This is the very last week of summer TV, which used to mean that all the reruns were mercifully ending and Real TV was starting back, but that’s not the case at all anymore and the final days of happytime programming coming to an end always bums me out a little bit. Or maybe I’m just feeling morose because USA already pulled the plug on Complications, which means my beloved Gretchen will never return to me again!
It’s not all bad news, though: Faking It returns tonight, and so do Riese’s recaps! And Survivor’s Remorse returned early and is back with us this week, which means so is M-Chuck, one of the most interesting lesbian TV characters from last season and one of the very few black lesbians on half-hour comedies.
Saddle up to say goodbye! Next week’s Boob(s on Your) Tube will be the end of most of these shows for a whole year.
Chasing Life
Mondays on ABC Family at 9:00 p.m.
Well, except for you don’t have to say goodbye to Chasing Life yet. For some reason, it’s running a month behind the other shows on ABC Family. So, April’s brand new husband Leo died, like straight out of a John Green novel or a lesbian trope playbook. They got married and he got dead. This week’s episode focused mostly on April trying to accept it and begin to deal with her grief, but Brenna was around for a little bit, mostly hanging out with Finn, the guy she gave her stem cells to but neither of them know it. He’s recovering from cancer too, and viewing it as just another obstacle in life that he can conquer, a sentiment that inspires Brenna, not only because of her sister having cancer and her new brother-in-law dying of (essentially) cancer but also because it’s hard out here for a bisexual woman whose sexual orientation is consistently erased and maligned.
Scream
Tuesdays on MTV at 10:00 p.m.
Audrey is still in the running to make it out of Scream‘s first season with all her limbs and livelihood in tact, something that would have been impossible for a queer character even a few years ago! This week, it’s Halloween. There’s no train with a body bag stuffed into the soda cooler, like on Pretty Little Liars, but it’s still gross and creepy. (Also, unlike PLL, they’re revealing the killer in the finale next week for absolute sure, after only ten episodes.)
Audrey’s main worries at this point are: 1) That Emma keeps kissing people who are not her, and 2) That everyone is ignoring the death of Rachel, the girl Emma opened up the show making out with and who was murdered second out of everyone. Emma grunts and mumbles about the first thing, but sets to work investigating Rachel’s murder hardcore with Noah to deal with the other thing. Firstly, they hack Rachel’s iCloud where she kept the zillion hours worth of video footage she had of her own life. What they find is a video showing Kieran leaving a bar with Nina (who is now dead) and who peeps Rachel (also dead) filming them. He looks pissed.
The problem is that Emma’s basically dating Keiran now, even though Will just got sawed in half a hot second ago. So if Emma accuses him of being the killer, Emma’s just going to think she’s doing it because she’s jealous and wants to kiss her, which seems silly but I one time tried to run over my best friend’s boyfriend in our high school parking lot with my literal car, so, you know, it’s not entirely outside the realm of possibility that a lesbian would accuse a teenage boy of murder to keep him away from her teenage best friend. “Best friend.”
If Audrey makes it out of this week’s finale alive (and not the killer), it’ll be a goddamn miracle.
Rookie Blue
Thursdays on ABC at 10:00 p.m.
It’s been a rough couple of weeks for my precious Gail Peck. Her brother Steve, you’ll remember, was arrested for being a Bad Cop. I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before, but Gail comes from a long line of police people. The Chief of Police is her actual godfather. So she shows up to testify in her brother’s trial, looking so fly, and her dad sweeps her away and tells her to lie on the stand and give her brother an alibi. So while she’s contemplating that impossible thing, the Child Services worker who’s trying to help her adopt Sophie shows up because Gail has missed two meetings since Steve has been arrested.
Gail doesn’t lie on the stand, despite her father literally yelling at her in court about it. Because she’s a good, noble human being who makes hard decisions that aren’t always what make her the most happy, but she does them because they’re right. And in keeping with that theme, at the end of the episode, she tells her social worker that she should allow the other family that wants Sophie to adopt her. It’s a teacher and like a doctor and they already have one really happy foster kid, and Sophie will be better off there. Gail does it because she thinks its right, which means she broke her own twice heart today.
