Weekly Roundup 3 Sept 22 - 28

sun: true blood
The plot thickens! Sookie's having libido issues she's never had to deal with before, including naughty dreams and wandering hands; Jason's feeling like his life's being undone by vamps, and being an idiot, he's making even more of all the wrong choices; Tara finally walked out on her drunk and abusive mom, but now she's living with her drug dealer cousin who's into everything unsavory available in that town. We find that Sookie's grandfather also knew things, and that Bill and his so-called friends are on opposite sides of the integration debate. There's a new anti-vamp preacher on the televangelist shows. Sam isn't a pretty pretty dog, unless he's also crazy-- a shape shifter with dissociative disorder so he thinks he's talking to the dog he is?-- but he does bark in his sleep. I like him, he seems sweet, which probably means he has some horrible secret so deeply repressed that even a mindreader can't get at it.
There were less boobies this time, but somehow more sex, and definitely more thinking about sex. How old is Sookie supposed to be? She's feeling a bit like a fifteen year old, and I think it's a delayed puberty because of reading everyone's thoughts and being perpetually turned off. Hey, if she met another mind reader, and they were reading eachother's thoughts, would it set up a feedback loop? That'd be sweet, and if it causes screaming and blood squirting from their ears, there's no reason it can't work in the show...
Anyway, it's still pretty interesting, and I'm still willing to keep watching.


mon:sarah connor, heroes
Another Monday, another SCC. Tense, but not much having to do with the story, though Penny Widmore is out (so I assume she'll be back on Lost this season), leaving Charley angry, disillusioned and blaming himself. Reily continues to make John do stupid things without really trying, and Cameron's still acting weird. Dereck goes against his better judgement to help Sarah, and Cromarty messes with their heads. T-1000 tired to hire Ellis.
The main points of interest are the questions I keep getting: how much longer before things cave in? What's wrong with Cameron, and is it a tech problem, or is she turning human on us? How long until Reily has to be informed of what she's waltzing through the middle of? Why is their landlady pregnant-- unless there's something important there? Why was John buying a massive computer? Everything in this show is chosen, carefully planned-- at least up until now-- and I want to know how things fit together.
Not a bad episode, but feels a little like wheel-spinning...

Hijinks Ensue says it thusly: "Heroes season 3 premiered this week. I don’t even know where to begin. Season 1 showed so much promise. Season 2 swerved directly into oncoming traffic, collided with a bus full of legless orphaned nuns, each holding a kitten and exploded into a fireball of fail that could be seen from space. Despite that I was hopeful. I blamed the mediocrity on the writer’s strike. Now I’m convinced the writers were striking to PREVENT future episodes of Heroes." (http://hijinksensue.com/2008/09/24/all-we-wanna-do-is-eat-your-brains/)
I don't think it's as dire as that. I think I'm one of the minority who like this show because it's cheesy rather than hating it because of the same. So what does the season 3 premier bring us? Let's see: Peter is replaced by future!Peter and... what? Locked in Weevil's head? Something like that. Mrs Petrelli's powers are dreaming. Lame. Nathan's gone all televangelist on the world, and apparently that messes it up worse than anything else. Hiro managed to lose the thing his father and grandfather defended for decades in, like, half a minute. Future!Ando is both a mutant and a traitor, and only Hiro knows about it. Maya's crying. Suresh makes himself into Collossus-- in a boatyard? Why? WTF? That's not scientific at all! PsychoSlut's still around and Parkman's still not useful. Molly's conveniently away. Syler's now invincible and aparently doesn't actually eat brains so much as... poke and them and absorb their specialness? And Claire can't die at all. What about if the world ends?
The whole episode was weirdly dark... things get a little doomy and all the lightbulbs in the world get replaced by 13-watt blue-tinged ones or something. And the future needs to be saved yet again. "Save ourselves, save the world."
Part two continues the confusion, with Nathan going all John Crighton with the Linderman neural clone, PsychoSlut not realizing / not knowing / not admitting that she's PsychoSlut, MamaPet saying she's Syler's mom, Hiro punishing Ando for things he hasn't done yet, Mohinder getting all horny-- then all scaly, Elle-who-is-not-VM getting fired after almost getting brain-poked, Peter still in Weevil's head... it goes on. There's a baddie who is not at all like Mageneto, no matter that he's German and controlls metal. Elle's daddy was Midas, apparently, and is now dead. Future!Peter is messing up EVERYTHING, no matter what he tries. Claire is convinced she isn't human anymore. Oh the drama!
I'm enjoying it, though, even when it makes no sense. It's kind of... sansationalistic. Like watching tabloid TV about the X-Men.


tues: fringe
This week's Fringe dealt with something called a Ghost Network, which was really not all that well explained, and, of course, it was linked to something Walter had studied before. I hope all the stories aren't something he's done before-- one, because it would get old really quickly, and two because I'm supposed to believe this guy who founded Massive Dynamics didn't accomplish anything on his own, but let the guy who's brain produced it all sit alone in a loony bin for seventeen years?
Plots continue to thicken, however, with Peter being involved in something shadyier than usual, Astrid being revealed as a Linguist, Walter being more cogent than usual, and the last two minutes showing us that Roboarm and Bossman are in a power struggle for our Agent Dunham, and the supposedly dead and burried Agent Scott is still not what he seems. If they bring him back as an assassin, I'm totally calling plagaism for a story I wrote eight years ago but never published.
The editing and pacing still seems off to me; the plot points aren't cohesive-- it's all about the gel... only it's really not at all. So why does it even matter? I'm okay with choppiness if they bring it back later to explain things. Lets keep track of all those plot points, shall we? And if they do keep them going, won't it be fun if Roy is now kind of a psychic and can pick up on things for them?

