Arrow comes back from its hiatus with “Broken Hearts,” a title that works on a few levels. The show opens with a couple pleading for their lives. Their tormentor shows up soon enough- Cupid, the crazy archer Team Arrow defeated a while back who went on to become part of ARGUS’ Task Force X. Task Force X is better known by their action branch’s name- the Suicide Squad.
There’s a big change coming for the Agents of SHIELD in “Parting Shot.” There’s a lot of tense plotting, with cuts back and forth between now and several hours in the past. The number of hours ago each segment takes place gets smaller with each flashback, making a sort of countdown to “How did we get here?”
Returning from a several week gap, like most of the CW hero-themed shows, iZombie comes back with “He Blinded Me… With Science.” Continuing from last episode, Blaine is riding a city bus definitely looking a lot worse for his recent adventures. He’s definitely a bad guy, but Blaine does get some of the best lines. I always enjoy his screen time.
After all the surprises last episode, the newest Supergirl is called “Manhunter,” filling in some backstory for a major supporting character. There are more plot twists this week, and they resist the temptation to do a quick and simple fix. Supergirl is definitely among the shows willing to change the norm for the sake of story development.
Gotham’s Wrath of the Villains continues with “Mad Grey World.” It takes a while to come together, but the episode is actually a really brilliantly done plan. It does a great job of showing how dangerous one of Batman’s underrated villains can be, if you once again put aside the fact that most of the Bat-foes seem to be a generation older than the Dark Knight himself. I really applaud the writers on this one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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