Last night's was the first truly disappointing episode of Ash vs. Evil Dead, the first that's felt genuinely uninspired. Pretty standard possession plot--person possessed by demon tries alternately to seduce and kill protagonists, main protagonist tied up and erroneously thought to be possessed. It was kind of funny how crystal clear Ash was through his gag.
Written by someone named Zoe Green, presumably a woman and so the first woman to write for the show, one might have expected to see better focus on the female characters but instead they're all side-lined even more than usual. Lucy Lawless and the cop lady get one scene and it's entirely exposition and Kelly spends the entire episode possessed by a demon. Mostly the episode centred on Pablo. The gormless and hopeful Hispanic lad crossed the threshold into embarrassing stereotype in this episode. I like Ash's new Nintendo Power Glove hand even less;
The idea that Pablo was able to somehow rig a sophisticated cybernetic hand from video game console parts is not even thirty percent as interesting as the inert wooden hand. Silliness like this lowers the stakes for everything and takes us into Hercules: The Legendary Journeys territory. Oh well, here's hoping next week will be better.
Last week's new episode of Star Wars: Rebels wasn't bad, importing the old Interdictor cruiser from the old Extended Universe. It looks like they meant it when they said they'd be bringing in EU stuff, which is nice. This is the second time this season the stunt casting has been a ship, two episodes earlier it was a B-Wing, always my favourite fighter craft when I was a kid.
Rebels shows us the old EU progression of ship technology has been reversed. Instead of the X-Wings and Y-Wings coming before the A-Wing and B-Wing, we've already got Rebels pre-A New Hope flying A-Wings and the B-Wing's just been introduced. It was nice to have an episode focusing on Hera, too, with Ezra given just a few token smart ass lines. The show is making a stronger effort to imitate the scope of Clone Wars. Though we're still getting a disappointingly meagre quantity of Ahsoka Tano appearances while seeing an awful lot of Rex. In the new episode, sort of modelled on the plot of New Hope, Kanan and Rex rescue Ezra from the Interdictor, the episode managing to have a lot of effective tension despite an endless series of scenes of characters supposedly sacrificing themselves only to be rescued by the characters they were trying to protect and, unlike in A New Hope, no-one dies, once again showing the series' problem with a softball Empire.
The stunt casting in the previous episode was Gina Torres as a bounty hunter friend of Sabine's and I very quickly began to wish she'd been cast as Sabine instead of the unremarkable actress who reads the part week after week. Suddenly there was a voice on the show with real sparkle.
Twitter Sonnet #815
If barley wanders past the future lake
November leaves redeem a bottle's glass.
If charcoal rainy souls escape the stake
Then puritan embraces burn the gas.
A boar in bedlam lists the heads and tails.
Nowhere affronts a house when shacks await.
Confused, the Cabbage Patch took root in pails.
Delilah's braids on brows mistook their fate.
A floating bow has clenched the last of clouds.
Objections raised'll henceforth echo wrong.
The stormy gravity lifts all the crowds.
And caterpillars may eschew the throng.
A borrowed saddle bag contained a bone.
Receivers rose against the monarch phone.
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