Bummed that you’re not getting your convention fix this weekend because you’re not in San Diego? Never fear, you can watch the weekend’s panels happening offsite in San Diego at the sixth annual Nerd HQ event online now.
Nowhere else can you watch every panel with Stephen Amell, John Barrowman, Nathan Fillion, Joss Whedon, Scott Bakula, Jennifer Morrison, Jai Courtney, Jared Padalecki, and Tom Hiddleston this weekend. Chuck star Zachary Levi began Nerd HQ as a charity event alternative for fans who couldn’t get tickets to SDCC. Ad hoc auctions occur throughout the panels to raise money for Operation Smile. Check out the fun borg.com staff had at past Nerd HQ events here.
Streaming runs live through Sunday. Here is the line-up for today and tomorrow (times are Pacific Time), followed by ALL of the Thursday and Friday panels below and the live streaming link:
ROBOT CHICKEN
July 23, 2016 11:00 AM
A Conversation with Breckin Meyer and the Robot Chicken Writers/Producers
If you missed the pilot for DC’s Legends of Tomorrow this week you can still catch it now. Bringing together nine characters from the CW’s Arrow and The Flash, plus the new time traveler Rip Hunter, the CW has provided a venue for a very comic book concept–the weekly team-up. And other than the Arrow and The Flash themselves, this new series has pulled together probably the best of the secondary characters from those shows.
Doctor Who’s other last companion Arthur Darville leads up this new team. It’s as if we get to see Darville portray the Doctor himself, at least an American view of the British series. The Comic Con crowd audience is provided plenty of familiar encounters and situations that reflect classic tropes and scenes. Seattle’s Space Needle aka Star City is the launch point for this new team composed of Brandon Routh’s Atom, Caity Lotz’s ex-Black Canary now the White Canary, the one-two punch of Victor Garber and Franz Drameh as Firestorm, Falk Hentschel as Hawkman and Ciara Renee as Hawkgirl. And bad guys Captain Cold (Wentworth Miller) and Heat Wave (Dominic Purcell) play the good side with Arrow and The Flash’s Vandal Savage (Casper Crump) as the series villain.
After about 20 minutes of world building, recruiting and meeting all the players, the show kicks in when the team finds itself in 1975. Captain Cold, Heat Wave, and White Canary end up in a bar where Canary goes on her own punching spree. It’s a great play to see the bad guys team-up with a good guy against… anyone else.
With the above photo released Tuesday by Arrow executive producer Mark Guggenheim, DC Entertainment is finally filling in the stray gaps of the Justice League. Who would you rather watch? Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman in one two-hour flick, or most of the Justice League every week on three TV series? Both Stephen Amell and Grant Gustin have now established themselves as the real thing with their Arrow and The Flash series. We already know Henry Cavill was a bust as Superman and early looks at Ben Affleck and Gal Gadot aren’t too exciting. The answer should be easy.
If you haven’t been keeping track, along with Amell’s Green Arrow and The Flash (Gustin’s Barry Allen, Teddy Sears’ Jay Garrick, and Keiynan Lonsdale‘s Wally West on the way), we’ve seen two versions of Black Canary (played by Caity Lotz and Katie Cassidy), two versions of Green Arrow’s sidekick Speedy/Red Arrow/Arsenal (played by Colton Haynes and Willa Holland), The Atom (played by Brandon Routh), Firestorm (played by three actors: Robbie Amell, Victor Garber, and Franz Drameh), Huntress (Jessica de Gouw), classic Justice League staple Jean Loring (Teryl Rothery), Vibe (Carlos Valdes), and an Earth-2 version of Doctor Light (Malese Jow). Each of these were featured in at least one version of the League over the years.
And now we have a first look at Hawkman (Falk Hentschel) and Hawkgirl (Ciara Renee), coming in three weeks as part of an Arrow/The Flash crossover event and lead-in to the next DC Entertainment/CW Network series Legends of Tomorrow. Still no view of the hawk wings yet. The other guy in the mask above is CW creation John Diggle (David Ramsey).
Two episodes down and we at borg seem to be the only viewers utterly underwhelmed by BBC America’s hotly-anticipated new import, Broadchurch. Lured in by trailers featuring some of our genre favorites, including Jodie Whittaker (Attack the Block), David Tennant, and Arthur Darvill (both, Doctor Who), we eagerly cleared our schedule and tuned in, expecting the sort of dazzling drama that series like The Hour and Life on Mars have led us to expect from BBC. We won’t tell you what happened next (it makes borg.com reviewer Elizabeth C. Bunce seem soulless), and we won’t waste the bandwidth trying to shout over the accolades. Instead we’re putting our energy into giving other disappointed viewers what they really wanted from the eight-part series. Unfortunately for many American viewers, several of these shows have not yet made it to Region 1 (U.S.) DVD, but they are well worth tracking down.
