So You Think You Can Dance S12E10

Last year around this time, SYTYCD was shaping its Top 10 in an episode that I had nothing but glowing praise for. This year, the show isn't as good, the talent isn't as strong, and we're still one week away from finalizing the Top 10, but this was just as strong of an hour of dance as that one was. I didn't think I'd find myself in a position to say it again but this is why I watch this show. This episode served as a reminder about all the good this series has to offer the world, and if they'd been bringing it at this level for the entire season, I think I'd be lamenting the show's probable cancellation a lot more than I have been. But on the other hand, if each episode had featured such a group of stunning performances by now, maybe the effect would have warn off and this episode would have paled in comparison. I don't want to recommend mediocrity as a course of action, but I do think that the fact of the matter is that this episode sores as high as it does in some small part because of just how bad and boring the episodes before it were. The routines were also original, challenging, and well thought out in a way that they haven't been this season, and they were danced with a fire and passion we haven't seen so far, but I still think the low bar set by the earlier episodes made it easier for this episode to be so rejoiced.

This, I think, rings truer for the first paired performance of the night, Jaja and Hailee in a jazz routine. I loved it when I watched it taking place. Hailee and Jaja are easily my two favorite performers on the show so far (with Megz rounding out my own personal top three), and I've been hoping for more same-sex dancing on this season as the gulf between the girls and guys gets wider and wider. The general "Girl Power" theme of the number is so played out on the show that I wanted to gouge my eyes out when I heard it, but Hailee and Jaja bring a fun and playfulness, but also a strength and fire to it that it made the routine worth my momentary cringe. So the point is that I enjoyed the number very much and I thought it was a great way to kick off the episode, and then as things went on I totally forgot it had even existed in the face of the better routines that followed it. This isn't meant to be a mark against these two, but I wonder if they won't find themselves in the bottom next week based simply on how forgettable the number was in the grand scheme of the rest of the episode. I wouldn't be surprised if their fanbase was strong enough to vote them through, but I also wouldn't be surprised if they found themselves in danger (though still pushed through to the top 10) next week.

Part of this is because the Alexia and Neptune number that follows them is just so much fun and so great to watch. I don't know that Alexia brought out the very best Hip Hop performance we've ever seen from a Contemporary girl (in fact I know she hasn't since this routine from Lauren and tWitch still exists), but I do know that there was something phenomenal about this number. First off, Neptune brings yet another high level of chemistry to a "romantic" performance. Last week he was vibeing with Kate on a level I didn't think possible for a mismatched pair who hadn't ever danced together, and this week it's Alexia. Both performances were real and believable, but this one was also fun and intriguing. I think we've seen all kinds of relationships on this show over the years, but this has to be the first time we've seen one between two mental patients. It was genius, and cute, and so much fun, and wonderfully danced, and everything you hope a performance on this show will be. Alexia's face went through a range of expressions and emotions throughout it that I think really sold the character, and both of them just preformed it wonderfully.

After two stellar performances and news of Derek's injury, I was expecting a less than impressive Ballroom number from JJ, and then I was wrong. It would be easy to attribute the skill and effectiveness of this number on the presence of the choreographer dancing with JJ. If anyone's going to know how to dance the number, it's the person that created it. But the fact of the matter is that JJ was honestly the star in this pairing; I couldn't take my eyes off of her. I don't want to down play the amount of that which is due to his partnering in the first place. One of the things I find fascinating about a lot of ballroom numbers is the fact that the male partner is often there to simply present and be there for the female partner. He often has more to do than just lift and pose, but in a lot of these kinds of numbers the guy is meant to be an afterthought really. And that's what happened here. Who knows if the number would have been as remarkable had Derek been well enough to perform it with her. Given that his injury came while practicing the lifts, it seems like he's lacking the upper body and core strength needed to pull this routine off. But whatever the case could have been had he been in there, we know what it was without him, and it was great. If I have one complaint, it's that the sexiness of the routine seemed to come from the costuming and the choreography more so than from any actual connection between the two dancers, but that's to be expected in some ways.

Everything up until this point in the night was good, but the number of the evening was Jim and Ariana's Contemporary piece about a man's struggle with depression. I'll admit my bias here; I love the performances on this show that have a dancer embodying more of an abstract concept than an actual person. Mia Michaels' Addiction piece will forever be a standout for doing just that. So as soon as Cheeseman said the word depression I was hooked. But then Jim (towards whom I'm decidedly indifferent) and Ariana (whom I actually like but haven't committed to memory until now) danced it and it was even more brilliant than I originally expected. Nigel mentioned that Hailee and Virgil's performance from last week would be remembered from here on out, but I think this will be the number that comes out of this season and lives on in SYTYCD history as maybe one of the top three or five best things to ever come out of the show. There was a strange indifference and detachment to Ariana's performance that I loved. While Kupono's stint as Addiction was more malevolent, Ariana's Depression just kind of was. There was a matter of fact quality to it that I thought worked wonders because depression isn't malevolent, it isn't malicious, it just kind of is. And Jim's struggle to get out of it was believable. I thought at the time that he could have shown a bit more sadness in his face, but now I think it's possible that his character was maybe past any sadness and had moved on to just a sheer force of will to break out. And if that's the case, I think it worked. Either way, I loved this from start to finish and I'll be shocked if either of them find themselves in the bottom next week.

I could go number by number like this, but the fact is that the rest of the episode ran apace of what came before. Virgil and Gaby had a really fun and cute broadway number that had me grinning and laughing out loud for a lot of it. And Marissa and Yorelis' hip hop number was good, though not great. The lowest point of the night came from Asaf and Kate's number, but that was no surprise. To his credit, Asaf was better than he was in that horrendous waste of time last week, but he still showed why he shouldn't have been kept around. The best moment was during the video package when Kate confirmed what I said last week: his being her partner made her fearful of her own safety. It's an eye opening moment of honesty. She cries because on the one hand she wants to help him get better and carry him through the performance, but on the other hand she can't really relax into any of the lifts because she's constantly scared he'll drop her. These contestants put their bodies, careers, and lives in one another's hands each week, and to keep someone around who isn't up to the task of taking care of his partner is negligent. And the judges' thin and pathetic justifications for keeping him felt like a slap in the face of everything this show has stood for over the last 12 seasons. This wasn't a case of America simply failing to see the greatness within a dancer (like Billy Bell for example) and constantly letting him fall into the bottom for the judges to save him and try to impress upon everyone how great he really is. It was simply about them pushing their own agenda in hopes of getting the best story. But it's over now, America put him in the bottom again and the judges did what they should have done last week and sent him home.

But instead of ending on that sour note, I think it's worth mentioning the other standout performance of the night. I was hard on the judges for keeping Edson instead of Moises last week, but given his performance with Megz this week, I think it's clear that they made the right choice. I don't think Moises had the strength to pull of that number as well as Edson did, so this was a situation of a more optimal pairing. Plus this new choreographer, Talia, is really quite wonderful. It's another number where a dancer embodies something abstract instead of a character, this time with Edson performing as Temptation and Megz as the tempted party, and it's just brilliant. The stuff with the shirts, and the hiding, and the lifts, and the eventual acceptance at the end, it was all wonderful. A great end to the best string of performances the season has seen.

The group numbers were fun too, but I'm starting to think they've run their course. Marissa goes home from team stage which will at least stop the bleeding of male contestants for awhile. During the team stage group number, I had a moment of shock when I thought Edson and Jim were the last two guys on the team altogether before I remembered that Derek was just hurt for the week. The girls are clearly better, I've said it a number of times by now, and I can't help but to wonder if we aren't in for an all female top six or five. After all, the street team is officially down to just Virgil and Neptune for the guys. But whatever the ultimate gender breakdown of the show when we reach the end, if they keep having episodes like this one, I can at least say it'll be worth the ride to find out.

Randoms:

--Same-Sex Speculation Space: given the continued shift towards an all girl group by the last few weeks of the show, and also given my continued urging for the show to embrace same-sex pairings for their dances, I've decided to create a space where I can posit stories for same-sex numbers in the future which have nothing to do with romance since I think the show tends to shy away from these pairings because they don't want the romantic implications. Let's start with the girls: imagine a number, maybe a Broadway or a Jazz number, about an older dancer who's time is running out and a young girl who reminds her a lot of herself at that age. The young girl is all sex appeal and easy talent which makes her not want to put in the hard work to be as great as she could be, and instead of being jealous and catty about it, the older woman tries to take the young girl under her wing and inspire her to be the great dancer she's meant to be. Nothing romantic about it, and not the typical "women fighting and being jealous" storyline we're used to seeing. But also not the general "girl power" rubber stamp the choreographers tend to roll out in these situations. You're welcome, SYTYCD, I'll let you have that one for free.

--My mention of Virgil and Gaby's performance was brief, but I really have to say that I was laughing for a couple minutes when they pulled out those glasses. Those two have personality for days and it's so worth it.

--I complained last week about how the lack of pairs stops us from having the "learn more about this dancer" segments that the show usually has, and then they rolled out the "one thing America doesn't know about me" segment this week. Kudoes to Kate (almost kidnapped? wtf?!), Virgil (awesome Jazz band), and Derek (cute adoption story) for actually picking interesting and worthwhile facts. Everyone else either bored me to tears or at least were pretty simple and straight forward as if they hadn't put any real thought into it.

