IX

The first season was suspenseful and engaging, keeping me curious throughout. However, this episode was slow-paced and uneventful, with an excessive amount of dialogue. To make matters worse, the dialogue was boring. It's bad enough to have to hear boring dialogue but to make matters, worse, I had to read it. Much of the conversation revolved around Angela's desire to hear something nice about her mother. You can't make an entire episode about that. There was almost no action. And please don't list Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow in the cast of episodes in which they don't appear. It's false advertising.

This show was initially a show about an old covert operative who people thought was a push-over, but who it turned out was anything but. I really loved it. At some point in the first season, however, it started having these long stretches of vague, portentous talk that were not intrinsically interesting, and certainly didn't advance the plot. The new season seems to have continued this trend, along with throwing in many-seconds-long stretches of guys just staring at each other.

Scenes of people talking at each other about vague abstractions don't make something "drama", it just makes it boring. It would be great if things picked up, but it unfortunately seems unlikely.