On the other hand, I called the ending in an email twelve hours before it aired, practically down to the dialogue, so clearly I saw SOMETHING coming.

Too bad it was this thing. Tor.com has the brunt of my despair, but I’m not done.

“Spoilerland.”

GOOD THINGS

- The White Knight. It was a really great performance! It’s almost a shame it’s in this miniseries, you know? (PS, he did not die! What a great fakeout.)

- Alice and Hatter got together. (Sometimes I am a sucker. I do not pretend anything else.)

- The Hatter was a beta male. Smart and funny with personality, but not one of those alpha males in action movies and romances who postures so much he ends up looking like a jackass (or, because the story requires him to be right, makes everyone else into a jackass). They had their own ideas, sometimes they had conflict, sometimes they had friendship, and then sometimes they made out! Well done, beta male!

- Alice. Really liked this performance. I hope she goes on to bigger and better things. It doesn’t often happen, but it happened for James McAvoy after Children of Dune and it might for you, too. I’ll be looking out for you, Caterina Scorsone.

- Kathy Bates. She’s so funny/creepy! Good job.

- Alice’s dresser. I like that color scheme a LOT. It never got old.

BAD THINGS

- Oh man, just EVERYTHING.

THINGS THEY NEVER EVEN PRETEND TO EXPLAIN OH MY GOD I HATE ALL OF YOU

- Alice spends a week in Wonderland and is gone for an hour in normal world? Okay, and her dad is gone for fifteen years. So has he been in Wonderland a hundred years? Because the Alice who came through in the Victorian era came through 150 years ago, so it’s all real-time except this Alice who swallowed up time and THIS WILL NEVER MAKE ANY SENSE OH MY GOD.

- Monarchy: just like the prom queen? (“Jack rules now, no takebacks!”)

- Dude, no more Tim Curry? What’s wrong with you?

- So the King of Hearts stayed in the casino because…?

- Everyone’s evolved enough for guns but still wears hats shaped like clubs?

- A hundred crack bodyguards, and none of them can deduce that the skeleton army might not actually be a huge tactical threat?

- The tattoos! We don’t really see Alice’s when she comes back because of long sleeves and weird lighting, so do the tattoos come off? If not, sucks for the people with FACE PAISLEY, doesn’t it?

- So, since human emotionade was the entire economy of Wonderland, what happens now?

- THE HUMAN EMOTIONADE. WHAT. WHOSE RESPONSIBLE THIS.

Bottom line: a plot has never made less sense. However, because of the strong characterization of the three leads, the awesome supporting cast who are all citizens of Ham Nation, and the vaguely satisfying conclusion that at least attempts to tie up some of the narrative threads, it passes. BARELY.

(Really, it would pass entirely because of the mom’s expression in the very last scene, as Hatter and Alice romantically make out, and she’s giving them the fisheye. That was amazing.)

The worst never came! Instead, Passable came, and Passable was so much better than what I had prepared for that by the end I was like, “That was GREAT!” (It is not. It is Passable.) I reviewed it over at Tor.com.

Here, I want to break some things down, to make sure there is no confusion. The plot here is not good. The plot is stupid. The plot involves stealing people and sucking their emotions out, and weird tattoos and a big conspiracy and a magic ring and it’s just a mess. But, just like with Beyond Sherwood Forest, it’s like the producers sat down and were like, “Here are some likable characters. They’ll just run around in the woods while all the rest of it is going on. Also, we’ll reference Alice in Wonderland a lot. It should be fine!”

And so they did! (Except that dead guy. The dead guy is not likable. That dude was a jerk.)

“I’m glad that skeleton is dead, and other things that might be spoilers!”

P.S. Alice is wearing Fluevog boots in that production still. I know because I wanted them for myself. Good choice, costume person. In fact, nice colorway all over, with the robin’s-egg-blue dress and the rusty tights and the oxblood boots and the purple coat. Too bad the Mad Hatter looks like a guy who went to my college and dressed like that because he was a drama major.

In fact, let’s just make some lists here.

Things I Liked:

- Alice. One of the things I hated most about DG in Tin Man was her inability to absorb anything that was happening, ever. Alice is the opposite. She has a series of quiet freak-outs sometimes, you can see them crossing her face, but it’s more like she panics for a few seconds and then chooses the answer she hopes will give away the least about her helpless position. And sometimes it works! Also, the obviousness of the martial-arts-automatically-equals-independent thing I hate is ameliorated by the fact that she accepts, even solicits, help from the right people when she’s in over her head, which is just good sense. Team Alice.

