Game of Thrones Review: "The Watchers on the Wall" - Empty Calories

Kit Harington gets his hero's moment in "Game of Thrones"

“Well that was fun,” were the first words out of my mouth following Sunday’s epic, episode-long battle in Game of Thrones’s “The Watchers on the Wall.”  And it was, indeed, great fun.  It had an extended fight scene with giants and mammoths, exploding barrels, and a minute-long tracking crane shot that final gave us the full scope of Castle Black.  And, yet, at the end, I couldn’t help but feel that the entire piece was a bit hollow - empty calories at the end of what has thus far been a season-long feast of character work.  Around this time last year I was pitching Game of Thrones to win the Emmy for Outstanding Drama and I still think it merits consideration.  But at this point in its lifetime, I think Thrones has moved beyond mere spectacle and has become a legitimately great drama.  Unfortunately, the hollowness felt at the end of last Sunday’s episode belies the fact that some characters on this show are much better developed than others and that the people at the wall are not yet capable of carrying their own hour.

Let’s start with the obvious comparison to season two’s Blackwater, which “The Watchers on the Wall” was clearly meant to evoke.  First off, both episodes were the ninth of their respective seasons, when the writers like to pull out their big guns (see also: the beheading of [SPOILER] in season one and The Red Wedding last year).  Secondly, they are the only two episodes in the run of the series to be set entirely in one location.  Lastly, both episodes depict immense battle sequences with potentially game-changing consequences. 

“The Watchers on the Wall” certainly succeeded at the spectacle aspect.  Visually, this was a stunning episode, perhaps the best that Game of Thrones has ever produced.  Director Neil Marshall was reportedly given an eight-figure budget to work with and it shows, from the flaming mammoth to the gorgeous crane shot to the wall itself.  The close-up fighting, too, was some of the best I’ve seen.  Much of the choreography in “Blackwater” was muddied by the darkness of the setting.  Here, however, the lighting and staging allow the battle to unfold in all its glory. 

Aesthetics aside, however, “The Watchers on the Wall” ultimately could not stand up to “Blackwater” for the very simple reason that I didn’t really care about most of the characters.  “Blackwater” truly felt like the culmination of a season’s worth of storytelling.  Stannis makes his move for the throne.  Tyrion, basically the default lead character of the season, takes command of the city’s army and becomes a true leader.  Joffrey is exposed as the sniveling wimp we’ve always known him to be.  Cersei begins her descent into paranoia, threatening Sansa and nearly poisoning Tommen.  And Tywin and Loras arrive to save the day, the former protecting his grandson and the latter avenging his lover’s death.  Even lesser characters like Bronn and The Hound get great moments and the battle ends definitively, with Stannis sent fleeing back to Dragonstone where he’s basically been ever since.

“The Watchers on the Wall,” rather than being the conclusion to a larger story, seems more like the midpoint of the tale and a not particularly interesting one at that.  It is the ascent of Jon Snow, which would be fine enough except that Jon is a rather dull character who has spent most of the last two seasons away from the wall and Castle Black.  The result is that, Sam and Gilly aside, I had no real idea who any of these people were.  I probably could have identified Ser Alliser and Maester Aemon, but only as the leader who keeps shooting down Jon’s ideas and the old, blind guy who saved his skin, respectively.  Otherwise, they were mostly fodder, ready to be chewed up and spit out.  Even Ygritte’s death felt largely empty because she hadn’t been a real force in Jon's life since late last season.  Unless you became invested enough in that relationship to carry through the entire season (ten full episodes) since Ygritte shot Jon full of arrows, I don’t see how that scene, as well done as it was, could have nearly the emotional impact it was clearly expected to.

Let me be clear, this was a massively entertaining episode of television.  But Game of Thrones has been so good for the past couple of years that I expect more than just “entertaining.”  Unfortunately, I don’t think that the characters at the wall have been developed well enough to support an entire episode whose drama relies almost entirely on whether these little-known faces will live or die.  This was a good episode, but Thrones is capable of much, much better.

A couple of spare thoughts –

It was nice to see Sam finally find use as a facilitator of action.  He might not be the best fighter, but he’s really good at making other fighters better.

