side project: classic who

Invasion of the Dinosaurs
A fun, interesting story that was only slightly damaged by the dinosaurs of the title. The
effects were awful. Classic Who usually does better, or at least, so much worse that it's
amusing, but these were just bad. The sea monster the Sea Devils brought up when the
show was still in black and white was better. And I think they were just convenient. Like the
script writers decided that a plot about a secret society of people who wanted to hand-
chose the people who would survive their attempt to roll back time and reset the world in a
time free of pollution and crime and overcrowding wasn't cool enough and needed more
monsters.

I disagree.

All that stuff was well-written, complex, and pretty riveting. You have no idea while watching
just what's going on, and the dinosaurs are distracting to a plot that's already convoluted
enough, and happens to hold together without them. Any plot device could have been in
their place-- as the purpose was to clear out all the people they didn't want to save,
anyway.

Sarah Jane continues to be feisty and able to solve her own problems, which is great,
especially since the men, including the Brig and the Doctor keep acting like she's helpless
as Jo. But Benton can't tell her no and helps her when they want to leave her behind, even
though it ends with her getting knocked out and rescued.

And then there's Yeats. Oh Yeats. He gets involved with the baddies and tries to help them,
thinking that rolling back time is a good idea and making it so most of the population of the
earth never happens is an acceptable risk. Gone is our charming, sweet, spunky Yeats,
and here is a new one that's sad and tense and has beliefs that have led him astray, but he
still tries to do what he thinks is right. And in the end, he's sent away and asked to resign,
so I guess he's no longer there. Which makes me sad. But all I kept thinking was that he
missed Jo and was broken up when she went off and married someone else, whether that's
what was intended or not, and that it left him sort of lost and easily swayed by someone
with a strong will and a bold plan. Old Yeats never would have gotten involved in this.
Over all, a very good episode, even if three or four of the six parts did end on the same shot
of the t-rex...

news: week 7

the x-files revisit is up to episode 8: Ice, which is one of my favorites.


Did you know that Life on Mars (uk) has a spin off named Ashes to Ashes? It's in it's second season now.


november 14th for the Children in Need special

Rose Tyler is a mom!


India is trying to spark a new space race


The future of written scifi


Nasa unveils it's new lunar rover prototype


News has been a bit thin lately; I really need to catch up on all my blogs. You don't realize how much of your time they take up until you have to work and suddenly can't keep up on them.

blood rites: book six of the dresden files

Right off the bat, this story is lighter then the last few have been. It starts out with Harry running from purple poo-flinging chimp-demons, which is less goofy then it sounds, to rescue a little of foo-dog puppies. And keeps going from there. This time, Harry has to help deflect a deadly curse from a visionary porn director, help out his vampire friend when his family comes after him, and root out a nest of vicious old-school Black Court vamps. Along the way, we get Kinkaid being too cool, Murphy in a dress, several extremely unlikely ways to die, family issues, a really cute dog, soulgazing on almost-human White Court vamps, mysteries about Harry's heritage, a good dose of his mentor, and some old fashioned vamp-hunting that goes way strange. Not to mention alot of porn stars, several crazy exes of the client, and the blood rituals of the title.

I'm glad Susan's out of the way. She's too good to be true, and she doesn't feel as real to me as all the other characters do. Plus, when she's gone, Murphy gets to be the main female in Harry's life, and she's more interesting. I like the way Harry and Murphy interact, and I like getting to know more about this badass chick.

And Thomas manages to have the sort of tragic lifestyle that vampires are always saddled with in these books without being all that typical at all, and the way Bucher plays with the steriotypes and comes out with freshness makes me happy.

The focus of this book was a little shifted; there's the massive three-part story line we've all come to expect, but the emphesis seemed to be more on characters this time, with less exploding of stuff and killing of badguys, though it wasn't at all lacking in that sort of thing. It just felt more... real, this time. This far into a series, it's easy to shorthand relationships and assume your readers know how everyone's connected and how they feel about each other, but Bucher isn't doing that, and I love him for it.

books: death masks, book five of the dresden files

Poor Harry has had a rough time of it. He falls in love and she falls into vampire clutches. He's trying to save her and getting nowhere. And now she's back in town with another guy, and he still loves her. Meanwhile, the Vampires have called him out in a challenge that will settle the war once and for all in one-on-one combat, he's up against these Fallen Angels who take over peoples' souls and make them nearly invincible, and he's on the case of the stollen Shroud of Turin, and this is bad enough that Michael isn't the only Knight of the Cross in town. Turns out the villains this week want to start the Apocalypse the classical way-- with a plague of plagues.

And there's new characters and new threads to the story! We get to meet Ivy, the Archive of all human knowledge. She's seven years old and cosmically powerful and knows everything that's ever been known. And we meet her bodyguard Kincaid, who's cool as all get out and almost supernaturally dangerous, though he claims he's normal. We learn that the Red Court isn't going to stop, even after they get Harry out of the way. We learn of the Fellowship that helps people who have been victimized by vamps, including people who have been half turned like Susan. And we learn a few interesting secrets about Marcone.

Book five is a good one, lots of action without so much of the hopelessness. It even has a little super-kinky and dangerous vampire lovin that kind of squicked me out even as I thought it was really hot, and it ended on a more hopeful note, wit Harry regaining some of his perspective and easing up on himself so that he can move on. Which is good. Sad desperate Harry is not as much fun as snarky hopeful Harry.

classic who: the time warrior

A new season, John Pertwee's last, and a new companion, Elizabeth Sladen's first. I've been waiting for the Sarah-Jane years; she was always my favorite, and her first go as companion is not disappointing... though the rest of the show is kind of dumb. The story goes like this: A Sontaran is having some issues with is ship and has crash-landed in the middle ages outside a pair of castles that are at war(ish). He starts kidnapping the best scientists from throughout time to help him fix his ship, and starts giving weapons to the local Saxons to get their resources. The Doctor waits for one of the scientists that UNIT has sequestered to disappear, and then follows in the Tardis, which Sarah-Jane has already wandered into. When she comes out, she's in the past and doesn't know what to think of it, and, naturally, she and the Doctor are on opposite sides of the little war between the castles.

Sarah-Jane is fun because she's feminist where Jo was willing to let men lead the way, and because she's resourceful and quick-- and because she doesn't automatically get all impressed with the Doctor. She thinks he's working for the Sontaran, and hatches a plan to kidnap him before she figures out that he's trying to fix things. I'm glad she starts off good. She didn't once twist her ankle, and she changed her clothes several times, and none of those outfits included her later-trademark ugly raincoat.

The plot, however, kind of bored me. Sontarans are always kind of meh to me, and while he wasn't that bad, the Saxon dude, whose name sounded like Iron Lung or Iron Gor depending on who said it, was just irritating, and the placement in the middle ages was only a convenience, and the acting was low even for Doctor Who.

catching up - week 6 (mostly):

sanctuary: folding men
Sanctuary goes up against Folding Men and finds a story about minority rights and drug addiction. Who'd have thunk it? Well, having watched the previous episodes, I'd say I would, actually.

They catch a guy wanted for robbery and accessory to murder, and Wil's doing his best to get through to him as he goes through withdrawal, and they get little snippets of info off of him that lead to Folding Men parents with missing children, a crumpled up body in a washingmachine, and false leads on drug processing, not to mention that Wil proves to be very easily manipulated when he thinks he's helping people, which will hopefully be really interesting in the future. There wasn't nearly as much running and shooting as before, so I guess they're finding their groove, and it's a pretty sweet groove at that. It's a really interesting show. Even if I do sometimes get distracted by the fact that all the CGI environments kind of look too open and spacious, like no one in this weird city can afford enough furniture. Or when I take twenty minutes off in the middle of the show to see if I know the actor behind some of the prosthetics-- I do know the one who plays Jack the Ripper from the pilot, as he played both Halling and Todd the Wraith on Atlantis, but I was looking for the Bigfoot, who doesn't get a billing on IMDB or the official website yet.



supernatural: monster movie
Inexplicably, one of the episodes I missed was a perfect little horror movie aware that it was a horror movie! Meta fiction! I love it! They show up in Pennsylvania in time for Oktoberfest in a little town that looks like a European village, following a reported vampire attack-- that has all the movie monster cliches. When they're just about to write it off as a loony, a wolfman attacks a kid in lover's lane, and a mummy kills a guard at the museum. A bar wench gets kidnapped by Dracula and he insists on calling her Mina and the boys Harker and Van Helsing, and crazy ensues. Turns out it's a shapeshifter who was born like this, beaten alot, chased away alot, and went batty in such a way that he wanted to be a classy movie monster instead of a regular beat up monster.

It's all in black and white with the camara going in and out of focus at random times, with a soundtrack every bit as melodramatic as you'd think, with mist and storms and a big castle that's made of foam and fiberboard, and a nod to both Frankenstein and Phantom of the Opera. Best of all, this ep has some really truly funny parts, and it's a welcome respite from the heaviness of the coming actual Apocalypse in the previous episodes. Dean gets the girl, the bad guy gets defeated, and they drive off triumphant-- but I like Jamie, and I think these boys could use a girl in their team. Keep them honest. Give them something to look after and someone to look after them. I vote that she comes back and joins up-- or, better, that she starts hunting baddies on her own and they run across her later. I mean really, could you survive that and then go back to pouring beer for a living?

On a side note, the CW viewer is crap. Clunky, full of ads, jittery, and when it runs comercials, it drops out of full screen mode and doesn't go back. Suck. Hulu is so much better.


supernatural: metamorphosis
Aw. Looks like last week never actually happened. Bummer.

