#Time Works is ultimately a fairly good episode but it doesn't do anything. interesting (it was supposed to be in the Divergent Universe but

[regicidal-defenestration]

Whilst the return of Doctor Who in 2005 brought lots of good things, including, for sure, the return of Doctor Who, I think it did untold damage to Big Finish audio stories

[clexa--warrior]

Fear The Walking Dead' continues its losing streak in Sunday night's episode 'Ner Tamid.'

Credit: AMC

Sunday night's episode of Fear The Walking Dead was a little bit better than the rest of this half of the season, and I think I know why: There was no Morgan!s

Morgan and Al are off doing their own thing, and miraculously we didn't hear from either one this week. That's good! Sadly, we also didn't get any Alicia. She remains one of the only characters I still like on this show, though the past few episodes have done their level best to character-assassinate her (she's probably off painting more trees at this point).

The rest of the episode was pretty much about as pointless as the rest of the episodes in Season 5. Charlie "runs away" from the convoy to go find some place for them to stay, so that they're not always on the move. Finding a place to stay is a really good idea. Running off on your own in the zombie apocalypse is stupid beyond all reckoning, and I wish the writers and producers would stop making the characters act like such absolute dunces every week.

It appears the real problem is June, who is apparently in charge of the caravan and its 36 members. She's driving them all hard, not letting them stay in one place long, no rest for the weary and all that jazz. Even John Dorie is like "Hey June, baby, I love you but this is ridiculous," but it falls on deaf ears. I'm not sure why June is acting like this, or why she's suddenly in charge, or why they have a caravan instead of a base to begin with, but that doesn't matter. Fear The Walking Dead just does stuff, and we're just supposed to eat it up without questioning anything.

I think that's the only way people can still enjoy this show--just don't ask any questions, don't think about anything too much, don't expect anything remotely like logic or realism or human nature to figure into it at all.

In any case, Charlie makes yet another new friend while out on her own. This time it's a Jewish Rabbi, Jacob Kessner, who lives all by himself at his old synagogue. All his former flock are now zombies, calling to mind Father Gabriel from The Walking Dead (though Kessner is much less annoying than Gabriel, who I still can't stand). Charlie thinks this would be a good place for the survivors to settle down, but things don't work out. Before the end of the episode, the safe haven is overrun and Kessner is out of a home. Shocking. We've never seen the survivors show up and ruin a good thing before! (That's sarcasm, by the way. Everywhere our heroes go falls apart, from the family on the island to the Mexican villa, to the ranch, to the kids' treehouse this season).

June and Dorie show up and there's some zombie action, but we know nobody is going to actually get killed by a zombie. That hardly ever happens on this show. The last time I can think of it actually happening was when Madison died, but she died offscreen so we didn't even see it. There used to be some great zombie kills in previous seasons, but there's no reason to fear anything in Fear The Walking Dead these days.

That applies to Logan and his group of feckless, toothless bad guys. At one point they chase Sarah and Dwight--who looks ridiculous clean-shaven, though I suppose it's symbolic of his being totally neutered by the do-gooder sickness that's befallen the entire cast--and almost catch them but the tank shows up and saves the day. Of course, why they were so worried and running to begin with is beyond me. Recall last week when Morgan and Al were faced with a dozen of Logan's thugs and nothing happened. They just blocked the road and that's all. Are we supposed to think that this week things are so different that they pose an actual threat now?

Of course, it turns out that the whole thing was just a diversion. Logan wanted to distract the convoy. Apparently he's figured out where the oil fields are and he wanted Morgan's group as far away as possible which, uh, kind of sounds like what he did in the very beginning of this season by having them fly off to the nuclear power plant region. They're running out of ideas so fast it isn't even funny.

Is there even a story here? I mean, there are things that happen I guess, but is there a story? Let's try to parse it all together, shall we?

Season 5 starts with Morgan and most of the crew crash-landing a plane because they thought they were helping someone but it was just Logan tricking them so that he could take over the mill. The first half of the season is spent trying to get a new plane or fix the old plane so they can fly it back. There's also a nuclear power plant that's going to melt down, and we meet a new character, Grace, who is trying to prevent that. Eight episodes are spent on this dual-plot, with Strand and Charlie ultimately saving the day by bringing propellers in a hot air balloon to the heroes who then use their years of airplane mechanic experience to fix the plane and then fly successfully back to their own area of Texas because apparently that region has zero roads leading. It is a mystical island within the state of Texas that can only be reached by air (unless you're Dwight or his wife who apparently both managed just fine on solid ground).

So that's the first half of Season 5. Crash plane, fix plane, fly out. Logan has the mill. Then, bizarrely, at the very end of the first half of the season Logan tries to make a deal with them. This deal is not struck, we discover in the Season 5 midseason premiere, and Logan goes back to working with the thugs. I can't tell if they're working for him or he's working for them, because the show has done such a lousy, inconsistent job at explaining things to us.