I wonder if I sorted Gail too soon. She’s not really a Slytherin after all, is she?
Defiance
Fridays on Syfy at 8:00 p.m.
I think we have probably witnessed the very last episode of Defiance, and I’m weirdly okay with that. I wouldn’t have been at the beginning of season three, but this was a really frustrating 13-episode run that took the show in a direction I don’t really care about and didn’t grow any of its awesome female characters even a single bit. At least Yewll was the real hero of the finale!
Her plan is to zip on up to the Omec spaceship and hook her own personal brain up to the ship’s hard drive and blow up all the sleeping aliens who will soon wake up and take over the earth. Datak Tarr takes out Kindzi, so that’s not an issue. Irisa has some problems with Yell’s plan, though; namely that there are thousands of innocent Omec children on this ship who will be murdered preemptively, for doing nothing, if they explode their shup. (She doesn’t mention that wiping out this ship would also, in effect, be a genocide of people of color, but that’s a true thing as well.) Yewll says they could slingshot themselves out into space to get the Omec away from earth, but if they do, they’re probably never coming back. Only she needs to stay and other person to pilot the ship.
Irisa says she’ll do it, but Nolan conks her on the head and sends her back to earth with Datak.
A couple of weeks later, the arch is restored with a holographic light and named after Nolan, even though every plan to save Defiance, including this one, was Yewll’s idea and Yewll continuously sacrificed her body and her life to make it happen. RIP first season of this show that was my favorite season of any sci-fi show ever.
Hannibal
Saturdays on NBC at 10:00 p.m.
Firstly and most importantly, I want to thank my girlfriend, Stacy, for making sure y’all knew everything going on with Hannibal this season. I never could ever have watched, so she did and wrote up notes for me for nearly every episode and even did screencaps for me so I wouldn’t have to do them and accidentally stumble onto a photo of an eel eating a man’s face. Here’s what happened in Saturday night’s series finale, according to Stacy:
I love you so fucking much.
Wait, no. That was my email to her. This was her email to me:
Earlier in the episode, Alana visited Dr. Chilton, a fame-hungry psychiatrist who has been tormented repeatedly by Hannibal and basically every other character on the show. DO NOT look up pictures of that scene. He’s in the hospital, face disfigured and his full body burned last week by the Red Dragon. She was somewhat complicit in this, since there was a scheme with Will Graham and the FBI to try to get the Dragon out of hiding — as Chilton reminds her when she tries to pass the blame onto Hannibal.
And now Will and the FBI have a new plan: faking Hannibal’s escape in order to draw the Dragon out of hiding, which is obviously not going to work at all how they plan it. Plus Will is playing the FBI anyway, since he and Hannibal are in love (probably really and not just metaphorically?).
Alana proposes the plan to Hannibal, promising him all of his privileges back if he cooperates with the FBI. He helpfully reminds her yet again that he will escape for real, and that every second she has lived since his first promise to kill her has been borrowed time, and that her, her wife, and their son all belong to him. Fun murder-times on the horizon!
So of course Hannibal really DOES escape (duh), and in a shocking twist of characters using their brains on a show with serial killers, Alana, Margot, and their son get on a helicopter and get the fuuuuck outta there and actually survive!!! …. But clearly only because the series got cancelled. If there was even one more season or a movie, you can count on Hannibal killing Alana — at the very least — in a particularly terrible way.
Other things that happened: Will and Hannibal kill the Red Dragon together (after getting stabbed and shot, but sure) and embrace, covered in blood, for a really long time, and then fall off of a cliff together into the ocean. Hannibal says something like “this is all I ever wanted for you, Will” and Will says “it’s beautiful” — again, they are absolutely covered in blood — and then they hug, and then Will makes them both fall off of this seaside cliff.
I will not tell you what Gillian Anderson’s character did in the end, because it was psychotic.
Oh, and that actress who played Tara on True Blood also survived after much torment.
The end.
YAY! #NoMovie
I Am Cait
Sundays on E! at 8:00 p.m.