So apparently monsterism runs in families, and this ordinary guy is coming into his inheritance. That he didn't know about. Because a Hunter killed his dad ages ago and he was put up for adoption. He's about to turn into a Rugeru-- something Dean keeps pointing out sounds like it's made up. Sam wants to see if he can get the guy to fight it, to appease it with alot of raw meat, and never eat human (which completes the transformation), and live like a recovering alcoholic instead. Travis, an old Hunter friend, wants them to flame it and get it before it kills. Of course, this old Hunter gets himself killed almost immediately, and it's a wonder there are any Hunters left the way they all get killed off around the Winchesters-- it's like they're Angela Fletcher or something. And the guy turns and loses everything and gets flamed, because this show seems to be mostly about fighting fate and fate getting you anyway.

So of course, this all leads to an arguement between the boys over whether or not Sam feels kinship with this guy who has evil inside him but is a good person, and whether or not Dean is a jerk and that's why Sam never told him about the demon blood or his experiments with turning the bad he's been given into something good-- and whether Heaven is jumping the gun a little on this whole issue. In the end, Sam decides to give up creepy powers, but there's the whole issue of how long and you keep from killing people when you have the ability to save them... and then, how long before the Wrath comes down again?


valentine: pilot
There's these old Gods, see, and they are about to become irrelevant in the modern world, so they have to find a new way to fit in as things change. Irrelevant Gods turn mortal and die off, and they're getting fewer and fewer clients every year, so they want to avoid the bad and stay in the good, and they take on a romance writer to tell them about modern love and get them back in the game.

Kate takes the knowledge that there are gods very well-- especially after Aphrodite gives her a screaming orgasm of pure love. Which was funny-- and jumps right in with helping a boy and a girl find eachother, when the Gods have almost messed it up.

The first episode is funny and sweet and charming, and like a little bitty rom com, which is my not-so-secret vice. And I get to watch people be in love every week! It's a hopeful, if not terribly delicate message: there's someone out there for everyone, and there are people making sure we get the chance to find them. Yay!



valentine: daddy's home
The god of war stops by to check on his family that he's usually too busy causing war to bother with. Ares is trying to take over the love business, saying that something's going down where they'll be in danger and he wants to protect them-- the only way he can, which is to get them all to help him start wars. Danny / Eros distracts him by love-shooting Kate and sending them home together, on the excuse of giving Ray / Hephaestus a chance to secure Aphrodite's heart, now that she claims to love her first husband and despise her second.

Meanwhile, a perfume chemist and a good Indian girl need to get married. The girls pose as wedding photographers as the parents plan an arranged marriage for her, and the boys try to convince the chemist to declare his love and demand her hand in marriage so the arranged one can't go through. When he finally does, the groom is as relieved as she is, and it's her mother that okays it! Yay!

All this means that Morgan and Nisha are happy and there's a great Bollywood dance scene, and that Ray's in trouble with Grace / Aphrodite for fixing Danny's gun (what was once arrows), and Ari is not at all happy with getting turned down. And right at the end, Phoebe drops some of Kate's hair in the Oracle, looking for some dirt, and gets an image of Grace literally under the axe. Spooky, and who knows what that means? Let's see what the next episode says, shall we?



valentine: act naturally
This week: celebutant trainwreck and small-time theatre owner. She's had a few flops that made her doubt her talent, and he's about to go out of business until she's forced to work with him for community service-- thanks to the Valentine crew. Add in a manager who seems to be intentionally running her into the ground, and you've got yourself a sweet little rediscovering who you really are sort of story.

On the home front, Phoebe gets Leo to work with her to steal something of Kate's to prove she's wrong, and they manage to burn down her house, which leaves her homeless, with most of her stuff gone. Danny softens up a bit and lets down his guard enough to awkwardly try to cheer her in a sweet little scene that ends with her moving into the mansion with a box of stuff and a cat. Phoebe goes through the box and finds books about Greek Gods, and takes it to mean the worst-- though she's probably just writing a story and doesn't want to embarass herself by mentioning it. And someone-- a girl-- sneaks in and poisons the Oracle, and we can't be sure if the clarification of the Grace-dead oracle is the truth or the poison, or if this is, say, Eris, Queen of Discord, or if it's whoever Ares mentioned was going against the Old Gods. Oooh, plot!

Three episodes in, there's what we know about the characters: Danny is erotic love embodied, which makes him kind of a rockstar and means he knows nothing about real love and can't see how it's different from lust (which likely means he'll fall in love himself before the season is up); Leo / Hercules stalled out somewhere around the 70s fashion-wise, but is sweet, if somewhat simple on occasion; Grace / Aphrodite is old-fashioned and somewhat over-sure of herself; Kate means well, but is either going to go bad or is going to be framed; Pheobe has trust issues and is pretty immature; and Ray / Hephaestus is jealous and swayable.

Weekly Roundup 7 - Oct 20 to 25

mon: sarah connor, heroes
The crew go out to find another person on the list that was left in their garage, and find a child psychologist who is suddenly in demand. Sarah, John and Cameron go in as patients and try to seem like normal people. Ms Weaver learns that terminators aren't good parents and wants to know how to get her daughter to love her again-- though it's pretty much said that she replaced the real Ms Weaver, and that's why she has no concept of how to handle a little girl. And Savannah knows her mom isn't right. Meanwhile a new terminator who's smaller then Cameron is sent back and goes after the doctor, and winds up all twisted up by Cam, so I'm assuming she's a contortionist in real life-- what a sweet gig.

Over in subplot land, Dereck is out for a run-- which he seems to be doing alot lately-- and comes across an old flame from the future named Jessie. They fall into bed and she destracts him so she can hide surveilance photos she has of the team. So either her I'm-AWOL-and-I-want-to-be-with-you-when-the-world-ends thing is BS, and she's either a replacement or a double agent with unknown and probably not nice missions, or she was sent back and stopped doing what she was supposed to do so she could rekindle old flames. Or, like, something else entirely that we can't possibly guess from this little snippet of a story.

It's nice that Dereck gets laid because I'm sure he needs it, but it's nicer that he basically tells her to shove off because she's stopped fighting and has given up hope. That's the soldier we all know and love, and the fact that he still cares about her will make things interesting when she has to die. There's a way that shows are set up, a way that fiction works, and when I was watching them being all lovey, all I could think was that she's gonna be offed. Probably in a way that traumatizes him more then anything else, and he's already constantly having flashbacks, and, as we learned this ep, at least one attempt at suicide.

We also learn that Sarah's dad was a soldier with post-traumatic stress syndrome who never had a way to deal with it, which probably softens her to the idea of going to the psychologist as a patient. We learn that John's scared and paranoid and thinks that's okay, and that to the outside world, that looks like PTSS, too. And Cameron looks like Asperger's. She keeps watching and noting things, taking significant notice of suicide facts and broken chips and such, but we aren't getting much of her the last few eps, and it feels like she's being underused. John's even gone all prickly toward her, and I think she gets more airtime when he's thinking of being in love with her and defending her from others. Anyway, she plot is thickening and these reaction articles are getting longer, and I like that alot.



So, what's been going on in the world of everyone's lamest heroes? Let's see. Syler seems to actually want to get better and stop eating brains. Maybe it's the cholesterol. Parkman made it back from Africa with his tutle totem and met Daphne just as she was meeting him on her recruitment mission, and managed to freak her out. And tries to get her to go AWOL and help him form the anti-Pinehearst. Hiro is not a murderer, but the baddies think he is, and he goes after the Painter in Africa, who teaches him a lesson about relying too much on his powers. And then say that they need to take him to where they were going to take him anyway. Papa Pet is alive and well thanks to stealing some cute English life force-- and by some I mean all, because all that's left is dust. Peter goes around busting shit up again, and gets into a fight with Syler that ends with Syler sedated-- after he's the one who freed Peter. That seems to happen alot this season. Claire commits suicide to get the blonde squad free from the Puppeteer, and Noah tries to recruit Meredyth to help him, now that he's decided to off Syler. Mohinder is more and more a mad scientist, which makes him more interesting-- and the fact that he considers himself misunderstood makes it all the better. Daphne knows he's gone monstery, and he's captured Tracy and Nathan to use for his experiments. And Pinehearst wants him.

Still alot going on. They're really working the idea of villains, with the good guys turning bad and the bad guys turning good and everyone walking around in this gray area that never ends or makes all that much sense. I'm stuck in gray, too. I still enjoy this show when I'm actually watching it, but I didn't really want to catch up on it beforehand, and I don't really want to do so afterward... It's so... joyless. Very few of them have any concept of how cool it is to have powers, and the plot doesn't do much to make us care or enjoy it. Doom itself doesn't necessarrily make a show dark; Buffy managed to laugh at Doom for seven years. Nine? Almost a decade, anyway. That's what Heroes is missing.



tues: fringe
An illness that makes heads explode. Or, more specifically, an illegal experimental treatment for an illness that when modified by something involving hyacynths, causes the head asplody. The team is called in after a girl manages to nuke everyone in a diner after being dumped out of a moving van by two thugs in hasmat suits. The trail leads them to another victim, a nervous husband, a suicidal doctor who's been giving illegal test treatments on the side of actual treatments, and to the head of a major pharmaceutical firm who considers himself untouchable.

This was a good one, guys. The pacing was right, the medical weirdness stayed in the middle of the story instead of getting pushed off by too many ideas to make sense, and the ticking clock of the missing woman gave it an edge that otherwise would have left them all without any reason to act rashly. And there was much rashness. Liv went undercover without permission or orders to scope out the baddie, then busted him very publicly and involved the press on info that Peter got from Ms Sharp over at Massive Dynamics. Walter solved a problem he hadn't worked on previously two decades before and the fictioned science made sense within the context of the show.

