I went into “Project Deadalus” determined to keep an open mind. My reaction to last week’s episode was a legitimate one—I didn’t decide to get frustrated with the unnecessary call-backs and weird pacing just so I could yell about something for several paragraphs—but it can be easy to lean into a particular view of a…

“If Memory Serves” opens with something of a tease. In a handful of clips (introduced by the Netflix logo, which briefly made me wonder if I’d loaded the wrong screener), the episode attempts to recap the plot of “The Cage,” the unaired Star Trek pilot that featured the original version of the Enterprise crew,…

There’s a moment midway through “Light And Shadows” that typifies much of my problems with the show. Chief Engineer Stamets beams on board a shuttle in the middle of a time anomaly. He’s there to try and rescue Captain Pike and Ash Tyler with his advanced navigation skills—spore drives and tardigrades and what not.…

Be careful what you wish for, I guess. “The Sound Of Thunder” spends nearly all of its running time focused on a single story, and it’s one of the most frustrating episodes of the season this far, full of big crowd-pleasing moments that make little to no sense and rash decisions which always manage to work out for the…

Five episodes into its second season, and Star Trek: Discovery is still working on getting the balance of serialization and standalone right. I appreciate that—it’s a tricky model to work with, and the show’s continued interest in offering smaller stories inside of its larger one is a point in its favor. Yet the…

So the first good news is that even though a couple of characters speak Klingon in “An Obol For Charon,” no actual Klingons appear in the episode. After last week (thanks, Alasdair!) that’s a relief. The other good news is that Jet Reno is back! God bless her. And she’s immediately at odds with Stamets, which is a fun…

“New Eden” finds Star Trek: Discovery offering its own take on a classic Trek archetype: the theme planet. When Tilly (with an assist from Burnham) comes up with a way to track the the red bursts, Pike orders the spore drive back online for a jump that takes the ship halfway across the galaxy, or near abouts. There,…

Star Trek: Discovery’s second season premiere doesn’t waste much time. Within ten minutes, we’ve got our portentous opening narration; a flashback establishing Michael Burnham’s difficult relationship with her brother; and, in the present day, Christopher Pike beaming over to the Discovery from a severely damaged …

“The End” is good. I’d go so far as to say that it’s very good. So good, in fact, that it makes me that much more annoyed at the failings of the episodes that preceded it. Unlike previous entries, this isn’t a two-parter, and it’s also not especially long—at just under an hour, it’s roughly average for the series as a…

And here we find ourselves at the end—not “The End,” that’s still a couple episodes away, but the climax, the acme of the Baudelaires’ journey. Although, as usual, it’s not that simple. As Lemony Snicket has repeatedly told us, he has no idea where the Baudelaires actually are, so a happy ending with them living with…

I feel bad for Violet and Klaus. Oh, not because their parents died in a fire, leaving them orphans; and not because they’ve been shuttled through a series of increasingly unlucky caretakers; and not because they’re pursued by the villainous Count Olaf, who wants to steal their fortune. It’s because they have the…

[Inset boilerplate rewording of “series of unfortunate events” here. I dunno, maybe try something that rhymes this time? Feels pretty hollow at this point. Eventually you really have to let a formula go, or else just double down and make a meal out of it, but I’m not really feeling either. Could go meta. That seems…

This is not going to be a clever review. Oh, I thought about it. Black Mirror’s newest entry “Bandersnatch” is a choose-your-own-adventure story about a young man’s efforts to finish a choose-your-own-adventure video game based on a choose-your-own-adventure cult novel. It’s designed for trickery, and, to Charlie…

So that’s what happened to the teleporter. All this time, I assumed the Monarch and Gary would’ve kept it to themselves for their own plans, but it turns out they handed the discs over to the Guild. Which makes sense; after spending last season trying to circumvent Guild protocol, the Monarch has spent season 7 being…

Oh man, this is a good one. The whole season I’ve been reluctant to go above an “A-,” my standard “this is terrific, but I’m not completely convinced” grade I use when I’m hedging my bets. But I’m going all out “A” on this one. Objectively, I’ll try and explain why, but it’s probably best to be up front right here: I…

Last week, Doc Venture (along with Billy and Pete) invented a teleportation device that could revolutionize the world, and the Monarch and Gary somehow managed to steal it. This week, that—doesn’t come up at all. Which isn’t a problem! “The Terminus Moderate” is an excellent episode, one of the best of the season so…

Tonight’s Venture Bros. asks a simple but unexpected question: what happens if Doctor Venture actually came up with something good? One of the core principles of the series has always been Rusty’s basic ineptitude. He may walk the walk and wear the speedsuits of super science, but he’s never been able to live up the…