Covert Affairs 4.16: Trompe le Monde & Season 4

Well, here we are.  Covert Affairs has finished its 4th season, and we can now look back with 20/20 hindsight and figure out what worked ... and what did not.  The final two eps were filmed in Hong Kong, and were *visually* awesome, as this show always is with all its foreign shoots.  The finale was a fairly solid ep in and of itself, as all the fall season eps mostly were, IF I could have subtracted the Helesa storyline out of them.  The climactic scene (of not just the ep but the entire season) was very satisfying ... another one of those lovely scenes that manage to rise above the clutter and frustrations of the season, at least in those fleeting moments.  I want to put a screenshot of it here but I don't want this post to be too spoilery, so I'll refrain.

Covert Affairs 4.15: There Goes My Gun

O.k. this is super obnoxious ... I always use Amazon HD to get my screenshots for these blog posts, but for some reason, Covert Affairs ep 4.15 is still not available to watch there.  They normally make them available in the wee hours of the morning after it airs.  Not sure what the hold-up is.  Guess I'll just use these pics I got from the show's official Facebook page.  The one below of Auggie fighting the dude in Hong Kong is a real doozy.  It's too hilarious not to use if I can't get the screenshots myself from Amazon.  Heh.

Covert Affairs 4.14: River Euphrates

 

Hahahaha ... is this too mean?  I'm sorry but this is ALL I saw from every single A&A interaction for this entire episode.  10,000 nails on 10,000 chalkboards.  Granted, if I could completely separate this A&A storyline out of the episode, it was actually pretty decent otherwise.  It's just that exactly what I feared would happen with A&A after last week's ep is now playing out just as I had pictured it - in a way that makes every scene with Annie and Auggie just make me feel miserable.  Completely, utterly miserable.  I want to punch Auggie, I want to smack some sense into Annie, and I want to throw my TV out the window during every scene with them together (thank god we only had to endure a couple though).

Covert Affairs: No. 13 Baby a.k.a. The One Where They Ruin Auggie

Dear Covert Affairs,

No.

Dear Auggie,

NO.

From last week: My god, could Helen a.k.a. Helesa BE any effing worse!?

YES.  I mean NO she CANNOT be any effing worse but she DOES GET WORSE.  Soooooooooooo much worse!!!

From last week: Does Covert Affairs have its mojo back?

NO.  O.k. well, kind of.  I mean in the sense of telling a coherent story ... they're actually still doing pretty well.  In the sense of giving me something I actually want to watch, however??  Well, for the first 38-ish minutes, yes, they gave me mostly good stuff.  But then, they did the TV equivalent of putting 10,000 kittens through a huge blender right in front of me.  The took a HUGE EFFING DUMP ALL OVER MY TV SCREEN FOR THE REST OF THE EPISODE.  Hahaha o.k. well not for the whole rest of the episode.  But once they took the dump ... all I could see in my head for the rest of the ep was diarrhea (by the name of Helesa).  I couldn't scrub the diarrhea off.  It was permanently there.  I was just living on Diarrhea Planet.

Covert Affairs 4.12: Something Against You

My god, could Helen a.k.a. Helesa (remember her alias earlier in the season was Teresa something) BE any effing worse!?  She is not only a completely unnecessary and grating character, but she proved in this week's episode to be a TOTAL scammer.  Back in ep 4.07 she was all like, "Ohh whoops sorry Auggie I never loved you, it was all for the mission, duh!!"  "Oh Annie, falling in love is dangerous, going dark is the best!!  OMG it's soooo kewl you should try it out too!!  You can be SO awesome as a spy this way I swear!!  It's totes fun.  Love only slows you down.  Dump the loser and you can be cool like me."

And now this week she's all like, "OH wait what's that you say??  Annie's dead!?  OH in that case!  Auggie I DID love you, I never stopped loving you, I totally regret going dark what the hell was I thinking OMG!!??  Going dark is so lame I shoulda never done that shit!!"  UGGH.  Just go EAT A BAG OF Ds HELESA, SERIOUSLY.  And get out of our faces already.  You are a plot device and you're doing nothing but EFFING shit up in the most obnoxious way possible for the audience.

Anyway.  Despite my venomous reaction to Helesa being on my TV screen, luckily her screen time was kept mercifully short in this episode.  And the rest of the ep actually managed to be pretty damn good.  Two weeks in a row of good eps now.  Does Covert Affairs have its mojo back?  God ... please TV gods ... I pray to you that this is the case.

Annie has been thrown off the rails in this ep, and it appears that she may be starting to have feelings and stuff again, like a normal human.  Maybe.  I hope so.  We'll see what happens next week.  Here's my review at GeekFurious:

http://geekfurious.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-plopper-reviews-covert-affairs-412.html

Covert Affairs 4.11: Dead

A month ago, when the mid-season finale of Covert Affairs aired, I was extremely frustrated with this show.  I went into the fall premiere with another month's worth of realizing how annoyed and disappointed I was with the way that the quality of the storytelling seemed to complete drop off a cliff between episodes 6 and 7 of this season.  The first 6 eps were quite enjoyable and I had given them all good ratings in my reviews.

So I couldn't, and still can't, figure out why the next 4 eps were such a cluster of half-baked and convoluted stories, leading into an ultimate decision by Annie that felt totally unconvincing.  And the crazy thing is that the turn in the story was actually something that I really LIKED in theory.  It's something that should be completely amazing and badass, but we got there in a way that didn't make much sense.

