Community S2E9 "Conspiracy Theories and Interior Decoration" - Fake guns, blanket forts, and Dean Danger

I thought Community started its second season somewhat slowly (I couldn't stand the space episode which everybody seemed to love), but it's definitely on a streak of great episodes which continued with "Conspiracy Theories and Interior Decoration". It was a major contrast to last week's bottle episode, but it had two hilarious plotlines and is immensely quotable.
It all starts when Dean Pelton (Jim Rash) notices an odd entry on Jeff's schedule. The Dean claims, to Annie's shock, that Jeff (who, by the way, is going with some sick stubble!) completely invented a class (Conspiracy Theories in American History) and a teacher (Professor Professorson). This would force the dean to conduct a strenuous audit of the entire school, which would be very time-consuming ("Good-bye writing in Starbucks until a certain Persian barista asks me about my novel!"). Jeff gets the Dean and Annie to come with him to look at the classroom where he claims he took this Conspiracy Theories class, but it turns out to just be a broom closet. However, as the Dean is about to leave to commence his unfortunate audit, Professor Professorson (Kevin Corrigan of "Superbad" and "Big Fan" in an awesome guest role) shows up, telling the Dean that they've probably never met because he teaches primarily in the night school. The Dean, happy to be proven wrong, sets off to continue writing chapter one of "Time Desk: The Adventures of Dean Dangerous" (Jeff: "That will be the worst book I ever read cover to cover").  But not all is right, at least with Annie. Jeff admits he's actually never met the shady Professor before, and while he just wants to get lunch, Annie wants to snoop more.
Meanwhile, Troy and Abed, while at a sleepover, created a simple blanket fort. It was Troy's idea originally to make it bigger, but the real expansion begins when Abed's dorky friend Pablo sees it and wants in. The fort continues to grow until it covers their entire floor (and Leonard joins in with blankets he stole from his son). There's some pretty funny stuff here, and it gets better later on, but I just had to give some back story here.
Back to the main storyline: the stakes are raised when, after Annie discovers that Professor Professorson's name is actually Professor Wooley, Jeff gets a threatening phone call about how "things will get explosive". Jeff sees Annie fiddling with her alternative energy project for the marvelously-named Bio-Diorama-Rama and dives to get her out of the way of the explosion which turns out to be no more than a few underwhelming sparks. This scare only inspires Annie to go even deeper into her investigation, so she and Jeff are actually going to check out the night school and get to the bottom of the whole mystery. They catch Professor Wooley in the hallway and he, knowing they want answers, runs away. This begins an epic chase through Greendale, including through the now-gigantic and citylike blanket fort (it has its own civil rights museum!), and this scene was hilarious. It was a brilliant parody of the standard chase scene. They eventually catch Professor Professorson/Wooley (who it turns out is also the drama professor Sean Garretty). The professor explains that he entirely invented night school because he, just like Jeff, wanted to get an easy free credit. Now that Jeff has this relatability with the professor, they decide to scare the dean away from the scent by using fake guns from the drama department.
This brings on the climactic scene in which we learn that basically everybody was conspiring somehow with everybody else and everybody is fake-shot by their co-conspirators. The dean shoots Annie to teach Jeff about academic honesty, Jeff shoots the dean to teach Annie about friendship, and Annie shoots Jeff to teach the dean not to conspire with anybody he can (Annie: "If you conspire with every person who approaches you, you're not even really conspiring with anyone, you're just doing random crap.") and the dean's high-pitched wail is hilarious. And then of course there's one more conspiracy: an actor shoots Professor Garretty to teach all of them to not use fake guns.
All that was left after that was an amusing end bumper where, after reading about their blanket fort in the school newpaper, Troy and Abed fear that they've gotten too mainstream so they execute "Protocol Omega", which is to pull a couple strategically-placed cords to cause the entire fort to collapse, and looting to ensue (at least for Leonard). But the episode ends with them vowing to each other to go on to create a cardboard submarine.
So while this episode kept me laughing, there is a lot to digest. It's interesting that one week after the bottle episode which had every member of the gang so focused upon, this week Britta, Pierce, and Shirley were barely in the episode. I also wonder about that mysterious professor. What was his real name actually? And will he be back? I sure hope so, because Kevin Corrigan played that part excellently and he is a really fun character.
I said at the beginning of this getting-to-be-pretty-long review that this episode was really quotable, so I'll end with some extra quotes from it.
Professor Professorson: "My family name was Professorberg but we changed it when we were fleeing from the Nazis."
Jeff (after discovering that Professor Professorson is actually real): "My latest theory? Maybe I'm a god. I've ignored the signs for far too long."
Abed: "You shouldn't be in here, Leonard. You already have three farting strikes against you."
Jeff: "Did you just mispronounce etcetera?", Professor Wooley: "My latin class was fake!"
Jeff: "He has defrauded your school to the tune of dozens of credits per year, and nearly twice as many dollars!"
Some of the night school courses were pretty funny. Here are the names of some of them: History of Something, Learning!, Introduction to Basics, Principles of Intermediate, Studyology, Class 101, Theoretical Phys Ed, Math 1-2-3, Simplified Chinese, Reading?, Nominal Ascertainment, Canned Response Awareness.

