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!
Andor – “Daughter of Ferrix” (S1E11, Disney+)
Read our full review by Brian Salvatore.
Dead End: Paranormal Park – “My Super Sweet 1600” (S2E6, NETFLIX)
Wow. That was one jam-packed episode. We got questions about Courtney’s origins. We got a name for the creep with infinity eyes: The Watcher. We got the next phase of 5 Fingers’ plan going into action. And we have confirmation that Norma and Badiyah’s relationship IS deeply awkward post-confession/rejection. I guess Asmodeus, Temeluchus and Zagen show up too.
Poor Norma. She doesn’t have the strength to be honest to Badiyah (at first) and Badiyah is trying WAY too hard to make her feel better. I liked how the show handled the awkward, and how it set up a touching heart to heart between Norma and Zagen, but I have to say, I did not enjoy watching it. The secondhand embarrassment was strong and I much preferred watching Pugsly drink his sorrows away with Temeluchus in an “exes meet at a party and reminisce” kind of way.
As always though, there’s a lot to love and even the stuff I don’t like isn’t bad, just not my cup of suspicious red liquid. Maybe it was that red skeleton vampire’s? I wonder what kind of demon it was.
Speaking of parties, I love how the mission 5 Fingers was sent them on was billed as important but it’s just to be, as that pig demon said, “the fun police.” Basically it was a glorified noise complaint and I kinda love that. It gives characterization to the angels as absolute buzzkills AND geniuses playing 5D chess because Fingers clearly knew they wouldn’t break the party up once they saw it and could use that opportunity to seed future events via The Watcher and the scolding after.
I’m glad Barney and Pugsly got to take a bit of a backseat this week. They weren’t forgotten but Norma & Badiyah, and to a lesser extent Courtney, got to be front and center instead. Courtney’s longing to know her past is great drama to add to this gremlin while Norma’s struggles with her emotions and pretending things are alright when they’re not and when she keeps being reminded they’re not sets up that WHOPPER of a final line. Think she’ll be back or is this a permanent moving on for Norma? We’ll find out soon enough.
Ooh. Maybe she’ll have a spin off adventure with Gord. Now THAT’S peak TV. – Elias Rosner
Pennyworth – “Rag Trade” (S3E9, HBO Max)
We pick up this week where we left off: with Alfred’s proposal to Sandra. Sandra isn’t interested in what he’s selling and he’s surprised to hear it. But Sandra doesn’t want to marry if it’s only because she is pregnant.
Lucius has snuck into the Level 7 facility to free the PWEs being tested on by General Thursday. He watches one of the PWEs get tested on and killed. After opening the cells he goes down to the lab and sees Bet! When the army showed up to Salt’s lab a doctor revived her and made her a PWE. She’s got super strength now as if she needed it to kick ass.
Sally comes to Daveboy for help and tells him a doctor has been killed by the group on the drugs. They find Patricia in a closet hiding for her life. She lets them know Frances plans on using the drug on all of London. Daveboy realizes it’s Dr. Glubb and the drug is Lullaby. They need to stop him! But they end up sleeping together first. They wake up to Peg Sykes and the baby. Bringing the whole crew together for the last episode.
Thomas returns to England in time for the main thread of the episode: the kidnapping of Samantha. Martha and Thomas argue and it comes out that she knows he killed his father. She says she is okay that he killed Patrick, but she isn’t happy that he put the family at risk. I’m not okay with it. During the argument Alfred’s mum shows up and we realize a shapeshifting PWE, disguised as Alfred’s mum, has taken Samantha. The PWE mum calls and demands a ransom of £100,000. Martha calls Alfred for help while Thomas gets the money.
Continued belowThey arrive at the ransom spot and Thomas finds a note to him which says “Confess”. He gets on a soapbox and confesses to the murder of his father. A car pulls up with PWE mum and they take Thomas and Martha. We discover that the shapeshifter is Virginia. She’s back to get revenge on the Waynes. Virginia tells Thomas he has to kill Martha, the thing he failed to do earlier in the season. A fight breaks out and Martha ends up killing Virginia.
After the kidnapping Martha gets on a call with Aziz. They’ve found Glubb’s body and now need to know who has the Lullaby drug and what do they plan to do with it.
The episode ends with Frances putting Lullaby into milk and loading up milk trucks to deliver to the whole city setting up the season finale. – Matthew Vincenty
Stargirl – “Frenemies – Chapter Eleven: The Haunting” (S3E11, The CW)
For a show that is rapidly drawing to a close, “The Haunting” was an incredibly slow and inconsequential hour of television. No new information was presented, aside from in the very last scene. No plotpoints were furthered in any real way. Even the minor moments that attempted to tell us something new were either rehashing old information or not substantial enough to really dig into. Of everything that we saw, only Artemis’s pair of emotional scenes around the deaths of her parents felt earned and important to the overarching story.