And there was character development. Liv has a stepdad that she almost killed as a kid who's been torturing her mentally on her birthday for twenty years, who looks like he'llbe coming into the picture soon. She made the decision to go with her gut and her emotions, and that's gotten her some kind of punishment that we don't know about yet, other then the factoid that someone informed on her when she went off record and now Broyles is not happy with her, and presumably, whoever he works for is similarly unhappy. Meanwhile, Walter almost remembered Astrid's name-- called her Astrix, which amuses me-- and was weird without being too crazy, which is where he works best. And Peter sold his soul to the interests of Massive Dynamics in the name of his already life-endangering lurve of Liv. There was much eye contact and speaking into eachother's personal space, and in tv code, that means they lurve eachother.

Incidentally, watching these shows on Hulu is making me really want the HP Touchsmart.



weds: pushing daisies
This week brings us Emerson Cod's inexplicably white mom, who also happens to be his only friend and his mentor who taught him all he knows of detective work. She doesn't know that he has a kid, or that she was kidnapped as a baby.

And the case at hand is a man killed by some sharp object, who happened to have been a professional friend-- a sort of escort for friends, rather than hookers. He was leaving the job so he could marry the receptionist, overly-perky Barb, because fraternization was strictly against policy, and he was killed because the boss couldn't handle the idea that his friends were just employees, even though he started the business to allow his employees to be friends to everyone.

Along the way, we meet David Arquette being another in a long line of strange people: a lonely little guy who's hobby happens to be taxidermy... and then posing said taxidermy creations in little dioramas. With Olive and Chuck spending so much time together and being best friends, Ned wants a friend of his own, and he gets a little freaked when he finds out what that hobby is, and does what everyone does, which is to be creeped out. But as this is a fairytale world full of weird people, Ned sees the error of his ways and apologises, and they get all the clients who hired friends together to meet eachother and make real friends. Olive and Chuck face eachother's lies and secrets and have a fight, which makes Chuck want to move back in with Ned, and he decides he needs to learn to be alone and stop being so codependent and clingy, which means Chuck and Olive have to really try to be room mates, and it's a relief, because it was getting a bit much for me, everyone being unhappy all the time. Plus, Emerson's mom learns to be a mom instead of a pal and gives him tips on his book so he can accomplish his goal of finding his daughter.

Hopefully, we'll see Taxidermy Boy again, because David Arquette is always fun. And with Olive actively facing the fact that Ned loves Chuck, maybe the sweet salesman will come back, and she can be happy with him.


thurs, friday and saturday still to come! At least I'm consistently behind, right?

books: death masks, book five of the dresden files

Poor Harry has had a rough time of it. He falls in love and she falls into vampire clutches.
He's trying to save her and getting nowhere. And now she's back in town with another guy,
and he still loves her. Meanwhile, the Vampires have called him out in a challenge that will
settle the war once and for all in one-on-one combat, he's up against these Fallen Angels
who take over peoples' souls and make them nearly invincible, and he's on the case of the
stollen Shroud of Turin, and this is bad enough that Michael isn't the only Knight of the
Cross in town. Turns out the villains this week want to start the Apocalypse the classical
way-- with a plague of plagues.

And there's new characters and new threads to the story! We get to meet Ivy, the Archive of
all human knowledge. She's seven years old and cosmically powerful and knows everything
that's ever been known. And we meet her bodyguard Kincaid, who's cool as all get out and
almost supernaturally dangerous, though he claims he's normal. We learn that the Red
Court isn't going to stop, even after they get Harry out of the way. We learn of the
Fellowship that helps people who have been victimized by vamps, including people who
have been half turned like Susan. And we learn a few interesting secrets about Marcone.

Book five is a good one, lots of action without so much of the hopelessness. It even has a
little super-kinky and dangerous vampire lovin that kind of squicked me out even as I
thought it was really hot, and it ended on a more hopeful note, wit Harry regaining some of
his perspective and easing up on himself so that he can move on. Which is good. Sad
desperate Harry is not as much fun as snarky hopeful Harry.

side projects: classic who

classic who: the time warrior
A new season, John Pertwee's last, and a new companion, Elizabeth Sladen's first. I've
been waiting for the Sarah-Jane years; she was always my favorite, and her first go as
companion is not disappointing... though the rest of the show is kind of dumb. The story
goes like this: A Sontaran is having some issues with is ship and has crash-landed in the
middle ages outside a pair of castles that are at war(ish). He starts kidnapping the best
scientists from throughout time to help him fix his ship, and starts giving weapons to the
local Saxons to get their resources. The Doctor waits for one of the scientists that UNIT has
sequestered to disappear, and then follows in the Tardis, which Sarah-Jane has already
wandered into. When she comes out, she's in the past and doesn't know what to think of it,
and, naturally, she and the Doctor are on opposite sides of the little war between the
castles.

Sarah-Jane is fun because she's feminist where Jo was willing to let men lead the way, and
because she's resourceful and quick-- and because she doesn't automatically get all
impressed with the Doctor. She thinks he's working for the Sontaran, and hatches a plan to
kidnap him before she figures out that he's trying to fix things. I'm glad she starts off good.
She didn't once twist her ankle, and she changed her clothes several times, and none of
those outfits included her later-trademark ugly raincoat.

The plot, however, kind of bored me. Sontarans are always kind of meh to me, and while he
wasn't that bad, the Saxon dude, whose name sounded like Iron Lung or Iron Gor depending
on who said it, was just irritating, and the placement in the middle ages was only a
convenience, and the acting was low even for Doctor Who.

side projects: catching up:

sanctuary: folding men
Sanctuary goes up against Folding Men and finds a story about minority rights and drug
addiction. Who'd have thunk it? Well, having watched the previous episodes, I'd say I would,
actually.

They catch a guy wanted for robbery and accessory to murder, and Wil's doing his best to
get through to him as he goes through withdrawal, and they get little snippets of info off of
him that lead to Folding Men parents with missing children, a crumpled up body in a
washingmachine, and false leads on drug processing, not to mention that Wil proves to be
very easily manipulated when he thinks he's helping people, which will hopefully be really
interesting in the future. There wasn't nearly as much running and shooting as before, so I
guess they're finding their groove, and it's a pretty sweet groove at that. It's a really
interesting show. Even if I do sometimes get distracted by the fact that all the CGI
environments kind of look too open and spacious, like no one in this weird city can afford
enough furniture. Or when I take twenty minutes off in the middle of the show to see if I
know the actor behind some of the prosthetics-- I do know the one who plays Jack the
Ripper from the pilot, as he played both Halling and Todd the Wraith on Atlantis, but I was
looking for the Bigfoot, who doesn't get a billing on IMDB or the official website yet.


supernatural: monster movie
Inexplicably, one of the episodes I missed was a perfect little horror movie aware that it was
a horror movie! Meta fiction! I love it! They show up in Pennsylvania in time for Oktoberfest in
a little town that looks like a European village, following a reported vampire attack-- that has
all the movie monster cliches. When they're just about to write it off as a loony, a wolfman
attacks a kid in lover's lane, and a mummy kills a guard at the museum. A bar wench gets
kidnapped by Dracula and he insists on calling her Mina and the boys Harker and Van
Helsing, and crazy ensues. Turns out it's a shapeshifter who was born like this, beaten alot,
chased away alot, and went batty in such a way that he wanted to be a classy movie
monster instead of a regular beat up monster.

It's all in black and white with the camara going in and out of focus at random times, with a
soundtrack every bit as melodramatic as you'd think, with mist and storms and a big castle
that's made of foam and fiberboard, and a nod to both Frankenstein and Phantom of the
Opera. Best of all, this ep has some really truly funny parts, and it's a welcome respite from
the heaviness of the coming actual Apocalypse in the previous episodes. Dean gets the girl,
the bad guy gets defeated, and they drive off triumphant-- but I like Jamie, and I think these
boys could use a girl in their team. Keep them honest. Give them something to look after
and someone to look after them. I vote that she comes back and joins up-- or, better, that
she starts hunting baddies on her own and they run across her later. I mean really, could
you survive that and then go back to pouring beer for a living?

On a side note, the CW viewer is crap. Clunky, full of ads, jittery, and when it runs
comercials, it drops out of full screen mode and doesn't go back. Suck. Hulu is so much
better.



supernatural: metamorphosis
Aw. Looks like last week never actually happened. Bummer.
So apparently monsterism runs in families, and this ordinary guy is coming into his
inheritance. That he didn't know about. Because a Hunter killed his dad ages ago and he
was put up for adoption. He's about to turn into a Rugeru-- something Dean keeps pointing
out sounds like it's made up. Sam wants to see if he can get the guy to fight it, to appease
it with alot of raw meat, and never eat human (which completes the transformation), and live
like a recovering alcoholic instead. Travis, an old Hunter friend, wants them to flame it and
get it before it kills. Of course, this old Hunter gets himself killed almost immediately, and
it's a wonder there are any Hunters left the way they all get killed off around the
Winchesters-- it's like they're Angela Fletcher or something. And the guy turns and loses
everything and gets flamed, because this show seems to be mostly about fighting fate and
fate getting you anyway.

So of course, this all leads to an arguement between the boys over whether or not Sam
feels kinship with this guy who has evil inside him but is a good person, and whether or not
Dean is a jerk and that's why Sam never told him about the demon blood or his experiments
with turning the bad he's been given into something good-- and whether Heaven is jumping
the gun a little on this whole issue. In the end, Sam decides to give up creepy powers, but
there's the whole issue of how long and you keep from killing people when you have the
ability to save them... and then, how long before the Wrath comes down again?



valentine: pilot
There's these old Gods, see, and they are about to become irrelevant in the modern world, so they have to find a new way to fit in as things change. Irrelevant Gods turn mortal and die off, and they're getting fewer and fewer clients every year, so they want to avoid the bad and stay in the good, and they take on a romance writer to tell them about modern love and get them back in the game.