--I think one part of why this episode's performances were so much better was that the choreographers finally took off the kid gloves and started putting the contestants through their paces with these routines. It looked like there were a few lifts in the video package for Asaf and Kate that were edited out of the final number, but that doesn't seem like it's for lack of trying on Cheeseman's part to get them in there in the first place.

--I really liked Nigel's Nigel’s point about Yorelis looking like she hasn’t been choreographed but just feels the music and lets it move through her. She's not my favorite, but she's certainly got that particular quality, and I never could have found the words for it without Nigel pointing it out.

--What're the chances Burim could have danced with Kate in that number better than Asaf did? I know it's not a strict one-to-one trade off since the pairs aren't set. If Burim had stayed, he could have just as easily been with Gaby instead of Kate this week. but since he was gotten rid of instead of Asaf, I just felt the need to compare the two, and I can't help but to think he would have turned out a better performance to show why he deserved to be kept around than Asaf did.

--Is it just me or is Derulo actually getting more helpful and more palatable as the show goes on?

So You Think You Can Dance S12E8 & 9

An odd thing about reality tv in general is how dependent on outside forces it is to be "good." The participants have to be interesting, and in the case of SYTYCD also talented, you have to be able to form an attachment to any number of them, and then the "right" people have to be sent home each week to allow the drama to remain compelling and to leave the viewers feeling vindicated that the "right" person has won by whatever metrics such a thing is being judged. After so many episodes this season, I'm shocked by just how many ways this show is failing in those areas.

First off the good, because there is still good. Virgil and Hailee's number that closed the competition routines last night. It's the best thing that's happened this season. My jaw was on the floor, I cheered throughout it all, and couldn't help but to be amazed. Both of them danced it wonderfully, and I have to agree with Travis' point that Hailee was the best person from his team for this number. The two of them together were the perfect duo for the routine and they worked hard to start to distance themselves from the competition.

The number before it staring Neptune and Kate was equally impressive on the other end of the spectrum. The judges can wax poetic about the dancers dancing out of their styles each performance all they like. The fact of the matter is that that's always been the bread and butter of this show. So while it's impressive that Hailee was capable of dancing Hip Hop so well and that Neptune delivered on contemporary as well as he did, it's no more impressive than the many cross-style performances that came over the 10 years before it. But that's not to diminish the number itself which was just brilliant. Neptune and Kate had a chemistry that we haven't seen thus far in the competition because no one's danced together enough to build it. That they can just fall into a new performance and sell the emotion on such an astounding level is to be commended. That's not even mentioning how skillfully it was danced. Kate's skill level and training brought a crispness to her movement that Neptune lacked, and that was all for the betterment of the piece. I got the impression watching them that they were really two different people from two different worlds, but that they honestly loved each other and the entirety of their relationship made sense. Sometimes when two contemporary dancers get together in a routine like this one, their combined skill level leaves it feeling a bit homogenized and like they're both just two halves of the same performer. But there's something about the difference in the quality of Neptune and Kate's movement that really added an extra layer to the story that deeply resonated with me.

Sadly, I think that's where the good ends thus far. The first episode with everyone dancing outside of their comfort zones wasn't as bad as I expected, or as bad as this episode for that matter, but it hasn't been on par with where we're used to seeing this show at a comparable point in previous seasons. The bulk of the dancers, and that's on both teams, simply aren't as good as they usually are. The Stage dancers seem to be low on personality and performance ability. It feels almost as though the 10 of them that made up the top 20 were chosen specifically for that purpose. Whereas the Street team has personality in spades and very little technique and skill. This was expected from the moment the theme of this season was announced, but the failings on the Stage team are more surprising. I think it was orchestrated this way simply because if you took the best Street dancers you could find and pitted them against the best Stage dancers in this show's history, they'd be slaughtered. So conceits were made on both sides to try and keep things leveled. The results are just bad performances that can't solely be blamed on the less trained Street competitors.

Darion going home last week after his technically interesting but ultimately bloodless Ballet number with Jim and his seriously lagging number with Hailee and Yorelis was evidence of this. Here's a classically trained Ballet dancer with all the technique in the world. And we've seen Ballet dancers on this show go far when they let their personality and performance level fly. But Darion didn't have that second level. In fact, he was so lacking in being able to bring out any emotion that I was left wondering if he'd have been on the show without the need to keep the Stage team down closer to the Street team's level to create a fairer competition.

"Would they be here if it were just a regular season?" was a question I expected to be asking of the Street dancers, but not of the Stage dancers. But that's not to say that it isn't fair to ask of the Street team too. In the cases of Burim and Asaf, the answer is clear: No they wouldn't be. Asaf at least shouldn't even be on this season seeing as how the judges cut him only to bring him back to fill in for a last minute injury. Burim at least has a leg up on Asaf in his skill and his ability to pick up choreography, but he's not at the level of some of the better B-Boys we've seen in the past (Hok and Legacy come to mind), so while I think he might have been a good choice for this year, I still ask if he would have made the cut in seasons previously. And yet for all of that, the judges decide to keep Asaf and to lose Burim this week? Over the years, I've seen some really confusing choices be made on this show, but one of the things that generally kept me watching was that those choices were usually made by the voters and then rectified by the judges. The judges' ability to decide who from the bottom three vote getters would be going home until the top 10 was formed was one of the things that always set this show above others. And while they haven't always been perfect, they've at least often made their decision with a level of understand-ability. Not this time. And the lack of explanation on their part doesn't help to make this seem like a reasonable choice either.

How can anyone justify keeping Asaf after he turns in what can only be described as the worst performance of the night. The Cha-Cha routine he was given was even streamlined and simplified for him and he still managed to make it slow and boring and lifeless. The fact is Asaf isn't a strong enough dancer for this competition, and instead of admitting that and sending him on his way, the judges subject us to him for at least another week. The choreographers don't know what to do with him during group numbers, which is why he's always in the back or off to the side and never focused on from the cameras. And he's hurting his partners each week by not allowing them to let lose and just dance for fear that he might not be there to catch them when needed. Keeping him around at this point is both boring and dangerous, and yet he stays because he tries really hard and the judges like the idea of seeing his overall arch when everything is said and done. This isn't a competition to find the best sob story or the most improved dancer, it's about finding the best, or at least America's favorite, dancer, and the judges just undercut that in a big way.

Oddly enough this is also reflected in their decision to cut Moises instead of Edson. Neither of them danced particularly well this night, but Moises proved last week, at least to me, that he's got more performance ability than I expected. He's maybe the most technically sound Stage boy left in the competition, but the way he was capable of bringing out a strength and masculinity that I didn't think he had last week won me over on his performance ability. Conversely, Edson hasn't. In his number this week, I didn't buy for a second that he wanted either of the two girls he was dancing with, and since his character was at the center of a love triangle with them, that was important. But after a lackluster Bollywood routine last week and an unbelievable performance this week, he somehow manages to stick around while Moises is sent packing. It's two bad decisions in one night from the judges and it leaves me thinking that they're more interested in keeping up with their theme than they are in presenting the stellar level of dance we're used to seeing from the show.

It all boils back down to what I said in my very first review of the season; the show is trying to change fundamental aspects of itself, and in doing so it's losing its identity and not picking up a better one to replace it. The Stage v Street concept isn't without it's strengths. The group numbers that have been closing the night have been consistently stellar in my opinion. And their willingness to get rid of contestants without considering gender opens the door for more same-sex pairings. Granted it's a door they don't seem at all interested in walking through as each episode has seen groups of three and four dancing instead of the traditional duos (which has also been the show's loss). But we've still reached a point where there are five girls and three guys on each team. And that's understandable since the girls are so much better this year than the boys. But instead of just having that happen, they need to capitalize on it and do something with those dynamics. What this show doesn't need are more crowded and convoluted routines like Stacey Tookey's number for Derek, Jaja, and Alexia. That didn't make sense and wasn't very interesting to watch.

These routines also speak to the other thing the show has lost: the strong storylines born from the chemistry (or lack of same) of the early pairings of dancers. Being paired together gave the dancers incentive to do their best to help their partner as well as themselves, and it gave us those cute but silly video packages where the dancers would tell us something special about their partners. Instead we're left with very little idea of who the contestants are, and therefore left without much of an ability to latch on to anyone to really root for. Beyond Virgil and Jaja, I couldn't tell you who the Street performers are. Same goes for the Stage team now that Moises is gone. I know Hailee's name after her number last night, but prior to that I wouldn't have recalled her.

So if we know next to nothing about the contestants, and the people who were allowed into the season aren't that talented, and the wrong people are being sent home week after week, then what does this season of SYTYCD have going for it? Nigel remarked at the end of Virgil and Hailee's performance that when this show turns 20, it would be a performance they'd still be talking about. The hard truth is that this show probably won't make it past its 10th birthday, never mind its 20th, and as I watch each episode thinking these are the last we'll ever see, I'm left wondering how we're going to remember the show. They made it a point to look back over the first 10 years during that one hour long special last week, but this season isn't the capper to that remarkable journey, it's just the last death rattle of the end.

