Weekly SciFi TV Roundup

link: Pretty, Fizzy Paradise: Earth: Final Conflict Review: 1x01 Decision

2010-05-21T08:43:00.000-07:00

Pretty, Fizzy Paradise: Earth: Final Conflict Review: 1x01 Decision

It's been a long time since I posted anything here (and I owe you so many movie reviews and a few Classic Who reviews that are probably all lost to the ethers now), but H sent me this link, and it's pretty much what I always wanted this blog to be like. So enjoy!

Also, this blog will probably get absorbed into the main one, too, while the TV reviews will go up on the Examiner site, but somewhere I think I'll be getting back to whole season and Classic Reviews over the summer when my shows are off the air.

review: the end of time, parts 1 and 2

2010-01-06T16:47:00.000-08:00

I really hate to see MyFutureHusbandDavidTennant in pain. And he acts it so well. I wince every time and want to give him a cookie and a glass of juice and a hug.

Anyway.

The official review is over on Examiner, so here I'll just mention some personal things to add to it.

I'm annoyed that there wasn't more come-uppance. I mean, that was a huge emotional and mental break there at the end of Waters of Mars, and he said some pretty upsetting things, and then it was all 'crap-that-was-wrong-all-better-now-never-mind', all the emotional and plot-ly fall out in, like, three seconds and it's never mentioned again. I hope that the Moff mentions it. It's the exact point where he went too far, where he took things the wrong way and stopped being himself and started being a lunatic, started being the Master-- and then that just didn't matter at all when this ep started and the Master was back? Yeah, that's not good writing, not good continuity, and we expect better. I expect better. And I expect someone, some time before too long into the new series to come back to it and point out that, yeah, that was wrong, and he's still dealing with it, still trying to figure out how to make up for that-- another thing to haunt him and drive him toward good.

And I'm just annoyed that as soon as the Master comes back, he's all 'let's be best friends, okay?', and doesn't have to deal with the fact that he's now that much closer to what the Master is, and it's never once a temptation to go to the Dark Side there. I mean, the Master has Force Lightning. He's already a Sith Lord. And the Doctor never even had to be tempted by that?

Geek rage rising...

And there's been this niggling feeling in the back of my brain since these specials started-- since the last three eps of the last season, really-- that it's a super-extended huff from RTD. I mean, he seems upbeat in the interviews, and then he gives us episodes where everyone is off-character, and plot lines don't make sense, and the Doctor keeps being a jerk*, and then he takes it all away, packs up his toys and moves on. It feels... bitter. It feels done. And it feels final in a way that doesn't sit right in my head based on how amazing it's been up to this point. ::sigh:: But now it's over, and we can all let this stuff settle and forget the annoyances. We never need to watch these weird overblown last episodes again. And that's almost a relief (though still a bittersweet one, because I really will miss Ten and Tennant. Four was my Doctor; now Ten is, and always will be.)

I'm divided on the unfairness of it. On the one hand, this is a kid's show, and things should turn out fair and clean and happy-- or, at least seem to be so. On the other hand, it really IS unfair, and I don't want it to be. The fact that the Doctor himself keeps saying it's unfair just makes it seem that much more unfair.

And I'm still not happy with how Rose or Donna turned out, though I like the last glimpse of Rose that we had.

I think that woman who kept appearing to Wilf is more interesting if it's Future Old Donna, turned into a Time Lord the way Ace never got to be, or if it's Romana. It'd be awesome if it's Romana. There's the idea also that it's the Doctor's mom, which would be sweet, but I don't think we need that.

Things I'd like to see in the new series:

- More than just one episode where the Tardis is grounded-- that looked like some severe damage, and it'd be interesting to see the Doctor stuck on Earth, a little like how the Third Doctor was. Not permanently, just not immediately able to up and leave. Because he's so keen on avoiding connections, I'd like to see him trapped with the same people. And I want to see the new Tardis design happening in stages as he repairs things-- or, at least see a few options before he settles on one. Something new, please.

- They promised a broken Sonic Screwdriver. Which is pretty cool. It's a crutch; I like a Doctor who can fix things like Macguyver all up in this piece.

- New monsters! And if there are returns of old ones, please please please let them be something other than a flipping Cyberman or a Dalek-- and if they are a Cyberman or a Dalek, let there be something new to say about them that doesn't involve them trying to be hybridized with humans. I mean, come on.