I Am Cait has suffered dismal ratings after the first episode of the summer docu-series. Y’all don’t seem to be enjoying it too much, either. But I’m still intrigued by it, mostly because as Caitlyn learns about the trans community, so does the audience, from people like GLAAD’s Jenny Boylan and the Human Rights Campaign and parents of trans kids and trans women of color who have been victims of so much oppression and hardship. And that feels really important right now. I mean, yes, half the show is that and half the show is vapid entitlement that I can’t even wrap my head around, but if people are coming for that and learning in the process, I think that’s an okay trade-off.
This week, Boylan and Candis Cayne work really hard to help Caitlyn understand that gender and sexuality are two different things, and that Caitlyn should follow her heart when it comes to dating and to love. The tabloids are all speculating that Jenner and Cayne are together, and the recent episodes have hinted that that’s a thing that will happen by the show’s end next week.
Obviously the main Kardashian thing that was happening last night was Kim watching Kanye announce his bid for presidency, so this episode was overshadowed just a little bit.
Survivor’s Remorse
Saturdays on Starz at 9:30 p.m.
If you didn’t watch the six-episode first season of Survivor’s Remorse, here’s a quick rundown: The show follows professional basketball player Cam Calloway as he joins the NBA and brings his family along with him to a new life of luxury. M-Chuck is Cam’s sister. She’s very openly and unapologetically gay, and she and Cam have a very loving but antagonistic relationship. Even though the show is about an NBA player, it actually never shows Cam on the court (or allows the characters to say “NBA” or like “Atlanta Hawks.”) It focuses instead on his relationship with his family, and his family’s relationship with their new lifestyle, and on Cam’s relationship with brands and media and fans and stuff.
After a stellar first season (on the court), Cam gets a crazy bonus and so the first episode of this season (of the show) opens with the Calloway family moving into a palatial home in Atlanta. M-Chuck takes at least a little credit for the move, telling Cam: “If I hadn’t accidentally launched that lawn chair off your roof deck, your condo association would’ve never kicked us out, and we would’ve never moved here to Calloway Castle!”
The episode mostly revolves around Cam learning to deal with all his off-court responsibilities, but the B-story focuses on his sister-in-law’s decision to stop chemically relaxing her hair. This after she awesomely destroys an archaic lawn jockey that came with their new house. She tells Reggie, “I’m sick of forcing myself to accept another ethnicity’s ideal.” And he supports her 100 percent. Teyonah Parris, who plays Missy, was the inspiration for the storyline, after she made the same decision in real life. (If you don’t know her from this show, you might know her as Dawn from Mad Men or Coco in Dear White People.)
This week’s episode focuses on a fight between Cam and M-Chuck that promises to deal with violence against men, so we’ll see how that goes.
Carmilla
Tuesdays and Thursdays on YouTube
For starters, the street cats Stacy and I are socializing are super into Carmilla.
On this week’s Carmilla, Mattie reveals everything she knows about Corvae, the corporation her mom wanted her to transfer Silas University to in the event of her death. It’s just a bunch of really old vampires and demigods, whatever, and basically Laura is stuck between handing control over to them or keeping it with Baron Vordenberg (WHICH IS A TERRIBLE IDEA, I’VE READ THE BOOK). Actually, the idea that Laura has any control at all makes Mattie cackle with glee. She explains, once again, that Laura is an impotent pawn in a game of immortals and the only reason she’s still breathing and walking around and being adorable is because Carmilla is in big gay forever love with her. Laura decides probably she should let the vampires deal with the vampires for now, and after they bounce, she tells the secret of how to kill Mattie to Danny, even though Carmilla told that secret to her in the strictest confidence!
In the middle of the night, Carmilla and Mattie try to sneak out to drink a fish god’s blood to either go crazy or hulk out and take out Vordenberg, but Laura wakes up and stops them and gives a season one-style speech about how people always underestimate her and tell her what she can’t do, but she showed them all when she figured out the old Dean was murdering virgins and she’s going to do it again this time! Carmilla is so turned on/reminded why she fell in love with Laura in the first place that she tells Mattie to go on without her to dine on the fish god; she’s gonna stay here and stare longingly at Laura.
Also, Perry gets weird with Danny, using her neverending star-crossed affection for Laura to puppeteer her into a place where she’s ready to so some murders.
Tumblr says Perry is possessed by the Dean. I don’t know. I feel for sure like Danny’s gonna die, though.
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