Speaking of which, we learn that during the break, during the period of time that occurs off-screen between the two halves of this season, that Morgan has discovered where Polar Bear's oil fields are. And I guess he's also figured out how to refine oil into gasoline. And I guess this is what Logan was after the whole time, but they just neglected to introduce that conflict in any remotely comprehensible way. Now, five episodes into the back half of the season, the entire plot seems to be "Morgan and group go around helping people more while Logan tries to figure out where the oil fields are." Five episodes of filler with virtually nothing of any importance happening. Alicia meets the guy painting on all those trees. Morgan and Grace try and fail to spark a romance. Logan is mad at Morgan but does nothing about it. They film a stupid PSA and put it on VCRs with generators wherever they can so that people know that they're out there trying to help people.

None of this qualifies as a story, at least not really. The story, if it had to be boiled down, would be the conflict between Logan and Morgan's two groups. But that conflict barely exists, as evidenced by the times they've actually encountered one another and done nothing. At least Negan did stuff. At least the Saviors posed a threat, no matter how badly produced Seasons 7 and 8 of The Walking Dead were. At least there was a story.

Here we just have people driving around wasting gas, talking on walkie-talkies, rarely having realistic conversations or actually interesting struggles or conflicts. It's all contrived. You could probably boil down the entire 12 episodes we've seen so far into two and not lose anything.

Just take away the whole entire plane crash plot and have them tricked into leaving the mill. Then have Logan realize what he wanted in the mill wasn't there and go to war with Morgan to get the map to the oil fields. The oil fields themselves would be useless to Morgan since he doesn't know how to refine oil into gasoline, but he knows that Logan is bad news so he keeps that information from him anyways. Have Logan kill some of the good guys, and have that test Morgan's resolve to be a good person. Have Dwight show up as one of Logan's dudes, on the other side of the conflict, and have that make him question whether he's made the right choice.

I mean, I think you could probably get eight episodes out of this conflict, and then you could twist things around for the second half of the season. Morgan could snap again, go full killstreak mode. He and Alicia could break into two different groups and the conflict could continue between them somehow. This is all just spit-balling. The fact is, it would be fairly simple to come up with a better story for Season 5, with better and more natural conflicts. Actually, I'd have introduced Logan as a sympathetic character and had him join the group, had his treachery not manifest until it was too late. Make the betrayal sting.

But this is all fantasy. I want the same kind of tense conflict that drove Season 3, with sympathetic characters on both sides and no easy resolution. But what we're getting is a bunch of badly written filler episodes with no real purpose and an overarching conflict that makes no sense. Meanwhile, we get things like Al leaving all her tapes in a safe and then not bothering to even shut the lock boxes, and that's how Logan discovers the oil fields. We get John Dorie shooting a bullet at a hatchet blade so that it can split in two and kill a pair of approaching zombies. That's the kind of vapid writing this show has now. It's just sad.

Next week, Logan will use the oil fields to wipe out half of all living things in the universe and the week after that Al and June and Daniel will send Skidmark back in time in a time machine they built out of spare plane parts, and Skidmark's job will be to kill Polar Bear before he ever planted the oil seeds that eventually grew into the oil fields, but little do they know that Polar Bear is waiting for them . . . . it's a trap!

I just . . . I can't. I don't know what else to say. What a sad joke Fear has become.

[cogentranting]

I am half way through s5- so far I haven't loved it, it's sorta disconnected for me. But o have 3 questions maybe you can answer1. Do we find out why felicity liked Billy? 2. Do we find out why Lila doesn't like felicity and asks if she's gonna be a problem? 3. The 100- is there a fan theory as to why she wasn't in it much? Also was it supposed to be his "dream life" or a "what if" if Dream life- says something about Olicity I think, what if- why isn't he a cheat? Lost.

1. If you mean is there ever a conversation where Felicity talks about what she saw in Billy or a moment where we go back and see the beginning of their relationship then no, we never get that. But (and I’m not sure exactly where you are in the season so I’m going to assume you’re somewhere around episode nine) I do feel that we see enough of Billy to judge for ourselves what she saw in him. From what we’re shown, Billy is very much in keeping with Felicity’s type. He’s pretty similar to Ray or Barry actually. He’s a detective- he’s trying to do good and help people in a similar way to Felicity’s superheroes she’s fallen for. Just.. less extreme. He also stands out for his honesty, being one of the few non-corrupt members of the scpd. And Felicity is specifically looking for honesty at this stage of her life. He seems sweet and respectful. He takes Felicity’s secret about working with the Green Arrow in stride and doesn’t pressure her. I’m trying to remember further details but it’s been a while since I’ve watched that part of the season and, ultimately, he’s not that important. All we really need to know is that some six to eight months after leaving her fiance, Felicity was trying to move on. Billy was supposed to be nice but unremarkable; sort of a guy who on paper is great but never going to be the love of her life. Really, Billy does bear strong resemblance (in general type) to Ray and Barry, and I think what we see is that that is the type of man that Felicity goes to when she’s trying to get away from Oliver. When Oliver does something to hurt her or push her away, and she’s trying to move on she goes to this same sort of man which is sort of “Oliver Lite”. The heroism without the complications is sort of the goal. So a guy who is heroic in some way, without the total self sacrifice. A guy who is strong without being as scarred (metaphorically). A guy who can lead but isn’t such a leader that he’s completely single-minded and independent. And so on. She’s looking for everything she loves about Oliver without all the things that cause her so much grief. But ultimately those men aren’t Oliver and so she cares about them but doesn’t love them like she loves Oliver. And Billy is just a piece of showing this. 

