SciFi Weekend: Outlander Finale; Game of Thrones Diverging From The Books; Legends of Tomorrow; Tron; Community; Orphan Black; Twin Peaks; Jon Hamm; Netflix; Serial

Outlander Season 1 Finale

Outlander ended the first season like ending a book, moving on to new things but without a television cliff hanger.  Note that even though it was divided, everything which aired so far is considered the first season, based upon the first book in the series. The episode concluded the arc with Jaime’s capture and rape by Jack. Jack even demanded that Jaime “Say my name!” I half expected Jaime to respond with “Heisenberg.” The topic of changing time did come up in the finale, and it will be interesting to see how this plays out as Outlander is a totally different type of time travel story compared to shows such as 12 Monkeys.

Ron Moore spoke with Deadline about the season finale of Outlander and the plans for next season. The comparison to the recent rape scene on Game of Thrones was also noted:

DEADLINE: The May 17 episode of HBO’s Game of Thrones featured a rape of the Sansa Stark character that erupted into controversy for a show already drenched in sex and violence. Airing so close to that, how do you think what happened there will impact reaction to the Outlander finale?

MOORE: Obviously we wrote the finale, shoot it, and put in the can a long time ago and the rape of Jamie by Jack Randall was always a part of this story. Suddenly I’m talking about our show and we’re stepping into a cultural moment where that Game of Thrones scene has suddenly grabbed everybody’s attention.

To be honest, I still haven’t even seen it. I’m behind in my Game of Thrones and I have yet to catch up on it so I keep sort of defying comparisons as a result. But I will say, it’s just one of those things you can’t control. You never know exactly what pop cultural moment a show is going to step into. Sometimes it happens and there’s nothing else around it, sometimes you’re sort of moving into the stream where something has caused a wake and that’s kind of where we are at this moment.

DEADLINE: While you haven’t seen the Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken episode of Game Of Thrones with the rape, having seen the sandstorm of a controversy it blew up into, did you think of toning down the finale?

MOORE: I’ve never even thought that for a second. This is our show. We stand by it. I stand by it. We made our decision. We’re ready to show it to the audience and we’ll see what happens, but no I never even thought about that…

DEADLINE: The season ended on what is basically the end of the first book in Diana Gabaldon’s series – is that going to be the strategy for each season going forward?

MOORE: The general plan is probably to try to do a book a season. Some of the books are bigger than others so we’ve definitely had conversations about, “well, you know, at some point we made need to split a book into two seasons,” but right now we’re not there yet so the plan is to do Dragonfly In Amber for Season 2.

DEADLINE: Are we going to see more changes from that book for Season 2 of the show?

MOORE: There will be twists and turns that aren’t in the book. The second book is more complex than the first book is. It’s a little tougher challenge to adapt it. It takes place in France and it deals with the Jacobite Rebellion. It’s much more political, it weaves in and out of actual historical events. There’s more complexity, just in terms of how Diana structured the story in Paris, in particular, as Jamie and Claire try to change history.

DEADLINE: What’s going to be different?

MOORE: It’s an urban setting and you’re dealing with aristocracy and the court of Louis XV so it’s a whole different thing. It’s not going to look anything like Season 1, so you’re really kind of prepping and shooting a whole new TV show into the second year. It has a lot of, you know, “oh my God, what can we do,” those kind of moments to it…

DEADLINE: You’ve worked on and led a number of shows, now that the first season is over on this one, how has Outlander been different for you from a creative standpoint?

MOORE: Well, it’s a very different experience, you know? Galactica was something where I took the old show and then decided to revamp it and reinvent it. But it was kind of something that I was making up in the writers room as we went along and I literally didn’t know where it was going season to season. It was a process of invention and discovery all the way along the road right up until the end. This project is different, it’s an adaptation so there is a roadmap – this is where we’re going. The challenges are very different. It’s the first time I’ve done an adaptation like this.

Just from a strictly producing standpoint, it’s been the most challenging thing I’ve ever done. The story aspect and the writing aspect has just been a very different game from what I’ve done before. It’s trying to maintain the spirit of the book, it’s trying to keep these characters, trying to maintain this story and making changes along the way because you have to make changes along the way. It’s trying to get back to that, and hopefully you’re able to serve two masters, the fans of the books and those who’ve discovered the story through the show.