The Walking Dead - S1E3, "Tell it to the Frogs". Human drama in a world of zombies. Cheesy post titles, too.

But seriously! I wrote that and then I was like, "Whoa. That sucks."

On to the Walking Dead? Good. We probably should be on our way by now anyway, seeing as it originally aired four nights ago already. Chill. I've been sick, okay?

The Walking Dead put out a really good episode this week. It was a great rebound from last week's mediocre "Guts", which I didn't even find interesting enough to write about. This episode was pretty cool because it focused, as I hoped the whole show would, on the human drama aspect of the zombie invasion. There were barely any zombies actually shown in this whole episode, but  it was still thrilling. It started with an absolutely heart-wrenching scene of Merrill Dixon, who we remember had been handcuffed to the roof of the department store last episode and seems to have become utterly mad and depraved since then, struggling to break free of his bondage as the zombies come closer to breaking through the chained door separating them from his flesh. We are then left to wonder what happened to him as we get back to our main group of survivors.

Rick has rescued the group, aside from Dixon, who had been living in the store, and they are ready to rejoin the main group of survivors, which, unbeknownst to Rick, includes his wife, Lori, and son, Carl, in the country. And how's that for a run-on sentence? So of course when Rick's gang comes back to the main outpost, there's a big teary reunion between Rick and Lori and Carl. Of course, lately, since Lori thought that Rick was dead, she's been sleeping with Shane, Rick's former partner and another survivor. So of course there's some awkwardness there, especially since Shane told Lori that Rick was dead. Now when we find out this little piece of information, I guess it's supposed to be a total bombshell, but I didn't find it that shocking or meaningful. I mean, wouldn't you expect him to be dead with everything that's been going on? The hospital he woke up in at the beginning of the first episode certainly seemed pretty ravaged. Lori's response to Shane's supposed deception actually seems pretty harsh to me. She obviously ends the sexual relationship, which I'd expect and would hope that she did. But she also tells him to entirely stay away from her and Carl, with whom he'd built up a good relationship. Again, this move is based on the fact that Shane supposedly lying to Lori about Rick's fate is so bad! But Shane is pretty torn up by this, and this is all part of the drama that will ensue at the camp later.

I should return to the main plot for a bit. Rick is feeling guilty about leaving Dixon in the city to die, and a not-too-warm greeting from Merrill's equally trashy brother Darryl doesn't help, so Rick gets some guys together to go back into the city and save Dixon, as well as Rick's bag of guns that he left behind. So they all go down there and find him gone, with only a hand left. This is definitely a big cliffhanger, and I'm eager to find out what happened to this guy, but it wasn't the most interesting part of the episode and I won't dwell on it much more.

At the camp, tensions are rising. Some of the women are upset about the division of labour, while they stand by the river doing laundry and the men are standing around doing nothing. Also, this one fellow named Ed seems to enjoy beating his wife. Shane is watching all this happen, and the great injustice of it all coupled with his indignation at his treatment by Lori makes his rash, and he leaps upon Ed and beats the living daylights out of him. I tend to think that Shane was justified in this, and Ed was a complete asshole, but it's clear that Shane went too far, and he might be a character to watch in terms of being on the edge.

So anyway, I stink at writing conclusions but this was a great episode. I hope the show continues in a direction that this episode took because, as high as the production value is for the zombies on this show, the lifestyle of the survivors is an interesting angle rarely looked at in the zombie genre.