Randoms:

--Speaking of the one hour special from last week, how much of a hot mess was that? I don't want to throw it under the bus too bad, but one hour wasn't enough, the current contestants dancing solos wasn't needed at all, and the constant toss ups to Ryan Seacrest about his new show were pointless and took up way too much time. It left something that should have been a wall to wall celebration of what came before feeling empty and rushed. And I also had a problem with Paula and Jason getting to pick performances to see again. They've been there for all of two days and they get a vote? If there was ever a time to bring back Mary Murphy and Mia Michaels, and Lil C, and Debbie Allen, and all the people who've made this show what it is today, this was it. The producers and Fox could have done better; this show deserved better.

--Last week, Nigel had a lot of glowing things to say about Jaja and Jim's performance and about how remarkable it was to see a Ballet dancers and a Hip Hop dancer together making a great performance. He went on and on about it as if this was the sole doing of the Street v Stage conceit, and the entire time I kept thinking "But that's what the Alex Wong and tWitch performance was, and it was a million times better than whatever we just watched." But he didn't even make mention of that piece of history. And then the very next night we get to see that performance again and I felt validated.

--The twitter save thing is another interesting change to the format that I want to like but I'm not sure I think it's being used to the best of its ability. I guess restricting the tweeting to the last 5 minutes makes a level of sense, but I think allowing people to do it throughout the show would encourage live tweeting of the episodes and get the word out even more about the show on social media. But in order to do that effectively, they'd probably have to reveal who the bottom 6 were at the top of the hour, and we already know that that doesn't really work, so I don't know. Either way, it feels to me like a good idea that just needs a little more refining.

--Pharside and Phoenix have been wonderful additions to the ranks of SYTYCD choreographers. I've enjoyed just about every routine they've made over the last couple seasons, and they're winning streak continues into this week.

--I can't express how upset I am over Burim going home. Not that I think he's top 10 material or anything, but that they had the prime excuse to just get rid of Asaf and they didn't take it bugs the shit out of me. Plus, I'll miss his beautiful blue eyes and cute little accent.

So You Think You Can Dance S12E7

I've long believed that if you don't enjoy a story, whether it be a book or TV show, you should give up on it. Life's too short to waste it reading books you don't enjoy or watching season after season of a TV show you're no longer into. Starting a new series is not the equivalent of a marriage. There are no vows, no promises, not even really lofty notions about eternity. It's more of a simple handshake deal. You sit down and you say, "I'm going to give you so much of my time, and in return you're going to entertain me to whatever level I feel I require to be entertained. If you fall short of that task, then I'm leaving you for another form of entertainment and you can't complain; if you wanted me to stick around, you should have been better." It's an odd one way street whereby you don't owe a show anything, but that show owes it to you to be entertaining and to contort itself into whatever odd shape your desires dictate in the moment. But with that being said, I'm only human and I come with my own set of loyalties. So when So You Think You Can Dance announced a set of changes that I felt sure would ruin the show, instead of giving up on it on the spot I decided to give it another go. A show that's built up some capital with me by being good in the past will inevitably last longer and get a stay of execution or two before I give up on it all together. I watched two of the audition episodes this year before I decided to give up on that and check in when the competition started in earnest, and then I decided that I'd give the season a fair shake of about two or three episodes before I decided for sure if I'm going to stick out this 12th and probably final season. After the Top 20 Showcase episode, I'm still on the fence, but not for the reasons I expected to be.

As I mentioned last year, the Top 20 episode is one of my favorites. In the past, when Fox had more faith in the show and give them more time to do their thing, it was an episode that served to simply show off what the contestants could do. Freed from the requirement of dancing for America's votes and from the constraints of having to dance outside of their given styles, the contestants skilled and lucky enough to make it to the Top 20 were allowed to just let loose to some great choreography that was often more about the beauty and the joy of dance than anything else. Now that the showcase has been integrated into the competition, I like it a little bit less, but I still respect the place it holds. This year it's still a solid showcase of strong dancers dancing well, but it's not quiet up to the level of previous years for a very simple reason: The choreography is lazy and uninspired.

When I found out that everyone in Vegas would only be dancing within their own styles, or more specifically that the "Street" dancers would only be dancing in Hip Hop styles and the "Stage" dancers would be dancing in all the different styles, I decided not to watch the auditions. As a result, I walked into this episode not knowing anything about any of the contestants except for Jaja who I loved last year and therefore is my early favorite, and I fully expected the Street dancers to enter this stage of the competition at a distinct disadvantage. In the past, the Vegas round was the most difficult aspect of the audition because it was supposed to prepare the dancers what what they'd be facing in the weeks to come. Here it was lightened in order to coddle them towards instead of away from success. Simply put, if the Street dancers had to dance Ballroom at these early stages, they would have been eliminated in large numbers leaving us without a team of ten in the top 20. So my expectation was that they'd reach this point without an ability to even perform choreography and then get tossed into the deep end against contestants who can do whatever is asked of them. On the one hand, that's not the case as the Street dancers clearly have the better set of performances on the night and take an early lead in the competition. But on the other hand, were any of them actually really challenged and pushed hard enough, or critiqued firmly enough by the judges, to make a fair accounting?

There are a few places were I think the routines lived up to this stage of the competition. The first of which is Brian Friedman's routine for Alexia, Hailee, and Marissa. It's a type of routine that I don't generally care for: sexy girls being sexy for sexiness' sake, but he choreographs it is killer high heels and has them doing a lot of moves in those shoes that should have broken their ankles. To their credit, the girls move around in those shoes well, I only noticed one point when someone looked like she was about to fall, but she caught herself just in time. But the problem here is really that the routine is sexy, the costuming is sexy, the shoes are sexy, and then on top of that the girls decided to pull overtly sexy faces too. It's one thing too much and the judges are quick to tell them to dial it back and not try too hard to be sexy when you've got so many elements making you sexy already. In spite of that one aspect to the execution, I thought the choreography was suitably strong for dancers good enough to make it to the top 20.

Likewise, Darion and Jim's Ballet routine featured a high level of difficulty. They weren't quite as in sync as they should have been, and they noticeably missed the connection on their first lift, but given how difficult the entire routine was, I'm willing to give them a bit of a pass. I didn't think it deserved the standing-O the judges gave it, but it was nice nevertheless. The two group numbers that closed out the night were also impressive and featured a high level from the choreographers. Team Street going last was exactly the right call as they blew the roof off the building and solidified their round one victory.

Everything other than those four performances, however, left something to be desired. It felt like the choreographers were going easy on the contestants in an effort to ease them into the competition, but the result was uninspiring and uninteresting numbers. Even Travis Wall's number was surprisingly lackluster, and that's from someone that I've praised again and again as a genius and the best thing to ever come out of this show. This week his story was simple and overdone, and the movements either didn't suit the story or weren't executed well enough by Edson and Kate to convey the story. It's a strange misstep in what otherwise should have been a home run.

To make matters worse, the judges overpraise the Street dancers at every turn while giving (understandably) harsh critiques to the Stage dancers. The other standing-O of the night came at the end of Chris Scott's number for Jaja, Lily, Asaf, and Burim, and that was horrible. Or maybe horrible is a bit strong, but it certainly wasn't anything to leave your seat over. Scott starts the video package by saying he doesn't really have much of a plan beyond wanting to showcase what each of the dancers is good at. Which......ok? I think I've made this analogy before and if I have, bear with me, but there's something that happens when a coach makes a guts call in sports: if it works, he's a genius, if it fails, people will be calling for him to be fired. There's something purely results based in sports that renders individual decisions incapable of being judged on their merits alone; it's all about if it worked or not. Chris Scott's decision to not come up with any kind of story or put forth any distinct choreography didn't work. And then the routine was filmed in a manner that left each individual dancer on stage as pretty much the only person in the frame while they were dancing. So if there were moments of synchronicity or of two people dancing against each other at the same time, we didn't really get to see them. The moves the dancers executed were nice, but there was no sense of great scale or purpose to it all, just four people on stage doing their own solos, and that's not what this show is about.

Compared to the Pharside and Phoenix routine for Virgil, Yorelis, and Ariana about a man trying to get into the pearly gates and being courted by one angel and one devil, the Chris Scott routine looks like amateur hour. Granted even this routine wasn't my favorite. I didn't find the difficulty level to be too high, though it was still higher than a lot of the other routines of the night, and there certainly weren't enough tricks or lifts in it to keep my attention for long. But it at least had purpose and showed that the choreographers were thinking about what story they wanted to tell and how they could both challenge the dancers to step outside of themselves while still showing off their talents. After a string of solid numbers last year, Pharside and Phoenix are really stepping up as a choreography duo that can stand toe to toe with NappyTabs, and that's a good thing.