- Jack. Her boyfriend at the beginning, and more than he seems by the end of Part One, he’s Crusoe from that other show that got cancelled ten minutes into the pilot. Nice to see him! He is tall. (I’m trying to avoid spoilers.)

- Hatter. ADORABLE. He’s boybandified, and I know it, but I can acknowledge it and still enjoy that he’s a nerdy little freedom fighter who helps Alice because he has a huge crush on her.

(Problem: Alice and Jack start out the miniseries together and then hit a rough patch, and even though it looks like he likes her as much as ever when they meet up again, dude disappears for AN HOUR AND A HALF while Hatter helps Alice and they sit by fires staring meaningfully at each other and having loaded conversations. That’s not a triangle. That’s a relationship that happens without you, and also you.)

- Tim Curry. God, where do you GO when you’re not on my screen, and can you leave there more often? Everything you say is all caps, and it’s amazing EVERY TIME.

- Kathy Bates. Everything I said about Tim Curry, with the added bonus that he mostly excels at being hilarious, and you can be hilarious or creepy, and often both in the same sentence. You are the shit, is what I’m saying here. (You are too good for this miniseries, is what I am also saying.)

- Some of the callbacks are nicely done. Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum are perfectly weird, and the Dinah shout-out was great.

- By the end of Part 1, everyone was in an interesting situation, and I am looking forward to seeing how it all works out.

Things I Did Not Like:

- I get that it’s hard to make Vancouver look like a crazy magical land of huge mushrooms, and you really only have the budget for one Jabberwocky and some pine trees. I get it. But the palace looks like a rejected Austin Powers set. Yes, I see that it’s supposed to be motifs on playing cards. This is no excuse for what it actually looks like, which is a fancy boutique in an episode of Law and Order: SVU when they only have two hours to set up the shot.

- I’m sorry, there’s a casino that drains people of emotions so you can bottle it up and sell it to people with no emotions of their own? What is this, Equilibrium?

- No seriously, that’s the A-plot. It makes NO SENSE. People in Wonderland have emotions! No one ever even says that don’t! It’s the CGI Dragon of this miniseries, that’s all, and it doesn’t work and it makes no sense.

- I have not even GOTTEN to the magical ring.

Then there are things I both like and dislike, such as the costumes. I just don’t understand how wildly different the production values are from one scene to another.

White Knight costume:

Vaguely knight-appropriate! Many layers that he can remove like real armor and not just a big jumpsuit! It’s MOLDING!

Queen of Hearts:

*clunk*

Dude. You are SHITTING ME.

First of all, Kathy Bates is no skinnypants, and I get that, but I saw her in Cheri this year and that lady laces into a corset just like anyone else, and she’s playing a QUEEN, for fucks’ sake, what is this J Peterman caftan bullshit?

Tomorrow, I wrap this thing up.

Terrifyingly, I will admit I am looking forward watching to the conclusion of this miniseries. I DO NOT EVEN KNOW WHO I AM ANY MORE.

I’m using my Katrina Ghent face for this. She was sorely missed in this total stinkbomb of a finale. As usual, the official version is up at Tor.com.

A spoiler-free list of things I wish had been different:

- THE CHARACTERIZATION. The actual, official characterizations were perfectly good. However, every time the show needed a plot twist, someone would get amnesia or aphasia or a concussion and act like an idiot. That’s frustrating.

- THE PACE. Let’s not just drop things for weeks at a time, yeah? Also, maybe have a through-line with more suspense than “Will the King learn to hate David this week? Again?”

- THE WASTE. Let me get this straight; you have your lead character speak directly with Death – nay, have weirdly romantic tension with her – and you never follow up on that? Oh, Kings. Was Saffron Burrows REALLY so hard to schedule?

A spoiler-free list of things I loved:

- MOST OF THE CAST. Chris Egan and Girl Who Played Michelle can sit down. The rest of you get a round of applause. That was some top-notch acting, guys, don’t think I didn’t notice! Also, I hope that Susanna Thompson and Ian McShane get to work together again. I loved every time they had a scene together.