Outlander Finale Rape

More on next season at TVLINE:

TVLINE | Claire and Jamie are off to France for Season 2. Talk to me about how the show will look next season.
They’re going to Paris, and they’re going to be dealing with the French aristocracy. So you’re already in a completely different planet than where we were with Season 1. Scotland is about heavy stone, rough wood, dark tabletops, smoke and candlelit rooms, and now you’re in world of gilt, fine China, glassware and costumes that are made of silks and bright colors.

It’s going to be a whole different tone, a whole different…playing the story as much more political. We’re dealing with the Jacobite Rebellion. It’s much more about deception, and lies within lies, and the gossips and the surroundings of Paris. And dinner parties, and going to the court of Louis the XV — and if you know those books, there’s St. Germain, and there’s Master Raymond, and there’s more of an occult feeling to a lot of that stuff. [Plus], she’s pregnant, and he’s got the aftermath of Jack Randall.

In probably every which way you can think of, it’s going to be different than Season 1 was, which I think is one of the strengths of the series overall: its continuing evolution.

TVLINE | What can you tell me about how Jamie and Claire will navigate that world?
In a lot of ways, [Parisian society] is more familiar to him in certain ways than you would anticipate, because he is a laird in his own life, and he has lived in France, and he speaks the French language. It is a somewhat familiar culture to him. He does know his cousin, Jared, who runs a wine business, and he’s been to this place. Claire also speaks French, and she’s adapting in a different way, but she still struggles with the roles woman in these times, even in French society.

TVLINE | Do Caitriona Balfe and Sam Heughan speak French?
Caitriona definitely does, because she spent quite a bit of time in Paris, and Sam is learning French. I just heard him at the table read the other day, and I was pretty surprised. He did quite well.

TVLINE | Can you speak to whether Season 2 won’t be quite as true to the structure of the novel Dragonfly in Amber as Season 1 was to its source material?
It’s just a complicated process of adaptation… The Paris section [of Dragonfly in Amber], the plot is not as clean and simple as the plot was in Book 1. Book 1, for a big chunk of it, is Claire going back in time and trying to get home, and then she’s trying to find Jamie, and those are very clean narratives.

The Paris section of Book 2 is just more complex. It’s about many more ideas, other characters coming and going. They’re involved in something that’s more complex Diana [Gabaldon] shifted points of view, herself, in Book 2. So that alone just makes it a more complicated task to make the adaptation. So, yeah, we’re still struggling with the same things, with trying to be as true to the book as we possibly can while making it a television series. We always just try to do our best.

Game of Thrones Sparrows

Last week’s episode of Games of Thrones had a couple of major events, including Cersei finding that a religious movement now has more power than she does. George R.R. Martin discussed his inspiration for The Sparrows in The Game of Thrones with Entertainment Weekly:

“The Sparrows are my version of the medieval Catholic Church, with its own fantasy twist,” Martin told EW. “If you look at the history of the church in the Middle Ages, you had periods where you had very worldly and corrupt popes and bishops. People who were not spiritual, but were politicians. They were playing their own version of the game of thrones, and they were in bed with the kings and the lords. But you also had periods of religious revival or reform—the greatest of them being the Protestant Reformation, which led to the splitting of the church—where there were two or three rival popes each denouncing the other as legitimate. That’s what you’re seeing here in Westeros. The two previous High Septons we’ve seen, the first was very corrupt in his own way, and he was torn apart by the mob during the food riots [in season 2]. The one Tyrion appoints in his stead is less corrupt but is ineffectual and doesn’t make any waves. Cersei distrusts him because Tyrion appointed him. So now she has to deal with a militant and aggressive Protestant Reformation, if you will, that’s determined to resurrect a faith that was destroyed centuries ago by the Targaryens.”

