Modern Family, "Moon Landing": Po-lice that moostash!

A quick review of last night's "Modern Family" coming up just as soon as I blame the Latino driver...

"Moon Landing" was a mixed bag of an episode, I thought. There were plenty of great one-liners as usual - Phil comparing Jägermeister to a potion from a fairy tale, "only you don't wake up in a castle, you wake up in a frat house with a bad reputation" may be the funniest joke of the series so far - and some good bits of physical (Jay in the locker room with Cam) and behavioral (Manny stuffing his mouth with cupcakes to avoid his mom's wrath) comedy, yet something felt lacking in it.

The set-up of making the Dunphy house seem like a hellmouth for Minnie Driver's arrival was a little labored (and/or predictable); if not for the usual endearing goofiness from Dylan, and my love of mustache-related humor, I would have gotten very impatient with that storyline. Conversely, the resolutions to both Jay and Gloria's stories felt too abrupt.

(Also, Driver's non-regional American accent is distracting, as opposed to when she puts on a specific one, like on "The Riches." Neither is incredibly believable, but at least on "The Riches" I accepted it and moved on, where here I kept thinking, "Boy, Minnie's struggling with this, isn't she?")

The show has banked enough good will with me, though, that I'm fine with an episode that worked in the small moments but not in the bigger ones. The Jagermeister joke alone was worth the tune-in.

What did everybody else think?

Friday Night Lights, "Laboring": Toothpicking against the spread

A review of the penultimate "Friday Night Lights" of season four (finale airing next Wednesday at 9 on DirecTV's 101 Network) coming up just as soon as I drive 50 miles to deliver this blog post...

"I am not playing on a fair field here." -Coach
"That makes two of us, hon." -Mrs. Coach

On one level, "Laboring" is a table-setting episode, preparing us for the season-climaxing showdown between East and West Dillon, for a reckoning between Tami and the school board, for whatever's to come between Vince and Kennard, and between the Riggins boys and the cops.

But, like season one's penultimate hour, "Best Laid Plans" (with trouble swirling around the Panthers on the eve of the state championship), "Laboring" was a table-setter that brought a lot to the table on its own: great moments for half the cast and some huge developments in their own right, regardless of how things play out in the finale.

There's a real sense of despair to a lot of what happens, particularly with the Taylors. Eric knows he doesn't have much of a prayer of beating the Panthers(*) under optimal conditions, and those conditions are now far, far from optimal. Luke is out of the game, which limits his offensive weapons to, basically Vince, and takes away most of the gadget plays that were working so well earlier in the season. And because the Panthers had to use a bazooka as a fly-swatter to respond to Landry's toothpick prank, the Panthers get to play the game on their cushy home field, with the Lions and their fledgling fan base forced to feel like pathetic outsiders in a game that should have been theirs.

(*) And, it occurs to me, if he were to win that game, the people in town would only grow to hate him more. Panther pride runs a little too deep for people to applaud the plucky underdog school across town for an unlikely victory, if that victory also keeps the beloved Panthers out of the playoffs.

And Eric has to deal with this - and the idiot radio calls(**) and defacing of his car and the rest - at the same time Tami has developed her own hate squad thanks to the abortion controversy. "FNL" in general, and Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton in particular, often offer up a ray of hope and idealism in the middle of potentially grim circumstances, but here our most hopeful characters were at their most hopeless. Tami doesn't want to write that letter of apology(***), but can she put her ideals ahead of her family's livelihood?

(**) I thought it was a nice touch that Slammin' Sammy, usually just as much a pig-headed yahoo as his listeners, tried to shut down that one caller's attempt to paint East Dillon as a ghetto hellhole she wouldn't take her family to. Sammy be an ignoramus and an agitator in many ways, but that doesn't automatically make him a bigot.

(***) And would the apology letter even work? Given how dug-in the opposition seems to be, wouldn't Tami apologizing (for something she didn't do) only make matters worse? I don't know small town politics very well, but isn't the wiser course for Tami to argue that at no point did she tell Becky to get an abortion? Which has the benefit of being true?