2. Lyla doesn’t dislike Felicity. That’s never shown and we have a fair amount of evidence to the contrary. However, the instance you’re talking about takes place in very specific circumstances. Lyla is trying to rescue her husband who is in prison and doesn’t want to be rescued and she knows/feels that Felicity is going to disagree with her methods of rescuing him. Felicity does disagree. When Lyla asks if Felicity is going to be a problem, she’s just asking if Felicity will try to stop them or deter them in some way. Lyla and Oliver are very similar people, they go about solving problems in much the same way and they view the world with the same time of objective oriented, ends-justify-the-means kind of attitude. Felicity is not the same way. So there’s potential to butt heads, but no in a way that indicates resentment or dislike. Felicity and Lyla end up on different sides of things again later in the season for slightly different reasons (I’ll try not to spoil anything specific) and it’s again because of different personalities, different world views, different positions. And again there isn’t really anything personally between Felicity and Lyla, no dislike or resentment breeding the conflict. Just some tension borne from being different people and some complicated circumstances affecting one of them personally. 

3. I don’t know about any fan theories regarding this I can only offer you my own thoughts. The 100 isn’t purely a What If or a Dream World. It’s a mixture of both. So basically it appears to have been a dream with some specific parameters. There’s a base What If scenario- what if Oliver never went on the Gambit, what if Diggle were the Green Arrow, what if Sara never went on the Gambit, and Ray’s ‘What If” is harder to pinpoint but it appears to be something along the lines of what if Ray never lost Anna. And their minds seem to have filled in the details as a form of wish fulfillment. So in some ways it’s bound to the logistics of the what if and some ways they get to dream a better version. So Sara just sort of dreams up a version of herself that wasn’t ever interested in Oliver so that she never hurts Laurel and never becomes Canary/White Canary and all the stuff that goes with that. Diggle gives himself a lot of attributes of what he associates with the Green Arrow, even though it doesn’t make sense for him individually- he has the same lair, the same costume even though it was inspired by a man he never met, there’s no way Diggle would have known archery etc. Oliver basically starts with the idea of the Gambit never happening. Now realistically that could happen one of two ways: no cheating or no undertaking. And he seems to have chosen both. And from there he has sort of this wish fulfillment belief that he still would have eventually become a good man, that Tommy would be successful, that his family would be whole. But there are certain logistics in his mind that are obvious enough that he doesn’t seem to be able to escape them. It’s a strong association that no Gambit means no Green Arrow, no Diggle, no Felicity. So his mind supplies that. It doesn’t mean those are parts of his life he wishes gone, it just means that he has a deep seeded sense of causality that his mind didn’t get past. And once you remove those elements (Gambit, Arrow, Diggle, Felicity, cheating) it becomes very natural that Oliver would eventually marry Laurel. And Oliver did love her at one point so I think the desire to fix that, and seeing that as a happy thing in an alternative life is very natural to him. And I also think that there were certain things Oliver craved resolution for that he never got. His parents and his relationship with Laurel are the two main things. So, given the chance, his mind tried to provide that, much the same way that in Three Ghosts his mind tried to give him resolution for Shado and Tommy (and was fairly effective). 

As to more generally why Felicity wasn’t a bigger part of the 100th- I think there are several story telling needs that  pushed this. 1. They needed a main Arrow character in the real world to drive that part of the story- Felicity makes the most sense since she’s the most capable at what they needed. 2. Having Felicity abducted is difficult for several reasons, one being that Felicity’s big regrets that would need to be changed are much nearer than everyone else so it’s hard to have a dream world correct them when the base premise takes place so long before them and virtually erases anything to do with them (a lot of her regrets and things she’d fix are very tied up with actual events of the series and with Oliver) there are things that you could do with her but they come sort of at odds with the rest of the Dream World instead of fitting in with it. A dreaming Felicity doesn’t end up in the Arrowcave with Dig, or dating Ray Palmer ( I don’t think). But she also doesn’t end up having anything to do with Oliver, Thea or Sara. So you’d almost need a whole new Dream Felicity sub plot and that’s just not feasible. 3. The big cathartic climax of the dream is action based and Felicity doesn’t fight. 4. Felicity’s issues and regrets are also being played out differently in the course of the larger season, so addressing them too much in the 100th diminishes the effectiveness of her season arc 5.Felicity is very present in the story nonetheless. She’s with Diggle as a foundational part of being the Green Arrow. She’s with Ray as an embodiment of what happiness looks like. She has the B storyline in the real world. And she’s symbolically present through Smoak Technologies being what guides Oliver et al. home. While giving her a primary role in the episode didn’t fit in with what they’d built and the concept they were exploring, Felicity’s importance was never undersold because she’s woven through every part of the episode and is emphasized heavily as the light guiding them all and one of the big missing pieces of this dream life.