This first episode of the competition wasn't enough to measure the show by. The real test will come next week when the dancers are paired up and forced to dance outside of their given styles. But even through the first hour some of the problems are still seeping through. Jason Derulo has yet another performance in this episode. It's not the first of the season and I'm willing to bet it won't be the last, and I'm already seriously beyond bored with him. His critiques have at least gotten better, and he was the only judge to fairly criticize the first routine of the night, so I'll give him that much. The new format has the dancers running off stage into the loving arms of their respective mentors after each tongue lashing from the judges, and then we cut to their very brief (seriously I think it was like three seconds) conversation with their mentor as they respond to what the judges said and he rushes through some kind of advice. Listen, I love tWitch and Travis Wall, but this is horribly fucking pointless. In order for this to work out, they need to better justify these two being such a big factor in the show. Travis choreographs one of his team's performances, but tWitch doesn't, and the advice we see them giving throughout the episode amounts to nothing. I'm hoping that we discover next week that the two of them have a hand in deciding the pairs and maybe even choosing dance styles for those pairs in the weeks to come. If they have insight into what these kids will be good at, I'd like to see them use it to make the show better and also to challenge the contestants to do better. But I'm not optimistic. In the mean time, it just looks like their going to be sticking around to wait in the wings and to pretend to be important. Much like So You Think You Can Dance's 12th season is shaping up to do if things don't change.

Random Thoughts:

--Asaf is the only dancer who seems to be too far out of his depths during this stage of the competition. And since he's only in the top 20 to fill out a spot vacated by a dancers who was injured in the last minute, I guess that's to be expected. I must say I found it pleasantly surprisings that he was the only dancer out there seemingly incapable, or maybe just unwilling, to pick up choreography.

--Megz is another early favorite of mine. She's beautiful and very expressive in her performance. She and Jaja are two reasons the female Street dancers are being so heavily praised this season, but it's not praise that's misplaced at all. From what I can see, the girls on the street team are much better than everyone else at this stage of the competition. It still remains to be seen how they'll do in other styles, but I'm hoping they stick around for awhile.

--Is it just me or are the Stage team boys really really gay this year? It just seemed like each time any one of them opened their mouths, a purse fell out. It's not a judgement, simply an observation. In the past, it's seemed like even a lot of the gay contestants (Travis and Benji both come to mind) were at least passable enough that you might not have known they were gay unless you were paying attention. This year....not so much.

--This year is also short on dreamy boys. No cute and derpy Kent Boyd, no one with the more adult sex appeal of Dmitry Chaplin, and certainly no one as adorable and bear cub-ish as Will Thomas. No one stood out to me this year and that's odd for this show. Who will the young girls who make up so much of the voting viewership of this show vote for?

Sense8 S2 Episodes 9-12

An interesting thing happened while I rewatched the last act of Sense8, I stopped taking notes as I had been doing consistently through the first eight episodes and just watched it all transpire again. It shouldn't have been as engaging since I literally only just watched these episodes for the first time a couple weeks ago, but I couldn't pull my eyes from the screen. It wasn't that I didn't have anything to say about what happens in this final act, but what I had to say took a backseat to the experience. And I think that's most of what I love about this show in a nutshell: it's not without its problems, when you stop and think about things for too long (like why the hell does Wolfie just happen to have a damn bazooka in the trunk of his car?), the story can falter a little bit. But it's all so interesting, so engaging, and so unlike anything else on TV that you can be totally immersed in the story while its on. In a scene where Kala Visits with Capheus, she asks him why a house might have a big screen TV but no bed. His response is that the bed keeps you in the slum while the TV takes you out of it. True escapism at it's finest. It's not the only thing I love about storytelling, but it's certainly one of the things I love the most, and I think Sense8 does it about as well as any other show out there.

The last four episodes serve as a culmination of everything the show had been building towards for the eight that came before. Most of the stories draw to a solid conclusion, we get an awesome sequence of all of the cluster working together to use their skills and save one of their own, and a fairly solid path forward for future seasons, assuming there are any. Collectively, these elements combine to make a thrillingly satisfying ending, but taking the stories on an individual level, I'm less sure.

I mentioned previously that Lito's story is my least favorite of all the individual threads they follow in
the first season, and that's equally true for the ending. The scene between him and Nomi in the eighth episode is brilliant, but it's also the first extended Visiting scene he has in the season. The scene where Sun is on her period and he feels the effects for it was mostly played for laughs, as are most of Lito's scenes, and this is the first time that he has this kind of sit and talk and share some piece of yourself moment that the others have been experiencing all along. It's a part of what I don't like about Lito's story: he feels so isolated from the others. But the other thing I didn't care for about Lito's story is that it felt the most predictable. From the moment Lito allowed Daniela to go off with Joaquin, you knew there was no other way for his story to go. Of course he spirals without Hernando, of course he finds his courage and goes after her, of course he gets her back and his actions allow Hernando to forgive him and they all get to be a happy family again. Subtlety was never Sense8's strong suit, but this was all a bit too obvious for my taste. Which leads me to say that we've seen this kind of story (specifically the closeted gay man having to come out in order to earn the love of his out boyfriend) enough times before that there's nothing new or interesting that can be done with it, so maybe choose a better story next time.

With that being said, Lito finding his place within the cluster by helping Wolfie achieve his action movie climax was amazing. I complain about Lito's isolation from the rest of the cluster, but the truth is that Wolfie is isolated too. Prior to the tenth episode, which opens with him having a brief and perplexing conversation with Will and leads to his moment with Lito, the only person he'd spent any one on one time with was Kala. That's still one more senseate than Lito spent time with, but the fact that the two of them are the cluster's most isolated characters and they join together to help one another through their respective story's endings makes a lot of sense and is very fulfilling. If the two of them continue to be on the fringes of the group moving forward, it could be a lot of fun to see a close friendship developing there.

I've mentioned the show's potential balance issues before, and that came up in small ways in these last four episodes. Lito and Will's conversation during the attempt to rescue Riley bugs me. These last four episodes feature a couple of the cluster members meeting for the first time. Capheus and Kala sit and watch a movie together, and the aforementioned scene between Nomi and Lito is their first meeting as well (other than the orgy). In both of those cases, the characters start off not by introducing themselves but by acknowledging that they already know who one another is. Nomi looks at Lito and says, "You're Lito," and he responds with, "You're Nomi." But when Lito pops up in the BPO facility, the first thing Will says to him is, "Do I know you?" It's a line purely in service to the comedy of their awkward exchange about the orgy they had and Will's being flustered about it all, but it doesn't work for me. I think you can stick with Will's discomfort about having had sex with two men and one woman, and the weirdness of it all, but there's no real excuse for the group to have reached the last episode and for him to still be unsure about who anyone in the cluster is. It strikes a discordant note to me.

But there's also an element of discordance to the entire final act which kicks up the action elements of the show to a much higher level than any previous point in the series. I don't think that this is a mistake, the ability for this show to be high action has been there from the start, but it was obvious that they wanted to focus on the characters first and the action later. I think all of this was done in an attempt to make sure that when the action happened, we were invested enough in the characters to care about who was getting shot at and why. But it still makes the third act feel, at times, like a slightly different movie than we've been watching for the last eight hours. The quiet character moments that set this show apart from others in the genre are still there. Lito and Nomi's scene is a landmark scene for the two queer characters within the cluster. Capheus and Kala's scene is a mirror of the scene he shared with Sun in the fourth episode. And this group of episodes doesn't lack in more of the romance between Will and Riley and Kala and Wolfie. There's also the third moment of the series doing something that no other show on TV is doing: the birth scenes while Riley listens to her dad playing.

First the 4 Non Blondes song, then the mind orgy, and now graphic depictions of each senseate's birth all set to classical moment and streamed one after the other. It's honestly transcendent in a way that no other show could really capture. The first time I watched it, I cried like a baby over the beauty of it all. This time, I didn't cry but I still had goosebumps and I couldn't believe how each of their births informed so much of who they'd each become. Kala born in a temple, Will delivered in the back of a cop car, Lito born while the whole family watched the latest telenovela. Who they are echos back to those moments and they are connected to those moments in a deep way, and each of them being connected to their own moment connects them to each other's as well. It felt magical and moving.

But there's also the action. And the action comes to the forefront in a way that it simply hadn't prior. In the last four episodes, there's multiple shoot outs, car chases, two games of chicken, multiple explosions, and hand to hand fights. Each action sequence works because we are invested, so the show did its work well, but the overall feeling of watching a different show is still there on the surface. In the end, I think this is neither good nor bad for the first season, it's just a fact.

It all leaves me with a feeling that through the course of its first season, Sense8 was capable of telling us exactly who it was. It's a show that's capable of grand ambition and showing us things we've never seen before. It's a show about the quiet moments between these connected characters that prove we aren't alone in our personal struggles. And it's a show with some really great action moments. These things don't have to be mutually exclusive. Indeed, in a show about eight people scattered around the world who are all living different lives but get to be constantly connected, I'm not sure how these things could be mutually exclusive. How Sense8 is telling its story is intricately wound up in what that story is, and that's a brilliant thing to find in a first season.

Which leaves us with the question of what me might be able to expect from the show going forward? In spite of Netflix's procrastination in announcing a renewal, I find it hard to believe that we won't be getting more episodes. So what might happen? Having Will look at Whispers in the last episode means they'll have to address that in some fashion moving forward. It also probably means that killing Whispers so that Will can have his mind to himself again should be at the top of the Cluster's to do list. Will and Riley are together now, though we don't know for how long, so I expect to see more about how love within a cluster is narcissistic, as Riley's Iceland friend, Inga, put it. Meanwhile, Kala and Wolfie seem to have hit a snag in their own romance. Watching the two stories progress alongside one another should be fun. But mostly, all I think I want to see is more scenes like Riley's rescue. More of these people jumping in and out of one another's lives at just the right time to add their own special skill set to the mix and solve the problem before them.  The way the show figured out how to have a specific use for everyone was brilliant, and if that's more of what the next season looks like and less about each character's individual stories, then I'm all in.

