By John Keegan
Leave it to “The Vampire Diaries” to use a Christmas hymn as the background music for a slaughter. The writers for this show don’t fool around when it comes to the mid-season cliffhanger, and that is triply so in this case. There are shows that don’t display this level of ambition and fearless change in a season finale.
Leave it to “The Vampire Diaries” to use a Christmas hymn as the background music for a slaughter. The writers for this show don’t fool around when it comes to the mid-season cliffhanger, and that is triply so in this case. There are shows that don’t display this level of ambition and fearless change in a season finale.
Ever since the beginning of the season, there has been a sense that John Barrowman’s character was waiting for the right moment to strike. Even as relatively grounded as “Arrow” can be, given the emphasis on human relationships, Barrowman manages to exude the characteristics of a melodramatic villain without going completely over the top. Instead of being silly, it comes across as supreme confidence.
Last week's episode of American Horror Story was perhaps the most disturbing holiday episode in the history of television. Sister Jude was nearly tortured and raped by one a homicidal Santa she's been keeping in solitary. The good news is she managed to stab him with a letter opener; the bad news is she's now an inmate at Briarcliff.
I'm not entirely sure of what I'm supposed to feel about this episode after viewing it. On the one hand, it showed some really powerful moments, ones that were true to the characters on the show. On the other hand, there exists parts of the episode (and many of the storylines within it) that somehow defy logic. I made the comment to no one in particular that at times, it felt like the show was falling apart at the seams. That something like the death of Abu Nazir should be a big, public event where the CIA and FBI are too late to stop him from enacting his entire plan. Instead, he dies in an anonymous Virginia mill surrounded by armed agents.
This has been a very rocky season of “Dexter”, at a time when there is every reason for the show to return to its former glory. At the beginning of the season, I expected things to rapidly begin to escalate through a two-season story arc that culminated in a definitive finale. Instead, the season explored other various other elements that were interesting in and of themselves, but suffered from poor execution, and seem to have been only tangentially-related to the real closing arc of the show.