Broadchurch - Season 2, Episode 7 - Review

My review of last week's episode

At the moment, I'm sitting here, wracking my brains to remember whether anything actually happened in this episode. Mostly stalling. The trial has never been more interminable than here, as people yell at each other, and Olivia Colman cries more, and the verdict is continually stalled. Drama. Drama. Drama. *snore*

Broadchurch - Season 2, Episode 6 - Review

My review of last week's episode

This episode is about dysfunctional couples. There are four of them. We now have a new media romance, as evil Abby Thompson jumps in bed with Olly (he's still a jerk) in order, it turns out, to gain information.

Couple number three are Cate and Ricky Gillespie, who, reunited by Ellie, quickly slip into bickering again. Number two is Tess and Alec. The latter has finally decided to make some decisions on the Brink of Death front, by having a pacemaker installed. It's not quite as abrupt as it was in Gracepoint, but this sudden turn of events is a bit anticlimactic. My impending exit from terminal medical thingy makes the whole show gain a sense of vague urgency, until producers think money and Tennant-Colman chemistry and decide to cancel my death because season three.

Broadchurch - Season 2, Episode 5 - Review

My review of last week's episode

Oh, all right. This episode has drawn me back to Broadchurch. It still has some of the same problems, but is blessedly free of some of the silliness of the second and third episodes. There's lots of the same: tense confrontations, unnecessary subplots, angry/distraught/happy/thoughtful people contrasted against a lovely sky, but it's a decent enough episode.

Broadchurch - Season 2, Episode 4 - Review

My review of last week's episode

Well, overall, a bit more reasonable than last week. Damning with faint praise? It's the best I can do.

Ellie has had her Worst Day Ever, so now it's Alec's turn. The episode starts as he has disturbing flashbacks to when he found Pippa Gillespie's body, which makes him cry like an increasingly boring character looking for sympathy. He also faces the prospect that he might have been wrong about the whole Sandbrook case and manages to alienate both his wife and his daughter and the murdered girl's dad, Ricky Gillespie, and Ollie (who's still a jerk).

Episode 7: Babette's Feast - Hallelujah!

The Patriarch's cooking skills, Law and Grace, something's rotten in the state of Denmark, and why Christians should stop acting like accountants.

Agatha Christie's Poirot - Elephants Can Remember - Review

My review of last week's episode: Dead Man's Folly

A couple, General and Mrs. Ravenscroft, walk along the white cliffs of Dover, arm-in-arm. The dog runs ahead, barking happily. They smile at one another. A few seconds later, a shot rings out, and the two lie dead.

Thus kicks off the climactic season of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, running circa 1989. Despite an added storyline involving murder by hydrotherapy (a psychiatric treatment in which the patient is blasted with scalding then freezing water), this episode is not as uniformly dark as Murder on the Orient Express, the intense conclusion to the previous season.

Ariadne Oliver’s appearance adds a good element of humor. Her slapdash, jovial demeanor is the perfect foil to Poirot’s fastidious world-weariness (which has become a little old—dude, one smile won’t hurt.) During the reception for her Crime Novelist of the Year award, Mrs. Oliver is cornered by the formidable Mrs. Burton-Cox, a mother with an ax to grind. Does she remember her goddaughter, Celia Ravenscroft? Yes, well, what she wants to know is did General Ravenscroft kill his wife, or did Margaret Ravenscroft kill her husband?