Random thoughts:

--One thing I'm still not sure on is Wolfie's statement that he's a monster. On the one hand, I think he's just feeling a bit down on himself after the events at his uncle's place, but prior to the last episode, there was no evidence of him being monstrous. So should we take the statement with a grain of salt, or does the show honestly want him to be a bit more on the homicidal maniac side of the spectrum? The way Will calls him in to play chicken with the helicopter suggests that he's akin to a suicide bomber within the group. But I still don't know if I feel like that was earned or not.

--Something else I feel very split on is Riley's background. Currently, she feels like the one cluster member with the fewest skills or knowledge to offer in big action moments. But beyond that, the last episode being so focused on telling the story about her and her husband seemed like a miscalculation to me. It's not that those flashbacks weren't affecting, because they were. But in a situation where so very much of who she is in these moments has to harken back to this experience, it seems a bit odd that we're only just finding out about it now. They do a good job of dropping hints about it all throughout, esp in the episodes after she's back in Iceland. So I feel confident that they knew this backstory all along, but it's another moment where part of me thinks they should have told us about it before they did.

--For all of my dislike of Lito's story, his scenes at the bar were really nice. I liked it that they had him go back and apologize instead of allowing the scene to just kind of exist in a bubble. But also, did he actually pay for any of those drinks? I know he's famous and all, but still.

--I mentioned it earlier, but Wolfie just happening to have a bazooka in his trunk made me laugh both times. It never pulled me out of the narrative, but it was still funny and slightly unbelievable, but still fun.

--One more thing I'd like to see if the show is renewed is for the partners to be a little bit less perfect. Amanita, Hernando, and Rajan are all just way too storybook for me. I love them all as I love all the characters on the show, but a few flaws can go a long way.

Sense8 S2 Episodes 5-8

“Who can say if it is we that make the choice, or the choice that makes us?”

Capheus' line from the fifth episode gets at one of my favorite aspects of this show: the question of

what makes us who we are. And also how who we are can bind us to others from around the world no matter how dissimilar we might seem. It also comes in the moment I knew I was going to go all in on this show. I think the 4 Non Blondes singalong from the fourth episode was a landmark moment of the series, but the conversation between Sun and Capheus in this episode marked the true strength of the series for me. It's two people who couldn't be more different; Capheus an African man with an exuberant and outgoing, optimistic personality, and Sun a Korean woman who is more reserved and internal and strongly pragmatic than most of the other characters. They get together and they just talk. There's no running, no shooting, no action, no big time governmental conspiracy behind their conversation, simply two very different people talking and finding out that they aren't very different at all.

I love the conversation that they have. I love the sheer amount of "I" statements found in it. Sun's isolation and struggle to answer the question before her calls Capheus to her in spite of how much she wants to be alone, but instead of having some kind of "tell me your problems and let me offer a solution" moment, Capheus talks about his family and his history with his mother. Sun talks about her family and her last moment with her mother. And through these similar relationships and experiences, the two of them arrive at a solution for their respective problems. Capheus remembers the importance of keeping his promise to care for his mother through everything, and Sun remembers the importance of keeping her promise to protect her brother and father. It's clear that their decisions to work for Mr. Kabaka and to go to prison respectively will setup their stories moving forward, but for the time being, it's just two people talking mostly about themselves, finding their similarities, and wading their way towards a hard choice.

The way the show can strike a balance between these quieter moments, and the bigger more action based ones is to its credit. But the second act of this 12 hour long movie also exposes some of the weakness in the storytelling. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that it exposes the very very fine line that I think the show walks sometimes successfully and sometimes a bit more wobbly. I talked in the last review about the pacing issues, how slow the show can feel through those early moments, and about when the show decides to release certain information. The biggest element of these in this second act comes in the form of the closure of Dr. Metzger's influence on Nomi's story.

It takes a full seven episodes before we find out who Metzger is actually working for. This information reshapes our interaction with Nomi's stint in the hospital from the first four episodes. He isn't some shadowy monster hired by her bigoted family to lobotomize her. He's a shadowy figure from a huge multinational conglomeration, BPO, who has been working to lobotomize senseates all around the world. That makes far more sense! Forgive my flippant tone here. In all honestly I do think that this explanation makes far more sense than the assumptions we were left to make before hand, but I also think the conspiracy storyline is the weakest within the show. But more on that in a future review.

This question of what information to release and when is at the heart of most storytelling. And the truth is I'm still not sure if I think Sense8 answers it properly. Telling us something more about Metzger when he was gearing up to perform the surgery would have changed my view of that particular story early on and helped things make a little bit more sense. It would have changed my perception of Nomi's mother from a cartoonishly evil villain, into someone who has her flaws but still honestly thought she was doing the right thing for her daughter. But having this information then would have eliminated the mystery aspect of finding it out here. So what's more important: giving your audience the information they need to make a scene make sense at the time, or preserving the mystery? I don't know that I have an answer to that question, but what is clear is that Sense8 chose the mystery and to a certain extent the first three episodes suffered as a result of that choice. If anyone couldn't make it through those episodes because they didn't have this information, then I wouldn't be able to blame them, but getting it here was a lot of fun and they certainly missed out.

There are two scenes in this collection of episodes that I think are just as much landmark scenes for the show as the singalong from the first act was. The first being the orgy scene in the sixth episode. It comes (pardon the pun) smack in the middle of the series (it's the center-most point of the center-most episode), and it is phenomenal. It's hot no matter how many times you watch, it's an unabashed moment of the producers saying, "Look at how beautiful our cast is," and it also answers one of those silly and simple but still important questions that sci-fi stories often have to grapple with: What's sex look like for these people now that they've been born to their new lives? The answer is hot, pansexual, international, and intense. And good for them! There's also something important about the fact that Sun, Riley, and Capheus are missing from the sexy fun times (though I can't really spot a solid reason for Kala's absence. Maybe she's sleeping). Lito and Nomi are having sex with their respective partners, Wolfie is turned on by a woman at the naked spa he seems to spend so much time at, and Will is exercising which we all know releases endorphins and gets you all worked up. So everyone participating in the mind orgy is already in that aroused headspace and get those emotions kicked up a notch by the actions of two members of the cluster. Riley, and Sun, however, feel sad and troubled at this moment. And Capheus is bored but trying to remain professional as he waits for his boss's daughter to finish her treatment. These three, even though they all seem to be awake at the moment the mind orgy happens, are not experiencing emotions that would allow for them to participate. Capheus at least seems to get a boredom boner while watching another Van Damme movie, but that's the extent of the effect. It shows, in my opinion, that the people behind the show are still really thinking about the deeper implications of everything they're doing. And this conscious and reasonable exclusion of specific characters takes a scene that otherwise might have been totally gratuitous and makes it an important moment of deepening the show's mythology.

But it also exposes one more potential problem with the storytelling. It feels like the producers know the portions of the story they're focused on now might be a bit slow and boring, and so every now and then they toss the viewers a bone to get them over the hump. Some of the action sequences and certainly the mind orgy scene feel as though they fall into that trap. They aren't wrong, per se; the story through this middle section of the show was especially slow and boring to me on this second viewing. But much as Game of Thrones often used sex and nudity to spice up what they thought was a boring exposition scene in their first season, Sense8 is trying to mask the fact that they couldn't come up with a more natural way to make the story engaging in its own rights by throwing sex at us as a distraction. I agree with the tactic here more than I did on Game of Thrones because 1) the scenes on Game of Thrones weren't as boring as the showrunners thought they were and therefore didn't need spicing up, and 2) because the sex here actually does do a good job of deepening the mythology of the show as I said. So if the distraction can still hold some level of importance, then I can't see a reason to fully dissuade them from using it. Though I would suggest maybe choosing a more interesting and engaging story for next season so you don't have to fall back on these tricks.

The other scene is Nomi's big action sequence towards the end of the eighth episode. This is the start of the other reason I think I love this show more after a first season than I do most other shows in the same time frame. One of the reasons I don't care for first seasons as much as I do subsequent seasons of a show is because I'd much rather see characters in control of their skills and abilities than simply learning how to get there. One of my favorite moments in Buffy the Vampire Slayer comes in the finale of the fifth season when Buffy goes out back to kill a vampire like it's nothing and then walks back in to continue the conversation about how she's going to save her sister from a god. Vampires through the first three seasons represented a serious threat to the group. Every night offered Buffy a difficult fight, and the villains she was most frightened of (Spike, Drusilla, The Master) were all just vampires. But by the time you reach the fifth season, slaying a vampire is just "what I do," as she puts it.