While the Taylors are trapped in bleak circumstance, it's up to the Riggins boys to provide some hope and happiness - for a little while. After some comic relief from Billy failing to be calm about the birth, we get this perfect moment with the two brothers at home, staring down at the baby, and Tim (wonderfully played by Taylor Kitsch) getting to appreciate the site of a Riggins man being a good daddy for once.

Of course, a Riggins man's happiness can never last very long. So after Tim got to enjoy being an uncle, and showing his new ranch property to Becky, he winds up going to jail, along with Billy, for the chop shop operation. (The large wad of cash Tim gave the realtor surely didn't help.) And will little baby Stephen Hannibal suddenly have to go years without seeing his daddy? With Taylor Kitsch not being a regular after this season, I could see a circumstance in which Tim and Billy do go away for a while, and if we see Tim at all in season five, it'll be with Coach talking to him through prison glass.

Meanwhile, Vince was busy burying the man (boy, really) responsible for drawing the Riggins boys (back) into a life of crime, and then being sucked into Kennard's plan for revenge at any cost. And Jess, realizing what her ex is about to risk, fights to stop him from doing just that, even if she has to ditch Landry in the process.

As with most "FNL" stories related to the criminal world, Vince's plot was the part of the episode that most bordered on cliche. But every time it threatened to get silly or caricatured, Michael B. Jordan and Jurnee Smollett dragged it back into something real and painful, as exemplified by the scene where Jess shows up at Vince's apartment to tell him, "I know that good guy that's inside of you!" To which Vince (desperate to keep Jess away from him as he goes on a mission that could land him in jail or the morgue) replies, "I am a monster! That's what I am! I am that guy!" That dialogue could be terribly corny, bu these two superb young actors made me ignore the words being spoken and focus on the pain, hurt and love behind them.

Thanks to Jess, Vince makes the right decision in the end, but he does it in a way that puts him in the sights of Kennard (who feels like Vince owes him this killing for the rehab loan). And it occurs to me that, because Kennard was the mastermind behind the whole car theft ring, we could see a finale in which Tim and Vince's problems cancel each other out, with Billy rolling on Kennard to secure his freedom (and unintentionally secure Vince's safety).

And if that's what winds up happening, I'm not sure how I'd feel about it. On the one hand, it would seem a little too neat for a show that likes to be sloppy even with its happy endings. On the other, after so much bleakness for our characters in recent weeks, I could use a little sunlight - whether that comes from an improbable, pride-restoring win for the Lions, or Tami getting to keep her job without compromising her beliefs, or Vince and/or Tim getting out from under their criminal burdens. I don't know that I want all of those problems to be solved, but I do love these characters - both old and new - enough to not want to see them suffer any more.

Some other thoughts:

• Am I the only one who was under the impression that Jess's mom was either dead or out of the picture, and that she and Virgil had been raising her brothers on their own? Instead, this week we meet her mother, Bird (played by Lorraine Toussaint), whose appearance played out as if Steve Harris wasn't available this week and so the writers scrambled to give Jess a different parent. Then again, Toussaint's IMDb entry says she was in "Stay" earlier this season, but either I didn't notice her, her scenes got cut, or (as is often the case with the IMDb and TV guest stars) the info is wrong. Whatever the explanation, I was distracted. UPDATE: Several commenters have pointed out that in the final air version, Jess introduces Bird as her aunt, not her mom, which means one of two things: 1)The line was changed in post-production after the screener I got (ala Principal Burnwell's reference to the game "last night"/"last Friday" earlier this season), or 2)My hearing's going. I am open to either possibility.

• Speaking of moms, Dana Wheeler-Nicholson makes her first appearance of the season as Mindy's mom (Tyra's, too) in the labor and delivery scenes.

• Though we know Coach to be a very good and wise man, he's also a stubborn one who (rightly) views himself as separate from the kids he coaches, so we very rarely see him admit a mistake to one of them. That's why it was a bit eye-opening, if appropriate, to see him apologize to Luke for giving him a hard time about the injury. Some of you last week objected to my attempt to categorize Luke's actions as selfless - that he was doing it in his quest for a scholarship that will get him the hell out of town. And while there was certainly something to that, keep in mind that he suffered the injury in the same episode where Coach gave him a giant guilt trip about missing practice because he had to help his dad with the fence - sending a very clear message that Luke should never let his personal problems get in the way of practicing and playing for the Lions. And I'm sure Eric, away from the heat of the moment when he discovered the hip flexor injury, realized the role he played in this mess.

