All the things, ranked from worst to best.
Resurrection season 2, episodes 11 to 13: I'll admit that I was getting into this as it started drawing more and more on apocalyptic imagery, and supposedly heading towards an epic climax. But if there's one thing I can't stand, it's an anticlimax. This series spent hours building up the premise that "if this baby is born it could mean the end of everything!!!!!". Of course the baby is born, millions of people return from the dead, and then the show cuts to a "one year later" transition and shows that everything is fine and dandy, aside from some irritating bits of anti-Returned legislation. It's the textbook example of how to get me to stop watching your show.
Marvel 75th Anniversary Celebration #1: This comic is mostly full of throwaway anthology stories. The most notable are a look at what the other Marvel characters were doing during the origin of the Fantastic Four (a story which contradicts continuity in a number of places) and a Darwyn Cooke adaptation of a prose story that was Stan Lee's first published work. The latter is a fine example of what a great artist like Cooke can do with an execrable piece of writing. It's fun, but not enough to save the rest of the forgettable material.
WWE Raw episodes 1,135 and 1,136: Speaking of forgettable... WWE is on the road to Wrestlemania, which is supposed to be the biggest event of the year, but you'd never know it. The same story beats are being hit week after week, the champion Brock Lesnar never bothers to show up, and the wrestling has been decent at best. Who would have thought that the highlight would be Curtis Axel, and his delusional #Axelmania rants?
The Walking Dead season 5, episodes 11 and 12: Interest is picking up here, as Rick and co. move into a community that, shockingly, seems perfectly safe. It looks to me as though they're heading for a story where we explore whether Rick's crew can still function in a normal society, and I'm cool with that. It's a change-up from the same old formula, and that's exactly what the show needed.
WWE Fastlane 2015: Most of the matches here were dull, and the crowd didn't help. Why would you pay to go to a wrestling event, and not react to anything? The last two matches saved it, though. John Cena and Rusev had a good back-and-forth match that went a long way to cementing Rusev as a legitimate main-event heel. The ending, with Rusev hitting a distracted Cena then making him pass out with the Accolade, was the right one, and sets up their Wrestlemania rematch nicely. The Roman Reigns/Daniel Bryan main event was a corker, but that's to be expected when Bryan is involved. And as much as I would rather see Bryan head to Wrestlemania as the top guy, I'm kind of glad that the WWE doubled down on Reigns in the face of negative crowd reactions. Bryan was the safe option, but they're trying to make a new star here, and even with Reigns's obviosu deficiencies that's commendable.
Thunderbolts #13-32 by Charles Soule and various artists: I hadn't really enjoyed the first twelve issues of this series by Daniel Way, but with Charles Soule taking over the book improved a lot. It got a genuine premise, for a start: the group do one mission for the Red Hulk, then one mission for another member, alternating each time. It also gained a sudden self-awareness of it's own absurdity, which it needed. You can't put so many grim killers on the same superhero team and expect the book to be taken seriously. The highlight of the run was the team's trip to Hell, which embraced the silliness of the situation and had some clever tie-ins to other Marvel books. The book tailed off a bit at the end, and got cancelled before it could get around to giving every character a mission, but it had its fun moments.
Powers: The Bureau #1-12 by Brian Michael Bendis and Mike Oeming: This series has been running for about 15 years now, but this is the first time I've tried it. The premise is that the world has superheroes, and the FBI deals with them. It's pretty simple, and the opening arc sets the tone immediately by featuring a case involving superpowered semen being sold on the black market, and some highly entertaining foul language. The plotting is a lot tighter than Bendis's mainstream work, and the characters are entertaining on a superficial level. I was with it until he introduced a pregnancy plot for the main character, had her lose the baby after being kicked in the stomach, then didn't mention it at all in the nest story. Perhaps it will be explored going forward, but it's not the sort of thing that I feel can be dropped like that.
The Sign of the Four by Arthur Conan Doyle: The second Sherlock Holmes novel is better than the first, mostly because Holmes is actually in it the whole way through. It still falls into the same narrative trap that A Study in Scarlet did, though: the last chapter is a massive block of exposition detailing how and why the murder was done. The plot is cliched from a modern perspective, being a murder mystery involving missing treasure and an island native, but Holmes himself remains entertaining enough.
Nova #1-16 by Jeph Loeb, Zeb Wells, Gerry Duggan and various artists: Young Sam Alexander finds his dad's space helmet and becomes the star-faring Nova, in a solid execution of the teen superhero formula. There's nothing new on display here, but it has a lot of exuberance that carries it through the standard tropes.
Foundation's Edge by Isaac Asimov: How often does someone create a sequel to their most famous work decades after the original, and pull it off? Not often, but here Asimov has managed to do it, writing a novel in 1982 that's just as good as the Foundation stories of the 1950s. Foundation is a hard sell as a series, being a story about a fellow who maps out the future using maths, then sets up two organisations whose goal was to see that the best possible future comes about over the coming centuries. This story involves the technologically superior First Foundation and the psychic Second Foundation being drawn into a conflict revolving around the mysterious planet Gaia, with the fate of the galaxy at stake. There are no space battles, or exciting things like that, just politics and space exploration. This is hard sci-fi, by one of the masters, and if you're into that sort of thing it's a series you really ought to read.
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