While the senseates aren't quiet as in control after their first eight episodes, the start of that control is beginning to shine through. Will and Nomi are drawn together through their simultaneous investigation into the BPO issue. And so he helps her to escape when Whispers is coming for her. Her distress wakes up Sun who joins with Will's knowledge of basic police procedure to keep them informed of what's happening and to give Sun a leg up in her fighting with predetermined information. All of this is seamless, and when you consider that Sun hasn't spent much, if any, time with either Will or Nomi before now, you see that there's an ease with which she can come to their rescue and do her thing. Likewise, as soon as Nomi gets into the car and remembers that she doesn't know how to drive, here comes Capheus with his exceptional driving skills to help her out. It's a fun and important scene that showcases a taste of just what is possible through the senseate connection. If this is what can happen when just four of them Share with each other and use their skills to help one another get through a tough situation, then imagine what it will be like when all eight of them work in tandem. Honestly, I don't think it's spoiling anything to say that we won't have to wait for the realities of that too much longer. To give us the satisfaction of that in the midst of the first season is remarkable. And it feels, at least to me, like its happened sooner here than it would have in most other shows.

The other stories drag a little through these middle passages as the show works to setup the final moments. A lot of what happens here is clearly just table-setting of everything to come. Felix gets shot and ends up in a coma with Wolfie by his side. It's a tragic thing that stems clearly from their theft and sale of the diamonds in the first act; before he's shot, Felix is panicking about the fact that he tried to get in touch with Abraham and hasn't been able to. But there's still something that feels a bit more liminal about it all. I was invested the first time I watched it, and even still invested now, but it's not as satisfying as the heist that came before it and the action that will follow. So you're left viewing these scenes as what they are: an excuse to get Wolfie and Kala more time together, and obvious setup for what's to come in Wolfie's story.

The second act does at least represent the strong escalation of Kala and Wolfie's romance. When he shows up naked to her wedding (and shout out to the writers and directors for going with a full frontal male nude shot here when so many other shows shy away from such things while not at all second guessing the choice to show women naked), it starts the main portion of their story together. The track of their romantic relationship running alongside Will and Riley's is one of the things I like about the show. But in these middle moments it makes Kala and Wolfie feel more isolated from the rest of the group in a way that bothers me. I think the show has a slight problem with balancing who spends time with whom in the cluster, and that's hardly ever more glaring than in this story where Wolfie spends pretty much all of his time with Kala and she spends most, but not all, of her time with him. More on that to come.

With that being said, I love their rooftop conversation about her faith and his atheism. As an atheist, I tend to side with Wolfie here, but I also really enjoy seeing and hearing stories about people who do have faith and who have thought about their faith and the reasons they hold it and have strong moments in their past that connect them to their faith. The scene of Kala as a child looking out through Ganesh's eyes and seeing the festival and becoming a true believer is beautiful and moving. And her assertion that her love and belief in science is not mutually exclusive to her faith is a really nice touch. The show's continued work of making these characters deep and three-dimensional is something that should be applauded.

Sun's story finds itself starting in earnest while most of the others are at a middle. The scenes of her in prison are the best for the character. And the story of how these women have found a freedom and a sense of community only in prison, having been removed from the male dominated world they otherwise live in, is both beautiful and heartbreaking all at the same time.

Lito is also at something of a beginning for his story. The first act for him served as nothing more than character introductions, while the second act introduces the real antagonist and the obstacle he has to overcome. Lito's story continues to be my least favorite, but I think I'll save most of my thoughts on it for the review of the last act.

So through the first two acts of the show we've seen great character work, a solid foundation being laid, a clear process within the four episode arcs, and the beginnings of how in control and how strong the cluster is capable of being. All of which, I think, has been handled deftly and with a self-assurance that other shows don't have in their first season. Next week, we'll look at the way they bring these things together in the final act and maybe talk a bit about what I think of as the last reason I loved this first season so much: The show's strong sense of identity.

Sense8 S1 Episodes 1-4

I heard about Sense8 about a month or two before the episodes landed on Netflix. The trailer was intriguing, human, and sexy as hell. The buzz around the show was picking up quite a bit of steam on social media, and a lot of people I knew couldn't stop talking about how queer the show would be. Which, of course, was the first step in getting me to the point where I was more than excited to watch it. I started following a couple blogs on Tumblr about it, and everything I saw and everything I read from the showrunners only served to make me more and more excited for this show. I convinced myself that it would be the best thing on TV, and being helmed by the Wachowskis and J. Michael Straczynski, how could it not be? Fast forward a couple months and the first season arrives. I spend a weekend locked in my room watching all 12 hours over the course of two days and it all turns out to be even better than my ridiculously high expectations. I finished the 12th episode with an immediate desire to go back to the first and start all over again. Sadly, the pending release of Orange is the New Black's third season put a slight damper in those plans, but I've just watched the first four episodes again, and I have to say, it hasn't lost it's appeal for me. I think I'm solidly in love with something new and Sense8 has quickly worked its way into my top five favorite shows ever. This is an important development for me because I generally hate the first season of everything. The groundwork and foundation laying parts of storytelling which are always so necessary just aren't my favorite. So I went back to rewatch them in an attempt to find out why it is that those things don't bother me about this show. Hopefully over the course of these reviews, I'll figure that out, or at least I'll just have a damn good time watching the show again.

In an interview he gave Collider (which is well worth reading, honestly; you can find it here), Straczynski said something that shaped my original viewing of the season:

I want people to watch all 12 hours, straight through. If you have enough time on your hands to watch all 12 hours, straight through, that’s the best case scenario. That being said, once we restructured for 12 episodes, we realized that it’s almost a three-act structure. It’s four-episode arc is like an act. So, you could do four and four and four. That’s one way to watch it because there are good break points in there. But, my hope is that they’ll watch it straight through. From our point of view, it’s really written as a 12-hour movie. Ultimately, that’s what it is. When you walk into a movie theater, you don’t walk out half-way through, and then come back the next day to watch the rest of it.

 On the one hand, this can bee seen as a showrunner trying his best to drum up business and get as many people in to watch his show as possible, thusly insuring they get a second season. But I thought of it as something more than that; I thought it suggested that they'd thought about this show in ways that you don't find people thinking about their shows before they air. It's something I lament in a couple of my reviews of the show Empire, they seem to just be going from episode to episode without much thought or structure to the season as a whole. But from what Straczynski said, I assumed that they started with a story on Sense8, and then discovered their 12 episode format around that.

The first three episodes are slow. I realized this when I watched it the first time, but I was engaged enough with the characters to overlook it. In this sense, the pacing felt deliberate to me. A lesser show would try to rush through the character introductions, lay that groundwork immediately, and then hit the ground running. Sense8 wants to take its time, savor the introductions, and try to get you to connect with these characters on a real level. That doesn't mean that they don't paint with broad strokes in the early going like most shows do. But that's inevitable so like with any storytelling medium, you have to give them a little leeway. Will (Brian J. Smith) is a cop in Chicago, and when he finds a shot black kid in a bad neighborhood, of course he goes to save him against his partner's better judgement and of course he stands up to anyone looking to stand in the way of his noble and heroic action. In reality, he's just doing his job, but within the current climate of our increased awareness towards police brutality, it's the show's way of saying "We know he's a white cop in a big urban area, but it's OK, he really is the good guy!" You roll your eyes a bit, but you keep watching.

This is because the introductions that are subtle are more impactful because of it. Kala's (Tina Desai) intro is that of an Indian woman about to get married and having doubts about that marriage. But what's remarkable about that is the way the show skirts around certain cliches. She is Indian, and she is Hindu, but her marriage isn't arranged. The man she's to marry is important, and dreamy, and he chose her, and went about his courting and proposal in the right fashion. Any woman would be happy to have him. But Kala isn't. The show doesn't try to explain why she's unhappy with Rajan in those first four hours. But it does make it a point to say that it's not for the standard reasons you'd assume this woman in this culture would be unhappy with her pending nuptials. In so doing, they immediately paint Kala as a real and complex person, and avoid certain racist stereotypes.

Not everyone is given the same amount of development in the same short amount of time that Kala gets, but there are eight of them, so is it really realistic to believe that they could? Instead, the show is willing to allow the rest to fall into place over the course of those first four episodes; the first act of the movie if you will. Which is exactly where that belongs. In the first two episodes, we learn about Lito's (Miguel Angel Silvestre) secret relationship with Hernando, Nomi's (Jamie Clayton) relationship with her mother and the specifics of her identity as a trans woman, Capheus' (Aml Ameen) difficult life as a bus driver in Nairobi taking care of his sick mother, Sun's (Donna Bae) strained family relationship and her precarious position within her father's company, Wolfgang's (Max Riemelt) criminal activities, and a few things about Riley (Tuppence Middleton). Admittedly, Riley gets the least amount of development in those first four hours in spite of her story starting off with the most action and suspense. Either way, it's eight characters with eight different stories all capable of being the center of their own shows, and yet we get a solid foundation for each of them in the first four hours. It's an ambitious feat for any series, and one that I think Sense8 handles as well as can be expected.

A portion of the credit for that goes into the way the show chooses to introduce and wrap up storylines. Two great examples of this in the first four hours can be found in Nomi and Wolfgang's stories. Nomi falls off of a motorcycle while riding with her girlfriend in the San Francisco Pride parade. She wakes up in the hospital to find her horrible mother still insisting on calling her Michael (her birth name), and partnering with a Dr. Metzger to force her to have a brain surgery she doesn't want to correct a defect she may or may not have. In the first episode, Wolfgang and his best friend Felix race against a rival gang to break into a safe and steal a nice amount of diamonds. It's a tense sequence in which Wolfgang attempts to crack a safe we're told is supposed to be uncrackable. They succeed, of course, and make off with the goods at the very last minute.

