3/10
Wow that was bad
24 January 2017
I don't expect a lot from The Librarians. It's silly, and dopey, and often illogical, but it's a fun thing to watch when you want to turn your brain off. Most episodes are dopey fun, although sometimes there's a fluke episode that's solidly written and plotted, like last week's Tears of a Clown, and sometimes there's an episode that is phenomenally bad in every way, which brings us to the Trial of the Triangle.

Like many of the weaker episodes, this one features Noah Wyle. The problem is not Wyle himself, who was fine in the movies, but the way the series has never found a place for his character, Flynn. He's not part of the show, but instead of treating him like a guest star, he's always treated like a part of the cast who just happens to not show up very often, and because of that his appearances usually throw off the balance between cast members.

This episode is pretty much focused entirely on Wyle, perhaps because he wrote it himself.

The episode begins with this horribly conceived "intervention" in which the librarians tell Flynn the ways in which he annoys them. It's a terrible, tedious, seemingly endless sequence. It's also the first thing in the episode, which suggests Wyle has enough heft on the show that no one can tell him when he's making a terrible mistake.

While that's easily the worst part of the series, it's never gets much better. It attempts the usual Librarians silly humor but rarely hits the mark, and Wyle's attempt to carry the entire episode by himself is a major fail.

There is another bad scene where Wyle has to tell the truth about himself, which ties in directly with that "intervention" (which I have to put in quotes because that's not what an intervention is). The thing is, it's a really easy challenge that even an idiot could get through, raising the question of why previous challengers failed.

According to the IMDb, Wyle has never written anything before, which isn't surprising based on this. Writing is certainly a learnable skill, at least on the level of The Librarians, but I suggest before Wyle try again he find an experienced co-writer who can stand up to him. Then he should write an episode he's not in so he can avoid the temptation to write something entirely about himself.

Or he could just take the terribleness of this episode as a sign that he should't do this anymore.
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