I do really like where “The Watchers on the Wall” leaves Jon.  He comes out as the definitive hero, having almost single-handedly won the assault at the top of the wall and the battle at Castle Black.  But he’s smart enough to realize that this is just the beginning and that, even his plan to deal with Mance is stupid, it’s the only plan they’ve got. 

Apparently the man Jon orders to hold the gate from the giant was named “Grenn.”  Even though I didn’t know that, his brief speech and the rallying of his fellow soldiers with the Night’s Watch oath were sufficiently spine-tingly.

Tyler Williams is a professional librarian and an amateur television critic.  You can reach him at tytalkstv AT gmail DOT com or on Twitter @TyTalksTV.

Cosmos Review: The World Set Free - The Easy Way or the Hard Way

"Cosmos" gives us a glimpse inside a world with runaway global warming.

“Yet the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world's leading space-faring nation.”

“The World Set Free” borrows liberally both in words and in theme from John F. Kennedy’s famous “We choose to go to the Moon” speech, delivered in September of 1962 at Rice University.  The episode closes with Kennedy’s words, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” and Neil deGrasse Tyson repeatedly reminds us of the many times in our past that attempts at alternative energy sources have failed because we’ve chosen the easy paths of fossil fuels.  But it is the above quotation, from the same Kennedy speech, that has always intrigued me more.  While it’s true that part of why the United States was so eager to reach the moon was to prove its superiority over the Soviet Union, the greater reason, claimed Kennedy, was that somebody had to prove it could be done and nobody else could do it better or faster than we could.

It is perhaps fortuitous then, that “The World Set Free,” Cosmos’s endgame, its raison d’être, comes only two days after President Obama announced an ambitious new program to reduce carbon emissions from American power plants by thirty percent from their 2005 peaks by 2030.  This is a program bound to be opposed by conservative state governments (especially those that approved new coal plants three days before the announcement), but which is a huge first step in the United States taking leadership in combating the scientifically accepted scourge of man-made global climate change.

If it seems odd that I haven’t spoken much of the episode itself, it’s for the simple reason that this was the most straightforward hour of Cosmos yet.  From beginning to end, this was an exploration of global warming: A meticulous breakdown of its causes and its consequences.  The facts are largely agreed to.  The earth is warming.  We know this because long-term temperatures are rising both on land and sea.  We know these temperature increases are being caused by the accumulation of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere; that’s simple physics.  We know that the single largest source of unnatural greenhouse gases is the burning of fossil fuels. 

The consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect are similarly well-known.  We have Venus as the most extreme example, but even modest increases in global temperatures will cause sea levels to increase, likely flooding coasts and bringing regular droughts throughout the world.

The anticipated effects of global warming are not the most depressing aspect of “The World Set Free,” however; it’s the acknowledgment of how close we’ve come to embracing alternative fuel sources on so many occasions.  We first saw the power of the sun at the 1878 World’s Fair.  We even saw how solar power could transform the desert prior to World War I.  But each time, economic realities smacked alternative energy down.  Coal and oil are simply cheaper to turn into power than the energy from the sun or the wind.  It’s probably for this reason that Tyson chooses to focus on Kennedy’s proposition of “easy and hard” ways. 

The ugly truth is that fossil fuels are the easy way.  They’re cheaper to use even with the added costs of extraction.  Where fossil fuels lose their cost advantage, however is when you factor in the long-term negative impacts on the environment.  Economists call these negative impacts externalities, because their costs are borne not by their creators, but by others.  Governments have long recognized the need to minimize these externalities, from Clean Water and Clear Air Acts to anti-smog and acid rain legislation.  

For some reason, the world has thus far avoided addressing the externalities of global warming.  Perhaps there’s an unwillingness to admit the true nature of our predicament.  Perhaps, as Tyson suggests, we’re simply addicted to the “easy way.”  Whatever the reason, Tyson argues, the time is now to invest in alternative energy sources that utilize the immense power of the sun to generate power.  We’re already seeing the initial effects of a warming world and we’re largely doing nothing to abate further greenhouse gases.  Great change is needed, and it must come from somewhere.

