TV #90 of 2021: Star Wars: The Bad Batch, season 1 My expectations weren’t high going into this recent Clone Wars spinoff, as I generally found that parent show to be of variable quality and didn’t think these particular ‘defective clone’ figures made much of an impression beyond a gimmick during their brief appearance there. …
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TV #89 of 2021: Hawkeye, season 1 The latest Marvel show on Disney+ is a flawed but fun action-comedy, taking full advantage of the Christmas setting for a festive buddy romp as Clint Barton reluctantly accepts an eager new junior partner. He’s trying to shut down a mob investigation into the Ronin, his blood-soaked alter …
TV #88 of 2021: Fringe, season 3 This is my favorite era of Fringe, and I am so tempted to give it a full five stars. Picking up on the cliffhanger escape from the parallel world, this run starts with our Olivia Dunham trapped over there, being brainwashed to believe she’s her doppelgänger, while that …
TV #87 of 2021: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, season 5 Another strong year of life aboard this space station, where an ongoing plot provides important background context for the episodic concerns, where the characters and their relationships change over long-term arcs, and where the local geopolitics likewise continues to develop with a history and …
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TV #86 of 2021: Doctor Who: Flux Doctor Who is a franchise that thrives on change, and so I have to credit soon-to-be-former showrunner Chris Chibnall for structuring this season as basically one single six-episode story, an experiment in serialization the likes of which the show hasn’t attempted since maybe Trial of a Time Lord …
TV #85 of 2021: ReBoot, season 3 An absolute delight, all the way through to that daft but earned Penzance recap number that closes everything out. This run starts right where the last one left off (although a year and a half had passed for viewers), and it continues the strong streak of serialized plot …
TV #84 of 2021: Star Wars Resistance, season 2 This batch of episodes is a marked improvement over the first, with main character Kazuda far less irritating now that he’s no longer juggling his poorly-disguised espionage missions with equally inept racing and mechanic work. I think that’s due partly to personal growth and partly just …
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TV #83 of 2021: Shameless, season 11 This title has always been all over the map tonally, so perhaps it’s fitting that its closing run would be produced and set during the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although in practice, the only real impact on events seems to be that everyone is wearing masks and …
TV #82 of 2021: Fringe, season 2 This year drops the ball a few times in terms of maintaining the tension in its serialized plot — say hi to Meghan Markle, whose junior agent disappears after the second hour — but overall it continues the strong streak that developed late in the initial run. The …
TV #81 of 2021: ReBoot, season 2 The first four episodes this season are about on par with the previous year: competent yet disposable pieces of 90s children’s entertainment, more notable for the technological graphics achievement of the time than for any appreciable complexity or storytelling ambitions. (And in the initial airing of the show, …
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