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Flash: Trajectory

After a several week long break for no apparent reason, Flash returns with “Trajectory.” Before I get to the review, I’m going to take a moment to point out something that’s really getting annoying to me about a lot of current hero shows and movies. This is a mini-geek rant, so if you’re not interested, feel free to move on. Secret identities seem to be falling out of favor with most heroes, something I really don’t like, but that’s another issue. The ones that still have a secret generally have reasons for it. But over and over, we keep seeing so-called “masked” heroes in public with their masks off. If the hero wants to keep their secret, keep the mask on. If the actor playing them is so desperate to get their face on screen at all times, don’t sign on to play a hero who wears a mask. It’s a stupid trend no matter how you look at it, and it comes up several times this week. Ok, rant over. On to the review.

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Jessica Jones 8 AKA You’re A Winner

Episode six of Jessica Jones, “AKA You’re A Winner!” starts off with another Kilgrave scene. His casual, thoughtless evil is really chilling. He uses his powers to win a high stakes poker game, and then deals with the player who gives him attitude about it in an offhand but vicious way.

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Supergirl: Falling

Supergirl has a really bad few days in “Falling,” and so do a lot of her supporting cast. One of the challenges of the show is that Superman exists, and has been around for a while, but at the same time they are having some classic Superman elements appear for the first time on Supergirl. That makes sense, you don’t want a lot of, “Oh, this happened before with Superman,” but it also makes those of us who know the comics a bit confused from time to time. When she fought Reactron, he’d been around a while and has clashed with Superman before. The Bizarro idea was new to this show, for example.

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Agents of SHIELD: The Inside Man

Things get complicated for the Agents of SHIELD in “The Inside Man.” Quite a bit of the show involves the creature that was exiled to Maveth, which is now inhabiting Ward. Malik isn’t sure what to make of what he got, and the creature doesn’t really seem to care what Malik thinks.

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Gotham: This Ball of Mud and Meanness

I admit that Gotham got me with this week’s title. I saw “This Ball of Mud and Meanness” was wondering which version of Clayface would be turning up. It was a decent guess, but I was wrong. Instead, we see them do another major departure from later Batman canon. At this point, the show is absolutely an alternate world from the later Batman stories, and this just nudged it along further in that direction.

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Thor #5

Tension has been building for a while now, and things finally go over the edge in this issue of Thor. Thor has had enough of Odin, and the two of them fight. And “fight” isn’t anywhere near a strong enough term. I think they did some damage out Jupiter way, but Aaron did something amazingly…

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Legends of Tomorrow: Night of the Hawk

The Legends of Tomorrow crew take a trip to the 1950’s in “Night of the Hawk.” There are tensions and unanswered questions among the team, and that’s before they end up in the sleepy little town of Harmony Falls, which is, as Jax says, just like all the towns where old horror movies start. Everything looks normal until things take a turn for the ugly.

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Agents of SHIELD: Bounce Back

After a long mid-season break, and the run of season two of Agent Carter, Agents of SHIELD finally returns. After the surprises at the end of the showdown with Hydra, the team has to see if they can “Bounce Back.” They scored some victories, but took some losses, but the Terrigen-mutated Inhumans don’t care as more of them manifest.

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Gotham: Wrath of the Villains: A Dead Man Feels No Cold

The back half of Gotham’s second season appears to have been titled “Wrath of the Villains,” as opposed to the “Rise of the Villains” that was the first half. Just as Galavan was the big bad throughout the first part, I suspect they are positioning Hugo Strange to be the serious behind the scenes menace this time around. I’m amused that they are so carefully avoiding calling him Dr. Strange, no doubt due to the movie coming out later this year. For the record, Hugo showed up in Detective Comics back in 1940, Dr. Stephen Strange not making the scene until 1963, well over twenty years later, in the appropriately, but coincidentally, titled Strange Tales.

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Legends of Tomorrow: Marooned

For this week’s episode, “Marooned,” they seem to be patterning themselves off their companion show, Arrow. A good bit of the show is flashback, in this case showing us something of the origins of Captain Rip Hunter. We already know what led to his split with the Time Council, now we get to see the roots of that problem.