And there are other, more direct influences as well between Catholic Church and the Faith of the Seven as well, Martin pointed out. “Instead of the Trinity of the Catholic Church, you have the Seven, where there is one god with seven aspects. In Catholicism, you have three aspects—the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. I remember as a kid, I was always confused by that. ‘So there are three gods?’ No, one god, but with three aspects. I was still confused: ‘So he’s his own father and own son?’”

Game of Thrones has diverged from the books this season. The show runners discussed one of the changes seen in last week’s episode  which I think makes a lot of sense to move the story along–moving up the meeting between Tyrion Lannister and Daenerys Targaryen:

Showrunner David Benioff said pairing these two characters—played by Emmy winner Peter Dinklage and Emmy nominee Emilia Clarke—was one of the twists the producers most eagerly anticipated this season. “We’re really excited to see these two characters we love so much finally set eyes on each other,” Benioff said. “Creatively it made sense to us, because we wanted it to happen. They’re two of the best characters of the show. To have them come so close together this season then have them not meet felt incredibly frustrating. Also, we’re on a relatively fast pace. We don’t want to do a 10-year adaptation of the books, we don’t want to do a nine-year adaptation. We’re not going to spend four seasons in Meereen. It’s time for these two to get together. It’s hard to come up with a more eloquent explanation, but this just felt right. [Varys] puts Tyrion’s mission out there [in the season premiere] and the mission ends in Meereen.”

Tyrion and Daenerys have not yet met in George R.R. Martin’s novels upon which the series is based. But as is increasingly the case on the show, the producers opted to progress the story beyond the characters’ stopping point in Martin’s most recent book, A Dance with Dragons, in order to maintain an intense TV-friendly pace. Benioff and his fellow showrunner Dan Weiss have previously pointed out they prefer to cap the series around seven seasons.

“There will always be some fans who will think it’s blasphemy,” Benioff noted. “But we can’t not do something because we’re afraid of the reaction. I like to think we’ve always done what’s in the best interest of the show and we hope most people agree.”

The first real conversation between Daenerys and Tyrion, which occurs on tonight’s episode, should be interesting.

Game of Thrones The Gift

Both Ron Moore and George R.R. Martin have dealt with questions of the television works they are involved with differing from the books. Martin recently addressed fans who have been upset with events on the television show which differ from the books, such as the rape of Sansa, on his blog:

How many children did Scarlett O’Hara have? Three, in the novel. One, in the movie. None, in real life: she was a fictional character, she never existed. The show is the show, the books are the books; two different tellings of the same story.

There have been differences between the novels and the television show since the first episode of season one. And for just as long, I have been talking about the butterfly effect. Small changes lead to larger changes lead to huge changes. HBO is more than forty hours into the impossible and demanding task of adapting my lengthy (extremely) and complex (exceedingly) novels, with their layers of plots and subplots, their twists and contradictions and unreliable narrators, viewpoint shifts and ambiguities, and a cast of characters in the hundreds.

There has seldom been any TV series as faithful to its source material, by and large (if you doubt that, talk to the Harry Dresden fans, or readers of the Sookie Stackhouse novels, or the fans of the original WALKING DEAD comic books)… but the longer the show goes on, the bigger the butterflies become. And now we have reached the point where the beat of butterfly wings is stirring up storms, like the one presently engulfing my email.

Prose and television have different strengths, different weaknesses, different requirements.

David and Dan and Bryan and HBO are trying to make the best television series that they can.

And over here I am trying to write the best novels that I can.

And yes, more and more, they differ. Two roads diverging in the dark of the woods, I suppose… but all of us are still intending that at the end we will arrive at the same place.S

The video above has interviews with the cast of Legends of Tomorrow, and the first few seconds shows them in uniform. This includes Caity Lotz returning as The White Canary, and a scene showing The Atom shrinking.

Disney has announced they have discontinued plans for Tron 3. While some fans are complaining, I don’t mind. I see the Tron series as something out of the past which which we have moved beyond and no longer need–like another Clinton or Bush running for president. Besides, with Disney owning the movie rights to Marvel and Star Wars they have much better genre properties to develop into movies, such as we have much better politicians to consider for the presidency.

The Community sixth season finale will be on Yahoo this upcoming week. Yvette Nicole Brown will return to reprise her role as Shirley. Then is is six seasons and a movie?