“First in war, first in peace,” eulogized Henry Lee about our nation’s first president.  It was in this spirit that the United States first put a man on the moon and it is in this spirit that we must move forward in combating global warming.  As Tyson mentioned a few weeks ago, modern man is perhaps the only species in Earth’s history to have the ability not only to destroy its environment, but to rebuild it as well.  We met yet be the makers of our own undoing, but we also have the ability to be our own saviors, if only we have the will.

Tyler Williams is a professional librarian and an amateur television critic.  You can contact him at tytalkstv AT gmail DOT com or on Twitter @TyTalksTV.

Halt and Catch Fire Series Premiere Review: I/O - First Impressions

Scoot McNairy and Lee Pace hatch a plan in "Halt and Catch Fire"

It’s an easy joke to say that AMC’s newest drama, Halt and Catch Fire is reverse-engineered from every other prestige cable drama we’ve seen in the last fifteen years.  Yes it’s a period piece like Mad Men.  It’s set in the early-1980s, like The Americans.  Yes, its lead character is an intelligent, enigmatic charmer who manages to talk pretty much everybody he meets into doing whatever it is he wants and even when his plans go completely sideways, still manages to find a way to come out on top.  Yes, he’s Don Draper, Walter White, and every other male anti-hero you’ve seen since Tony Soprano.  The sympathetic male character even gets a shrill wife beating down his dreams in order to protect their family, just like…well…every wife of every male anti-hero you’ve seen since Carmela Soprano.

It’s true that there is a lot here that borrows from other shows.  But as every character in Halt and Catch Fire is drawn to Lee Pace’s Joe MacMillan, I am drawn to this show’s charms.  The performances are electric and the pilot’s caper-like plot had me attracted like few drama pilots I’ve seen.  There is still a good deal of work to be done, and we are only one episode in, but this is a show with a enormous potential just waiting to be unleashed.

Halt’s premiere episode follows Joe as he bounces from supporting character to supporting character, charming the pants off of them (yes, sometimes literally) all along the way.  He plays the board like a chess game, opening with a too-smart computer science student at Generic Eastern University in Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis) who, aside from the whole “pants” thing, is just a seed he’s planting for later.  He then talks his way past Cardiff Electric executive John (Toby Huss) to earn himself a sales position where he immediately begins recruiting mousy, cowed software engineer Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy), whom he taunts over a failed career filled with unmet promise.  Within days, he’s convinced Gordon to lie to his wife and reverse-engineer IBM’s PC hardware leading to the threat of a massive lawsuit and the possible bankrupting of Cardiff Electric.

As it turns out, that was all part of Joe’s master plan as he would never be satisfied selling software at a safe, boring mid-level computer company.  He wants to build the next great personal computer and he needs Gordon, whose previous failed attempt at hardware he calls “ahead of its time” and Cameron, who he brings to Cardiff in order to legitimize their hardware program and keep from getting destroyed by IBM.  It’s a complex plot, but it serves mostly to bring the gang together.

And that gang is filled with magnetic performances.  Lee Pace typically has a fairly bland visual affect, but here he’s like lightning in a bottle: I just can’t take my eyes off of him.  He dominates every scene he’s in (especially those with McNairy, who is serving a far more dour role) and only occasional crosses the line into full-on scenery chewing mode.  McNairy is given the much more difficult job, having to play the passive, reluctant cubicle dweller who will inevitably be talked out of his comfort zone.  It’s a tough task because we pretty much know where his character is going even as he plays the sad sack.  Thankfully, McNairy seems to lighten up in the latter half of the episode when his character does, finally becoming more than a lump for Joe to needle and prod or for his wife to yell at.

Gordon’s wife, Donna (Kerry Bishé), is a bit of a problem at this juncture.  I see in her the same traits that caused a certain segment of the audience to turn on Carmela Soprano, and Betty Draper, and Skylar White.  She is overbearing.  She does try to keep her husband from following his dream.  While she does relent in the end, it’s clear that the Clarks’ home life is going to be a continuing source of drama for the show.  But I think they’re trying to do something a little more interesting with Donna.  For starters, she’s an intelligent, driven woman in her own right, working as an engineer at Texas Instruments.  Additionally, she and Gordon have already tried, and failed, together to design and sell a personal computer and it almost cost them everything.  There’s a real character here beyond just “overbearing wife wants to keep her husband from doing fun things.”  It will take a while before we really know where they’re going with this relationship, but I’m not going to write off Donna just yet.

