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!
And since the summer is here, check out our 2022 Summer TV binges, where Multiversity staffers reach back in time to review comics/comics-adjacent/nerdy shows all summer long. (Here’s a handy list of what’s being covered too.)
Dead End: Paranormal Park – “The Pauline Phoenix Experience” (S1E8, NETFLIX)
I think I have to eat my words from last week. The pacing remains exactly right, we’re clearly nearing the finale but aren’t there yet, and we’ve got a number of new complications going into the last two episodes that have me so excited. In fact, this might be, hands down, the best episode of the series thus far.
The homages and spoofs of different eras of TV & film are spot on without being overdone, the character work continues to shine as bright as ever, and that cliffhanger at the end?! I cannot wait to dig into the penultimate episode.
One of the themes of this episode is about letting go of the past in order to embrace the present. While this isn’t borne out through Barney & Pugsly, it is through Norma, Courteny and surprise celebrity guest Pauline. Norma is coming to grips with the person she idolized and whose work built her personality, or at least hobbies and obsessions, is both a terrible person and also a ghost possessing lookalikes of herself. She’s in denial so much she refuses to leave the world of the TV even though she’s the first to be aware it wasn’t real.
Courtney, too, struggles with this, though we don’t see it until the end. Before that she’s her usual acerbic self, pretending not to care about her friends and unable to admit that maybe her life here on the neutral plane can be good, maybe better, than back “home.” That, to paraphrase Barney from “Norma Kahn: Paranormal Investigator,” the park is her home and these are her family now.
Her denial of this opens the door for Pauline to manipulate her at the end and pushes Norma, Barney & Pugsly away. Not permanently, not even very far, but just enough and for just long enough for her to make a bad choice out of desperation. It’s really good stuff and doesn’t feel like an eleventh hour fight for drama’s sake. Courtney fucks up by being Courtney, the others are hurt and act accordingly, and because it’s all bluster, we see it for the tragedy it is.
Pauline is probably the most literal and obvious exploration of the theme. She dies because she can’t stop thinking of herself as she was 30-years before and now is literally a ghost so she can continue living as if she 1) never died and 2) never stopped being famous. Now, “The Pauline Phoenix Experience” isn’t all heavy narratives – Gorm is used as a sword at one point if I remember correctly – but those are the parts that stuck with me the most this week.
Well, that and the in-universe Dead End show. I’m a sucker for a good Gothic TV roast. – Elias Rosner
Harley Quinn – “A Thief, a Mole, an Orgy” (S3E4, HBO Max)
Of all the ways to introduce the Court Of Owls, this is the second or third least expected debut. Harley Quinn swings for the fences once again, giving us an Eyes Wide Shut style socialite orgy of Gotham’s elite. Ivy and Harley explore a common relationship trope not even worth mentioning, while Gordon Watch 2022 has our Mayoral hopeful pressing the flesh in hopes of scoring campaign cash.
The biggest take away from episode four is Joker being a dad. I’m biased. As a father and lover of this ridiculous universe, Step-Dad Joker is my favorite thing. He doesn’t go as nuts as I would like. He does call the boy “son,” which is sweet coming from a cold ass psychopath in clown makeup. – Carl Waldron
Continued below
Paper Girls – “Growing Pains” (S1E1, Prime Video)
Read our full review of the series premiere by Reid Carter.
Paper Girls – “Weird Al is Dead” (S1E2, Amazon)
When the titular girls find themselves trapped in the future and face-to-face with Erin’s future self, they take a beat to grapple with the trauma of their past few hours. The girls meet Old Erin and enlist her in their quest to get home, meeting with a connection of hers to try to understand the strange device they were given in the previous episode. Meanwhile, the high tech figures in white cloaks discover their dead comrade – killed by KJ via hockey stick in the pilot – and begin to track down his killers, finding KJ’s parents and attacking them to discover her identity. When Old Erin proves less than useful, the girls abandon her, taking shelter in an abandoned shopping mall as they make their way towards future Tiff instead. Then, after an outburst of cruelty towards her somewhat friends, Mac breaks from the group, says she has no interest in returning to the past, and storms off in search of her brother.
This episode is a drastic improvement over the first, mainly because it takes the time to give the characters some actual emotional stakes. Young Erin is haunted by the disappointing future that is destined for her, and KJ simultaneously processes the pressures of her upbringing and the fact that she recently killed a man with a hockey stick. The show doesn’t know what to do with Tiff yet, although it lays the seeds of a future storyline revolving around her future self. The problem in the show’s internal logic lies with Mac, who is so insufferable that the lack of prior connection between the girls begs the question of why any of them are willing to continue spending time in her presence. Mac has a chip on her shoulder about her family’s economic status and her less-than-sunny home life, but she expresses it primarily via racial and homophobic slurs and wild emotional cruelty. When she storms off at the end of the episode to parts unknown, it’s hard to believe that any of the others would be interested in going to find her. – Reid Carter
Riverdale – “Chapter 117: Night of the Comet” (S6E22, The CW)
Read our full review of the season 6 finale by Elias Rosner.
The Sandman – “Sleep of the Just” (S1E1, Netflix)
Read our full review of the series premiere by august (in the wake of) dawn.
The Umbrella Academy – “Auf Wiedersehen” (S3E7, Netflix)
This episode was “in action” concerning the main storyline arc, and it felt good to be back on that. While there have been emotional journeys and feelings to be felt, the kugelblitz is still happening whether they like it or not, and things can start disappearing fast. After Allison drops Harlan’s dead body off at Ben and The Sparrow Academy, he opens the doors to work with The Umbrella Academy. They put their differences aside to try and shut this end-of-the-world black hole. Lila, Sloane, Viktor, and Christopher are tasked with shutting it down into a “cage” and leaving it in Christopher, the cube one, to keep it contained. This plan works for a short time, and there’s even a celebration between the two academies. It’s short-lived due to its true power of having Christopher to implode and eat up the entire building.
On the side plot, we got Klaus working with Reginald to figure out how to harness his newfound coming back from the dead power. Klaus is initially skeptical of Reginald’s eagerness to help, but it’s with good intentions behind it. Reginald had been drugged by his children and unable to function correctly before Klaus showed him how to stash the pills instead of taking them. It’s a funny montage of Klaus getting hit by various vehicles and Reginald timing his resurrections. We watch with a particular curiosity since Reginald has his kamikaze mission in mind and is just using Klaus.
A storyline that should get more of the episode is we find out that Stan wasn’t Diego and Lila’s child but instead just a kid of someone with whom Lila was in a band. We do find out that it was a test for Diego because Lila is pregnant and scared of the hell of having a family. This storyline deserved more screen time because we can only see Klaus get hit by so many vehicles. Diego has so much information to process in this episode that it’s almost like seeing a new character scared to say anything. Now we wait to see if they can avoid another apocalypse. – Alexander Manzo
