Fall 2012 TV Reviews: Once Upon A Time, Castle and How I Met Your Mother
Yay, it’s proper TV season again! All my lovely shows are back from hiatus, plus we’ve gotten a couple of new interesting shows. In total there are actually over 20 new shows, but only a handful of them seem worthwhile or promising. I’ll review those once I’ve watched more episodes; I always find you need to give a new show a 3-6 episodes to find its feet.
Today though I’ll review the new seasons of 4 of my current favourite shows: Once Upon A Time, Castle, How I Met Your Mother and Grey’s Anatomy. Obviously: beware of spoilers for previous seasons. I’ll list under the titles which episodes of this season I’ve seen so far (and might potentially spoil).
Once Upon A Time
S2E01 Broken, S2E02 We Are Both, S2E03 Lady of the Lake
It took a while for me to get into the first season of Once Upon A Time, but it ended up being one of my favourite shows last year. I’ve been waiting patiently all summer to see how the writers would deal with the Storybrooke characters getting their memories back and how they’d deal with Regina and Rumpelstiltskin. I was a bit disappointed what that is concerned by the season opening; it all felt a bit too easy. I did love the twist in that first episode though where the “flashback” scenes turn out not to be flashbacks at all. Plus it’s interesting having Emma and Snow in the fairy tale world, trying to get back home and dealing with being mother and daughter.
I think my only problem so far with this season is that there are now quite a lot of characters and they all have to share screen time. For instance, we haven’t seen Mr Gold and Belle since the first episode, and Regina was barely in the third episode. Besides that I don’t like the new characters Mulan and Aurora (Sleeping Beauty). I’m hoping they’ll become a bit more interesting once we get some more dedicated fairytale flashbacks about them. Fairy tale/Disney characters I wish they’d add: Ariel (although not sure how they’ll do mermaids in our world) and Simba (just to see how in the hell they’ll pull that off).
Castle
S5E01 After The Storm, S2E02 Cloudy With A Chance of Murder, S2E03 Secret’s Safe With Me, S2E04 Murder, He Wrote
Caskett! We finally get to see Castle and Beckett as a couple, and so far it’s been awesome. They’re great together and the chemistry between them has only gotten better. I was scared to see how the show would deal with it (so many other shows that relied on the “will they, won’t they” angle have failed miserably), but the writers have done a great job. The murder-of-the-week plots are predictable as ever, but who cares, it’s still a lot of fun.
How I Met Your Mother
S8E01 Farhampton, S8E02 The Pre-Nup, S8E03 Nannies, S8E04 Who Wants To Be A Godparent?
I can’t believe I’ve been watching How I Met Your Mother for 8 years now… It makes me feel old. To make me myself feel even older, consider this: How I Met Your Mother started after Friends finished, which had 10 seasons…
How I Met Your Mother is always a bit hit and miss for me; some episodes I love and laugh so much, others are just boring and not funny at all. I really enjoyed the first two episodes of this season, and am still so curious to see who the mother turns out to be. I know it’s a bit of a gimmick, but I’m still enjoying it. The latest two episodes though I didn’t like. I’m not sure if that’s cause they’re focusing on Marshall’s and Lily’s now baby-filled life (which I couldn’t care less about) or if it’s just bad writing.
I’m also curious to see if this will be the final season and we’ll finally find out who the mother is. The writers previously have said that this will be the season where we find out the mother’s identity and that if they get renewed they’ll do something interesting for the season after that. One idea I quite liked was a season full of flashbacks from the mother’s perspective.