Orphan Black Mexico

Orphan Black did not advance the overall story very much this week. We don’t even know if anyone survived Paul’s grenade, but it was confirmed that the military installation was in Mexico. The highlight was another case of one clone impersonating another, in this case Cosima as Alison. Next it is the time for the suburban drug deals to play host family for Helena.

Showtime has doubled the length of the planned Twin Peaks reboot from nine to eighteen episodes.

Jon Hamm should walk away with the Emmy this year for his work on Mad Men.  Hamm has also showed other acting talent doing comedy work such  as on 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Next he has a more dramatic movie role, string in a political thriller, High Wire Act. From The Hollywood Reporter:

Jon Hamm has signed on to star in the Tony Gilroy-penned political action-thriller High Wire Act. Brad Anderson is directing the film for Radar Pictures.

Set in 1980s Beirut, Hamm plays a former U.S. diplomat who is called back into service to save a former colleague from the group possibly responsible for his own family’s death.

Netflix has renewed another show well worth watching, Grace and Frankie, for a second season. Netflix, incidentally, accounted for 37 percent of internet bandwidth during peak hours in North America in March. According to  Variety, “YouTube accounted for 15.6% of downstream Internet traffic, web browsing was 6%, Facebook was 2.7%, Amazon Instant Video was 2.0% and Hulu was 1.9%.”

In addition to increased viewing of television from streaming sources. podcasts are becoming more popular, with Serial one of the biggest. It has been announced that Serial will have at least three seasons, with the second season coming this fall.

Halt and Catch Fire starts its second season on AMC tonight. Reviewers are saying it has fixed many of its first season problems and the second season sounds worth watching.

SciFi Weekend: Arrow; Mad Men; Agent Carter; Agents of SHIELD; Person of Interest; The Blacklist; Gotham and Twin Peaks

Arrow Felicity

I was surprised to see Arrow ending its third season in a way much like one of the possible endings I see for Mad Men. Although Don Draper doesn’t currently have a comparable woman in his life, I can easily see him ending the series starting over with a new life in California. As for Oliver Queen, there is little doubt that a new threat to Starling City will bring him back. The best line of the finale was Lance not being surprise that the cite was in  grave danger because it is May, showing awareness of how each season of the show has turned out.

Mark Guggenheim appears to have given away the direction, and big bad, for next season in an interview in Variety:

What can you tease about the trajectory of season four — will HIVE still play a major role?

We’re kind of doing a lot more in terms of the big bad for next year than we have in previous season finales. We first heard about Damien Darhk in episode 321 and there’s a pivotal sequence that surrounds Damien Darhk in the season three finale, so that’s exciting. It feels like we’re pulling a “True Blood” or a “Sons of Anarchy” where the big bad for the following year is teed up in the season finale of this year, so that’s kind of exciting for me because that’s something we’ve never seen before.

A trailer for the spin-off DC’s Legends of Tomorrow has been released and Caity Lotz will play The White Canary, apparently returning to life in a changed form due to The Lazarus Pit.

Mad Men Milk And Honey Route

As for Mad Men ending with a comparable ending with Don Draper driving in California, this is one of many possibilities. He did look the about the happiest he has ever looked at the end of last night’s episode, just sitting on the bench at the bus stop, having divested himself of almost everything in his life. It would be even more plausible that Don would never return to New York if not for the events of last week, but it is also possible that he will pick up the kids after Betty dies and settle into a new life with them in California or elsewhere. There has been some talk recently that the show could end with Don jumping out of the building as in the opening titles. I see the story very likely ending figuratively along such lines–not with Don actually jumping but with him giving up everything about his life as Don Draper except possibly his kids.