So much of this episode was spent with people talking about what Icicle’s return means. For his part, Icicle seems to want everyone to get along and move forward, until that final scene reveals what his real plan is. There’s no one scene that really pulls this off better than another; aside from getting some practical information about why and how he exactly returned, these scenes all echo each other without any variation. And that is very frustrating, because Jordan Mahkent’s return has serious impacts on just about all of our characters.
The only character to really respond strongly to this is Sylvester, as he should, as Icicle is the one who killed him. It makes total sense as to why his well-established temper is flying off the rails with his killer alive. But all that he’s ‘learned’ this season seems to be tossed out the window at this news, and while that is, again, understandable, it doesn’t make for great TV. – Brian Salvatore
Star Trek: Prodigy – “Crossroads” (S1E14, Paramount+)
Just as the Diviner recalls Gwyn’s name, Vice Admiral Janeway and crew come in contact with Barniss Frex’s communicator on a snowy wasteland of a planet – right where the crew have powered down and stashed the Protostar to find a way to contact Starfleet without bringing the weapon along for the ride. They meet the mysterious con-man Captain Okona (the return of a character last seen nearly 30 years ago), but find that their travel plans don’t quite align.
In a real comedy of errors, all of the crew, except Rok Tahk, cross paths with the human Janeway and her away team, but through misunderstandings and miscommunications none of them mention who they are and why they need to speak to Starfleet, which allows the slimy and awful Frex to tell his side of the story and really screw things up for our heroes.
A grand chase ensues, Murf is reborn, and both sets of our heroes are pitted against each other. Storytelling that is strong and frustrating in the best way has us understanding both crews’s motivations. For such a short run time, the episode captures so many plot threads and finally begins to tie them together towards a new a neat season finale.
An excellent example of Star Trek as a place, we see many different alien species from across Trek canon, we get intimate, small-scale conversations, some stellar (and terrain) action set pieces, and some greater story implications that could move the show into some serious conflicts. It’s a very exciting time for this show and fans should definitely be looking forward to what comes next. – Chris Egan
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Titans – “Super Super Mart” (S4E4, HBOMAX)
After the table setting of the last episode, “Super Super Mart” begins to pay off and further sets the season on its course for the remaining two thirds. I’m starting to feel more certain that this will indeed be the last season of Titans. There are outside macro indicators for it the sale of the CW and Berlanti Prods overall deal coming due soon put the main producer of this type of show in doubt as well as James Gunn-Peter Safran now being the head of DC Studio’s and the clear messaging of a “unified” DCU – which has never been a thing but they’re at the mercy of Wall Street wanting everything to be the MCU. Those industrial indicators, however, are now wedded to the feeling of finality the show could accomplish as they once again vanquish a resurgent TriGon cult. The image of the Titans driving off into the sunset towards San Francisco is a good open ended final shot, they would’ve become the titular team and if they get picked up again can always just go back to SF.
They just have to survive the onslaught of zombies and the potential magical end of the world first. After deciding to see if the TriGon cult survived the Asylum back in the first season, the Titans pull up to find it replaced by a Super Super Mart. That Super Super Mart hides a dark past as well as a dungeon. Boris Mojsovski exploration of this space isn’t as satisfyingly moody as Nick Corpus’ work in the second episode the set felt a little disconnected as the Titans explored it and just happen to come across exposition dumps in the form of recordings. This was all build up to reveal that Sebastian and Raven are kind of half-siblings in that way Yuji and Choso are in “Jujutsu Kaisen”. This is supposed to give Sebastian a greater sense of tragedy, but it just makes him more of a macguffin made flesh at this point. We are all just waiting for him to go bad.
Once the zombies show up the episode begins to have a bit of life to it, ironically. The mass zombie sequence is one of the better hands to hand sequences in the series. It isn’t cut to shreds mostly stuck to a low angle medium shot and with the bodies in the frame you had lots of movement. The choreography did get a little odd when Jinx froze all of them and they didn’t just have Conner laser off their heads, but overall, everyone did something that played to their strengths. And then zombie Deathstroke appears. Admittedly his hand-to-hand sequence wasn’t that great, the suit for the show is great but clearly imposes movement limitations. The show instead treated Zombie Deathstroke as if he were Jason Vorhees to better effect.
“Super Super Mart” is a solid end cap to what could be the first act of the season. – Michael Mazzacane
The Walking Dead – “Family” (S11E23, AMC)
Read our full review by Chris Cole.