Halt’s biggest problem so far is that its pilot gives no real indication of what the series will be moving forward.  “I/O” is a fantastic caper, as Joe assembles his crew, engages in back-room deals, spends a weekend essentially trying to crack a safe, and even gets caught, only for the viewer to discover that getting caught was part of the plan all along.  It makes for a rollicking 47 minutes, but I don’t know that the show can keep that same pace for 13 episodes.  So where will it go now?  Will it turn into a deep character drama, or will it keep trying to find do-or-die stakes in the world of 1980s computers?  While I like the cast, the characters aren’t yet deep enough to support the former and the latter might just end up hokey.

I don’t know where Halt and Catch Fire is going and even professional critics haven’t seen past the first episode, an unusual move for cable networks but probably an indication of how much faith AMC had in this pilot.  It is a faith not misplaced as the energy and magnetism Lee Pace brings allows the episode to hurtle at blazing speeds.  My only questions are about the future, but the ride thus far has me glued to my seat. 

Tyler Williams is a professional librarian and an amateur television critic.  You can reach him at tytalkstv AT gmail DOT com or on Twitter @TyTalksTV.

CBS 2014-15 Schedule Preview - Blowing it All Up

"The Big Bang Theory" will be launching two nights this fall.

As I wrote this afternoon, I refuse to predict CBS schedules because they always make far bigger moves than I ever think they will.  That strategy came in handy this year as a programming slate I would have predicted mostly stability from will end up changing half of its lineup from year-to-year.  Thursday Night Football was always going to cause problems, but the network made changes on every night of the week, trying to strengthen every weak spot all at the same time.  It is a bold schedule, designed to halt the ratings drops CBS has seen for the last few years.  At the same time, it’s a schedule that relies on old hits to build new ones, a tried and true CBS strategy than has been successful for years.  As I wrote in my preview piece, I don’t expect CBS to win next season (thanks to NBC’s airing of the Super Bowl), but this is a strong play for an uncontested second.

CBS’s 2014-15 Schedule (New shows in BOLD)

Monday –

7:00pm – The Big Bang Theory/Mom – 2 Broke Girls/Mom

8:00pm – Scorpion

9:00pm – NCIS: LA

2014 is the year for ending long-standing programming traditions, apparently.  NBC will be abandoning Must See TV sitcoms at 7:00pm on Thursday for the first time since 1982.  Fox will break up the Animation Domination that has held court on Sundays for a decade.  And CBS won’t be airing a two-hour sitcom block on Monday nights for the first time since 1985. Moreover, the network has been airing sitcoms at 8:00 on Mondays since 1954, when December Bride replaced The Red Buttons Show (a half-hour variety piece) behind I Love Lucy.  That’s sixty years of comedy tradition that CBS is shuffling off in the name of the NFL and Thursday night ad revenue.

Tradition aside, the biggest news here is not that The Big Bang Theory is returning to Monday, at least temporarily.  That was to be expected.  The biggest news is that How I Met Your Dad did not get picked up.  Josef Adalian has the full(ish) story here, but the short version is that CBS wanted to reshoot the pilot (and potentially recast two parts) and executive producers Carter Bays and Craig Thomas did not.  Seeing HIMYD land at Fox wouldn’t be surprising (it is a 20th Century Fox production), but it’s just as likely to end up dead over “creative differences.”

The fact that Mom, then, gets the Big Bang lead-out is as much due to CBS’s weak comedy development this year as its own success.  They ordered only two new sitcoms, one of which is headed for midseason after a recasting and reshoot of its own.  Airing after Big Bang will give Mom a nice boost for a few weeks but 2 Broke Girls proved last fall that it wasn’t a self-starter anymore.  Will people stick around once the juggernaut moves back to Thursdays?