It makes sense to introduce these stories in these early moments. The scenes serve to tell us a lot about the characters in question and setup a lot of the story moving forward. And the impressive thing is how they're both granted soft endings in the fourth episode. Wolfgang and Felix steal the diamonds in the first and find a way to sell them in the fourth. Boom, that's done (of course their overall story is only just beginning, but more on that in awhile). Likewise, Nomi's escaping from the hospital and right out of Dr. Metzger's clutches by the end of the fourth episode, but more importantly it also marks the last time we'll really see her mother for the rest of the season. The actions and choices made in the fourth will have consequences for the episodes to come, but if you're interested in the story about this trans woman being held against her will and trying hard to have the people in power validate her identity, and protect her body and her rights to make her own choices about said body, well then that story's been told and now it's time to move on to what comes next.

The other thing that works here is balance; not every story ends in the fourth episode. Lito doesn't have much of a cohesive story in the first four hours, but what will be the major conflict of his story for the rest of the season gets started in the third episode with the introduction of Joaquin. As I mentioned before, Wolfgang sells half of the diamonds they stole and brings some portion of that story to a close, but the selling the of the diamonds only serves to bring more trouble for him and Felix in the long run. Likewise, Capheus finds himself drowning in customers for his van in the wake of the events in the third episode, which seems to signal an ending to his financial and professional struggles. But he's also immediately introduced to Silas Kabaka, a shady businessman who has exactly the medicine Capheus' mother needs and will of course ask Capheus to do something underhanded in order to get it. So where one story might reach an ending, another springs up to take its place and set the tone for much of the rest of the season. The overall effect is that you can stop after the fourth episode if you so desire, but the storytelling is so well planned and executed that you really shouldn't want to. When a question is answered, another question, just as compelling as the first, is asked and the cycle continues. It's simple storytelling 101 kind of stuff, but the deft hand they employ to make it work this early in the show's run bodes very well for the rest of the season and for seasons to come.

If it seems like all there is to talk about with this show is the human drama elements, then that's because at its core Sense8 is a drama. The sci-fi elements of the show are brilliant and important, but they really only serve to enhance the human drama and to offer some really cool kick ass moments. The AV Club reviews of the show lament the early episodes' reliance on ending on major action sequences. And they aren't wrong per se, but I think they miss the point to a certain extent. The first hour ends with Riley in a tense and bloody shootout in a drug dealer's living room while her friends try to rob him. The second ends with Will in a high speed car chase. And the Third ends with Sun using the power of the Senseate bond to "Share" with Capheus and use his body to employ her great martial arts skills to kick some ass. But to say that these scenes are nothing more than perfunctory action sequences to hold the viewer's attention through these slower moments is to miss the nuances of each.

Will's been having a lot of weird things happening to him, and at the end of the second episode, he meets someone who seems to have the answers he needs. The problem is that at the beginning of that episode he was told by a higher authority that this person is a wanted terrorist. So while the scene that follows is a standard action-y car chase through Chicago, the character motivation that fuels it is important. Will had to choose on the spot between his years of cop training and doing what's "right" within those parameters, and listening to his gut to get the answers he needs. He did what makes sense and as a result Jonas (Naveen Andrews), the one person with answers, is taken into custody. It's smarter than your average Michael Bay car chase. It's not action for action's sake, it's action for the purpose of greater characterization. Likewise, Sun's scene with Capheus severs the purpose of showing us what the Senseate bond is capable of. We get a quick rundown of the difference between "Visiting" and "Sharing" from Jonas after he's been arrested, but the fight sequence to end the third episode puts all of it into motion. We see how Sun's abilities can be used by Capheus to help him out of his situation. In the same scene, we also see Will imparting a bit of his gun training at the shooting range. This kind of thing is only possible from within the Cluster, and that fact will be very important later on. But for now, the show gives us these action moments in an attempt to show us these things instead of just telling us.

But as I said earlier, the first three episodes are slow and can be a bit boring at times. So while the action based endings aren't, in my opinion, solely about spicing things up with a little excitement, I do think that they have that effect. And it's a solid and valuable reward for sitting through what otherwise might be an hour of tampered enjoyment. But it all leads into the biggest takeaway from the first four episodes: Sense8 is not a sci-fi action show; it's a drama with sci-fi elements. This fact is brought home in the best scene in the first four episodes, and maybe even the entire season. That's the singalong to 4 Non Blonde's What's Up. It's a fairly standard 90's song that I don't have a particular attachment to, but it's impossible not to have a deep emotional reaction to the sequence. It's simply so very very human. Two of the cluster members just so happen to be listening to and singing this song at the same time (Riley on her mp3 player, and Wolfgang at karaoke), and that leads to it kind of vibrating through all the rest of the members and bringing them together emotionally if not physically as it does Wolfgang and Kala. I think this has less to do with the song in particular, which is a great choice and certainly resonates with the themes of the episode, and more to do with the sheer universality of music in general. I think it's something all cultures share, and having a deep emotional reaction to music is something I'm sure everyone's experienced at one point or another. So you know what the characters are feeling at this moment in time, and you know what it's like to be in a car with friends, or at a concert with a bunch of strangers all listening to the same thing and all feeling close to the same emotion because of it. This scene is the reason you watch through the first four hours. If you make it through the song and you aren't all in for this show, then I'm not fully sure you're all together human.

These are the things I think the first four hours do exceptionally well. What doesn't work as well are some of the choices on when to release information. Lito's story suffers from this in a visible way over the course of the first four. He takes Daniela to a movie premier as his beard, and when she presses for the evening to end in sex he turns her down. This in and of itself is actually a nice moment as it shows that Lito isn't closeted because he's denying his sexuality, he's only showing a straight face to the press so he can keep getting the action movie roles he likes. He's not cheating on his boyfriend, he's simply hiding him away from the rest of the world. It's not that that makes it better, but it does make his story feel different from similar stories on TV. But what fails is when Daniela shows up at Lito's place a few hours later drunk and making a scene so he'll be forced to let her in. What follows is a scene where she barges into his home, makes an attempt to basically rape him, and then runs up to his bedroom without an invitation to find Hernando laying in bed in his briefs. It's a scene that's played for laughs in a lot of different ways, as are most of Lito's scenes throughout the season, but Daniela's insistence and forwardness, which could have come off as nothing more than a female character in control of her sexuality, actually came off as predatory in a way that didn't work for me. If the genders of the two characters were reversed, it wouldn't be a funny scene at all.

In the next episode, we find out that the real reason she was acting that way was because she needed a place to stay since her crazy ex-boyfriend, Joaquin, is looking for her and she's just looking to lay low until things cool down. The truth is that she's in trouble and needs help, but since we don't learn that until after she's introduced to us as a raving, sex-craved, near-rapist, it's hard to have much sympathy for her. If they'd had her find out about Hernando in a different, kinder, fashion, it would reshape our view of the story early on.

Nomi's story suffers from the same problem. Her's is the one with the highest stakes in these first four hours since she's being held against her will and is about to be lobotomized. But the truth is that without knowing anything at all about Metzger, it's hard to take her story seriously. His introduction is handled in a fashion that suggests he's just working on her mother's orders and is looking to perform this surgery for no real reason. That's not the case, but we won't find that out for another episode or two. And when you couple the hospital's actions with those of the Nurse turning Will and the gunshot kid in the first episode away from treatment, you're left thinking that the writers just don't know what healthcare in this country really looks like. It's not legal for any hospital to refuse treatment to someone who stumbles in with a gunshot wound, and it's also not legal for them to hold a healthy adult woman in custody to perform brain surgery on her without her consent. Indeed, if her mother and the doctor wanted to force the issue, they could, but first they'd have to have her declared incompetent or otherwise incapable of making her own decisions, or prove she's a danger to herself or others before they could get that ball rolling. Again it's a situation where information given at a point after these first four hours will shine more light on these events and allow them to make a higher level of sense, but for the time being it has the effect of pulling you out of the narrative. Knowing when's a good time to reveal certain information can be a tough tightrope for a story to walk, and for me personally, Sense8 doesn't do a very good job of getting it right in these first episodes.

But the good far outweighs the bad, and it all left me thinking that sticking with the show would be worth it. And I was right. I think there's a confidence to the show's storytelling. It knows who it is in a lot of ways, and that's something I don't think you get from very many shows in their first seasons. Shows usually have to try on different stories and different scenarios before figuring out what story they want to tell and how they want to tell it. Through four hours, I didn't get the impression that that would be a problem with Sense8. So that's one thing I think this first season has that others don't, but it's not the only thing. I'll review the second act of this 12 hour long movie next time and dig a little deeper to get at one of the other important distinctions that I think sets this show apart and launched it into the space of my top shelf favorites.

