F*cking hell. Dunnowhat's up wif my browser and settings here, esp. post formatting. Will try again. Again. Getting very pissed and cranky. Bloody effing hell.
So. Two thirds thru the trilogy now. I did watch most of the Miami ep. Briefly: Was okay. Walter's funny. Ryan's still good. Ep was visually very nice, though it'd been awhile that I'd forgotten about their propensity for excessive slow motion stuff and odd musical juxtaposition with montage sequences only 90 seconds apart. That and "Doktor Ray," which just seemed somehow odd. (ya beat me to mentioning that
Fay 
). I guess with all the various Rays the show was associated with they wanted to make him especially distinctive
. The show doesn't seem to be missing Delko very much, but what do I know about Miami.
I dunno how the NY ep woulda come across to one who hadn't watched the Miami ep, or is only a casual viewer. The recap was pretty clear, and the storyline is definitely only a very superficial treatment of all that the Megopolis Uber Ebil Axis of Zeta are into
.I thought the ep suffered for odd pacing, that it kind of stutter-start/stopped repeatedly, didn't have any sustained momentum, or even an ebb and flow. Stilted. I agree with
Roxi, and observed the same, in that NY's hour also suffered somewhat for it's slot in the cross-over. Transient, and a bridge to get from the start of the trilogy to the concluding ep.
I thought Michale Massee as the driver/perp was excellent, (just as he also was excellent on CM); thought there were some nice visual moments, especially some of their NYC location shots. I appreciated the nod to the veterans' memorial today of days, and the planning and foresight that allowed for its inclusion. I just don't think it will be a very memorable episode this season, aside from being a part of the cross-over at all. The set-up of the accident seemed to take ages, between showing viewers the rig and the car about to plow into it and the various factors creating the accident. I liked that Flack got his Mac on (his words, not mine) :lol:. They still managed to squish some DL into the ep (one might say the honeymoon was over long ago). The sun now also shines on DL, it rainz no mo'. Danny wasn't even limping that I noticed. He didn't feature as much as some, though they did also manage to stick in his signature "boom." That just neeeeeever seems to get old :shifty: :lol:. I liked that Sid got some decent screentime, though apparently meeting Ray isn't on his to-do list as it was for the ME guy in Miami
. Bob Joy had lotsa big multi-syllablic words spoken very fluidly impressively. And then he was gone. Ah well.
The first segment did manage to set up the premise pretty well of all that was going on, the human trafficking and organ harvesting, and the tie-ins to Miami, and Langston.
The second segment started with some of the NY footage, complete with the prisoner offering cell-mate chat info being a woman. An odd location for it, but it kept things moving, at least at that point, and was mostly a vehicle for Ray and Mac's heart to heart in front of the memorial. The scene seemed to drag, but concluded on a pretty decent note with what's "worth a phone call." Flack had a helluva choice to make in the face of letting a harvested organ from a victim go into surgery or let a guy die. Included for drama no doubt, but a bit of an odd moment for me. What the hell
would you do.
The third segment had a pretty good scene for Sheldon, with Flack questioning the smarmy surgeon, essentially getting his Mac on too :lol: with "you stupid, greedy sonuvabitch." Was among the best scenes in the ep for me. And oh, hullo soapbox, what lovely mallets you have there. Overtly explaining the stakes and scale with all the nastiness of trafficking. And then the stop/start momentum kicked up again with Flack and Sheldon apparently being the action heroes on steroids that PL was referring to in their chase sequence
. I do like that Sheldon's mixing it up a little more action-wise than he has previously. Don't worry, Danny, I'm sure your time will come sooner rather than later (too soon, which is the point) but I'm not missing ya in that role, really. Sheldon's doing fine. Both he and Flack took their bloody lumps, and it's nice to know action heroes are human too, or that they at least bleed while they keep going.
By this point it was plain that New York wasn't going to get a very satisfying chunk of storyline real estate within the cross-over. Theirs was basically a manhunt ep, if you will, still one step behind and trying to get a handle on the system in play let alone the roster of players they were chasing, with each perp they tracked a cipher cog in a much larger machine. I would guess, regardless of what happens in the concluding episode in Vegas tomorrow evening, that the Zetas are going to be an ongoing nemesis. In a way I suppose that's also fitting, as I also recall chat here about how the scope and scale of human trafficking storylines often come across as oversimplified in their portayal on teevee.
Can I also just comment briefly that as annoying as sound f/x on cuts and zooms have been in other eps, especially montage sequences, that the sound clip smear of car horns on city shots, cuts and aerials is also going starting to go beyond signature to noticeable and will soon be just as annoying.
Segment four, after Flack's boys
found the car, saw a little more Adam, a little more Lindsay, and a little more Edna. And then Adam, Stella, and Danny got to stare at tubes of dirt. A rather long montage of it too. More of that stutter start stop odd pacing. We know Danny's on the mend as his Boomage has returned. And then Flack, Doktor Ray and Big Mac are whisked off to a suddenly determined one particular scrap yard in Corona. Flack's party favor is Mac's price of admission
, one shotgun, complete with Langston refusing it and then commenting on it thru a history of it's social evolution. With the last dose of steroids taken, the final hide and seek and then chase was on, to get that phyrric victory done.
The choice of a scrap yard was disturbingly fitting, as the girls were essentially traded and dealt wholesale or for parts and discarded in pieces. Super Mac got some spidey skillz, car hopping like that :lol: Ray got a handy dandy dirt bike to go wif his shotgun. He's having a helluvan eventful fieldtrip
. By the time they caught the guy, I half-way did hope he'd give Mac a reason to put a hole in him. It was indeed a phyrric victory, but better for it than just the level of NY being the bridge in the middle of a trilogy. They got the driver but Madeline was already handed off. It was satisfying to have one that got away for NY, a case not fully solved that is, but it would be more impressive if NY might do that thru the regular season here and there, and not just to enable the chase and case to continue in Vegas; I also liked the return of a somewhat dark and gritty ending to NY, but I wish they'd manage to do that too a bit more often for themselves and not just to hand over the unresolved baton.
It was also satisfying to have such a well-played skeevy perp also be just a minor cog in the machine, that it was such a hard fought catch for an incremental notch up in the battle. The whole main cast got an appearance in the hour, and while most had little enough to do, they at least each got something. And so the ep ended as it began, typically cyclical, girl in a new rig and back on the road with a new and equally anonymous driver. The show heads to the mothership. Motherland? Motherload, the franchise probably hopes. And I'll probably tune in.
Call it a B-. A half step up from average for the scope of the trilogy undertaking alone. As an individual ep, was decent but like a miscellaneous snack on the go, when ya might wanna sit down to a memorable meal now and then, and what better time would that have been than a special occasion with guests. I feel like Edna handed me an overpriced undersized ingot of a granola bar from a flashy but well used vending machine.
This better effing work and go thru without mucking all this about. Was painful to put this post together. And I give up. I have actually started shouting at the inanimate digital objects that are the current contrary absurdity of my computer and intarweb. :lol:Except, I'm not laughing anymore, I'm going hoarse.
