The Week's Best, for the week of 4-19-10 to 4-25-10

The Week's Best is an entry I'm going to do (hopefully!) every week, talking about my favorite TV show episodes and comic books of the week. Pretty self-explanatory, right? What's that? You want to know why movies aren't on the list? I'm glad you asked! I won't be talking about movies on here because all the best things about movies are covered by myself and mi amigo Nick on an almost daily basis over at Heckling from the Balcony (plug! plug!) And now, here are the week's winners.

The Week's Best TV Show Runner-Up - Supernatural Ep. 5x19, "Hammer of the Gods"
Another solid episode from one of the few shows on television that never disappoints me, this episode saw a literal pantheon of "pagan" gods gather to try to decide how to stop the Christian apocalypse, only to end up slaughtered to a god by Lucifer (except for Kali, but, y'know, she IS the Hindu goddess associated with eternal energy, after all*). Oh, yeah, they also killed Gabriel. Yes, the archangel. How can you not love a show like that?

The Week's Best TV Show Winner - 24 Ep. 8x18, "Day 8: 9:00am - 10:00am"
I've loved 24 for a long time, but it's been a very up-and-down romance: the ups would be when they focus on Jack and what he does; the downs would be pretty much everything else. It's no secret that the B storylines on the show usually suck. The strength of this episode, then, is that, with the exception of a scene or two with Gregory Itzin doing his slimiest as President Logan, this episode focuses squarely on Jack. He runs the emotional gauntlet in this one, from grief to rage to violence to insubordination, and eventually becoming almost a terrorist himself. The end of this one really ratcheted up the suspense for the next episode.

The Week's Best Comic Book Runner-Up - X-Men Legacy #235
The fourth part of the big X-Men story going on right now, "Second Coming," this issue really had it all. Greg Land's art, which I'm not usually a fan of for reasons anybody who knows how to Google can easily find out, wasn't nearly as bad as usual and fit the story fairly well. That story, by Mike Carey (who, aside from comics, has also been writing novels; there are four or five out now, I've read the first two, and they're simply fantastic, I highly recommend them) is the strongest of the storyline so far. He matches intense action, including multiple deaths, impaling, and a beheading, with some really fantastic character beats. Any other week, and this easily would have been the winner. However...

This Week's Best Comic Book Winner - Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #9
Brian Michael Bendis (if you haven't heard that name before, get used to it; you'll probably see it here a lot) has been writing Ultimate Spider-Man for 10 years now, has churned out around 145 issues in that time-frame, and, if I had been doing this blog that whole time, would probably have been on this column for most of those weeks. He has turned the series into a version of the old Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends cartoon: young Peter Parker has been forced to have Iceman and the Human Torch live in his house with him and Aunt May, and his girlfriend Gwen Stacy lives there as well; his two exes, Mary Jane and Kitty Pryde are always there as well. This issue sees the Torch team up with Spider-Woman in a fight sequence before he asks her out and, apparently, makes out with her; alas, poor Torch has no idea she's Peter's clone, which makes Pete all kinds of hysterically uncomfortable. Another highlight of the book is when Gwen, MJ, and Kitty all gang up on Peter to make him get a haircut (and Bendis uses this as an excuse to needle readers as well: when artist David LaFuente took over the book, people complained his Spidey's head was too round, so the girls tell Peter his hair makes his in-costume head look too perfectly round) and the results are priceless. The issue turns serious at the end, though, when federal agents try to drag Kitty out of school just because she's a mutant, and it ends with a dramatic cliffhanger that, like most issues of this series, leave you hungry for more.