This week's Eureka found things coming to a head-- Eva had plans to destroy the bunker thing and Zoe got infected with an aging illness, while Jo and Zane bickered. Don't care so much about that as you'd think. Maybe cuz Zane's kind of a tweeb. Anyway, Carter went to get some of the purple goop to make a cure for Zoe and wound up trapped in the bunker as it was sealed off by this TV psychic looking guy, where we found out that Eva doesn't age and one of the scientists was her brother-- and that they'd sealed themselves up to keep the illness from spreading, and while they were dying of it, they devised a sort of antiradiation bomb that would fix it.
Not too bad, but it felt rushed. All the plot crammed into one episode when it could have been a really well-scripted two-parter. And Zoe's boyfriend wasn't at her bedside as she went blind and got old or anything. But the end! Eva moves on to a new life! Allison's pregnant and wants Carter to be her coach! Carter's fired! What's next?



thurs: supernatural, knight rider
After the longest 'previously on...' i've ever lived through, this week's Supernatural goes right into the action with Hunters being taken out all over the area. Blood, guts and ribcages all over the place, and salt isn't holding them back. It's ghosts, forced to rise and made of pure anger, and they're after Dean and Sam. There's witchcraft, there's really angry ghosts, there's lots of shooting, there's salt everywhere. They win, of course, but only to find out that it doesn't matter, because the ghosts were a sign of the Apocalypse. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we've got the End Times here on Supernatural. I mean, it's not like no other show in this genre has ever faced the end of the world-- Buffy and Angel handled it every season-- but it's not usually the Biblical Apocalypse, and though I haven't read a Bible in a long long time, this seems pretty close to what I remember. Neat. And creepy. Man, is this show creepy. Not the scariest thing I've ever seen, by any means, nor even the freakiest thing I've read-- and I'm a horror editor, so I read alot of creepy shit-- but it's creepy enough to make me glad I'm watching it during the day and not at night, though it also makes me sad I don't have comercials to break up the creepy. I'm kind of amazed CW allows this sort of thing.
And I can hardly wait to see where this season goes, which is pretty amazing.

So this Knight Rider redux. Not as bad as I was led to believe, though I almost wanted it to be because I wanted something to rain against. Oh well, there's always Heroes.
This one has the feel of all those silly-scifi shows I love so well, with the camara angles and plot tricks and general feel of something like Andromeda or SeaQuest, both of which were not so great, but had a certain charm that made me like them. Everyone kind of sucks at the acting thing, but that's also par for the course in these shows, and doesn't really break the deal. Also, the plot points are not terribly original-- main character can't remember his past, love interest is wary but somewhat teasingly inviting, sidekicks are the full range of secondaries that are to be expected, boss can't be trusted-- but it seems to come off as fun rather than sucky. At least for now. I liked the remix of the theme song, and it was a night touchstone with a show that's not really the old version. Kitt kind of kicks ass. He's soooo shiny... And he transforms, so there's like seven cars fitted with that cylon light thing, and he's an autonomous AI, which I always find fun. How long before he finds another AI and tries falling in love? How long before they request to build a baby? How long before there's an evil Kitt? How totally awesome would it be if the evil Kitt was the love interest and the baby was pirated software? Blindingly awesome, that's how.
I like Zoe. She's irreverent and flirty and smart and one of the only ones who actively realized how totally cool this weird little world is. Senator Kelly is shifty as is expected. The FBI is untrustworthy. And apparently people don't ever bleed.
So not so bad. Let's see if they can stay cool. And if it only lasts a few years, maybe it can be good enough to fit in with 7Days and First Wave in the flash-in-the-pan scifi that's close to my heart category.


fri: history hacker, project earth, atlantis
This new show History Hacker is pretty damn cool. Makes me want to build things-- and brings out the latent engineer in me that I never got a chance to nurture / didn't join the army to nurture, even when the ASVAB said I'd make a great engineer. The premier episode was on Electricity, focusing mostly on Nicola Tesla's weird and wonderful not-yet-followed-up-on theories and home-made tech. I love me some Tesla. The man was a scifi prop room unto himself-- I mean, wireless electricity? Using the air as the inside of a lightbulb? Inventing the neon light? Deathrays? Teleportation?? The guy was a hero for those who turn scifi into reality.
So we followed in his footsteps and found that it's easy to turn your already-cool hipster bike into a home-grown power generator, and that lightbulbs can glow without wires (though you may need to be in a Faraday Cage if you're doing it that way...), that things can move themselves around in orbit while generating their own electricity cleanly and nevigating using only em force. Gods, I love science. I wonder if there are any electronics courses I can take without having to find a way into MIT?
A really fascinating first episode.

Project Earth wasn't on this week, and I missed Atlantis, so that review will be in next week's-- or, more likely, I'll just put it up on it's own when I see it. And I think I'm going to start posting NonFic shows on their own, or in a separate roundup if there's enough of them.

Upcoming side projects:
Catching up on Middleman, which I entirely missed
All of the ill-fated New Amsterdam, which I just realized I have
Comics!