Kate takes the knowledge that there are gods very well-- especially after Aphrodite gives her
a screaming orgasm of pure love. Which was funny-- and jumps right in with helping a boy
and a girl find eachother, when the Gods have almost messed it up.

The first episode is funny and sweet and charming, and like a little bitty rom com, which is
my not-so-secret vice. And I get to watch people be in love every week! It's a hopeful, if not
terribly delicate message: there's someone out there for everyone, and there are people
making sure we get the chance to find them. Yay!



valentine: daddy's home
The god of war stops by to check on his family that he's usually too busy causing war to
bother with. Ares is trying to take over the love business, saying that something's going
down where they'll be in danger and he wants to protect them-- the only way he can, which
is to get them all to help him start wars. Danny / Eros distracts him by love-shooting Kate
and sending them home together, on the excuse of giving Ray / Hephaestus a chance to
secure Aphrodite's heart, now that she claims to love her first husband and despise her
second.

Meanwhile, a perfume chemist and a good Indian girl need to get married. The girls pose as
wedding photographers as the parents plan an arranged marriage for her, and the boys try
to convince the chemist to declare his love and demand her hand in marriage so the
arranged one can't go through. When he finally does, the groom is as relieved as she is,
and it's her mother that okays it! Yay!

All this means that Morgan and Nisha are happy and there's a great Bollywood dance
scene, and that Ray's in trouble with Grace / Aphrodite for fixing Danny's gun (what was
once arrows), and Ari is not at all happy with getting turned down. And right at the end,
Phoebe drops some of Kate's hair in the Oracle, looking for some dirt, and gets an image of
Grace literally under the axe. Spooky, and who knows what that means? Let's see what the
next episode says, shall we?


valentine: act naturally
This week: celebutant trainwreck and small-time theatre owner. She's had a few flops that
made her doubt her talent, and he's about to go out of business until she's forced to work
with him for community service-- thanks to the Valentine crew. Add in a manager who
seems to be intentionally running her into the ground, and you've got yourself a sweet little
rediscovering who you really are sort of story.

On the home front, Phoebe gets Leo to work with her to steal something of Kate's to prove
she's wrong, and they manage to burn down her house, which leaves her homeless, with
most of her stuff gone. Danny softens up a bit and lets down his guard enough to awkwardly
try to cheer her in a sweet little scene that ends with her moving into the mansion with a
box of stuff and a cat. Phoebe goes through the box and finds books about Greek Gods,
and takes it to mean the worst-- though she's probably just writing a story and doesn't want
to embarass herself by mentioning it. And someone-- a girl-- sneaks in and poisons the
Oracle, and we can't be sure if the clarification of the Grace-dead oracle is the truth or the
poison, or if this is, say, Eris, Queen of Discord, or if it's whoever Ares mentioned was
going against the Old Gods. Oooh, plot!

Three episodes in, there's what we know about the characters: Danny is erotic love
embodied, which makes him kind of a rockstar and means he knows nothing about real love
and can't see how it's different from lust (which likely means he'll fall in love himself before
the season is up); Leo / Hercules stalled out somewhere around the 70s fashion-wise, but
is sweet, if somewhat simple on occasion; Grace / Aphrodite is old-fashioned and
somewhat over-sure of herself; Kate means well, but is either going to go bad or is going to
be framed; Pheobe has trust issues and is pretty immature; and Ray / Hephaestus is
jealous and swayable.

week 6 news

Is SCC getting a tossed bone, finally? http://www.denofgeek.com/television/128816/the_sarah_connor_chronicles_gets_a_reprieve.html

More news on the will-he-won't-he 2011 season of Who
http://www.denofgeek.com/television/128817/doctor_who_david_tennant_to_stay_until_2011.html

A black Doctor for 2011? http://www.denofgeek.com/television/129413/doctor_who_has_the_next_doctor_been_chosen.html

Prince Charles turned down a Cameo on Who
http://www.denofgeek.com/television/129315/doctor_who_prince_charles_turned_down_role.html

X-Files Revisited so1eo6
http://www.denofgeek.com/television/129291/revisiting_the_xfiles_season_1_episode_6.html

News for the first Dr Who special http://www.denofgeek.com/television/130422/doctor_who_first_special_in_easter_2009.html

Saturn has Cyclones http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/10/081014-saturn-cyclones.html?source=rss

side projects:wkk 5 catchup

Sanctuary certainly is a slow-burn isn't it? But I like the emphesis on story, so I won't argue.

This week (last week) they found the Morrigan, three women from 800-ish AD who have the power to kill people by releasing the souls from the bodies. Only sanctuary doesn't know that, and the women have amnesia. Wil won't believe they're 1200 years old, and thinks they have a group delusion stemming from being held hostage for too long. Until they start remembering and go all hovery and destructive, which leaves Sanctuary conveniently low on defenses and lets the new Big Bad in-- this Cabal that's been doing what they do for two and a half millenia, and do it with much bigger guns and in a much more militatistic way. And they're not happy that their 'property' has been taken. Wil manages to get through to them enough that they think they can eventually be free, but they understand that it has to be because they did it, and if they stay on the promise of freedom, Sanctuary will be taken down by the Cabal-- so they go, under the agreement that if they do, Cabal Leader 1 will leave everyone alone.

There's alot of shooting in the last act, and can I just tell you how great Amanda Tapping looks walking down a hallway, talking on a phone and shooting monsters without ruffling her hair? This is all the bad-assery of Carter with the added benefit of being able to wear heels and nice clothes, and being able to fight non-militarily. And the autopsy scene was totally Scully. I'm loving it.

This week's monsters were like giant vole skeletons, and that was pretty neat, too, and we got to meet an informant named Squid who may or may not be a giant bug-thing on a bridge that may or may not be the Brooklyn Bridge with the middle missing. There was an underground fight with Ashley and a Chamelon creature that served only to get her away from the Sanctuary when lockdown happened, and I think that could have been handled better-- so if it turns out the Chameleon is part of something better, I'm fine with it, but otherwise, it was pointless. And Wil has a girlfriend who was on Batterstar Galactica and thinks he's seeing someone else. Oh the trauma. This week had a really great Celtic Fusion soundtrack, and I'm great on that. But the accent... gets a little Australian sometimes...


Knight Rider explosion 1 at 12 minutes! Sexy misunderstanding at 22 minutes! Girls sitting on eachother's laps at 34! Not known for it's subtlety, this show.

It seems that Mike is up against surfing smugglers, and that the show thinks it's Point Break, but it's not even that. So Mike and Zoe go undercover, Sarah gets jealous, Billy hates being outside, and Kitt gets snarky. There's a bad actor surfer who wants to smuggle giant smart bombs and rocket launchers so he can blow up a nuclear power plant for no real reason, and there's a tech-a-mabob that jams the missile but making it return to sender. Yeah, I didn't think it makes much sense, either. All we really got out of this is that in Afganistan-what-Mike-doesn't remember, he was being the same self-righteous something or other that he is now. Huh?

The music was fun, all spanish rap and neo-surf rock, and the visuals made me want to move to the beach, but the plot was dumb, even for this show.



Mike's been poisoned and only making a delivery on time will get him the antidote! Whatever will team Knight Rider do?? Apparently, engage in multiple car chases and work with the FBI to fake a CEO's death so they can trace the culprits. Standard procedure, right?

Mike managed to actually die, like, twice, but was defibbed once and had an antidote synthesized by Kitt with Sarah's blood the other time. He's no Daniel Craig, though; he would have defibbed himself in that case. And he's not even Jason Strathan, who would have just kept himself hopped up on adrenaline to stay alive.

Not enough Zoe and Billy this time, though we did see Kerry, who I forgot existed because she wasn't even in last episode. No explosions, but Mike did keep going soft on Sarah when the poison started acting like a truth serum. Conveniently, however, he doesn't remember what he said. I give them shippy points for saying the L word (hint, not lesbian) in the fourth ep, but I take most of them away because of being lame and not remembering. That's so TV cliche, especially since they didn't even kiss or anything.

This week's fun tech-a-mabob: contacts that give you a heads-up display in your field of vision. Sweet.


Still more to come, as I'm now behind on Week 6, too.

weekly roundup 6 - oct 12 to 18 (way under-watched)

I've actually been working some this week, so the watching is way down and the updating is way behind, but here's what we've got so far:

mon: heroes
First, a random note: Peter looks really good jumping over tables and slamming people into walls. He should do it more often.

This week brings us Daphne seeing Linderman; Nathan and Tracy tracking Dr Zimmerman (very quickly and off-screen) to Mama Pet, who revealed that Nathan was made like Tracy because Papa Pet was upset that he didn't have abilities at birth; Daphne and Knox recruiting specials for an army; Mohinder going all psychopath and webbing people up in his lab, including Maya who can kill you with her mind, but has a remarkably weak will; Hiro and Ando looking for Daphne and getting hoodwinked-- first by Adam, who got away and then got kidnapped, then by Daphne who got Hiro into the army by having him kill Ando (!!!); Mama Pet dreaming the future and getting paralyzed as a result; Claire trying out her vigilante gig and winding up as a councillor; New-Guy-Steven (who has a really neat power) going on the run, getting caught between various powers, and then committing suicide so he doesn't have to kill Syler; Claire becoming disillusioned about her dad and confused about a Syler that seems to actually be trying to be good... except that one part in the car...; Meredith going looking for Claire and winding up in the clutches of someone who can control you and is creepily obsessed with clowns. And big ol' SPOILER-- Papa Pet is back, and he's behind it all.

So everything's messed up. Parkman's not even in this week, but he's next up on the recruitment list, and he knows that Daph is supposed to be his future!wife. Everyone's trying to fix the world and only getting into worse positions then they started out.

