! Now the interesting question becomes does Luthor know who framed him or does he just blame Superman and that darn reporter, Lois Lane? When the Arroverse has dealt with this kind of level of villain before, it can be a little hard to make them fit with the weekly goings of a TV show. But this has a lot of promise. Also, Bizzaro, ahem, Inverse Superman woke up, so that’s not good.
It’s interesting to see these shows get back in the licensed music game, but there must be some sick irony of sending your kid to a concert for The Cure when their Mom is battling breast cancer. – Michael Mazzacane
Sweet Tooth – “Chicken or Egg?” (S2E3, Netflix)
Read out full review by Alexander Manzo.
Titans – “Project Starfire” (S4E11, HBOMAX)
The penultima episode of Titans does everything a penultimate episode of a season or series should do in this genre. Our big bad, Brother Blood, appears to be near unstoppable and summoning his extradimensional Father to proclaim hell on Earth and Tamaran. The show’s strongest by power level standards, Superboy, is seemingly dead. (I’m betting he is resurrected in under 30 minutes for the finale, extra points if they use pink kryptonite). The Titans find the macguffin that might be the key to stopping Brother Blood, without sacrificing one of their own … if only Dick could hold fast and let Kory finish charging the battery.
Joseph Morgan’s performance has gone sadly unremarked upon in this space, but his interactions with the Confessor in this episode were solid. The dude has played the character he was given wonderfully. That whole sequence is itself just another thing the episode does well in checking off all the boxes.
Look, is this episode “Baelor” levels of shock and awe? No, because too many people forget that Game of Thrones is an exception to the rule, not the rule itself. And for a show whose early seasons are characterized as failing to act like proper television, the sheer consistency and well-executed banal motions of structure is a sign of how far this series has come as it gets read for one last episode. There isn’t exactly a lot to pick at with this episode, but for what it needed to do, it did its job supremely well. – Michael Mazzacane