• Presumably, this is Jesse Plemons' last year as a regular on the show as well, and I feel bad that Landry has been a bit lost in the shuffle as we head to the end of his time in Dillon. His relationship with Jess has turned out to be more about giving us a window into Jess's feelings for Vince, and this was the first episode in a while where he felt like an integral part of the football team (between his field goal kicking being the only thing standing between the team and more jingle-jangles, and then Landry coming up with the toothpick plan). And though his big moment (waiting outside the BBQ joint for Jess, only to be told by Bird that she wasn't coming) wasn't as flashy as Jess and Vince crying in each other's arms, Plemons did again make me feel sorry for young Lance.

• Kennard said their target was a couple of hours away, and it certainly seemed like Vince got out of the car close to the end of their drive. How exactly did he make it from the middle of nowhere back to Dillon on the same night?

• Notable songs this week: "I Like You So Much Better When You're Naked" by Ida Maria (Billy goes in to be there for Mindy during the delivery), "Rock Candy" by Montrose (Tim playing air guitar at Riggin's Rigs before the cops come), and "When the Night Comes" by Dan Auerbach (the final montage).

• Every time Principal Burnwell complains about all the problems Coach has brought to his school, I want to remind him that his school didn't exist before this year. But as with all things East Dillon, the show tends to wax and wane on what all these characters were doing before the redistricting happened.

• Because Madison Burge isn't technically a regular castmember, and because Becky seemed to say goodbye to Tim last week, I wondered if we had perhaps seen the last of the character - that perhaps that was the compromise the creative team had to make for this story, by letting a character get an abortion and then quickly writing her out. But she's still very much present, even if Tim won't respond to her crush on him, and even if, with Tim in jail and Luke having been pushed away, her connection to the rest of the "FNL" world is pretty tenuous.

Back next week for the finale - which will be the first one, I believe, where I'll watch it not worrying if it's the last episode of the show I'll ever get to see. Hooray for two-year renewals!

What did everybody else think?

Human Target, "Sanctuary": Bulletproof monk

My brain's starting to pay the price from staying up til the middle of the night to write last night's "Lost" review, so I don't have much candle power left to write about tonight's "Human Target," which was a fun mash-up of "Die Hard," Indiana Jones and six other pop culture influences, and gets extra credit just for Chance's use of a censer. Top that with some good Chi McBride comedy and some very interesting shadings for Guererro and it was arguably the strongest episode so far - albeit of a show that seems content to operate on a fairly lightweight, but well-executed, level.

Plus, after all my comic book nerditry on today's podcast, I had to appreciate a good "Crisis on Infinite Earths" gag.

What did everybody else think?

Firewall & Iceberg podcast, episode 2.1: Lost, Fringe, American Idol and more

So, after the fun hijinx Fienberg and I had with our first podcast attempt at press tour, we gave it another go via Skype today, so head on over to NJ.com to download the new podcast and read my explanation for what's in it, and for why, however lame this version is, it's not 1/10th as horrible as the one we recorded, then abandoned, earlier today.

Lost, "LA X": Multi-tasking

A review of the "Lost" final season premiere coming up just as soon as I bring a book into a cave...

"My condition is irreversible." -Locke
"Nothing is irreversible." -Jack

Hot damn, that was fun.

The traveling comedy/obfuscation team of Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse spent much of this final "Lost" hiatus promising that season six would have a new narrative structure, just as we got in seasons four (flash-forwards) and five (time travel). Having taken us both back and forwards through time, turns out the game for year six involves going sideways, with a "Sliding Doors"(*) approach that allows Cuselof to have it both ways with last year's cliffhanger, as we see one timeline where Faraday's plan worked and Jack and company wound up back on the plane in 2004, and another where it didn't and everyone's in the middle of a big mess on Craphole Island in 2007.

(*) I swear, I spent the first fifteen minutes after the premiere ended wrestling with whether to use "Sliding Sawyers" as a subject line, or if that would be an unfair giveaway for time-shifters, folks on the West Coast, etc. Ain't easy when my fondness for semi-clever wordplay clashes with my hawkishness about spoiler protection.