I think Syler's most interesting right now. The whole thing is about heroes and villains and their interchangability and how everyone's doing good from their point of view, but he's the only one actively attempting rehabilitation. And Zachary Quinto seems to have more range as a confused and hopeful Syler then as a flat and voracious Syler. But I'm pissed about Hiro and Ando, and the only way I won't be is if he did that back-up-time thing right after stabbing him and before leaving-- although, that will make Ando that much more likely to go villain and kill Hiro in the future. And we all know how spectacularly unsuccessful our peeps are at staving off future disaster.



tues: fringe
This week was... kind of boring. Dude man can control electricity, only not really-- he has the ability, but he has no training and no active control, just a sort of emotionally-linked fight or flight, and he only manages to kill his love and his mom and mangle his boss. And the team is not much help to him, managing only to capture him and take him away. Not much Mad Walter in this one, though he's there, of course, to tell us he knows something about this and studied it two decades ago (it'll be better when they get past that little muguffin), and then to spet out of the plot. Not much Peter, either, and the tone gets rather full of it's own deepness when he's not snarking on it. X-Files managed to keep from being depressing because Mulder was a joker, and they should keep that fact in mind as they emulate it.

And really, she story was about Olivia going off her bean. She's seeing Keen Eddie all over, and she thinks he's a hallucination, but he keeps giving her clues. Turns out, Walter thinks, off the top of his head, that maybe when she was in the tank in the first ep and she mind-melded with him, a part of his conciousness plugged into her brain. So yeah. Agent Scott / Keen Eddie went to the same school of resurrection as Linderman over in Heroes and Scorpius over on Farscape... and he seems to have an will and knowledge base indipendent of Liv, and keeps telling her how much he loves her and helping her out all spookily. It'll be fun if he's disembodied but becomes a regular character, though that might get in the way of Liv and Peter, which is what I really want to see.


Yeah, I know. Nothing.

movies: iron man

Sunday, October 5, 2008 -- accidentally posted in the wrong blog!

I know, I know, I'm the last person on the planet to see Iron Man, buy you know what? It doesn't matter, because even on the TV, it's a pretty sweet flick. Glowing heart-sustainers! Explosions! Emergency Engineering! Socio-political Commentary! More Explosions! It's bright, shiny, snarky to the point where I almost actually forget that I never much liked Iron Man in the comics, and it's got layers that were unexpected from this genre: he manages to change without sacrificing who he is, he decides to do right in his own way, war = bad is proved without being too blunt or indelicate, big business = bad (when you aren't in control of your own interests) is proved, too... And the computer's voice is Paul Bettany, who I love, and who manages to be snarktastic even in a flat synthesized way. Additionally, there's Pepper Pots, who entirely understands her boss, her job and herself, who cares enough about him to get in the middle of a massive-robot battle, and cares enough about herself to keep the love-interest angle where it should be-- at least until he becomes capable of not wandering from model to model. Although, a loving, open, polyamorous super hero might be really nice...

And there's plenty of squee. Hints of War Machine, that whole section at the end of the credits, the classic Iron Man things like hand-weapons and crazy flying... Over all, a pretty solid and really fun sort of movie, with way more joy in it's existence than the last X-Men movie, which seemed to entirely forget that all this super hero stuff is just really really cool.

side project: classic who

The Green Death

So here we have the last episode for Jo "I'll make a list" Grant. It was actually pretty good. She decides to go off on an adventure for the first time by herself, without the Doctor, to do things she has her own opinions on, and he finally gets to Mirabillis III, which they've been talking of visiting all season-- she falls in love with someone who reminds her of the Doctor, but younger, while he has a horrible time without a companion. He winds up in southern Wales where she is after she goes missing, and there's much quarry and UNIT and glowing green slime and the word 'fungus' instead of mushroom. And maggots. Two-foot-long mutant maggots. And environmentalism-- she goes to a coal mine where a psycho machine is getting people to dump toxic waste down in the closed shafts, except there's still people mining nearby, and they start getting sick with something that smells like rot and makes them glow green until they're dead. She hangs out with Proffessor Cliff who yells at her much the way the Doctor does, and she's immediately back to being a bumbling walking accident, but she gets to talk more, have opinions of her own, and tries to help with the problem of the freaky-large maggots, which they have to stop before they turn into mutant bugs and fly away.

Dispite Jo's habit lately of falling for guys, this one seems more realistic-- she already knew who he was, and he returned the affection and worried about her when she was stuck down the mineshaft. When he got sick, she did all the could to help him, and when he woke up, he was disarmingly happy to see her. And he was a fairly-well-rounded character who was basically a good man despite being a weird hippy scientist a bit over-fond of fungi. In the end, he asked her to go into the amazon with him and to marry him along the way, and she agreed-- and they actually got to kiss, which I was expecting would be disallowed by the BBC.

And this is really one of the first times we get to see a little of the Doctor's inner life. When Jo and Cliff start getting close, the Doctor tries to make up reasons to keep them apart, and when she decides to leave UNIT and leave him and give up travelling the galaxy for love, the Doctor says goodbye and then leaves the party alone, obviously sad. He yells at her, but he's fond of her, and the fact that she left him for someone who reminds her of him didn't help any.

A good end to the season and a good send-off for Jo, letting her be a person and not just an ankle-twister. I could have done without the BOSS smarmy computer, who got really irritating by the end, but the monsters and disasters main plot was fun.

Next up, Sarah-Jane Smith, and one more season of Pertwee before we get to Doctor Four, Tom Baker.

weekly roundup 5 - oct 5 to 11 (part 1)

This week has been crazy, guys, so right now it's just a partial review. I haven't had the time to watch all the episodes, and so a few are missing, but here's what I've got, and I'll get back to the rest as soon as I can.

mon: sarah connor, heroes, sarah jane
More pieces falling into place, more allies made-- and more sadness dumped on poor John Connor's shoulders. Episode 5 sees John checking into military school to save someone who will become a major resistance leader, someone who has the actual training to get people organized behind future!John. Dereck manages to get a teaching gig at the same school-- way too conveniently, let me add, as it's just handed to him pretty much against his will. And there's a T-888 like the first one coming after all the Martin Bedells in LA, just like they came after all the Sarah Connors in the beginning, when Sarah became John's mother. She's determined to keep the two remaining ones safe, so she basically kidnaps a 10-ish-year-old moments before Triple8 takes him out, and John goes to military school.

While Sarah's playing mom for this kid, including a book report on John's favorite book (reliving the easier days when John wasn't a rebellious teenager much?), John and Dereck make friends and make plans with the actual Bedell. He's going to run away and get married; but the time he gets through helping to bust a T-888, he stays because he has to, gets the training he knows he'll need, and has bonded with John sufficiently to ensure loyalty later on... though, really, he should have bonded to Dereck, not John, as he's the one who made all the plans, planted all the claymores, organized the kidcruits to act like actual soldiers and finally took Triple8 down.

It was... a bit hasty, plotwise. Not really enough time to get in the depth of loyalty and friendship the episode needed, but at least they have him on their side. I wonder of Marty the younger will fight with them? Sarah promised him that if he needed help ever, she'd come from wherever she is and help him. Gave him a code word and all. And I wonder if the other kid soldiers will be more or less likely to want to go to war after being unwittingly used to stop something that's almost unstoppable?

Subplot land has Ellis investigating the power plant and seeing the damage they call caused a few weeks ago, and deducing that there were two robots who caught each other, which Ms T-1000 didn't know. And she offs the plant manager who was asking too many questions after Ellis mentioned to her that he wanted an investigation that would hold up the full automation of the plant in August 2009. I'm thinking that's the new Judegement Day.

But mostly, this ep serves to give John more info about the future, namely, when some of his friends are going to die, and how tender hearted his dad always was. Being the future leader of mankind sucks in so many ways, not the least of which is knowing that all the future-soldiers you send back are going to die, including the one who will be your dad, and that the people you ally with now are also going to die, and all in your name. I wonder waht kind of mentally messed up crazy future!John is?


Heroes has "Become Death"... only not really. Though they did kill a kid, which surprised me (because we hadn't been given a chance to care all that much). So here's the haps. Future!Claire is a sadist, I'm assuming because she went all super-emo when she couldn't feel pain anymore. Future!Peter messed up one last time by getting hissef killed before he could tell now!Peter what to do. Nathan's hooking up with Tracy who is the last of triplets (so at least we don't need to worry about her more-- she's not, like, a clone batch or something-- at least until they retconn it again). He becomes president, she's the first lady, and he gets killed by now!Peter when he takes future!Syler's abilities and therefore his hunger. So I'm seeing the two of them switch places in the coming season. Future!Syler's a dad, so that's that rumor sorted, but that's the kid that gets killed, and that's the beginning of the end cuz he goes all nuclear and blows away everything. Future!Claire apparently had everything taken from her. And neural-clone!Linderman claims to be an angel.

In subplot land, Parkman eventually marries speeDaphne and they have the hugest baby ever, and all she does in the future is cry. She doesn't survive the Syler-blast, and he witnesses it in the past while hopped up on African walkabout visionquest future-seeing drugs. Also, his totem might be a tortoise, which is far too appropriate. And he's still stuck in Africa. Meanwhile, Hiro and Ando try to escape Level Two and wind up taken to see Mama Pet, who tasks them with saving the formula because he's the only one who can, whatever that means, and he has the key... wich requires digging up a body. Mohinder's taken a turn for the worse, getting angry and violent and more scaly, not to mention slimy and sticky, and future!Mohinder has snaky sorts of sound effects.