As for the 9:00 slot, putting NCIS: LA there is a strong play.  While Hostages and Intelligence failed this year, Hawaii Five-0 was struggling in the slot even before that, so there’s no guarantee that LA’s 2.44 season average will translate.  But even if its ratings drop to Person of Interest levels, that will still be a marked improvement over anything aired there for the last few years.

Tuesday –

7:00pm – NCIS

8:00pm – NCIS: New Orleans

9:00pm – Person of Interest

I speculated earlier today that NCIS: New Orleans could slot in behind the mother ship and it makes perfect sense.  If New Orleans can pull down what LA did last year and LA can be a modest success on Monday nights, this move should work out perfectly.  And if New Orleans fails, they can always bring LA back and slot something else in on Mondays.

Wednesday –

7:00pm – Survivor

8:00pm – Criminal Minds

9:00pm – Stalker

A similar strategy was put in place for Wednesday nights.  Move a consistent performer off to anchor a trouble spot on a new night and slot in a new, potentially more compatible drama in its place.  We’ll get to CSI’s move to Sunday in a bit, but this move, while aggressive, makes a lot of sense.  Stalker seems to be in the mold of Criminal Minds, only focusing on stalkers instead of serial killers.  Given CSI’s recent turn to a bit more comedic under Ted Danson’s watch (at least compared to the show with Laurence Fishburne as the lead), this pairing works a bit better.

Thursday –

7:00pm – Thursday Night Football – The Big Bang Theory/The Millers (beginning Oct. 30)

8:00pm – Thursday Night Football – Two and a Half Men/The McCarthys (beginning Oct. 30)

9:00pm – Thursday Night Football – Elementary (beginning Oct. 30)

Brief foray in football aside, Thursdays actually end up with the most consistent schedule, with the only change being new comedy The McCarthys taking The Crazy Ones’s place on the schedule.  CBS will surely get a good boost from the NFL for the first six weeks of the season, but after that it will be business as usually for the network’s strongest night.  It may seem odd that The Millers continues to get the prime post-Big Bang timeslot, but this is a perfect example of the changing nature of television.  CBS owns The Millers, whereas The McCarthys is a Sony production, meaning that the greater CBS Corporation stands to profit hundreds of millions of dollars by getting The Millers a nice, fat syndication contract, whereas they will get nothing on the backend from The McCarthys.  I expect this pairing to last for a while, or at least until CBS finds another homegrown show it wants to support.

Friday –

7:00pm – The Amazing Race

8:00pm – Hawaii Five-0

9:00pm – Blue Bloods

Fans of The Amazing Race will either praise or lament its move to the “Friday Death Slot.”  Some will lament it, obviously, because Friday is seen as the night where shows are sent to die, but those who praise it may have the better argument, because moving the show to Fridays means no more obnoxious football and golf overruns.  Truthfully, the difference in ratings between Fridays and Sundays on CBS has diminished almost to nothing at this point and The Amazing Race actually skews quite young for a CBS show.  So if it can bring its demo viewers with it, this could become a perfectly fine lineup.

Sunday –

7:00pm – Madam Secretary

8:00pm – The Good Wife

9:00pm – CSI – CSI: Cyber (bridge show between CSI half seasons)

On Sundays, The Good Wife stays put, paired with the Tea Leoni-helmed Madam Secretary.  It seems like a good match, but one not likely to build the night.  And CSI moves into the most-vexing timeslot formerly occupied by The Mentalist, meaning its start time will regularly be pushed back to 9:30, 9:45, or 10:00 in the fall.  The aging veteran’s ratings were already flagging on Wednesday night, so it will be interesting to see what happens on Sundays.  Obviously, the best case scenario is that will continue to draw a demo rating in the high 1s, but given The Mentalist’s drop when it moved into this very spot, I find that prospect unlikely.

In the end, exactly half of the network’s timeslots will feature new shows this fall, even more if you count Thursday Night Football instead of the shows that will follow it.  It’s an aggressive schedule, trying to launch new shows and use aging hits to fill in established holes.  I don’t see it being a total disaster, but there is definitely some risk to balance the potential reward.