- I'd love for this not to be the end of the Modern Companions. Last regeneration, we had Rose to carry us into the next series, but this is a new Doctor with a new companion and a new head writer, so who's carrying us over? I bet Moff could make Marfa more interesting. Especially now that she's married to Mickey, even though she was engaged to that cute doctor that she met in the Year That Never Was. And since I still have issues with Donna's story, I want her to come back and get some better handling. And there's always the chance that Rose and Other Doctor could come back, but I think that should wait a while. Let everyone breathe and move on a bit-- and then be a special episode in, say, two years, when it'll feel fresh again. And Sarah Jane still has a lot to do. The Doctor said so in her show.

- There was a lot of awesomeness mentioned in passing about how the Time War went down, and it'd be fun if some of that came through. Not too much, just a little at a time, say, the Abyss Child or whatever it was, just one every other season or so. Because I really like the idea that the TimeLords are entirely batshit crazy, and that they aren't really gone, just locked away and sectioned off where they can't hurt anyone anymore-- and that now they know there are ways to get through and come back.

- Jenny. She's not done by a long shot-- and she's not supposed to have happened. She's a loose end, and that makes for an interesting story.

- River Song. Especially if it turns out the way it looks like it would-- her being the Doctor's wife or something. Especially especially if it turns out that she's something else entirely unexpected, like his daughter or his sister or himself as a woman. Especially if she's not as human as she looks, and it doesn't matter what he looks like to us, because he looks the same to her because she's looking at what he actually is, not the body he's in. Or if the timeline has been changed by his regeneration, and now he has to relate to her on a different level. I just want her to be awesome and unexpected.

- Amy's from 1991. That's a long time ago. It'll be fin for her home time to be out of synch with ours, and it'll be fun for our time to be far in the future of her's, and I hope they deal with that.

* Jerkiness: I love you, Rose, but even though the plot point that made this make sense was cut, and you risked destroying the universe to come back to me, I'm still leaving you here back where you started. Here, it's a slightly-less-cool copy of me. I'm sure he'll be fine living in a house and getting a job.

Jerkiness: I am the Timelord victorious. I do what I want. Even when it makes my companions kill themselves.

Jerkiness: Don't let Donna remember anything, or it will melt her brain. Also, that's probably not true.

Jerkiness: You don't have to be all Master-ish anymore. We're the only two left, so you can travel with me for all times, like bros, and when I lock you up, I'll make sure to give you lots of space and to pull you out from under the floor boards and dust you off once in a while, like I do with the Crilitanes.

Jerkiness: You're great, Wilf, but you're not anything and I'm awesome, and I don't think I should have to die for you. Oops, I totally did anyway. Damn.

flashforward: s01 e05 gimme some truth

2009-10-25T18:58:00.000-07:00

I don't know what just happened, but I lost this whole post and I'm too tired to redo it, so we'll skip to the questions at the end.

Questions!

- Who sent that message to Olivia? There were only three people with Mark when he admitted what happened, unless someone else at the bar is a spy. Did someone else entirely know through other means, and it's only a coincidence that it happened then? And why would they send the message at all?

- Why were they attacked-- was it the President's call, or was it independent? And why are the attackers all Asian?

- Is Janice going to die? If so, that changes the future and ups the ante on the show, since the Flashes are only what would have happened then and things can be changed. Which puts Noh back in the game and totally tosses Mark out the window, since the whole Mosaic project is based on his Flash.

- That lady at the door was the same one in the picture, right? If so, why does the kid know Stan so well, while his mom is all frigid? And what did Stan "do to that girl"? And why wouldn't his wife know about it?

- What's going on in the rest of the world? The other doctor and his mystery woman, the call Lloyd got, the babysitter's drowning, all of that?

- Are the Towers still there? And if they're intrinsic tot he Flash, where are the bigger ones that would have set it off for the whole world?

classic who: The robots of death

2009-10-18T18:10:00.001-07:00

This is frequently considered one of the best eps of all time. I don't know about that, but it's not bad, and the robots, though generally idiotic and easy to confuse, have a really awesome design that is now in action figure form. I might need to get them.

Anyway.

The Doctor and Leela wash up on a ship that's out mining sandstorms in search of riches. Miners again. ::sigh:: The crew of the ship are a mix of high-class and low-class from some planet where that's really important, but it can be evened out by bringing home enough lucanol (which sounds like an expensive medicine). Except that their whole society is dependent on robots, and there's many more of them then there are people. The robots apparently have enough of a reputation for harm that one of the crew members mentions that he heard of one ripping a dude's arm off once, but it's considered an urban legend... until people start turning up dead.