So apparently everyone who can afford it or steal it gets powers in the future, and somehow, that leads to the world getting shattered. But President Nathan wants to start an army of mutants, so maybe that's what does it... Yeah, as if this wasn't tangled up enough. I think that web of connections made of yarn is the plot tracker the writers use to keep all this straight. Also, the future's almost as blue as the present is white. Lighting is weird on this show. I'm not even going to guess where this show is going; we're four eps in, and it's already crazy as hell, so I have no idea. But it's fun trying to remember where Peter got all his powers-- shouldn't he be unkillable, too, because he already took Claire's ability, or is this like a secondary mutation that wasn't active at that point?-- and now that Syler and Peter are kind of the same person, that'll be fun to follow.



Sarah Jane, who has faced down the likes of Sontarans and traveled the galaxy is afraid of clowns. Silly.

Anyway, Luke misses Maria, but insists that he doesn't fancy her, even though he's moping and sighing all over the place. They've left it open so that she can come back after she's done with her real-life test scores and can act again, so that's fun. Clyde was trying to be cool about it and act like he doesn't miss her, and when they meet Rani, he was immediately thunderstruck and went about being cool until she wasn't sure she wanted to talk to him. Luke, however, is weird and she likes weird-- she wants to be a reporter, and she is what is sometimes called 'nosy', meaning that the early decision to keep fresh new girl Rani out of the weirdness across the street from her house immediately went out the window.

Kids are disappearing from all around town, and when Clyde and Rani start seeing clowns, of course no one believes them but Sarah Jane, and certainly not Rani's dad, who happens to be the new Headmaster at the school. I'm inclined to think that headmasters are always bad news-- if Dr Who and Buffy have anything to say on the matter-- but he just seems to be tough. Anyway, as a first parter, this is all leading up to getting them in trouble, in the form of a Circus Museum that happens to be run by the Pied Piper who wants to steal all the children, and has already started by stealing the ones with the free tickets that were previously passed out. Sarah Jane is terrified, and so I'm assuming the kids will have to chip in to save themselves so she can face her fear, but that'll have to wait till next week.


tues: fringe
Fringe brings us more weirdness, and a little sinister edge to the dealings. It starts with a bald man who puts all sorts of weird hot things into a sandwich and waits around for a disaster to happen-- which comes right as he's finishing his meal. He goes to investigate and calls it in, unsurprised, as if he knew what it was before it happened.

So the team is called in to investigate this weird stretched-egg thing, and Walter knows what it is without thinking he knows anything about it. With some help from an old firend of Olivia's who was there when the last one happened, they decide it's a torpedo that goes through land instead of the sea. Someone's out to get it and Walter hides it, but Peter is taken hostage to find out where it is-- and gives it away without knowing the answer, because of some creepy wires up his nose.

Blah blah blah chasey chasey, and they wind up where Walter, who's acting very stange, hid the thing, and manage to keep it from falling into enemy hands, byt not from exploding / escaping-- there was a very deep hole, so I can't say what that was supposed to be.

The upshot is that Peter, who had been ready to leave, to the point of calling in favors and having a new life set up for him, is not dedicated to figuring out exactly what happened and says he won't leave anymore, and there's a new player on the scene-- this bald guy, who seems to appear just in time to observe all these patter-related incidents, no matter where they are, and he always looks exactly the same. Weirder still, he was there when Walter ran off an icy road years ago and he saved both Walter and Peter, which may have something to do with Peter's hinted-at medical history, and it forged some sort of link between Water and the Observer, allowing him to have memories he never formed himself.

Will this link matter more later? Is Walter in with the Powers that Pattern? The Observer can get inside people's heads, and I'm sure that'll come back. And Walter lost Astrid the Labtech's trust by drugging her so he could steal the thing, so it'll be fun to see how they sort that out... and hopefully she isn't just being written out.

Not as great an episode as the last one, but it's fast-paced and adds lots more for the wiki-makers to sort out, and it's thickening up nicely.


weds: pushing daisies
Another cute episode, but perhaps a bit sadder. I really liked how in love Ned and Chuck were before, and now with her moving out, even if I entirely understand why, it's got a different dynamic-- more mopey and sad, less cute and shiny. I do like the Aunts getting more out and about, thought, and it's always fun to see them in the Pie Hole and the lengths Chuck goes to not to be seen. And without Olive, I'm super-curious to see what kind of kook they get to work there-- maybe two, if everyone's going to be leaving to solve crimes all the time. Although, the crime solving seems to have dropped out of focus a little... I hate to say it, and maybe it's just the fact that I'm resistant to new things, but it feels ever so slightly off, like they misplaced a bit of the vision when everyone went on hiatus, and that makes me sad. It's still cute and sweet, but it doesn't feel as sublime as it did before.

news: week 5

AMC is picking up Red Mars

Those who might have been the Doctor

Eight Cheap Tricks for Dr Who 4.5

Companions that might have been

Tom Baker to come back to Who?

Den of Geek revisits X-Files, one episode at a time

Details of Dr Who Series 4 DVD Special Features

Some predictions on Heroes So3

These are some of my thoughts exactly on SCC and it's immanent cancellation

Though it seems the rumors are unsubtantiated (says Fox, who we don't trust)

Classic 80s Scifi V is returning!

More reviews of the Series 4 Box Set, including a nice look at deleted scenes I can't wait to get my hands on.

The Seven Doctors up for Children in Need?

movies: cloverfield

Yeah, I know, an old one, and if you're tired of hearing about it, I won't hold it against you if you don't read this review. Much. No, really. Go ahead and ignore me.

I've managed to stay fairly clean of spoilers, so other than the previews and trailers during commercial breaks, I didn't really know what to expect other than shaky camera and a lot of running. I liked it. The party scene went on almost longer than it needed to, and I was starting to get bored with it to the point where when they finally got out on the fire-escape and I recognized the setting from the trailer, I was relived, but I liked it. I don't think it was the best movie in the world, and I don't think it's even the best thing that JJA has had his hands on, but I liked the idea and it was a fresh voice in the glut of monster / apocalypse movies that I do so love and have probably seen far too many of. The frame story that this was found after the fact and is classified government info added a neat edge of conspiracy.

The monster was not like anything I've ever seen, and that meant that even when they were showing it-- earlier and with more clarity then I'd thought to get-- none of it made any sense to me, and that was great. If it's an alien, there's no reason it would make sense. And the parasites were almost scarier than the monster-- they were on a human scale, able to attack directly, and made it almost impossible to hide. I think the scenes in the subway tunnels were some of the best, and that that's what similar scenes in 28 Weeks Later should have been like. And that bleeding-eye body-asplody that happened from the bites? Unexpected and really gross. The characters were nicely human, scared, jabbering stupidly and latching on to random parts of what was happening, like you do in traumatic situations, blindly heroic because that's really all you can be like that-- better to die doing something then alone and hiding, right? And the random flashes of that one perfect day before everything went to hell pretty much accomplised the whole juxtaposition thing. It was real enough to get my brain going along those 'what would I do in this situation?' pathways, and that's really harder to accomplish than a plain gutteral fight or flight reaction. Adrenaline is mindless, but this managed to get inside my head and creep me out, though in the end it was more suspenseful then scary.

Don't read the Wikipedia page before hand, and really, don't read it after, either. The backstory somehow manages to make it less cool and more stupid.

There's talk of a sequel, and that makes me nervous. The only way I think it would be interesting would be if it was the same story from a radically different angle-- there were thousands of people in the City, and someone else must have recorded it (or several someones-- it'd be cool to see the thing from, say, five different angles, all different, all with differing goals, spliced together to give us a clearer look at the event). Other then that, something post-apocalyptic, the clean-up and dealing with the parasites might be neat, but I think it would be a different movie, a different subgenre. There was talk that this was a juvenile, and if it's not dead, as the credits seem to hint, a full adult might bring down the whole world-- and the concept art looks interestingly cthulu-esque, but if there's no way to stop it, it'll be harder to make the story anything but hopeless and depressing. A second Cloverfield will have to be more interesting to get out of the shadows of the first and to justify it's own existence, or it might as well not even happen.

side project: nu who revisted

Gridlock and Daleks in Manhattan

I mostly remember series three as sub-par. I didn't love Martha (hertofore called Marfa), and I wasn't a fan of the tone of the season. But we watched all of it before introducing it to D, and we've been re-watching it in a piecemeal sort of way to catch him up with where we are now. Tonight, we watched eps three and four.
Gridlock was one of the better episodes of the season, and I did remember liking it, but I didn't remember a whole lot about the events in it. The Doctor and Marfa land on New Earth and quickly get separated, Marfa taken into the depths of permanent traffic jams and the Doctor to a Senate where only Novice Haim and The Face of Boe are still alive, and it's up to the Doctor to put everything right, as usual. The plot is fun, but it's the characters that make this episode-- Brannigan the Cat and his lovely human wife and their litter of hybrid kittens who have never seen the ground; The Sisters, who are actually a married lesbian couple who have been on the road for twenty three years; all the random characters the Doctor drops down on as he hops from car to car, looking for Marfa before Haim kidnaps him. It's fun and it's straight forward, and it's good Who. Not the best, not like Blink, but good, and definitely a high point of the season. But even this is haunted by the fact that the Doctor's heart is broken and he's in willing denial, trying to start over with Marfa without really letting her know anything at all about why he won't talk about things and where he's from and what he's running from. We get some stories of Gallifrey in the end, and it sounds lovely, and we get the all important "you are not alone" that will define the end of the season, but that's not the point of this ep. The point is the Doctor being the Doctor and saving people.