Ramblings on "Blue Bloods" and other procedurals that would otherwise have potential

I recently watched half of the first episode of the new CBS show "Blue Bloods", a show about a multi-generational police family. I thought this could be a really interesting family drama, but it turned out to be nothing more than a standard police procedural. It really annoys me when things like this happen. It's not like there aren't enough police or legal procedurals on TV. If I want to watch one of those, I'll just turn on one of the CSI's sometime. They're all entertaining, but the only one I've ever found compelling enough to watch regularly was the dearly departed "Numb3rs". And  I guess the even more prematurely departed "Pushing Daisies" kind of counts. "Blue Bloods" had the potential to be a really good show. It's an interesting premise, and it had a pretty talented (or at least famous) cast (Tom Selleck, Donnie Wahlberg, Bridget Moynahan, Andrea Roth, etc.). To me, it looks like CBS messed the show up.

Of course they've done this before. CBS has more procedurals than any other network, and just last year they took another great-looking show and turned it into one. I'm speaking, of course, of "The Good Wife".  That show's premise was so interesting! It took the disgraced former politician, and focused on how his wife would handle the whole fall from grace thing. But of course, the way she handled it was by becoming a practicing lawyer once again, so she could take on a fascinating new case every week. And there goes a great actress (Julianna Margulies) and a great story.

I hate that the TV networks are too close-minded to do have any kind of variation in their lineups. The only kind of dramatic shows you see on broadcast TV are procedurals, and you have to go to cable for interesting things like "Mad Men" and "Rescue Me".

Like I say, I hate pop culture.

The Amazing Race. S17E8. "Ali Baba in a Suit!"

The Amazing Race headed to Oman this week, in what was a bit of a downer episode for me after KevJumba and his dad, the team I had been rooting for, got out last week. But this episode had no shortage of thrills, even though the two dysfunctional couples with obnoxious men ended up being successful.

Obviously this was a big episode for Chad and Stephanie. The two South Beach muscle-people had a rough start after oversleeping two whole hours, but they quickly made up the time after getting to Oman, and Chad made the headline of the show by proposing to Stephanie. This is reality TV, so of course she said yes, but I could not understand why. Chad has been nothing but a brute to her this whole season, and he is rarely not obnoxious. However, he definitely stepped up to the plate this week. They couldn't have run a better race and they ended up in first place.

On to some other things about this week's race. It took less than two minutes to make the obvious joke (Nat: "Oh man, we're going to Oman!"). When Chad proposed to Stephanie, the intolerably bubbly Mallory (and of course I'll get to a lot more on her in a bit) seemed even happier and more excited about it than Stephanie was. I was a little disappointed in Nick this week. I've thought for a while (ever since the "Are you a battlement?" fiasco in episode 1) that despite their apparent lack of intellect, Nick and Vicki were my favorite couple because, despite some tantrums, they seemed to have a warm relationship. Well, Nick had one of those setbacks this week with that meltdown in the gas station. This was sad to see because I thought they had been making some legitimate growth as a couple, but they're still definitely my favorite team at this point. And then there's Thomas. The Thomas-and-Jill team finished second this week, and they really need to get out. Thomas is just too much of a douchebag, and I feel really badly for Jill for having to put up with him.

So of course at the end Gary and Mallory got out, and I can't say I'm too upset about it. Mallory seemed like a spoiled brat, and although her positivity was occasionally enjoyable, most of the time she was absolutely insufferably annoying. Her dad Gary did always seem like a good guy, though, but while I wish they had gotten into his character a little more while he was on the show, I definitely don't miss this team.

Predictions!

Gosh this is hard to say. Not one of the 5 remaining teams has really set themselves apart consistently. If I had to pick a winner right now, it would probably be Brook and Claire. They might have the best relationship of all the remaining teams, and they seem to be able to handle the physical stress (I still go back to episode 1 where Claire was hammered in the face by a watermelon and popped right back up), and they seem to be mostly finishing well. As for the next team to get out, I would probably say Jill and Thomas. It's only a matter of time before their personal deficiencies catch up to them. Nat and Kat should also be on the lookout; other teams are going to start next leg with a big head start over them, and while they have good teamwork I don't think their guile can get them very far.