It was clear quickly that there was something hinky with the 2004 timeline, particularly since I had only recently rewatched the pilot to write this morning's column. Jack's hair was obviously wrong (as was Rose's), but so were subtler details like the dialogue between Jack and Cindy, or the fact that she gives him only one bottle here, when she slipped him two in the pilot. And then as the flight went along, things became more and more disconnected from the timeline we originally knew: Desmond is on board, Hurley is blissfully lucky, Boone failed to bring Shannon home, etc.

(Perhaps the biggest change of all in the new timeline: the island is underwater. So when Juliet set off Jughead, a whole lotta people died. Hell of a plan, Jack.)

It's a trope of many comic book time travel stories that if you go back in time to change the past, all you do is create an alternate timeline, while the old one you wanted to change still exists. Based on Juliet's posthumous declaration to Sawyer that "It worked" (and based on Lindelof's comic book bonafides), I'm going to assume that's the operating theory here, and that the 2004 scenes aren't some extended dream sequence.

For a brief period, I began to wonder if the gimmick was worth the screen time, and the effort of bringing back Ian Somerhalder, Dominic Monaghan and the rest. Whether the 2004 timeline is real or not (and there comes a point where I have to set my inner comic book nerd aside and acknowledge that none of this is real), the fact is I've spent the last 5 years being invested in the characters back on the island in 2007, and it's their stories I want to see continued.

And, certainly, the parts of "LA X" that resonated with me most deeply were the ones taking place on the island, about which I'll have plenty to say in a bit. But as the premiere moved along and we kept zipping back to hang out on Oceanic 815 (and then in the airport), I began to have the same feeling I did when I rewatched the pilot: I was just so happy to be reminded of when I liked Jack or when Locke was a serene wise man and not a pig-headed victim. I remembered that I did, once upon a time, care about Boone and Charlie (and the unfortunately-absent Shannon). And as the characters landed at LAX and their stories took unexpected turns - Kate escaping from Marshal Mars (and commandeering a cab occupied by Claire, in a neat convergence of Aaron's two mommies), Charlie and Jin independently winding up in custody, Jack and Locke bonding over their respective lost luggage (and Jack and his savior complex wondering if he can fix Locke's wrecked spine) - I couldn't help but be curious about where this was all going.

Not only do I wonder where these alt-stories will travel, but what connection it's all going to have to the "proper" timeline on the island. Will they just be used to illuminate characters' behavior in the island present, the same way they did back in the early flashback days (pre-Jack's tattoos, at least)? Or is the parallel structure telling us something else? Will Alt-Jack reach a point in his time on the mainland where he realizes, just as his bearded counterpart once did, that he has to go back? Might there be a circumstance where the two Sawyers meet and the universe explodes in a collision of sarcasm and anti-sarcasm? Or will the island and mainland timelines remain independent for the rest of the show's run?

If the 2004 scenes were often intriguing, and occasionally distracting, they were still a sideshow to the main event taking place back on the island.

Where to begin? With the confirmation that Evil Locke (or the Man in Black, or Esau, or whatever we want to call him), is Smokey?

With Sawyer and Juliet's tearful, and all-too-brief reunion in the wreckage of the Swan station?

With our first visit to the temple of The Others, and our introduction to two new recurring characters played by John Hawkes (another "Deadwood" alum) and Hiroyuki Sanada?

With Sayid's death and apparent resurrection?

Let's bounce around, why don't we?

When Locke turned out to not be Locke in last year's finale, I wondered exactly why the smoke monster - which we'd been previously told was the island's "security system" - would tell Ben to blindly follow a man who turned out to not be acting in the interests of the island (and/or Jacob, if you can separate the two). Well, now we know: Smokey ain't working for Jacob, but against him, and is made up of the Man in Black. Like so many "Lost" mysteries, the explanation raises up plenty of new questions - for starters, why Smokey would be willing to work with Ben in previous periods, when Ben was following the orders of Jacob - but we finally have something resembling a definitive answer of exactly what/who the monster is. Now we just need to know exactly who/what Esau is. Heh.

Whatever he/it is, Terry O'Quinn is clearly relishing the chance to play this new, mysterious, dangerous character, and Non-Locke's powers and knowledge of people like Ben and Richard (whom he last saw when Richard was "in chains") creates an unsettling dynamic among these characters who are so used to being in charge. And he also finally, more clearly delineates between the good guys and the bad guys (I think). Since Jacob=light, and Esau=dark, and The Others were with Jacob, and our heroes are now with The Others, that should lay things clear, right? (Of course, we'll still need to learn why The Others were all into kidnapping, torture and other experiments while Jacob was still alive, or if we're just supposed to write that off to Ben being kind of a dick as the human leader.)

And since Ben made clear last season that the island, as far as he knew, could not resurrect people - which was then confirmed when we saw Locke's corpse and discovered that the guy we thought was Locke was really the Man in Black - does that mean we shouldn't be so quick to assume the Sayid who sat up at episode's end is really our Sayid? Could Jacob be using Sayid's body to find his own loophole in this never-ending fight? Or did he just know that the only way to defeat an immortal man who can turn into a smoke monster is with a communications expert-turned-torturer-turned-international-assassin with great hair?

If Sayid's back to life for real, great, but if not, I think I'm okay with it. It felt like the character hit a natural stopping point after he shot young Ben last season, and his opening moments with Hurley in "LA X" suggested the show was saying goodbye to that iteration of Sayid just as Sayid was preparing to say goodbye to this mortal coil. (And, as with Alt-Locke, Naveen Andrews will still get to play a version of the character we know so well.)

Whether Sayid got resurrected or just reanimated and possessed, he's still ambulatory in some fashion, where Juliet appears to be so dead that not even Miracle Max could do anything for her. Josh Holloway and Elizabeth Mitchell got to put a moving coda onto the couple they created with the writers last year, and it was every bit as heart-wrenching as Juliet's plunge into the Swan shaft at the end of "The Incident." The only problem I had with it, I think, is that Sawyer's love and grief for Juliet was portrayed here as so strong and all-consuming that I can't imagine the show plausibly trying to revisit the Jack/Kate/Sawyer triangle, at least in this timeline. Unless there's a point in this season where island time jumps forward a long way from this tragic moment, Sawyer's going to be too wrapped up in his feelings for Blondie to convincingly give Freckles the time of day as anything but a shoulder to cry on and an extra gun to back his play.

Juliet's death also gives the show a fresh spin on the enmity between Sawyer and Jack, and the massive, fatal failure of the Jughead plan (from this Jack's perspective, anyway) might hopefully convince Jack once and for all that things tend to go bad when he's appointed or appoints himself leader of anything. But probably not.

And speaking of leaders, we meet another of a sort in the Hiroyuki Sanada character to be named later. (Several internet sources list Hawkes' character as "Lennon," which simultaneously seems too obvious and amusing, and for simplicity's sake, I'll use that until we get in-show evidence to the contrary.) The temple Others seem culturally different from several other Others factions we've seen, styled more like hippies. (Might we find out that there are a bunch of Dharma defectors and/or their descendants among this bunch?) We've been hearing about the temple for years, and this is definitely an interesting introduction to the place.

And I see by the clock that it's now 1:06 a.m., so I better get to the bullet points before my brain shuts down. Some other thoughts:

• Well, we knew that Cindy and the kids were among the group sent to the temple back in season three, but we still hadn't seen them in all that time. Now we have. All that's left is an explanation for why they (and any other Oceanic survivors recruited into Other-dom) didn't skip around in time last year.

• Getting back to Rose and Bernard, did Jughead's detonation fling them back into the present as well, or did it only affect the time travelers who were close to its explosion?

• Alt-Sawyer has his counterpart's nicknaming gifts, as he dubs Cindy "Earhart." (While doing some prep for this season, I stumbled across this awesome YouTube collection of Sawyer nicknames and its sequel. Absolutely worth the waste of your time.)

• Bram's failed attempt to survive Smokey's attack finally gives us a good explanation for why Jacob's cabin was surrounded by that circle of ash: it, along with the Dharma sonic barrier, are the only things that seem able to repel the monster.

• Still more explanations: the guitar case Jacob gave Hurley contained not a guitar, but a wooden ankh with a fortune hidden inside.

• We may not have gotten Shannon, or Mr. Eko, or some of the other awesome Oceanic survivors in this one, but we got Arzt! And Frogurt! Both as annoying as ever!