Daleks in Manhattan is another issue all together. It's just not good. I'll admit that on my second watch through, it's not as bad as I remembered, but I know how bad it's going to get, and I think it's because now I know how it all goes, I can be more forgiving. There isn't the shock of it's badness smacking me in the face like before. But it's still bad. Why are there pig slaves? Why pigs? And there's no wait on the big bad's reveal. I mean, we know it's Daleks, but they're right there, plain as day, in the first fifteen minutes and that leaves nothing to the imagination and flattens any excitement the reveal might have had. The Doctor plays with a squishy jellyfish that has no purpose by to tell him where it's from, there's Tallulah who could stand to be less annoying, though I do like her love-conquers-all approach to the fact that her boyfriend's a pig now, and then-- then there's that whole crap with the Worst Villain Evar. D's reaction when he was revealed: 'seriously??', and mine back 'yeah. see?', and then he understood why we didn't want to rewatch this one. The season would be better if these two eps were just removed-- or, better yet, if they were replaced with something better. When I first watched this season as it aired, this was almost enough to make me walk away entirely, and only my love of a certain lead male kept me watching, hoping it would improve, and this two-part set is a large part of why I didn't like this season. One and two were so good, so rich, everything worked and even the dumb eps were passable, but three... three feels like it's limping, damaged, things are missing. If that's what they were aiming for, they hit it dead on. But mostly I think it was missing the joy; a heatbroken Doctor screams too much and has that horrible about-to-cry face that I can hardly stand to look at. And the lack in this season allows this ep to just fall flat.

side project week 5: classic who

This week brings us Planet of the Daleks!

Which totally doesn't deserve that exclamation point at all. I found it long and boring, and weird in that what-were-they-thinking way. Liquid ice that never hardens? A whole planetary core made of it? A jungle that the Daleks want to trundle around in? Plants that spit tobacco juice that makes a gross fungal coating that has nothing to do with anything except that Jo gets it and spends a big portion of the serial unconscious? Big hairy purple creatures?? A guy that Jo falls in love with, only to very easily tell him no, which he doesn't fight at all, knowing that she's leaving at the end of the next serial?

Not at all impressed. Hopefully the last Jo story will show her at her best so she can go out on a high note.

books: fool moon, book two of the dresden files

I'm always a little leery of reading a second book in a series when I really enjoyed the first one, on the chance that it'll suck and ruin it for me (not that it kept me from diving right in this time...). I'm glad to say, however, that the series continues nicely, and somehow manages to top itself here in the second book of the series, which I read-- no, devoured-- in an equally short amount of time.

Book two finds our Harry up against werewolves. And not just any weres, but ALL the weres, all four main kinds of wolf-person there are. Add in mobsters, Internal Affairs, the FBI, and an old apprentice, and you've got the fixings for another crazy adventure.

What I like best about these books is how Harry is entirely believable. He's got all the powers, sure, but he's also got a heart and a mind that are understandable and caring, and no matter how messed up things get, no matter how far behind the badguys' plans he is, he always goes for what's right, and when things go very wrong, he's willing to power through even if it means he'll definitely wind up dead. Though he hasn't yet (and there's eight more books after this)(though, with this weird world, I wouldn't put it past him to die and keep going).

Things are tense with Murphy who thinks he's betrayed her. Things are heating up with Susan who isn't just after stories now. Marcone's plotting and planning and trying to get Harry on his side. Baby weres are looking up to him. Magic is all crazy all the time.

The show was never this great.

books: storm front, book one of the dresden files

By Jim Bucher

Meet Harry Dresden. Chicago's only openly practicing Wizard.

If you've seen the show, you know the basic idea of what the story's about: scruffy, poor wizard tries to solve crimes like a sort of magical PI-- more of the noir type then the Magnum type. He's got no money, he's never sleeping or eating enough, he's stubbornly old-fashioned, cocky, self-assured in an entirely lunatic way sometimes, and he's used to walking the lines between crazy and law-abiding. He works with Murphy in the Police Department to solve weird cases of a magical sort to supplement the little money he makes on his own.

Book One starts with three problems: A police case where people's hearts are blown out, a scared woman looking for her husband, and the Mob wanting to pay him not to bother with either. And from there, it all gets weird.

Guys, it's a really fun book to read. I started late Saturday night, and had it finished by 1:30 this morning, and that was with time off to do actual day-time things like clean the house, cook dinner and go to the store at eleven thirty for groceries. It's well-written in a way that isn't at all self-complicating-- all first person, all inside Harry's head, and while his magical skills give him extra insight, he's really just a normal guy with a strong sense of right and wrong, duty and debt, and he knows when he messes up, knows when he's not being nice and has to and feels bad about it, and is resigned to the fact that he can't really have a normal life, but still isn't all that happy about it. He's an appealing POV, a man who knows what he has to do and tries his best to do it right, and when things go wrong, still tries to get the right thing done, even if it means his death, and even if he's got a mystical death sentence hanging over him, restricting what he's allowed to do.

There's fairies, ghosts, all sorts of spirits and demons, a black wizard, conjured monsters, Mafioso, a tabloid reporter with unclear motives, damsels in distress, chicks that'll kick your ass, really neat magic...

When I finished this one, I went up stairs to my neighbor's house and immediately borrowed the next one, and started it before I went to bed. There's nine more to go: let's see how they hold up, shall we?

Weekly Roundup 4 - Sept 28 to Oct 4

sun: true blood
Okay, so one thing true blood has going for it is weirdness. Jason's accused of murder for the second time in four episodes, and when he's in cuffs in the back of the cop car, he downs that v-juice he got last ep. Tara gets him out by lying directly to the cops saying she's Jason's alliby, which complicates things because she was with Sam that night. And all the v-juice goes right to J's little man, and he gets a case of 'accute priapism' which is both funny and gross. We never get to see it, but with the looks on everyone's faces, including the doctor, I think it's better that way-- imagination is way stronger than reality sometimes. Meanwhile, Gram asks Sookie to listen in on people's brains, and everyone just wants to see her brother hang and knows nothing-- except Hoit, who's probably the sweetest one on the show-- so she decides to go check out this vampire bar both the dead girls were known to visit.

Now, this bar-- Fangtasia, which is so cheesy it's great-- is something like the way puritanical churchies think goth clubs are, except the vamps are real. And it was less scary then I thought it should be the way everyone's going on about it. Kinda like the vamp-gang from last ep. There's a fine line between stupid and cool when you're being a vamp, and most of those we've seen are like people playing dressup. Bill's got that Angel I-feel-bad-for-killing-people thing, and then there's Eric, who sits like a king and has the Curse of Eternal Coolness. Watch him walk through that door and see if he isn't neat. Though, it's better if he doesn't talk.
Anyway, the bar scene was a letdown, but it's made up for with Bill freaking out a county sheriff that pulls him and Sookie over on the way back. Finally a little vampire mojo! Though I do feel a little bad for the guy.

And then, just in case the weirdness wasn't at a high enough level, Sam breaks into deadgirl's house and starts sniffing all over the bed where she was found, rolling around in the smell of her-- just like a dog. Yup, I'm sure there's something going on with that boy now.
I don't think this episodes was as enthralling as the previous three, but this is the point when a show has to actually get itself into a plot, so that's okay. Story happened. Let's see what happens next week.



mon: sarah connor, heroes
Cameron's acting really weird now, reverting to previous versions of herself and apparently confusing herself for the real human she was based on. It makes cam really really creepy as well as more unstable than before, and it makes her history more convoluted-- she was 'chosen' by John in the future, probably because she already knew him in his past. We already sort of knew that he chose her to reprogram because he already knew her-- but if he already knew T-Cam, and then chose Real!Cam for whatever reason, and then remade T-Cam because of that... Time travel implications mess with my head. There's alot going on with Cameron and John, in the current time and in the future, and if there's romantic feelings on one side or the other, and if John remembers all this stuff already...

It must really suck to be the one who has to organize all the time-travel that will result in the life you already have.

Anyway, the episode was neat, no explosions, but lots of new pieces of the puzzle, with John doing things on his own and Dereck nowhere to be seen. In subplot-land, Ellis takes the job with Terminator!CEO, who has a daughter (huh? can Terminators have babies now? Is she also based on a real person? Is the daughter a clone or something?), and a crash that left her without a husband and with a driving need to find the stuff that will be Skynet. (More questions: Does she not know that she's the same as the robots, even though she obviously has full control of shape-shifting? Was her husband another posing terminator, and it's his arm that was in those pictures, or is she doing the play-human bit to get to whoever that husband was? Was she the 'mechanical error'? Is Ellis to blame for Skynet happening anyway, now that previous blame-ees have been stopped? Why's it always gotta be a black man? I'm sure there's a paper in there somewhere...) And Casey went into false labor and had some bonding time with Sarah, which is interesting because she's really the first mother Sarah's had any real interaction with that we've seen, and she's so very very normal. But I still think there must be something special about that baby they keep making up stories for.