This week's fall premiere was the start of that new storyline, so I tried to just set my frustration with the way the show brought us here to the side, and take in the new storyline for what it was, on its own.  Interestingly ... the ep ended up being FAR better than the last four.  It felt like suddenly the show had come back to sanity ... back to the show that gave us 6 quality episodes in the first third of the season.

I don't know what happened, or why, but it suddenly feels like the show has its focus back.  It's a bit of a different focus, but it's one that sounds extremely interesting to me.  I see great potential in it, and it's starting to give me hope again.  Will the goodness continue, or will we return to convoluted chaos again before the season is out?  Only time will tell, but in the meantime, here's my ep 4.11 review at GeekFurious:

http://geekfurious.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-plopper-reviews-covert-affairs-411.html

Covert Affairs Eps 4.09 "Hang Wire" & 4.10 "Levitate Me"

Dear Covert Affairs, you are kiiiiiilllllllllling me.  Seriously.  There are few things in this fangirl's life that are more frustrating than to watch a TV show take its HUGE potential and squander it.

My last post was for episode 4.08, because I went out of town on vacation for a week and a half after that.  I was out of the country for 4.09 & 4.10, so this is my post to link to those two reviews.  At the time of my last post for 4.08, this is what I said:

I just pray that eps 4.09 and 4.10 are completely epic because ... they seriously need to be to make up for the lameness of 4.07 and 4.08.

So ... were they epic?  Well ... no.  They were not epic.  They were not horrible, don't get me wrong, but they just, were NOT epic either.  And rather than appease the frustrations I was already having after 4.07-8, they simply compounded and multiplied them.  And it all ended in this scene:

This scene that just ... it broke my fangirl heart, because it was something that could have been SO amazing.  It could have been.  It SHOULD have been.  There's no goddamn way this should have been anything other than ass-kickingly awesome.  But it just wasn't, and the problem was NOT the scene itself.  The scene on its own was wonderful.  The problem was that very little of what led into it made sense.  And therefore, the scene itself didn't hold much weight.

UGGH.  Anyway.  Just check out my reviews for the details.  Will they fuck up the back 6 when the fall season starts??  We've had 6 good eps this season and then 4 not-great ones in a row.  Somebody wave a magic TV wand for me, please.

Ep 4.09 "Hang Wire": http://geekfurious.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-plopper-reviews-covert-affairs-409.html

Ep 4.10 "Levitate Me": http://geekfurious.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-plopper-reviews-covert-affairs-410.html

¡Vamos! Covert Affairs Season 4 Begins

I've thought about possibly creating a new blog that is just for my TV-related posts, but I ended up not doing it because I'm going to be reviewing Covert Affairs over at GeekFurious instead of on my own blog for season 4.  And I can't guarantee how often I'll write posts about other shows, at least while I've still got my Bible Reviews project going on.  I've been following and enjoying Magnus's blogs (ChuckGasmic, GeekFurious) ever since the Chuck days, and let's face it, reviewing Covert there means it'll actually get SEEN by a few people!  Unlike here, where I'm lucky if I get 20 non-spam hits in an entire week.

Anyway, Covert Affairs' 4th season finally started last Tuesday.

Mmmm, yes please.  Teo Braga could be my new Simon Fischer.

If you're one of the few people who has actually read my blog before, you may recall that I got sucked into the show late last summer, and then reviewed several of the last few eps of the season.  Here is my review of the season 4 opener over at GeekFurious:

http://geekfurious.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-plopper-reviews-covert-affairs-401.html

I guess I'll keep linking to them from here the same way I do for my Bible blogs, though I'll be surprised if they bring any more hits.

Covert Affairs: "Lady Stardust" and Season 3

Lordy.  You know, with most t.v. shows, I'm able to love them at a totally healthy level.  Breaking Bad, Homeland, pretty much all comedies like Parks & Rec, 30 Rock, Community, New Girl, Louie, It's Always Sunny, etc.  And by "healthy level," I mean: I watch them, I enjoy them, I delete each ep from the DVR after watching.  However, there have been exactly three shows in history that have brought me into "obsessed mode."  Symptoms of obsessed mode: following Twitter feeds, reading (some) spoilers, checking ratings (uggh), and my husband's favorite symptom - keeping episodes on the DVR to comfort me like warm blankets until the DVD/BluRays come out (my husband: "Are you ever gonna delete these!?").  The entire list of shows that have ever fallen into this category is short: Alias, Chuck, and Castle for about one season.  Now that I think about it, I'm probably halfway there with Girls too.  Anyway now, I can officially add another show to that list, because Covert Affairs pulled me in hardcore this season.  And this is a show I totally blew off for the first two seasons because it looked way lame.  But then BAM, out of nowhere, in the middle of season 3 it sucker punched me, and before I had a chance to claw my way out of it, I was fully sucked in.  Sigh.

So now here I am, doing what seems to be the newest symptom of "obsessed mode": blogging a review of the season finale (ep 316 "Lady Stardust") and season 3 as a whole.  Let's get right to this, shall we?  Lemme start off by giving my bottom line, now that the entire season is complete: I loovved the first 11 eps of the season (everything up through Annie escaping Russia).  I mean, I am IN LOVE with them.  I want to marry them and live with them blissfully, happily ever after.  And then, I found the last 5 eps to be an exercise in frustration that eventually did have some payoffs in the last couple episodes, especially the finale - which I thought for the most part was a very good ep.  But, there's only so much that can be addressed in like 43 minutes.  Interestingly, the finale managed to bring some much-needed clarity to both the plot trajectory and Annie's character trajectory, but it also clarified and solidified for me one key thing I have felt was missing in these last 5 eps.  Let's start with the good stuff first, and then I'll get to that second part: