
Welcome to “NBC Team-Up” starring Bass and Kid Bass!

Welcome to “NBC Team-Up” starring Bass and Kid Bass!

Sebastian Monroe, voted Father of the Year by no one ever.

I am vengeance! I am the night! I haven’t had a bath in weeks!

Rachel and Charlie Matheson spend some overdue quality time together, fabricating chemical warfare materials and debating whether Grandpa Gene should live or die.

For Doctor Horn, life is a big ball of stibby stabby torturey worturey stuff.
One key part that definitely worked: the addition of Željko Ivanek as the sinister Dr. Calvin Horn. Before the blackout he toiled away in the Department of Defense’s Alternative Energies Projects division, the same workplace as Ben and Rachel Matheson, whose fault all of this is. He scaled the ladder of post-blackout career advancement and is now “the President’s senior science adviser”, which is more impressive if you accept the Patriots’ as-yet-unseen “President” as the true leader of the withered husk that represents what’s left of America. He doesn’t brook liars, he has his ear on the ground, and he thinks more than one step ahead. He’s not quite up to two steps ahead, but the potential’s in him.
On tonight’s new episode of The Tom Neville Show, “Dead Man Walking”, the best scene was shockingly not a Neville scene. Near the very end, a new character rides into the town of Willoughby, a mysterious Dr. Horn whose high-level connection to the Patriots implies big trouble ahead for our man Neville and his gang. I’m excited because, even though all Dr. Horn did this week was literally ride into town and wave hi, he’s played by Željko Ivanek (at right in the above photo), a recurring supporter from the great Homicide: Life on the Street who’s popped into dozens of movies throughout my lifetime and made them better places to be, for at least the span of his own scenes. If Revolution is adding him as a Big Bad, then…well, between him and last week’s strong episode, I may consider being excited about the frequent scenes that don’t have Giancarlo Esposito in them.
Enough about Ivanek. What about this week in Tom Neville news?

Tom Neville, Defender of Wagon Force One!

Born down in a dead man’s town! The first kick he took was…and so on.

If the show must keep swiping episode titles from sources cooler than it is, then “Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun” was a missed opportunity.
Tonight on the new episode of NBC’s Revolution, “There Will Be Blood”, the game is afoot for our hero, Tom Neville. The alleged President of the United States of America has returned to the mainland from his/her getaway in Guantanamo Bay and set up camp in Savannah, but his/her representatives are presenting themselves as the people’s rescuers through the use of big fat lies. Our hero knows the truth, believes nuclear madman Randall Flagg was working for them, and can second-guess their devious plan from a mile away: “Create the problem. Be the solution.” And Neville hates it when anyone lies but him.

Tom Neville is back. And this time…he’s still mad.
Revolution is back! And this time, it’s sorry if it made you unhappy and it swears it can change!
After an opening montage of moments from the first nineteen episodes set to the tune of “Can’t Find My Way Home”, at long last begins the Revolution season-one finale, “The Dark Tower” (not the first time they’ve referenced Stephen King). When last we left, Monroe Republic President Sebastian “Bass” Monroe and former best friend Miles Matheson were facing off inside the tower with coilguns at twenty paces. Will this be the duel to end all duels? Here in the first minute of the episode?

There’s this place. It’s called…The TOWER.
Thus does tonight’s new episode of Revolution, “Children of Men”, begin with a promise of explosions. We ended last week’s episode with Rachel Matheson triggering the grenade she carried with her into President Monroe’s field tent in hopes of avenging the death of her son Danny. Instead of opening this week with Rachel and Monroe both dead — which, let’s face it, would be a true game-changer — the grenade gets kicked out of the tent, exploding outside and destroying some tanks full of movie combustion fluid or whatever. Everyone in the tent is safe, and Rachel is easily captured and embarrassed.

Charlie (Tracy Spiridakos) and Jason (JD Pardo) share a moment of true love while a disenchanted Atlanta evacuates in panic.
“There’s a lot of beauty in ordinary things. Isn’t that the point?”
— Pamela Beesly Halpert, May 16, 2013.
Our family spent this evening bidding farewell to the quotidian saga of The Office after seven solidly engaging seasons, one apocryphal season we endured out of customer loyalty, and one mostly improved bonus season to make up for that one. Of all our ongoing TV series, it was the only one we watched unanimously. Whenever the Dunder Mifflin staff spent another work day together, we spent quality time together, like the families of days past that gathered around the old-time radio, the puppet stage, the family plow, or whatever other objects past generations thought were worth gathering around. (Well, at least we did this after my son was old enough to appreciate it and binge-watched the early seasons over one summer vacation.)

Former Google executive Aaron Pittman (Zak Orth), possibly the only sci-fi character in history that I can convincingly cosplay at conventions.

My son and I liked NBC’s short-lived, suspenseful Persons Unknown so much, we had to watch the last two episodes online after NBC had given up on it, even when we hadn’t. The cast included Chadwick Boseman (42), Daisy Betts (Last Resort), and Alan Ruck (Bunheads!). Not pictured: Reggie Lee from Grimm.
In this present age of DVD boxed sets, TV series completism is easier than it’s ever been in world history. Buy a complete-series set (or collect seasons one by one as funding permits); set aside multiple weekends for binge-viewing; repeat until you’ve become an authority on the series long after it departed the airwaves. Cable networks provide reruns of many series for your catch-up pleasure, if you’re patient enough to wait until the ones you missed take their turn. Even easier to complete are those fledgling upstarts that grab your attention, air two or three episodes, and find themselves axed by ill-tempered TV execs who’d rather be flooding the airwaves with cost-effective reality stunts instead.

Meet Miles Matheson’s new partner! Can these two dangerous men share a post-apocalypse without driving each other crazy?

If something compels General Monroe to stop sulking in Independence Hall and walk around in open daylight, you know things just got real.
As of tonight, now we know for certain why NBC tastefully postponed the new Revolution episode “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia” from last week. At first I wondered if the reason would be more scenes of Nora carrying out heroic bombing on behalf of the Rebel Alliance, but no. Even more unnerving, given the events of last week in real life: this week, Sebastian “Bass” Monroe, President of the Monroe Republic, mad with electrical power and incensed paranoia, sends a few henchmen to Atlanta, the capital of the neighboring Georgia Federation, to threaten it with an old-fashioned suitcase nuke. Presumably Monroe and his loyal scientists have been sitting on this portable, stylish WMD through all fifteen years of the blackout, waiting for the opportunity to fire it up and stop postponing WWIII. Luckily for them, most fissile materials have a half-life with a distant expiration date.