There is little doubt that the finale will center around Don, but there is much more in question as to whether we will see more of other characters. Pete somehow looks like he will be the one to end up living happily ever after after last week’s episode, but it remains possible that something will still change things in the finale. After we saw Betty in a previous episode with both a happy family life and going to school, it looked like this might be the end of her story. In retrospect her lung cancer was certainly foreshadowed, between Betty smoking so frequently and all the episodes dealing with cigarettes and lung cancer. Joan could live happily ever after with her financial settlement, and possibly with her new love interest, and we may or may not see her again. I do hope we find out whether Peggy is successful in being treated as a professional, but if we don’t see her again the manner in which she walked into McCann Erickson the last time we say her would be a satisfactory ending. I’m not sure what Roger will do there, but I was also never sure of what he actually did previously.

agent-carter_promo-cast-photos-616x462

Whether or not Oliver Queen or Don Draper wind up in California, it looks like Peggy Carter will when Agent Carter returns. The synopsis to the second season:

Marvel’s Agent Carter returns for a second season of adventure and intrigue, starring Hayley Atwell in the titular role of the unstoppable secret agent for the SSR (Strategic Scientific Reserve). Dedicated to the fight against new atomic age threats in the wake of World War II, Peggy must now journey from New York City to Los Angeles for her most dangerous assignment yet. But even as she discovers new friends, a new home — and perhaps even a new love — she’s about to find out that the bright lights of the post-war Hollywood mask a more sinister threat to everyone she is sworn to protect.

Agents of SHIELD finale

The season finale of Agents of SHIELD tied up the Inhuman plot but left them as potential future enemies. The whole question of a second SHIELD appears resolved, but we don’t know if Coulson will lead SHIELD as a one-armed man (or whether Dr. Ricard  Kimble will be chasing after him). Hopefully Simmons will be saved and Fitz will have happiness. We got some clues as to where next season could be heading. From Entertainment Weekly:

And here’s where the show sets up the now-official season three: a one-handed Coulson decides to put together a new team, centered around people with powers, led by Skye, under the promise that everyone on the team will be kept anonymous. An Inhumans team! Ah! It’s all happening!!!

But even Coulson and Skye don’t realize just how important and necessary their powered team is now, since the crate of crystals Skye sunk in the ocean breaks open, infecting all the fish, who are then caught by fishing ships and chopped up into fish oil pills sent to supermarkets and pharmacies everywhere. The world is about to become overrun with unsuspecting Inhumans! Jiaying’s plan succeeded, even if she did survive to see it happen.

More from executive producer Jeffery Bell at IGN:

IGN: Coulson wants Skye to form a new, super-powered and anonymous team. Is this heading towards the Marvel Cinematic Universe take on Secret Warriors?

Jeffrey Bell: Well, Daisy Johnson certainly has a big part in Secret Warriors and having a team like that. If you’ll notice, Coulson says right now she is the only person in what might be this new outfit. But you know, the idea of a team of powered people is something we’ve seen in the show, and I think there’s a world down the road where we do our version. We do our version of all these things so they may not be Secret Warriors but there’s a whole lot of super-powered people fighting super-powered people. That’s not really what we do or what we can even do on a weekly series. But tipping our hats to that direction I think is something we’re suggesting there in the new season.

IGN: Another new team looks like it could be forming under Ward as he moves into a leadership role in Hydra. What’s ahead for him?

Bell: Ward has been a lot of fun. He’s gone through several changes over the course of last two seasons – going from boy scout, to Hydra foot soldier who’s loyal to people above him, to someone who’s been off on his own, and coming to a place where he’s at peace with himself. But after these events at the end of these last two episodes — finally he has a personal vendetta against Coulson and his team in a way he didn’t before because he can now point to them as the reason, whether rightly or wrongly, that he killed the woman he loved. By saying he wants to get closure – and we’ve seen what that’s meant in the past — I think in many ways that means he’s going to be a much more terrifying person…

IGN: What can you tease about whatever the Kree monolith did to Jemma?

Bell: As you go down your list, you’re always looking at what would generate the most story and what would tell interesting, compelling stories. And her character has changed so much in the course of a year. With Fitz, in just in a more obvious way with the head trauma and PTSD with what happened to him, but we did see her go through a lot of changes as well. They’ve each kind of become their own — in the first season we referred to them as FitzSimmons, one word almost as if they were two halves of the same person. This season we’ve split them into two whole people. They went their separate ways, and now that just as they were coming back together, it just seemed like there was an opportunity to twist that story a little bit.