So You Think You Can Dance S12E1

Survivor is one of the longest running Reality TV shows. Clocking in at a whopping 26 seasons, it's easily become a TV staple that doesn't seem to be slowing down anytime soon. Part of its longevity is due to its two seasons a year format, part of it to its placement on CBS, and part of it has to do with the show's ever evolving format. The core of the game hasn't changed, and when you get down to it, no matter what you think of the show, it's a pretty brilliant game. Strangers forced to live together and work together to succeed are then forced to turn on each other to advance in the solo game, and are then forced to convince the people they turned on to give them votes for a million bucks. The dynamics shift so often and so completely that it can be hard to keep track of, and it's one of the few places where a person can be rewarded for what would otherwise be seen as despicable behavior. But while those elements remain constant over the years, the road to get there has often changed. The way contestants are chosen, who's competing for the 1st time vs who's back again, things like Exile Island, and the dynamics of setting up the original tribes have all be refined, included, and excluded over the years to keep the product fresh. That seems to be one key to making sure viewers keep coming back.

So enter a show like So You Think You Can Dance. It's a show where young people skilled in one specific thing (dance) get together and compete against each other for America's votes and the right to be named America's Favorite Dancer. There's not much room for improvement on the process. Which is probably why in ten years the only major change to the show's format has been the introduction of the All Stars. But coming into the 12th season of the show, we now have an all new format: Street vs Stage! And after this horrendous first episode, it appears to be as bad of an idea as I assumed it would be back when it was first introduced.

Basically, it seems to go something like this: The contestants are being split up into two teams. The Stage team will be comprised of dancers with formal training in the core genres this show is centered around: contemporary, ballroom, ballet, jazz, etc. The Street team will be self-taught dancers in Hip Hop and....well Hip Hop. I know that Hip Hop will ostensibly include things like Krump and Jookin which we get a nice look at in this episode, but let's be honest, on SYTYCD all of those things fall under the Hip Hop category.

It's horribly obvious to anyone who's watched so much as a single episode of this show that the Stage team will have an unbelievably unfair advantage. They're trained and well versed in multiple types of dance, they're being mentored by the great Travis Wall, and they're generally less likely to spend as much time outside of their comfort zones than the Street team is. What remains to be seen in this format is how the pairs will be formed once we get to the top 20. I have a lot of thoughts about the holes in that as well, but I'll reserve judgement until I see what the producers have come up with. Either way, in the 11 seasons of this show, only 3 Hip Hop based contestants have gone on to win. So one team starts out with an uphill battle ahead of them, and that fact should have been obvious to whoever came up with this ridiculous idea.

Also changed this year is the Judge's Panel. Gone is the staple that was Mary Murphy, and brought in on a weekly basis will be Paula Abdul and Jason Derulo. Abdul should be fine; she can't replace Mary who's high energy might have been grating to some, but who was always more than welcome to me. But she's knowledgeable enough to provide observant, if at times too gentle, critiques. Derulo might be the worst thing to ever happen to this show. He was useless, unhelpful, and too complimentary when he guested last season. This episode proves he doesn't have a dance vocabulary to be of any real use to the dancers. Ostensibly, you could say he was brought on to add a Hip Hop strong judge to the critiques, which will be useful under the new format, but I'd challenge you to give me one good Hip Hop observation he made in the whole two hours.

Instead, what Derulo offers is the chance to steal the spotlight and stage time from the people the show is actually about: the dancers. He gets up twice in this episode and goes on stage: once to sing, and once to dance. No one who watches this show is tuning in to see Jason Derulo. But what makes him an even worse judge is his obvious homophobia. Or maybe homophobia is a strong word, he doesn't make any beyond the pail hateful remarks, but he is clearly and unabashedly uncomfortable by effeminate men. There are two moments in this episode where Derulo's disinterest in feminine men shined through brightly, and both of those moments were so inappropriate and uncomfortable that it left me wondering if watching the season would even be worth it. Nigel's come under fire before for remarks that were just a shade too homophobic to have any place on a show like this one, and the big problem with Derulo being on the panel is that he gives Nigel a way to double down on that kind of behavior. I hate to stereotype too much; the fact is that gay men are just as capable of playing sports as they are of being great dancers, but the fact remains that SYTYCD has seen a large number of clearly gay contestants. So why would you bring in a judge who is seemingly so uncomfortable with homosexuality that he can't even be bothered to give the auditions by these people the benefit of his attention?

Of the episode itself, I'll say this: the audition process is lessened by removing the choreography aspect of the audition. Not everyone deserves to go right to Vegas, and not everyone who doesn't quite make the cut deserves to go right home. The choreography aspect of this stage made the complexity of the show and of dance in general more obvious. Either make it or go home is a process that works on American Idol, but not on here.

And as for the contestants, the only person that left a real impression was Jojo. If she makes it through Vegas, she'll be someone to keep an eye on. But what I really want to talk about is the rhetoric around Steven Ban's audition.

Cat starts with a rundown of what is needed to make it on the Street team, and then they cut to Steven. He's a young, lanky, white guy in glasses and with an undeniable nerd quality. This is something he embraces and plays up for the camera; the music he chooses even has a kind of video game quality to it. And it's all anyone can talk about: he doesn't look like your typical Street dancer. But here's the thing, he's actually good. He's not as great as some of the best Animators we've seen on the show. He's a bit static, and his pops and locks aren't as strong as we've seen. But his tricks and his quality of movement proves he knows what he's doing. In any other season, he'd be complimented and enthusiastically sent on to perform the choreography. Here, all anyone can talk about is how he doesn't "look" like a Hip Hop dancer. All of this is coded language for White. They shroud it in talks of him being a nerd, and he is certainly that, but when you get down to it, what it feels like Abdul is talking about when she says he "need[s] the rest of the 'stuff'' to fill out [his] vocabulary" is that he needs to be black.

The odd thing about this is that I don't know where to place it. Is it racist? You can't be racist against a white guy (this is not a point up for debate, if you disagree, I really don't care, it's a simple fact), but by implying that only black guys are fit to dance in this style, you're certainly implying something that feels pretty racist to me. Realistically, it's probably less about race and more about class. Hip Hop is urban, and I'm sure a white guy who clearly grew up in that kind of urban space wouldn't be insulted for trying out for the Street team. Indeed, I'm sure we'll see white people on the Street team, but more on that later. But even if it isn't about Race specifically, and it is about Class, it all boils down to something really problematic: the team makeup of this season is horribly limiting. The people likely to find themselves on one team or the other will fit into small boxes and it will be impossible to break out of them.

This isn't necessarily something new to this season. The Hip Hop dancers who've done well on this show have often been complimented on how well they dance in other styles for a Hip Hop dancer. This isn't often turned against the typically Stage dancers who then dance Hip Hop, or anything they aren't trained in. Contemporary dancers are generally expected to be good at Ballroom too. When they aren't it's surprising, but when Hip Hop dancers are good at ballroom, that's when the judges are surprised. My expectation is that given the increased number of Hip Hop dancers we'll see this season, we'll have to sit through a lot of this kind of thing, and I can't help but to wonder a bit what fuels it. At what point does "untrained" become code for "poor," and then an extension for "black?"

I don't generally review these early audition episodes of the show, but this year I wanted to change that because I wanted to get these complaints out of the way early. I think the best bet for this season, which honestly might be the last the show sees, is that the talent on display overshadows these format changes. And this is possible since the group of dancers seem to get more talented each year this show airs. And that's the claim to fame for SYTYCD. Viewers keep coming back to this show because they're certain to see even more talented dancers, even more breathtaking routines than they did last year. So while format changes might be what's kept Survivor fresh over the years, maybe this is one instance where what's good for the goose isn't good for the gander. Let other reality competition shows change it up each year; all SYTYCD needs to do is deliver on the high quality we've come to expect and we'll keep coming back.

Randoms:

--I don't intend on reviewing another episode until the Top 20 is set, so I should see you in a few weeks. Unless something really dramatic happens and I have too many thoughts not to make a post.

--There's also a review of this episode up over on AV Club. Oliver and I are pretty much in agreement on this one.

--The final tally after the first two cities is 43 stage dancers and 37 street dancers. We'll see how those dynamics continue as things move forward. On one hand I expect the number of street dancers to always be a bit below stage numbers, but this isn't a very big difference, so there's that at least.

--The power failure was a disappointing ploy for drama. Not that the producers created it just for that reason (although I wouldn't put it past them), but the resolution was a bit sad. Or at least the way they engaged with it was lackluster. I would have preferred to see more for this trimmed down, streamlined audition process.

--Or if that day of auditions was really going to have to be cancelled, then I would have liked to see how the show would have resolved that. I think the people who showed up would have deserved a chance to audition one way or another, and if that was just taken away from them, that would have been fucked up.

--Back to the point I made about the probable racial breakdown of each team. I honestly can't see a way around this ending up being the season of black dancers vs white dancers. It's possible that as the auditions leave the South (this week was Memphis and Dallas),  we'll see a bit more racial diversity, but if there's more then two white people on the Street team or two black people on the Stage team, I'll be shocked. This is a problem on a show that has racial diversity issues to begin with.

--The last performer of the episode was interesting. Not him, himself, because I can't remember anything other than his great body and nice looking ass in those shorts, but he was a contestant last year and Nigel asked him "Why do you think you didn't make the cut last year?" I can't remember ever hearing that question asked before, which is surprising given the number of repeat auditions this show gets, but I like it a lot. And the kid's lack of an easy answer means he probably didn't spend much time thinking about what kept him out of the top 20 and devoting himself to changing that aspect of his technique in order to be better this time around. Either way, it's a question I'd like to see asked more often.