I’m not… entirely sure that the team who wrote, animated, and produced “McMystery At McDuck McManor” realize how truly bizarre this episode is. (Colleen Evanson, who penned the script to one of the show’s weaker outputs, helms this one as well.) DuckTales, in any incarnation–comic series, old TV show, new TV show–is…
The Drag Race makeover challenge is typically for people who aren’t used to the spotlight, but that changes this season as social media influencers are brought into the workroom. The producers get to take advantage of the extended reach of these online celebrities, but they don’t have especially interesting personal…
“I thought I knew you.”
Because The A.V. Club knows that TV shows keep going even if we’re not writing at length about them, we’re experimenting with discussion posts. For certain shows, one of our TV writers will publish some brief thoughts about the latest episode, and open the comments for readers…
It only took five episodes—i.e., more than half this season’s entire order of shows—but Archer has finally zeroed in on what makes Danger Island great: Stick Pam and Archer somewhere, give them something to fight about (with Crackers on the outskirts to crack jokes and catch an occasional “Shut up, bird”), and let the…
Every week while the season is airing, I log onto a website and click on a link for the latest episode of The Expanse; and every week, I breathe a sigh of relief at the running time. Out of every drama I’ve covered in the past three or four years (or more), this is the only one that consistently sticks to the 43…
It’s an odd war that Serena Joy and June wage in “First Blood,” an often excellent but ultimately baffling hour of The Handmaid’s Tale. It begins when Serena Joy, scared and guilty, literally removes the wall that separates her from the woman carrying “her” baby, giving her a chance to see it on an ultrasound monitor.…
The season four finale of The 100 boasted a perfect storytelling gimmick: the doomsday clock. It was an entire episode devoted to a single story, which involved Clarke and the team working against the impending Praimfaya to save their lives. The structure of the episode, which made it clear how much time everyone had…
This was a terrific episode of Legion: An exciting jailbreak, a mindfuck of a desert journey, and some intriguingly elusive telepathic trickery all came into play. Unfortunately, then it stopped dead in its tracks for a hoary after-school special about the danger of cell phones. It may be time to retire Jon Hamm’s…
We knew it would come down to this in the end: All you need is love. Exactly how that would manifest itself in the fourth season finale “We Are The Flash” is something I never would have been able to predict, and I’m not certain it made any sense at all. But it was fast-paced, exciting, suspenseful, and full-on comic…
“All I’m trying to say is, you’re not an appealing person.”
In a recent interview with Variety, Les Charles, one of the co-creators of Cheers, reflected on the 25th anniversary of the final episode of that series and, in doing so, reflected on the inherent problem in ending sitcoms in general, zeroing in on the fact that last episodes don’t tend to be typical episodes.
It’s almost hard to remember now, but back in Supergirl’s first season we used to spend almost as much time with Kara Danvers as we did with Supergirl. Hell, I used to spend these reviews bemoaning the fact that the DEO half of the show wasn’t anywhere near as interesting as the CatCo stuff. Now…
You can tell when iZombie starts to pull a season together because the episodes are so full of plot you barely have time to take a breath. After really struggling to strike a consistent balance between character and plot in the back half of the season, this penultimate episode finally settles in and sets things up for…
The Terror didn’t end tonight. It died.
Hey, remember how the final sequence of Six Feet Under was a unique, sublimely devastating summation of the show’s vision of its characters’ shared human experience? Pretty great stuff. Well, imagine an animated sitcom conservatively a decade-and-a-half past its prime grafting that ending onto its own middling,…
How much do the stories we live by matter when we find out those stories are a lie? It’s an idea that Westworld keeps coming back to, especially in its second season, when the show has more or less surrendered itself completely to the hosts. Maeve knows that her daughter was a plotline she was programmed to follow, a…
“Jake & Amy” could’ve easily functioned as a proper series finale for Brooklyn Nine-Nine. In terms of its status on FOX, that’s kind of what it is. As an episode that will have follow-up though, it’s also quite refreshing to have a season finale that doesn’t end with the characters in a state of absolute chaos. …
The downside to wrapping up your major storylines in the middle of a season is that it can take a while to get ramped back up again. In the case of Billions, the creative team appears content to take the show’s central conflict off the back burner entirely and stow it in the freezer. Instead, Chuck and Axe have each…
So what happens when both your law enforcement figure and your criminal can’t trust their bosses? As we head into the first season finale of Killing Eve, both Eve and Villanelle find themselves cut adrift from the systems that created them. Eve has finally gotten confirmation (she thinks) that Carolyn knows more than…