Then there's a bit of the ol' The There Were None while the Doctor and Leela get blamed for the crimes and talk their way into solving them. Like you do. It seems that one of the robots that's supposed to be a basic and mute labor drone has been modified to be much more intelligent and to figure out what's up with threats on the home world of a robot revolution-- started by a sceintist who was raised by robots and doesn't like people, and is thought to be aboard. Several more people are murdered while the survivors alternately believe and disbelieve the Doctor, and eventually the engines get sabotaged; they have to cut power so they can not explode, which makes them sink, which forces them to ask the Doctor for help. Once that's sorted, they start looking for the cause of the robot malfunctions and find that they're being reprogrammed with a giant glitter-pen syringe to the brain. (they call it a laser of some sort)

It's revealed that the engineer is actually the terrorist they're looking for, and they start looking for ways to shut him down.

They manage to get all the robots except the crazy ones and the helpful one shut down, and the Doctor builds a machine to bust up the rest while he gives Leela the task of releasing helium gas to change Taran's voice so the robots won't recognize him. He's offed by his own reprogrammed robots, and D84, the helpful one, triggers the Doctor's device, which offs the rest, and all of a sudden, everything's fixed.

Notes:

I have trouble remembering the Doctor in this episode. I mean, he was there, but it was mostly miners fighting with eachother and cool-looking robots getting reprogrammed and killing people.

Leela's kind of boring so far, and not terribly useful on a ship. I miss Sarah Jane.

Miners, ugh. I'm getting so tired of miner politics. It's like the fallback when they can't think of anything more interesting.

There's a lot about this ep that are mirrored in Voyage of the Damned. It doesn't' really make it more interesting, but it's nice to see continuity over such a long stretch of time.

And then it just ends. The old eps seem to have issues with the idea of ending a show...

flashforward: s01 e04 black swan

2009-10-18T17:03:00.000-07:00

According to Blondie McTerrorist, a black swan is something so outside everything you know that it changes the world when you see it. Hm. Like a FF?

Anyway, what happened this ep:

Nicole saw herself being drowned and died before the end of her flash, and that's why she's been missing, although no one mentioned that detail. And she felt like she deserved it, and saw the killer's face. Now she's back babysitting. Also, she was friends with Arron's daughter-what-is-still-dead.

Ned was saved from dying on the operating table by using his flash forward to diagnose a disease he hadn't had any symptoms of previously, and came to the conclusion that the future saved him.*

Al's looking for someone named Celia, and Dr Cutie is drawing pictures of someone he hasn't met yet who probably has something to do with how he's not suicidal anymore.

Blondie McTerrorist sent them on what's probably not really a wild goose chase, where they found a would-be drug lord hiding out in a startup restaurant, and I'm willing to bet they wind up back there later, and find out that they just didn't have all the details the first time. Also, she says Mark's not the sort to give up everything for his goals. Yet, anyway. And really, maybe it's better of the things he values are taken from him rather than willingly being given up-- taken means it'll add to his drive, whereas giving means he's losing his humanity.

Lloyd manages to connect with Dylan, after taking Dr B's advice even though she didn't want to give it. She sent Dylan to physical therapy, trying to get rid of him so she doesn't have to face her FF, but he got sent back, so that's a bust. Oh, and according to Charlie-who's-now-called-Simon-apparently, he's at least partially responsible for what's happened. Which I totally called because that fuzzy not-asleep-guy looks like him. Even though he apparently has a FF to prove he was out. Maybe an evil twin? That'd be fun. Or stupid.

* like I said, more ordinary, but weirder. Not as weird as I was hoping, though, like some sort of transplant...

flash forward: s01 e03 137 sekunden

2009-10-18T15:51:00.000-07:00

You know how sometimes a show feels like the whole episode exists so you can get the emotional punch-in-the-stomach at the end? Yeah, this is one of those. I thought it would be another not-as-cool-as-the-pilot episode, and it kind of was, and then there was that last bit with the kid in Ethiopia that didn't really need to be there, but worked so well I'm glad it was.

The Plot: Nazi war criminals = assholes. Got it. But this one was an asshole in service of the Mosaic, and he gave Mark the piece of info that lead to the wonderfully creepy-named murder of crows, which led to the website that charted populations, which led to Ganwar, Ethiopia, and the idea that maybe this has happened before. All in the last, like, three minutes of the show, after all that boring Nazi crap.