- THE MUSIC. Oh man, the music. NBC, I WANT A SOUNDTRACK. I am not kidding around. (The composter of Hannibal scored the pilot. I’m just saying, it’s nice stuff.)

- THE PRODUCTION DESIGN. Sometimes you may have been dumber than a sack of hair, but show, you looked good.

I have no hopes that this show will open the doors to better-quality television, or that this show will get picked up, or even that the next random-religious-allegory series will fare better than this one. This show tanked, flat-out. However, I appreciate NBC airing the full season for those of us who wanted to see it.

Now just hand over the soundtrack album and we can forget this whole thing.

Good news: this week’s episode was really exciting and featured some good acting! Bad news: we had to wait TEN EPISODES for this.

I wrote it up at Tor.com, and extra thoughts are under the cut as per usual.

David made facial expressions. I KNOW, RIGHT?

- David giving Michelle the old, “Don’t even BOTHER to explain!” just made me want to scream, because I hate that trope so fucking much (JUST GIVE THE PERSON TEN SECONDS AND SAVE THREE HOURS OF MISUNDERSTANDING, PLEASE GOD), but on the other hand, if Michelle wanted to explain something to me, I’d probably tell her to piss off, too, so I was stuck in the middle on that one.

- I’m still pissed about Katrina missing out on all this awesome plot just because they killed her. Can you imagine how she would feel watching Silas go down, realizing Jack was a pawn in someone else’s scheme, but she’s still queen? Uncle Cross’s coup would have lasted about three seconds before she stabbed him through the heart with her heel and then told everyone to sit down and get to business already, and then Jack would be king instead of David, the World’s Most Boring Man. *sigh*

- The badass Thomasina is welcome back (sooooo welcome, you have no idea), but it just highlights how often characterization falls by the wayside in this show when they have to shoehorn some plot in.

- David acted! I clutched my pearls.

- David and Jack finally hugged. Remember in the third episode when Jack and David were hitting the nightclubs and Jack was doing a lot of Meaningful Staring and it looked like it was going to be a great, strained relationship, and then for eight episodes they forgot they had ever spoken except during unrelated commando missions? Yeah, me neither.

- We still do not know what Macaulay did. WE STILL DO NOT KNOW. At this point, it has to be a Death Ray or something for it to be worth the delay. (If it is a Death Ray – well done, show!)

Oh, KINGS. How can you look so pretty and manage so little?

I review this week’s Kings episode, “Javelin,” over at Tor.com. Before we jump cut, I just want to point out that Javelin is a reference to a Bible verse I used as a pullquote weeks ago, when I thought that plotline was really revving up. Oh, was I a fool!

Anyway, this week Kings takes to the courtroom. Below the cut, some stuff I didn’t mention in my review, none of which is about the Gilboan justice system. (David-based crimes are considered especially heinous. The elite prosecutors who fabricate these crimes are called Jack and Silas.)

CHUNG CHUNG.

- Thomasina’s subplot, planted lo these many episodes ago, seems to have been, “She feels like a bad person, so she kisses that guard who loves her to reassure herself she’s a good person.” That’s…huh!

- Also, seriously, it bugs me that Thomasina is somehow not prepared to order people’s deaths. I get that she’s not as used to it as General Wes Studi was, but seriously, this is royal politics we’re talking about. Surely it came up at some point in the interview process, you know?

- I would really love to know more about her than the show is ever, ever going to tell us.

- See also: Katrina Ghent, who I hope has just faked her death and is living it up on the French Riviera someplace.

- King Silas can be truly terrifying. Not even so much when he’s raging and plotting, but when he dismisses everyone and gently explains to David that David has to go so Silas can be the undisputed king, and David AGREES. (It would be more powerful if it was David falling under Silas’s spell instead of David just agreeing to everything the King has ever asked of him, but still!)

- I really wonder what happened to that king in the basement. We haven’t seen him in six weeks!

- You know what else we haven’t gotten back to in a long time? The Reverend, the war with Gath, David’s brother’s trial, Michelle’s health care plan, Macaulay Culkin, Death sneaking up on Silas.

- WHAT THE HELL DID MACAULAY DO TO GET BANISHED, OH MY GOD, JUST WRAP THAT UP, I BEG YOU.

- Two episodes left, I think. I have to say, the episode ended at just the right time to leave me actually interesting in what came next. If only that had been the case for any of the rest of this series, we might have a second season!