#allison shoemaker

[heisenbergchronicles]

Tonight’s Better Call Saul is 78 minutes long, so it’ll probably be pretty uneventful (9 p.m.): “AMC sure likes a tantalizingly vague episode description. People could be robbing a train in the middle of the desert and the description would be something like “Walt and Jesse deal with a supply issue; Todd meets a spider.” Well, despite this week’s vague promises—“Jimmy and Kim level with each other, while Nacho makes the rounds with Lalo and Mike has cause to worry”—we can all but guarantee that “Wiedersehen” is a not-to-be-missed, stay-off-Twitter kind of outing. First, it’s 78 minutes long, and while that wouldn’t be a promising note for every series, Better Call Saul is the kind of show that rarely wastes so much as a moment. Second, it’s the season’s penultimate episode, and as it happens, Better Call Saul is very good at penultimate episodes. Donna Bowman stands ready to make sense of all 78 minutes.” — Allison Shoemaker, AV Club

[leighlim]

Both the music and the film hit a very particular sweet spot, in which something painful is made both easier and more difficult to bear because the pain is beautiful. It’s because the world is beautiful, even when it’s not.

Allison Shoemaker

[reactingtosomething]

How Legends Of Tomorrow blends anger with antics is one of life’s great mythteries

“This isn’t a fun time period.” “These hats say otherwise.”

The most impressive thing about that Legends silliness-darkness potpurri is that even when the throughline is a heavy, sad, or disturbing one—or all three, as this one is—the humor never feels out of place. If there’s a balance issue here, it’s not that there’s too much goofiness, but that the pull of the big issues is so strong that it can be difficult to dive back into that other landscape at first. Once you’re in, though, it’s smooth sailing, making it all feel more human, rather than creating any kind of cognitive dissonance. It’s something Doctor Who has pulled off, something Buffy sometimes accomplished, but something that’s difficult to pull off in any medium. Legends, at this stage, does it each and every week.

by Allison Shoemaker

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