A Fine Selection of Brain Meats

[laguera25]

Looks like someone fell asleep in the tanning booth.

A random mishmash of TV thoughts:

--I don't know if I'm going to review CSI:NY every week. I still watch faithfully, but I'm running low on enamel to sacrifice to teeth-gnashing, and there are only so many ways you can say that the writing is weaker than a toddler dosed with Benadryl.

"Indelible" tried; it did, and there were many scenes that worked, but for me, the episode had two fatal flaws that doomed it to earnest failure. The first flaw was the choice of perspective. The decision to have ordinarily-focused characters drift off into 9/11-related reveries was clunky, trite, and cheesy, one better left to the realm of fanfiction, where such fluid transitions flow more fluidly. Flack's flashback was particularly cringe-worthy. It's triggered by the sight of the black stripe over Danny's badge. Uh, isn't Flack a detective, i.e, a cop? Wouldn't he have been surrounded by these black-banded badges all day? Wouldn't his own badge have sported one? Better that it had been triggered by Danny himself, or by something he said. The lameness of those memories being resurrected by a glimpse of the One Twu Badge cheapened an already feeble narrative device.

The episode would have worked better had it either been shot entirely in the past, or if they had framed it with the team waiting for the dedication ceremony to begin and sharing their memories with each other. By having the reflections be self-contained scenes seen only in the mind of those who held the memories and painting them around a flimsy, half-assed case that was clearly shat out by a baboon with IBS, the episode created, not a sense of unity, gratitude, and remembrance, but a sense of being in a ninth-grade World History lesson while the teacher flicked through grainy slides of Holocaust photos. You knew you were seeing something momentous and awful, but the full impact was at a remove, blunted by the knowledge that lunch was in twenty minutes, and if you were lucky, you might get to the tater tots while they were still hot. The "case" served no purpose, and should have been jettisoned altogether.

The second flaw was the triage scene halfway through the episode. I knew going in that the episode would focus on Mac. He lost Claire on 9/11 and was a first-responder. There was no way that most of the episode couldn't have been about him. However, the scene in the triage with Mac and the dead firefighter was just crass wish-fulfillment and self-aggrandizement. I can buy that Mac would help carry a dead firefighter inside. I can even buy that Mac would pray over the fallen man. But the way the scene was blocked and shot was skeevy. The focus of the scene should have been the heroic dead firefighter, not saintly Mac, praying over a dead firefighter while everyone else gazed at him in solemn awe as though he were a deity treading the earth among mere mortals. The shot would have been more effective if it had focused on the Mac and the firefighter's clasped hands as he recited his prayer, or on the faces of his fellow firefighters. By having Hawkes, Sid, and the wounded firefighter staring raptly at Mac like virgins getting their first glimpse of the Almighty Schlong, the emphasis was placed, not on the bravery and sacrifice of the dead, but on the godly awesomeness of Mac by-God Taylor. That scene felt like Gary Sinise's masturbatory fantasy of what he would have done if he had been involved in the initial rescue effort. Did not want.

--Dear CM fans,

Make up your mind. Either you want the show to explore the repercussions of Hotch and J.J.'s decision to deceive the team, or you want them to sweep it under the rug. Yes, Reid showed a bit of ass when he flounced on J.J., and it was a manipulative, low shot for him to hint that he nearly relapsed into Dilaudid abuse, but J.J. had her crack out first when she assumed that Reid was angry because "we fooled you." Really, J.J.? That's what you decided to go with given Reid's history of parental abandonment and neglect, abuse from his peers, and his history of abandonment by those he loves? You blow as a profiler. Of course Reid was angry, hurt, and betrayed. His father left him with his schizophrenic mother; his surrogate father, Gideon, left him with a Dear Reid letter and a kiss my ass; Elle left him; and now, three of the people whom he considered his family actively lied to him and allowed him to suffer for some abstract "greater good" that never seems to do anyone any good. He's going to have issues, and because he's often been coddled by the rest of the team and treated as the child of the team because of his youth, he's going to handle them immaturely. He handled it childishly, but when you responded with, "You're just mad because we got one over on the genius! NEENER NEENER!", you a)came off like a defensive Internet douche and b)stooped to his level. You should have known better.

Bless you, Hotch, for trying to defect the blame, but sometimes even if you leap onto the grenade, innocent people get hit by the shrapnel.

And goddammit, CM, pretty soon I'm going to be down to driving through the streets in an armored wheelchair armed with dual-mounted Kalashnikovs or huddling in a concrete bunker with a ham radio and a ten-year supply of granola and baked beans. You're like Sesame Street for the paranoid. "Hi! I'm Hotch! Haha! And today's lesson is, 'People are dangerous.' Not just strangers. No. Everyone. Even your special uncle. So, if anyone asks you for help, you should aim for the eyes and call for help immediately. If you don't, then bad things could happen. Yeah! Let me show you what might happen. TV! TV! Come here, TV! Haha!"

I want a Rossi.


--I still love D.B. Russell. I don't love Brass. Oh, Brass, why has Langston turned you into such a jerk?


--I love Team Lisbon, but I wanted Jane to stay with the new team for a few episodes. I liked the agent with the son, dammit.

Van Pelt is a dumbass.