Spoilers a'hoy.
Wonderland:
The pilot introduces us to Alice, her various father issues, and her ill-fated and short-lived engagement to a genie, Cyrus. Alternately rescued by the Knave of Hearts and the White Rabbit (who turns out to be an agent for the Red Queen,) she mostly seems to run around delivering vicious beat-downs and berating people who are trying to help her. I had seen about twenty minutes of this more than once at different ABC screenings, so the only new bits revolved largely around the Red Queen and Jafar who snarled appropriately at each other before capitulating to the necessity of teamwork, and the Cyrus reveal at the end.
The problem I have with this first episode is that the protagonist just isn't that sympathetic to me. When we first see her as an adult in Wonderland, she's kidnapping someone for her own reasons and threatening to destroy someone's home. Is she a heroine or a terrorist? I appreciate the attempt to make her a strong grrrl power character, but unlike the women of Once Upon A Time, Alice hasn't shown us the charming qualities that would make us overlook the aggressively self-absorbed ones currently on display.
The other complaint I have is the roughness of the CGI--some parts looked pretty good, some looked as though the people were lit slightly differently than the background, and the last shot, when they were walking away down the road, looked as cartoon-y as the lifesavers commercials Pixar used to do.
Conclusion: Some interesting characters and premise, but we'll hope for a better relationship with the characters next week.
Once Upon A Time:
This week we met Tinker Bell, who interacts with Regina once, and immediately goes from a fresh-faced fairy, to something unmagical who vaguely resembles the crazy ladies pushing carts around supermarkets. The interesting part of this episode, was the almost-unevil manner Regina adopted to try to get Tinker Bell to help them get Henry back. Frankly, if I were Tinker Bell, I would have just kept Regina's heart and made her magic me back some wings, but since the only fairies we've really seen besides Blue (who was duped by Geppetto ,) and Amy Acker, I'm beginning to think fairies may not be all that bright.
The big downer was that we once again got to revisit the painfully pathetic ball of unrequited love that is Mulan, and see her hopes get shot down by the the newly expectant Aurora. Dude, it's time to let him go.
Questions:
- Do we really think the shadow isn't going to come back for Robin Hood's kid?
- Do we really think Robin Hood won't follow him to Neverland, where he'll conveniently bump into his True Love?
- Do we really think this will turn out well for him, considering the last time Regina had a boyfriend, she ripped out his heart and made him into her love-slave?
- Is Rumple still off playing with his little doll?
Agents of Shield:
After the disappointment that was last week, I felt this one was an upturn, although not meeting the level of the pilot episode. This one gave us a little more insight into Skye and Wade, and May decided she didn't like staying back on the plane, even though it saved her from her usual trip to unconsciousness.
There were some strange elements (and not just Gravitonium) however, like why Coulson would think a three-piece suit was a reasonable thing to wear for a violent rescue operation, and particularly his resolution to the exploding device crisis. In the first place, he's told that he needs a catalyst to stop the reaction and the subsequent explosion. Does this seem wrong? My impression was that catalysts initiate or accelerate a reaction--shutting one down would be more something like a neutralizing agent...but maybe that's just semantics. The more important aspect is that it could literally be anything, since no one but Hall knows what the whole deal with the machine and the made-up-oniium is about. Given the complete uncertainty of the whole situation, Coulson shoots out the window and lets Hall fall in and get absorbed. What would make him think that was going to happen? Was he just hoping everything loose in the lab would fall in there and something would work? The human body is a pretty closed system--it doesn't seem like a natural first choice as something that would interact with...something and stop it reacting to...something. Kind of a Coulson ex machina.
Even stranger is his subsequent actions, in which he carefully takes the whole thing home and wraps it up like some odd snowglobe souvenir, storing it in the basement with no tags or records of it, saying "do not open." Because I'm sure THAT's not going to come back and bite him in the butt eventually.
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