What In The Hell Was THAT?

So much on TV last night!

Bones - The fifth season premiere picks up 6 weeks after Booth's brain surgery, with Brennan just arriving from a long trip to Guatemala and Booth begging Sweets to certify him for active duty. Sweets would prefer that Booth deal with his feelings about the coma dream he had that he woke up believing was real (THAT'S why he asked who Brennan was - because he wanted to know if she was really his wife - not because he had amnesia) but Booth is going stir-crazy and so Sweets folds.

Meanwhile Angela takes Brennan to a psychic (Cindy Lauper) who tells her that she and Booth are in love (not in those words but it's close) and then stumbles on a vision of a bunch of dead bodies buried under a fountain.

The entire episode is a study in how painful it is to watch people crank the awkward up to a billion, dial the chemistry back to nil and then do stupid stuff. Needless to say, if this kind of crap persists, I'll need to give this show the heave-ho because I have too much on my plate to put up with bad TV.

The Vampire Diaries - Ok, now this episode had Kevin Williamson's fingerprints all over it! The dialogue here was much more like a season 1 Dawson's Creek - all overly pleased with itself and full of bullshit.

So now Elena has decided to stop flirting with Stefan and try a more direct approach - like just throwing herself at him. But just as she puts that plan into effect she runs into Damon and that causes Stefan to act unbelievably weird and creepy. Instead of being appropriately twigged by that, she gives him a tiny bit of space and then resumes Operation Get Me Some.

At the same time, Stefan and Damon are playing a game of Who Can Control The Mind Of The Frightened, Drug-Addled Teenage Girl Better with poor Vicki. After her vampire attack trauma Stefan's super hearing tells him that she's probably going to tell her story so he sneaks into the hospital (not very stealthily - he really could learn a thing or two from Damon) and mind controls her into thinking it was an animal that attacked her. But Damon asserts that the lack of human blood in his diet has made his vampy powers weak which seems true enough since she continues to see Damon's sexy, menacing mug in her nightmares. Then when she bumps into him at the bar later she confronts him all "I know you!" but can't remember how or from where.

When she goes missing later, Jeremy and Matt have everyone frantically searching for her and Matt asks for Stefan's help right before ripping into him for possibly not being good for Elena but then Stefan's vamp ears prick up and he zooms away to a nearby roof where his dastardly brother is holding Vicki hostage and mind controlling her into thinking Stefan was the vamp who bit her. When Stefan tells Damon he'd rather be staked through the heart than have to spend another second with him, Stefan goes all passive aggressive, mind controls her back into the "animal attack, I don't know how I got up on this roof, damn I'm so high right now, hee hee" story just so he can stick around and continue to irritate his brother. Ah, family!

In other news, Jeremy's history teacher asks for a confab with Aunt Useless and then he proceeds to berate her the entire time. This is where the worst of the Williamsonian dialogue occurred. The convo went like this:

Teacher: Parenting a teenager is an impossible task isn't it?

Aunt Useless: It's been difficult, yes, but not impossible.

Teacher: THAT'S THE WRONG ANSWER! If you knew anything about it at all, if you were even remotely good at it, you'd know it's IMPOSSIBLE to raise a teenager.

Methinks that both Williamson and History Teacher need to buy a fucking dictionary and familiarize themselves with the definition of impossible. Because if it actually were "not capable of happening" then how in the hell did the trillions of people in the history of the world ever manage to do it?

Anyway, Teacher also busts Jeremy out to A. Useless for his drug use so she tries to get parental on his ass and fails in a pretty spectacular fashion. And later Vicki's date rapist boyfriend tells Matt and Elena (and everyone else) that Jeremy also sells drugs, particularly to Vicki. That causes Jeremy to retaliate with "well at least when I fuck her, I don't have to force her" and then there's a big dust up over whether or not she'd ever have sex with Jeremy and all of that takes place in ever-so-classy shouts and screams inside a crowded restaurant during a local celebration.

Finally, Bonnie touches Stefan's hand and gets some kind of vision and Caroline totally nails Damon but at the very end, in the middle of some moderately hot coital action, Damon's eyes go demony and Caroline screams and the screen goes black. It was impossible to know whether that scream was in horror or pleasure because you know they're just going to try to fake us out anyway.

Whatever, the fact of the matter is that the pilot was way better than the second episode. The leash on this one is getting shorter by the minute.