And some developments: Dimitri's fiancée saw him at their wedding, which got him off his moping-ass and into a more active mindset... after tracking the don't-get-killed phone message didn't get him anywhere; Aaron followed his gut and dug up his daughter's grave, which proved to actually be her's which means she can't still be alive*; Mark's boss's wife, it turns out, is Gina Torres, who I love, and she's going to be adopting a Muslim kid that she saw for the first time at the funeral held by the FBI for the ones who didn't make it out of the Blackout; and Marcy isn't sure she wants a baby and shows a tendency toward drowning her sorrows in alcohol**.

But man, that last scene. The goats all spook at the same moment, and shy away from the city. All the birds fly over, then just stop, and plummet from the sky. All the people are laying on the ground. And there's that cloud that's haunted the planet's imagination since WWII-- or at least something that looks enough like it that it gave me chills, looking like nightmares I've had since I became socially conscious when I was a teen. I feel so bad for that kid, the only one who wasn't knocked out.

This I hope they follow up on:

- Why crows? Are other birds affected? Is it a consciousness, thing, and if so, all the apes, most of the monkeys, a lot of the bigger parrots, squids and octopi and most, if not all the whales and dolphins should have been affected, too. (If they come up with something like this to explain the crows, and don't mention other higher-minded animals, this will totally become a pet peeve of mine.)

- What about the mushroom cloud for the one that took out the whole world? Someone, somewhere, should have gotten footage of it, even if no one actually saw it.

- The CDC keeps crazy-good records; someone who was there must've noticed the similarities, and someone who's read the records must've noticed that it's the same thing.

- Tangent: what about the people on the ISS? If they were affected, too, then the field or whatever was much bigger than they thought.

*...unless the plot thickens in such a way that reality starts changing, which would explain all the times when something from the flash seemed impossible. So maybe she's still alive in an alternate reality. And either way, maybe this bit of crazy starts the reuniting of her parents. This might also explain Ned being a black man in the future, but I'm thinking it's something more ordinary, but probably weirder. If that makes sense.

**... which would be an easy way for someone without a boyfriend to get preggers soon, so that she can be that far along in six months.

fringe: s02 e05 dream logic

2009-10-18T14:50:00.001-07:00

Olivia's buying in to whatever the fixer tells her to do, which is slightly troubling, though I like him. That might actually be part of why it's troubling, because I also liked Charlie. Anyway, she does what he tells her, under the faith that it'll help, even when it has no obvious reason to help. It seems to be, so far, but he's not offering anything, and the mystery puts me on edge more than the mysteries they're solving.

This week was a chip in the brain to fix sleep disorders that allows people access to the brain / dreams of those with the implant. First, they think it's an attempt at mind-control, but when Walter experiments on the brain of Agent Zachary Ty Bryant, he realized that it's like all the craziest drugs all at once, everything that goes through the other person's mid-brain poured into yours-- and the culprit is an addict of the rush that causes. But the result is that those he feeds off are living their dreams and killing people. This week's ick: several shots of slimy brain surgery, and pulling things out of said brains.

Pretty weird.

But the background of the show was shifting around while all this was happening. Olivia's dealing with Charlie's death and whether or not it's her fault and the creepiness of finding out that he was dead ages before she knew it (though they haven't really mentioned that part...). Peter is remembering that he used to have horrible night terrors when he was a kid, and now that he remembers, he starts having the dreams again. They apparently involve talking in his sleep, and what he's saying freaks Walter out. Meanwhile, Astrid is continuing to be adorably fond of Walter, and he's responding well. I like watching that weird little friendship happen.

I think Peter is remembering his own snatching. And I think that's going to be the arc of this season-- getting around to Peter's realization that he's not who he thinks he is, and therefore, everything he thinks about his life isn't right. The trust between him and Walter is only barely starting to solidify, and it'll be shattered. Maybe they'll even set it up so Other Walter shows up, and then he'll have to choose sides in the Coming War. Maybe he'll choose the other side and wind up facing off with Olivia, which I think would be horrifying, unless the result is to bond them closer as a team so they can work together to save both universes. There's so much potential for crazy pathos there.

The show is less about Olivia these days. She's sort of out of the equation by being messed up and frequently off doing something she isn't sharing with the others, and Peter finally having a purpose means he's doing a lot of the work these days. I'm not comfortable with the shift away from Olivia being a strong, empowered woman with a tech-savvy genius behind her left shoulder, but I'm willing to let them find a new equilibrium.