If you tuned in to see…
Jodie Whittaker as a grieving mum, try Marchlands (reviewed earlier this year here at borg.com)
The luminous Jodie Whittaker gives a haunting, nuanced performance as a young mother trying to come to terms with the disappearance of her daughter, while stifled by life at her in-laws’ home and the judgement of local villagers. Also starring Denis Lawson (Bleak House, Star Wars) and Doctor Who’s own River Song, Alex Kingston (Arrow), Marchlands is a complex look at the lingering resonance of one family’s tragedy. Plus there are ghosts, which in borg.com’s opinion is always a bonus. (And if you love Marchlands then you’ll want to see the follow-on series Lightfields we also reviewed here).
David Tennant investigating a murder in an idyllic seaside village, check out Viva Blackpool (just Blackpool in the UK)
With a few spoilers, (said in the voice of River Song).
Well, huh. I’m not sure where to start with a review of “Let’s Kill Hitler” and “Night Terrors,” the two new Doctor Who episodes delivered to U.S. viewers this week. Perhaps it would be easier to start with “Terrors” and work our way backward.
“Night Terrors” is a classic one-off episode of the “monster of the week” type, featuring the fears of a little boy made terrifyingly manifest, as his creepy toys, neighbors, and worrisome apartment-complex noises nearly kill off Amy (Karen Gillan) and Rory (Arthur Darvill). Although we (and The Doctor) are drawn in by young George’s plight and plea (“Please come save me from the monsters!”), the real pathos of this episode was provided by Daniel Mays (Ashes to Ashes), in a convincing turn as the boy’s desperate and frustrated father, unable to comfort his pantophobic son (pantophobia being, as we know from A Charlie Brown Christmas, the fear of everything… not just pants). It’s always fun to watch Amy and Rory tackle danger together–whether facing down interstellar child abductors or fleeing oversized dollhouse denizens come to life (or cracking elevator jokes that nod to Mays’s Ashes to Ashes past)–but this story as a whole feels familiar: We’ve seen Matt Smith’s Doctor comfort children terrified by the monsters under (or behind) their beds before, and “Night Terrors” is nothing new. And the child in this case has none of young Amelia Pond’s charisma, nor even the chance to develop any, upstaged as he is by his father’s role in the story. All in all, an entertaining if lightweight entry into the Smith/Moffat catalogue.
“Let’s Kill Hitler,” however… wow. Where to begin? Capturing much of the frenetic energy from “A Good Man Goes to War,” the episode starts off breathlessly and doesn’t let up, firing a dizzying barrage of revelations at the viewer. We learn, finally, Everything about River Song. After the years of teasing and the season of setup, Now We Know.
But do we care? That’s another question altogether. I don’t feel satisfied by this episode, the way I did after “A Good Man.” There’s something faintly baffling about the resolution of all the mysteries surrounding River’s past, and something definitely missing from Amy and Rory’s emotional arc. They’ve lost their child! I don’t care if they hardly had time to get used to the idea of being parents–let alone River Song’s parents–they’ve still had part of their hearts ripped out, and we should see that. Everyone in this cast is capable of the emotions the events of “Good Man” should naturally have engendered, and as a viewer, I feel cheated that we didn’t get to see any of that. There were no consequences to anything we saw last spring, and that depresses me.
To be sure, as a vehicle for Kingston, it was a success–her performance is stellar and delightful, and she proves she’s absolutely up for whatever Moffat throws at her. But, again, I’m left unsettled by the development of a character we’ve come to love. Yes, we’ve been prepared to see her criminal past since her second appearance (“Time of Angels”/”Flesh and Stone”), but this still didn’t feel like the River we know. And as a viewer now invested in the drama of young Melody/River’s mysterious upbringing in the Gamma Forest, seeing her instead as a childhood mate of Amy and Rory was a weird letdown. It was over too soon. All that marvelous setup and worldbuilding was so full of fantastic potential, and it all just fell flat. Even the title felt like a cheat–the blithe declaration, “Let’s Kill Hitler!” becomes nothing more than a comedic red herring to a rush job to finish off the River Song storyline.
It’s too bad, really. It wasn’t necessary to give this sort of ammunition to the Smith/Moffat naysayers. The show has proven it can do so much more–deeper, farther-reaching storylines that play all the right emotional notes while constantly surprising and delighting the viewers. To seemingly wash their hands of such a promising storyline–one we’ve been primed to anticipate for three and a half years–makes me wonder if the show’s creators are getting bored with their own creations. And that bodes ill for all of us.
