Noiseless Chatter Archive

  ALF Reviews: “Gimme That Old Time Religion” (season 4, episode 17) Welcome to the second “ALF becomes a _______” episode in as many weeks! I hope it’s as good as the last one, in which nobody seemed to care that Lynn is going to be in debt for the rest of her life in order to attend a school at which she has to sleep with her teachers in exchange for good grades. Seriously, what the fuck is Willie’s problem? Why isn’t this episode 30 minutes of him curb stomping the guy he learned last week is using his position of authority to sexually manipulate his daughter? And what the fuck is this  show’s  problem that the moral in that one wasn’t “If a teacher says this to you, rip his nuts off”? Why was it about ALF learning — and then apparently disregarding — the true meaning of being an artist? FUCK. THIS. SHOW. Anyway, this week ALF becomes an ordained minister — presumably because he’s fingered Brian often enough that he might as well make it official — and I see no way thi...

Better Call Saul is back, and, with it, an ongoing question of — and struggle for — identity. It’s something that we all experience on some level. For our ethically grey protagonist, it’s an eternal, Sisyphean nightmare. Saul Goodman was somebody. We remember him well from Breaking Bad , and the clear draw of Better Call Saul is the chance to learn his backstory. But very quickly this newer show become about something deeper, if not necessarily larger. It wasn’t a simple question of when a switch gets thrown to turn James M. McGill into Saul Goodman. In fact, as “Switch” and “Uno” both make clear, “Saul Goodman” isn’t even this character’s terminal point. After Saul, he becomes somebody else. Before James M. McGill, he was Slippin’ Jimmy. Somebody becomes somebody becomes somebody becomes somebody. We may never learn much more about his future than we see in these black and white flash-forwards, but they’re enough to help us contextualize what we’re watching; B...

I wonder if this season will play much better as one long story than it will as a series of episodes. So far, it’s difficult to judge them on their own, individual merits, and that’s both worrying and thrilling. It’s worrying because we have three episodes so far that don’t tell a complete story in their runtime. But it’s thrilling because, if the plates are kept spinning, we could end up with something incredible. It’s too soon to tell, but unlike “Hostile Makeover” these unresolved plot-threads hold some very clear potential. I’m a bit disappointed that the closest thing we had to payoff was Dean painfully urinating some nanobots down the toilet, but this week’s chapter in the elaborate setup of season six is…well, pretty promising. The title refers to Dr. Venture’s digging through his brother’s old, abandoned projects with Billy and Pete, but we’ll get to that shortly, because the more interesting story thread, for my money, is the (proper) introduction of Sirena O...

  ALF Reviews: “True Colors” (season 4, episode 16) “ALF becomes a ________” is a perfectly valid, if not necessarily inventive, template for an episode. Great shows use it (we could sit here all night listing the “Homer becomes a ________” episodes of  The Simpsons ), lousy shows use it. It’s not a serious indicator of how seriously we should or shouldn’t take the show as a whole; it’s just something TV shows do in general. In great shows, having your character become a ________ opens up new possibilities for jokes and situations that weren’t there before. You have a premise for your show, and that premise is (or should be) sturdy, but by turning your character into a ________ for one week, you get to stretch your legs a little, explore new territory, and keep things varied for your audience. I was listening to one television writer talk, though I forget who it was, and he made the point that your show should always be changing or moving forward in some way, because the audie...