Otherwise, the episode was kind of slow...

sanctuary s02 e01

2009-10-15T08:53:00.001-07:00

Somewhere along the line, when I gave up watching season one because it was taking too long to get anywhere, it seems to have gotten really cool. Now I'll have to go back and watch the rest of the season.

So here's where we are: Late last season, Ashley was kidnapped by the Cabal, who want to control all the Abnormals, and they've been running weeks of experiments on her, activating her latent Abnormal DNA, then grafting in new DNA from this Source Blood that happens to be the reason why Jack the Ripper and Helen Magnus don't age and haven't died. And she's the pilot of a program to make more like her: mindless soldiers with healing and retractile claws and unstoppable strength, and I'm assuming maybe some other powers. (Ash has teleportation from her father, but the other five were scrubbed clean of all abnormalities when they were children, so they could be grafted, theoretically, with any power they wanted to give them)

The goal is to take down the entire Sanctuary network.

Oooh, big! I was scared that it might still be slow and dull like the first season's beginning, but apparently I should have held out. Now I'll be watching this (because I don't have enough to watch already!), and I'll eventually go back and catch up.

flash forward: so1 e02 white to play

2009-10-06T13:01:00.000-07:00

The problem with these high-concept shows is that the pilot can be fantastic, but then the actual making-it-into-a-show is really complicated. I'm willing to see it through, but this episode seemed like alot of waiting, and I'm not a big fan of wheel-spinning (it's what plagues whole seasons of Lost sometimes, and it makes me feel bad for Penny). It's not that this was a bad ep, only that it wasn't as fast or as tense as the first.

So here we go:

Olivia and Mark are starting to feel a little rocky because of her affair in the Flash, and they haven't forced Charlie (why does this lady keep having kids named Charlie?) to tell her story, which means they don't know why she's acting up at school. All the kids keep playing Blackout, where they all lay on the ground and reenact the Flash, then wake up and tell everyone what they saw, and it's all good things-- though who knows how much of that is real. Probably most kids would have seen something ordinary. But not Charlie, and she doesn't want to play, and she runs away. Which brings her face to face with a military blockade that hasn't had much to do with the story yet, but brings into focus that the seeming return to normalcy isn't real-- everything's still weird just around the corner.

So her mom takes her to work, and while she's at the hospital, she sees Dylan, the kid that knew Olivia's name in the pilot, and flips out over the fact that someone hurt him, said she knew him from her dream, but wouldn't say more.

Meanwhile, Dylan's dad is Loyd, who happened to be the man Olivia saw in her Flash, but he apparently didn't see her, so she has the option to change history-- he doesn't know her, and maybe she can avoid him and the affair that comes with. Except that Dylan asks for her, so now he knows that she's something important to them.

Meanwhile meanwhile, Mark is following the leads from his wall. All the D Gibbons' in the country are being tracked, but the one in question walks into the office with cupcakes (and really, this convenience of the future already happening might start getting old if they don't shake it up and get a little more creative; it's bad plotting to have characters know when they should enter, though it could be a really great meta-commentary about plot itself if they do it right). She's never done anything wrong, but she dreamed about an argument with her creditors and knew Mark and Dimitri, and came looking for them to see what it meant. investigating her led to finding that someone had stolen her credit info and was using the card elsewhere in Utah, which led them to another D Gibbons who's been hacking networks, apparently doing what they're doing. And his phone says he was awake during the blackout and talking to the person at the stadium that they know was also awake. And it sounds like a conspiracy.

he blew everything up and got away, but the picture of the burnt doll happened there, and that's proof that they don't know enough to change anything yet, and so far, things are going to happen. So much drama. It's a shame it took this long to get to it.

Other things that happened this episode:

- Homeland Security was questioning how they had the chutzpah to assign themselves as the head of the investigation, which resulted in them showing her the video and getting the green light to continue allocating government funds.

- Charlie tells Mark that 'D Gibbons is a very bad man'-- so apparently her vision is some sort of lynchpin we really need to know about.

- Dimitri and tech girl enter their stories into the Mosaic on the off chance that someone has info they can use to help them make sense of their own visions, and by the end of the night, very shortly after, Dimitri gets a call from a woman with an accent telling him that she was looking at a case file that said he was going to get murdered.