This week's Heroes still has too much going on, but it might be okay if they can pull it all together... though their track record on that is not so great. Anyway, Parkman may not be a useless lump after all, Tracy is apparently part of a Samantha Mulder-esque clone batch (so I guess she can die hundreds of times and not leave the show) and Micah took her appearance remarkably well, future!Peter is trying to clean up his messes, Mama Pet is kinda creepy and acting like an incestuous cougar, Syler's having little crises of the existential variety while using his new job to nomnom more powers, HRG is plotting and planning, Hiro is still fumbling stuff and Ando is 'tired of being your sidekick' which doesn't bode well in light of the flash-forward, Claire is going all freelance and we know how that turns out... so yeah. Alot going on. But at least we didn't have to waste time on Mohinder-Fly and Now-Wimpy-Maya. I don't know. Always when I'm watching this show, I feel like it's making sense and being entertaining, but then when I talk about it later, it really doesn't and kind of isn't, but it feels like they're actually trying to make it work. I think they need to stop introducing new characters, though, because, I mean, the German was not so great, and Jesse is now nom-ed, and Baldy McFlame-On is back in jail with Knox the Angry, and that's four of the twelve down, and we haven't even met the other eight yet. Introduce and toss away. We've already got more than we can follow, guys.



tues: fringe
Fringe was on fire tonight. The plot was tight and made sense, the characters were true to themselves, there was a good mystery, and there were good questions raised. Peter has reached a believeable point where he isn't going to go off the handle and leave, and there's a new player in this game: the Observer... who almost seems like he isn't quite human. We get to hear a little more about this weird medical history of Peter's-- a terrible accident when he was a kid, which doesn't rule out weirder things, and, in fact, gives an opportunity for them. And there's a weird connection between Walter and the observer that I hope they get back to.
See, this is what the show promised it could be when I watched the pilot. Tight, sharp, strange. Good characters with lots of issues they have to work through. Lots of back story we don't know and have to explore. Show mythos that feels right, rather than tacked on and nonsensical. I can see how that same mythos can drown it-- it happened to X-Files, and it's happening to Lost-- but at this point, four eps in, I can also see how it can expand and enrich the show and make it like this all the time. Episodes 2 and 3 were good, but this one was great. And this is how I want it to always be.



wed: daisies
Pushing Daisies is back! And what a fun weird episode. Chuck gets a job! Olive moves away to a nunnery! Chuck moves into Olive's house! The aunts go outside of their own accord and without thinking about it!

It starts off months after the previous season left off, which makes me hate the strike even more, because it feels like I was cheated of watching fun stories that happened in the meantime. There was a bee-related death, which means only Chuck has the experience needed to go undercover. The design of the Betty Bee company makes me want to live in a bee hive and / or hire everyone who does the set design for this show to build a house for me. Missy Pyle was fun and weird, and delivered those introductory speeches just amazingly, and French Stewart was silly in a way just disturbing enough to be a villain. But it wasn't really the story that was great so much as everyone's interactions, and now that Olive's gone, I wonder if we'll get a new kooky waitress? I wonder if Chuck will keep her honey-soaked new job? And I hope the Aunts have more to do with the lovely saturated-color world they all live in.



thurs: supernatural, knightrider
Oh my, how the Winchester boys manage to get in trouble. Castiel sends Dean back in time to the moment when the curse happened-- and found out his family was not the way he thought it was, and there was no way to change it. He still has no mom, the Demon still kills everyone, but he gets to meet his grandpa Asistant Director Skinner, which is where his grumpy skeptic strak comes from. You know, this is a very fatalistic show-- they all fave a destiny, and even angels can't change it.

Anyway, the whole point was to show him exactly how it happened so that he can stop whatever the End Game is-- whatever Sam is off with demons doing. And if Dean can't stop it, Heaven will. While it might be interesting to see someone Struck Down, there's still most of a season to go, and leaving only one brother will really change the dynamic.

Of course, this is a two parter, which means I have no idea what happens and I have to scratch at my eyeballs for a week waiting for the conclusion, but it's the sort of captivating that means I will tune in again, so I guess they accomplished their goal. I wonder if anyone will point out that Dean being there is what introduced his mom to the family demon-- before his foreknowledge of events in the early seventies, the Campbell hunter clan wouldn't have gone to see Liddy, and so wouldn't have met Azazael (who was in Hex on the Beeb, wasn't he?), and the family wouldn't have been cursed. But, also, if fate is decided and nothing can be changed, he was already there anyway, and the loop in his timeline is unchangable, and his being there was because that's where he was meant to be, not because he was sent there. Ah, temporal paradox. If I ever write that paper on the subject, I have more fodder.



Before I tell you about Knight Rider, let me just say: Coolest. Interface. Evar. I want my computer to be as cool as the ones they use. And if I can flick a screen from a handheld to the hood of a car, all the better. Also, Kitt has a built in printer AND a matter replicator??? Why do I not have a car like this?

Anyway, it was bound to happen: a show about cars decides to do racing for pinks. And there's the prerequisite bony hot chick. See, I'm a girl, and I'm not all that into cars, but I am into computers, and things that go fast are always an easy way to bypass the ovaries, so this was fun. Exciting. There's racing, there's explosions, there's grand theft auto! It's great that badguys are lousy shots, too, because they would have trashed that cherry ride Sarah has gone through all the trouble to jack.

More racing! And the inevitable betrayal of someone we've never seen before who's introduced as a most-trusted old friend. It's not every day you see a girl get pistol-whipped, but what pisses me off is that she stopped fighting after that-- until it was time to kick someone to stop them from burrying her in the desert up to her neck. The one Chang Brother kept getting punched in the face, and the other kept being coldly angry, and that's about all they had. Oh, and they were selling classified tech to the Chinese or something. Blah blah blah explosions!

And in subplot news, Michael's tattoo somehow was read by Kitt's hood-screen and made a bunch of files pop up that they didn't have time to read before the baddies came. What happened in those Captain-Jack-esque missing years?


fri: sanctuary
Sanctuary is cool. A little slow and talky, but it makes up for it with the action. Even knowing that all the backgrounds are CGI and greenscreen, it's gorgeous, and the story moves at a nice pace. Helen Magnus is way different than Sam Carter, and that helps get past that issue, and as Helen, she gets to be all soft and pretty in a way Carter never really could be. Will Zimmerman is only passingly like Daniel Jackson. And the Sanctuary itself is full of fun and freaky monsters and mythical people. I especially liked the design of the mermaid, with her scaly body and sea-weed hair. It's one part zoo, one part embassy, and one part Torchwood Hub, all of which is fine by me.

But the best is that there's a lot of room for the show to grow. It's set up as a monster of the week show, with the twist that they're saving the monsters to better understand them and help them survive in a modern world. That pretty much allows them to do whatever they like along the way. And Helen is a big ball of mysteries that I think will only get more tangled as the show progresses. The pilot only barely touched on her past and how the Sanctuary happened-- apparently by the 1880s, she was already special and knew enough about her specialness that she was helping strange people, and I'm assuming that that was the start of the Sanctuary. And there's hints that the baddie of the week isn't the only one, and that she may actually be one of them.

All in all, a good start. Atmospheric, fun, full of action and distinct, fun characters as well as really cool weird people, and enough mystery already to keep me interested, even if it was a bit talky and the 'sets' were a bit... cold? That's kind of the fallback of anything fully CGI, though, so I can get over that. Here's to hoping it only gets better.

imports: merlin s01e02, sarah jane s02e01-2

Merlin continues to take us back to a pretty, clean, racially integrated Camelot for fun and adventures! This week's villain had no motivation, but he wanted to kill the bossy Prince Arthur, and it was up to Merlin to prove he was using magic. Pretty standard already. But Arthur had a little more depth this week, coming across less as a flat-out jerk and more as a young man who can't afford to lose face and who has too many things that are expected of him. Which was nice. He managed to trust his manservant Merlin, and stood up for him when proof was rather thin, and was willing to walk headfirst into death to keep up appearances when that thin proof didn't hold up-- honor and honesty. I think it'll be fin watching this young boy become the semi-mythical king.

Meanwhile, Merlin continues to recklessly use magic, which looks like it might get him in trouble next week (and you know, I really love short BBC seasons for this: no reason to draw out out like they do on US TV). I wonder what they're going to do with the dog he conjured?

Other questions: I wonder how long Morgana can hide that she dreams the future? I wonder what Hardass McKing will say about that when it comes out? How will Gwen the Blacksmith's Daughter make her way to queenhood?

Really, I think the real appeal of this show is not so much the storylines, at least from my adult and fannish point of view, which are silly and pretty straight forward so far, but the way the characters show hints of who they're supposed to be, and how the writers are moving them around. My biggest problem with the whole Arthurian Saga Remake is that you know where everyone's supposed to be and how they're going to end up, but this one is light and fun and adventuresome, and maybe it can get around the craziness and potential boredom that set mythology sticks it with.


Sarah Jane is back! Whoo! My quasi-Who fix has returned!
And it's adventure right off the bat with The Last Sontaran, which is exactly what is says.

There's a radio telescope off in a place called Goblin's Copse, which is very evocative, and Karg, the afore-mentioned last of the Sontarans, has set up base there by taking over the only scientist there and locking up his daughter Lucy. He's going to use all the satillites in orbit to burn the planet into ash in payment for the Doctor offing the invasion fleet after the ATMOS incident. This is great because Sarah Jane knows who they are from her first story-- which we're almost up to in our Classic Who so that it's like we're time travellers, too, knowing her in two different timeframes-- and because it's another incident of others having to clean up after our dear Doctor. He save the day and then he leaves; fall out is for sidekicks.

Anyway, the first episode is mostly set up, with the real story happening in the second; Sarah Jane and the Who Crew arrive, do some poking around, notice that things are weird, and they're quickly split up and she's captured defending Clyde. Karg the Not So Bright locks her up with Lucy in a room full of odds and ends, while there's much running about in the woods by the kids. Lucy is a ankle-twister is training. Maria and Clyde don't manage to stop the antenna, but Luke does crack the program. There's one more attempt before they save the day-- by way of Crissy-Maria's-mom going all shoe-attack on the Sontaran... which they don't let her remember. Except that she does. Even though she didn't. What gets me is that there's still people in this version of London who don't belive in aliens. I mean, every Christmas, something undeniable happens, and at least three times a season, the Doctor's there, saving everyone, and there's a whole series of Sarah Jane doing the same. Are Londoners that cynical?

It's fun that Karg the Underestimator keeps calling the kids Half-Forms. I love that Sarah Jane remembers the Sontarans from her first story in Sontar's future and her past. But Maria moves away! And next week, some new girl name Rani (as in The Rani??) moves into her house! And there's creepy clowns!