And now that she’s dead — [laughs] no, I’m just kidding — or lost somewhere. Who knows what happened to her? But it seemed like too good of an opportunity not to explore. We love Elizabeth as an actress, and we look forward to seeing what happens to her and how she deals with it.

"A House Divided" -- When an unknown entity prevents The Machine from seeing the full picture of an impending catastrophic event, it sends the team five separate numbers to help them piece together the bigger picture, on PERSON OF INTEREST, Tuesday, May 6 (10:01-11:00 PM ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network. Pictured left to right:  Jim Caviezel and Amy Acker Photo: Giovanni Rufino/Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. © 2014 WBEI. All rights reserved.

Person of Interest has only been picked up for thirteen episodes, but that could be a good thing as the show has moved from a procedural to a more science fiction show about artificial intelligence and surveillance. Thirteen episodes will allow them to deal more with the mythology and less with the number of the week–especially when the machine might not even be able to shoot out more numbers. It is not know if there will be further seasons after the fifty. If they end it with a good thirteen episode arc like on Fringe that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.

Co–showrunner Greg Plageman has discussed plans for the fifth season:

How much do you have planned about season 5 at this point?
Greg Plageman: We’ve actually got a lot mapped out. It’s really kind of cool. We gathered our writers at the end of the year — and obviously we left on quite a cliffhanger in terms of Team Machine being engaged in a firefight. [Laughs] We really wanted to know where we were headed. What does it mean with the Machine being in an impenetrable case, and what that’s going to entail for the first couple of episodes, and what the larger arc of the season was. Some really great things emerged from that, and [PERSON OF INTEREST creator] Jonah [Nolan] and I both feel great about the blueprint going forward.

Will you be picking up next season in the immediate aftermath of that epic gunfight? Or will there be a time jump?
GP: We discussed a couple of options, and we feel the most honest and satisfactory way to go would be to pick up in real time. Clearly, Team Machine is carrying a pretty valuable football. The case seems pretty impenetrable; I certainly hope it can float.

Will they be able to return to their subway sanctuary? Or is that off-limits now?
GP: The subway is still okay, as well is, interestingly enough, the cover identities of the guys hasn’t been blown in terms of Samaritan’s point of view. The problem comes when members of Samaritan recognize our crew out in the street, and know who they are, or they engage in anomalous behavior that alerts Samaritan. We feel like some of the fun we had [with the cover identities] is an unexplored arena we’d like to get into a little bit more in the next season.

Do you anticipate going back into the numbers of it all as soon as possible next season? Or does the Machine being compressed give you an opportunity to step away from that for a bit?
GP: It’s going to take some doing [to get back to normal], obviously. We imagine if the Machine knew its demise was imminent, it may have also known of a number of premeditated murders and plotted — before it was compressed into a Kevlar case — to let our guys know that there are some people they should keep an eye on until the Machine is able to regain some of its faculties.

Blacklist Finale Lizzie

Although not science fiction, The Blacklist ended the season in a way analogous to Person of Interest.  The show started out as primarily a vehicle for James Spader and frequently concentrated on the case of the week. Lizzie Boone was often a weak character who could only succeed by getting key information from Reddington. The season finale blew that up, and should make Lizzie  more interesting as a character. I have some question about the finale as I don’t  really think Lizzie would take the step of shooting the Attorney General, ensuring that she would be a fugitive. However for the purpose of advancing the show, I will accept that in a moment of extreme stress, with everyone she knows being threatened, she might take such an extreme action.

Morena Baccarin has been promoted to a series regular for the second season of Gotham.

Orphan Black has hit a relatively slow point the last couple of weeks, with one or another clone captured, along with some DNA talk,  so I will hold off on detailed reviews. Among the more memorable scenes was Helena killing the “lab rat.” I was surprised to see her leave Sarah behind, as previously she said she did not believe the claims that Sarah had betrayed her. Helena is never predictable.

There were questions as to whether David Lynch was going to go through with the revival of Twin Peaks. It looks like it is back on again.

Saturday Night Live mocked Hillary Clinton once again. Video via Crooks & Liars: