Last week Colton Dixon was the latest contestant to be voted off of American Idol, to the shock of many. The singer from Tennessee originally auditioned in season ten for the show, but did not end up in the Top 24. This year Dixon made it to the Top 7 and will be joining the other Idols on tour this summer.
Syfy's newest reality competition, the international hit, Total Blackout, starts tonight. Total Blackout is a half-hour game show where contestants perform challenges in complete darkness. Using all their senses but sight, contestants must complete tasks. Some may be physical challenges, where others are about identifying things with their other senses. People don't realize how scary the unknown can be in the dark, or for the audience, how funny.
By the time this episode was over, I was completely befuddled. Not by the plot; that was simple enough that Jordan had plenty to opportunity to focus on the more important element of character development. Not by the complete rewrite of history; the show had long since deviated from the historical record, so why not take it even further? No, the real confusion was why this episode was so much better than almost anything “The Borgias” has done to date.
I think the fact that this episode had four credited writers kept it from being very focused. There is a lot going on here and the show felt the need to check in on all of it. The central theme is something that has been explored on this show a lot: Lawyers are corporate and evil and bloodthirsty. It takes a judge going off the bench to get defended against prosecutorial misconduct to see that. It's really nothing new.
Considering the fact that I was ready to give this show up for good, I was surprised to see that this episode might have actually delivered a legitimate game-changer. Unfortunately, this is where the reputation of the showrunner can be a distinct disadvantage: having seen Tim Kring fail utterly at long-form storytelling with “Heroes”, is there reason to trust him to do better this time?
The war rages on, as we so clearly see in the opening scene of the episode. It's understandable that "Game of Thrones" tends to cut away during the actual battles, given the budgetary constraints of the medium. "Thrones" has typically done a pretty satisfactory job of working around these constraints, to the point that I don't even feel bothered when I don't get a full-blown battle sequence. The battles aren't really where the most important story developments occur, anyway (though I'll admit that I wouldn't mind seeing at least one actual on-screen battle at some point during the season). More important than the battle is the chance meeting between Robb Stark and a rather attractive battlefield nurse the next morning.
The funny thing about disappointment is that it only has the most tangential relationship with whatever it is people are actually disappointed in. The follow-up to this season's strong premiere drops the ball in terms of delivering on some of the most interesting plot threads introduced in "Something Wicked This Fae Comes", and it can very easily colour the episode in a negative light, but on the whole "I Fought the Fae (And the Fae Won)" delivers a very strong A-story and introduces some cool new characters that can be overshadowed by the smaller beats of disappointment.