Supernatural - Oy vey! Bobby still can't walk and it's made him an unpleasant combination of sullen and bitchy.

Castiel is pissed that his partnership with the Brothers Dumbass has resulted in his expulsion from heaven and the removal of some of his niftier powers...like the one that would have allowed him to heal Bobby. As a result of his current predicament Cas lacks a great deal of patience for Dean's snotty attitude and "funny" jokes about Cas's perfectly awesome plan to find God to help them defeat Lucifer. When Cas tells the boys that he's not there to discuss, only to retrieve an amulet that acts as a bit of a homing beacon and alerts the possessor when God's in the 'hood - it turns out that necklace that Dean's always worn is the amulet in question.

Dean finally hands it over to Cas but not before he acts like a big baby about it. Then Bobby gets a call from Rufus who needs help as he's in the middle of a full-on demon war somewhere in Colorado. When the boys get there they run into not only Rufus but also Ellen and Jo (yay!). A whole lot of blah, it's so hard for Sam to fight the urge to drink the demon blood, blah, Dean doesn't want Sam around demons, blah holy crap is this getting redundant-cakes and it turns out that there are no demons in town but rather horsemen number one of the apocalypse done come to town on his red horse, stirring up war by making people see things and driving them to kill each other. Sam figures out how he's doing it and he and Dean stop him and kill him and get his ring (that's how he was doing it).

But then at the end Sam is all "my problem is I'm hooked on being powerful, I've got the greed and the gluttony and the pride and the covetousness and a bunch of other deadly sins and I know you don't trust me around demons so I'm going to take my tragic, hideous hair and go far away and leave you alone and pout all by myself." And then Dean is all "oh thank God! I thought I'd have to keep acting like a total dick forever before you finally got the hint you giant pain in my ass!" And Sam was like "well if you would just say what you mean instead of being all passive aggressive for once you tiny little pip-squeak jackass. And by the way, you're the one who forced me to drop out of Stanford law school and be a demon hunter so let's not lose sight of who's fault this is." And Dean said "I know you are, but what am I? You wanna take the Impala?" And I screamed because you can't make up for being an asshole for 3 years with one nice gesture!

Now next week Jess (Adrianne Palicki) comes back somehow so I'm giving Kripke some leeway there because I love her but I will not stop my bitching until the Winchesters stop their petty squabbling and start being friends again.

Fringe - In case you couldn't tell, I was suffering through a night of disappointments so it was a really good thing that Fringe's second season premiered last night to rescue me from all of this crap.

The plot is almost less bizarre than is typical for Fringe. Olivia's car is involved in an accident in New York but she isn't in the car. No one is. The man in the other car leaves the scene, finds a random man and uses some creepy device to shape shift himself into this new guy while leaving the new guy dead with three holes in his soft palate and, if I understood Walter correctly, a lack of fluid in his body that left his anus particularly puckered?

Anyway, the FBI arrives to investigate the wreck with some new girl who is not Fringe Division in charge and then Peter and Walter arrive and while Walter is nosing around in the car, Peter is fighting with New Lady about where Broyles or Charlie are and how he can't tell her anything because she doesn't have clearance and he's better than her and yell, yell, yell and then all of a sudden Walter gets out of the car all freaked out and Olivia comes slamming through the windshield from Alterna-World and lays nearly dead in the street.

The rest of the ep is all her trying to remember what the eff happened and Shape Shifting Killer killing people and shifting his shape in an attempt to find out what Olivia knows and then kill her. But New Lady and Peter and Charlie are on the case. Unfortunately SSK totally kills and shifts into Charlie.

Meanwhile Broyles has to go to Washington because Congress wants to shut down Fringe Division on account of the fact that they don't accomplish anything and then he MAKES OUT with Nina Sharp! Peter then snags the shape shifting device and tells Broyles to tell the government that they can use it to create an army of soldiers who can look like anyone but they can't have it unless they keep Fringe Division open and also let them do whatever they want without having to answer to anyone. It was a little blustery and stupid but Joshua Jackson has never looked hotter in his entire life so I couldn't have cared less.

JJ Abrams and Akiva Goldsman wrote the shit out of this episode and restored my faith in writers in general.

The down side is that Josh's extreme sexiness made me kind of miss Pacey Witter and now I think I might have to re-watch Dawson's Creek.

P.S. Broyles and Nina Sharp...kissing...on the mouth. Holy shit!