Monday October 11, 2010

SPOILERS: House, Castle, Chuck

Ok, no excuses this time. Truth is, I got a mid-semester break from college and spent it playing video games and watching Season 1 of Ugly Betty (it's on Hulu!). It was wonderful. I fan-girled more over Christopher Gorham (Henry, also Jake from Jake 2.0 and Auggie from Covert Affairs) and am now convinced that Eric Mabius (Daniel Meade) and Jonathan Young (Tesla from Sanctuary) must be related. Insanely perfect spikey hair has got to be genetic, right?

Anyways, yes, this is from a week ago. Congrats to Castle for finally capturing the coveted spot of....

Episode of the Day: Castle, "Punked"


House, "Massage Therapy"

• New doc.....interesting, but not that interesting
• "Dude?" "It felt right"
• Loved the idea of House and Cuddy playing video games - and, if you look at the quick shot of it on the TV, you'll notice it's the game from last season episode "Epic Fail"
• "I was hoping you'd interrupt my cooking to talk about handymen"
• That's baby Chase and his mom - creepy, creepy reasoning House
• "Aren't you adorable..." [below]. Who didn't go "awww" at least internally during this scene? Rachel is absolutely adorable and we see House smile (though I felt I was seeing a bit of Hugh Laurie come through as well). As for anyone who thinks this is out of character - House has had positive reactions to children before in previous seasons. Deal with it.

First off, character of the episode = Taub. He had so many excellent lines in this episode. As for the case, well, as any good House veteran knows "everyone lies." So, not so surprising, although the schizophrenia twist at the end was interesting, and somewhat reminiscent of a great season 1 episode about a mother with the disease and her son who lies about his age to take care of her. With House and Cuddy, the masseuse storyline was a good way of tackling two different issues: Rachel and House's history of hooker hook-ups. Good, not great, but good.

Chuck, "Chuck Versus the Coup D'Etat"

• Toyota Sienna plug....really?
• I want everyone who WASN'T shot... go General Beckman
• Chuck and Sarah really are crap communicators
• Costa Gravas is very stable - they have Subway sandwich franchises!
• Mooorgan, daughter, dad - the three of them are hilarious in any scene together
• Sarah in bikinis, really, was gratuitous eye candy necessary?
• The Awesome Statue was....AWESOME
• A dictator doing karaoke - Costa Gravas is great
• Chuck tells Ellie about Mom and she handles it....well enough

This episode was great, lots of fun. All the jibes about Casey being in the walls, trying to kill the dictator of Costa Gravas, only to have to protect him at the end. Sarah and Chuck deal with more issues, though they end up helping the mission. Morgan/Alex and Elli/Awesome got their time to shine as well. But no matter what happened, they couldn't top:

Castle, "Punked"

• I want a smore-let!
• Castle and Beckett seem to always talk about Alexis this season when they reach a crime scene(Lannie deserves coffee! or a bear claw! get her one!)
• Captain Underpants shout-out
• Castle's theory of the Time Travelling killer! Wonderful!
• Goldstein drives a DeLorean! Double wonderful!
• I saw the duel scenario way before any character brought it up
• Castle spins the gun Mal style, but kinda sucks at shooting it
• Beckett's really got a magic nose if she can tell a gun was fired several days ago

This episode: STEAMPUNK. So utterly fantastic. And the running gag with poor Esposito's neck [above] was brilliant. All in all, I adored this episode; it made me smile. It nodded slightly to Nathan Fillion's past at Firefly, brought out Richard Castle's inner child (which really isn't that hard) and was just tons and tons of fun.