• Good to see Kate's tree-climbing skills are still intact even after a time-jump.

• Also good to know that at least Hurley is the one Oceanic survivor who didn't become a firearms expert shortly after landing on the island (or at any point after).

• Was glad to see that the Miles/LaFleur friendship wasn't quickly forgotten now that we're away from the Dharma days.

• "You're the monster." "Let's not resort to name-calling." Funny funny stuff from the Emerson/O'Quinn duo there.

• Claire makes her first appearance in more than a year, and I hope we finally revisit (in one timeline or the other) the matter of what will happen with Aaron's horrible destiny. And speaking of underserviced characters, I'd really like to see Sun return to prominence this year, now that most of the characters are now back on the island at the same time.

Okay, that's enough out of me. What did everybody else think?

Men of a Certain Age, "You Gonna Do That The Rest of Your Life?": Golf in the face of death

A review of last night's "Men of a Certain Age" coming up just as soon as I like to say "the journey"...

"Everyone's great under no pressure, but when you have a little pressure, only some people are great." -Joe

For an episode that opened with a death (albeit the death of a character we'd never heard of before) and had both Joe and Owen contemplating their own mortality, this one felt oddly lightweight. Not that "Men of a Certain Age" is ever that heavy of a show, but there's usually something more satisfying in the shaggy dog-ness of it all than I got last night.

A lot of that insubstantial feeling came from the Terry story. All three main characters have their inner conflicts that the show repeats over and over - Joe struggles with his anxiety, Owen is over-burdened and eats too much, Terry won't grow up - but Terry's always feels the most repetitive, in part because the character was the most familiar to begin with. Scott Bakula's fine, but there's often a predictability to the Terry plots (with occasional exceptions like last week's Big Brother story) that there isn't with the other two guys, and I saw every beat of this one coming, down to Terry using his previously-established knowledge of electrical work to start fixing things around the complex.

(It was fun, however, to watch the other characters react to Terry's usual obliviousness. Carla Gallo is doing some really interesting work as Annie, who knows exactly who and what Terry is and will overlook that, but only to a point she hasn't reached yet.)

Owen's story had some nice moments, as the running gag about his over-eating turned serious (though still offered us comedy like the sound of Andre Braugher saying "jicama" over and over), but like the story with Joe's dad last week, the resolution seemed a little too easy. The difference, of course, is that Braugher's a regular castmember and Robert Loggia isn't. So it's entirely possible we'll see Owen struggle and backslide and sneak some Fiddle Faddle in later episodes. But if this is it, too easy.

The episode's highlight, unsurprisingly, was the return of the Joe & Manfro comedy team (this time written by another "Everybody Loves Raymond" alum, Lew Schneider). I like that there's always this unsettling edge about how the two of them interact. Manfro seems like a goofball, but Joe's always afraid the guy could hurt him. Here, though, Manfro may have given him the inspiration to give the senior tour a try, and I liked the ambiguity of the final scene as compared to how Owen's story resolved. Joe seems determined to stay there all night until he hits 10 in a row, but it's also clear that he's going to be lucky to hit that many consecutively. And after spending so many weeks watching Joe be timid and uncomfortable(*), it was a pleasure to see him kicking ass and taking names on the back nine at the golf course.

(*) Speaking of which, I was glad to have Sarah Clarke back as Dory, but I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop with that character. Between the way Joe behaved on their first date in "Go with the Flow" and his creepy, morbid attitude at Terry's housewarming, I'm wondering why this woman hasn't backed away, very carefully.

No new show next week, with the season's penultimate episode airing on Feb. 15. It's a short season (in this economy, a lot of cable shows seem to be downsizing from 13 episodes to 10), but at least there's already a renewal in the bag so we know the next two won't be the last two.

What did everybody else think?

Big Bang Theory, "The Einstein Approximation": Ball pit Bazinga

Though the scene with Sheldon and Leonard in the ball pit on last night's "Big Bang Theory" was hysterical, overall I found the episode to be one of those occasional outings where Sheldon's behavior is pushed so far to the extreme that you wonder why any human being would tolerate him, why Leonard would live with him, the others be friends with him, etc. And I usually find those episodes tough to take, as was the case here.

What did everybody else think?