- Lloyd doesn't know how to be a dad, but alot of the pressure of telling his kid that his mom is dead is lessened by the fact that the kid already knows from his Flash. But he's also autistic, and that'll probably come into play later, or else there's no reason for it.

- Joseph Finnes continues to have a nice, even, believable bland American accent.

So, like I said, not a bad ep, but not as tense as the first, and not as exciting, though there was alot of info delivered, and less of the quick decisions and acceptance of weirdness that was my only complaint with the first ep. And I'm even more excited to see how it goes.

fringe: s02 e03 fracture

2009-10-06T12:33:00.000-07:00

I think I didn't review last week, but it had Olivia acting weirder than usual, her hearing heightened, her leg still damaged, her concentration off, and Nina Sharp gave her the name of a guy who 'put her back together'-- I'm assuming the one who gave her a robotic arm, or maybe someone involved after that. This week, she's still going to see him, three or four separate visits in this one episode that can't take place over more than a few days, and he keeps pissing her off.

Meanwhile, the case they're on is about people who are crystallizing and then exploding, becoming their own bombs and shrapnel in one-- a guy goes off in a train station and blows up alot of innocent bystanders, and that's what gets Fringe Division on the case, via a news filter Astrid's invented that looks for weird events.

It turns out that they've stumbled on something called Tin Man, a secret project that was supposed to help American soldiers exposed to a synthetic nerve toxin in Iraq. Most of the people treated died-- more than two hundred-- but a few of them didn't. They have to treat themselves with a top-secret serum they can't let anyone know about every day, but it's that serum that's exploding them. Their Colonel is calling them back into active duty and sending them to intercept people in black trench coats carrying briefcases, then triggering a super-high frequency that catalyzes the serum while also jamming all electronics so there's no proof of what happened.

They manage to stop him before he blows up the next one, but they don't catch the man in the trench, and in holding, the Colonel tells them that it's to send Them a message: they can't just pick a war with us. He doesn't actually mention alternate realities-- he doesn't know who or what they are-- but the montage while he talks shows us the man in the trench coat taking that briefcase to the Observer, while he says that they're collecting info on our culture and our defenses to use against us.

The plot, she continues to thicken. The last shot is of what's in the briefcase, the info that will doom us all, and it's observation photos of Peter and Walter. (dun dun DUN!!!!)

My reactions:

- I like that working with Olivia on her cases has changed Peter enough that people from his past who have plenty of reason to distrust him (though he won't say why), can now trust him on the force of his convictions alone.

- I like that we get to see something of what Peter did before he was recruited, and a little of who he was-- which was apparently both untrustworthy and somewhat dangerous. I hope it doesn't degenerate into Peter's 'I know a guy' replacing Walter's 'I remember working on this', though.

- I like that Peter could hold his own against a seasoned Colonel who has 'no regard for human life'.

- I like that when Olivia was in Iraq, everyone looked at her like she was nuts, but she had the decency to cover her hair.

- This guy that's helping Olivia deal-- I like him. He's vague and distracting and strange, but he seems sincere, if a little jaded, and he accomplished what he meant to do-- which seems to have been to piss Olivia off enough that she pushes past her fear. Because when he's done, she suddenly doesn't need her cane and can hold a gun without her hand shaking (does that means she doesn't need a robotic arm? It'd be neat if she does...). I wonder what else she has to go through with this dude?

- Astrid gets to have a little personality, and she seems to be getting kind of fond of Walter, alternating between sweetly guiding him where he needs to go emotionally, and firmly telling him where his boundaries need to be. The news before hand said he'd be getting romance from an unexpected quarter-- could be be Astrid? Talk about an odd couple, but I think it could work. She's so unfazed by everything, and she knows how to handle him, which has got to be good for Peter.

- Peter and Walter get to have their own apartment soon! So maybe they can both have some privacy. And it makes relations simpler, too, doesn't it?

- Olivia's still putting on a brave face and not sharing info with the others about what she's going through, and Peter's still seeing through it but not pushing her. This, I like. What I don't like is when a show has this sort of awareness of eachother's moods and mentality, and keeps insisting that they don't want to have a romance. These two-- I don't get a platonic siblingness off them, and if that's what they're aiming for, they really sort of missed that one and need to focus on shifting the intensity. It's frustrating in an X-Files way, and if that's one of the ways they emulate the previous show (ie: drag it out and keep denying the love and then toss us a single warped little bone very late in the series when we're all ravenous for a payoff), I'll be more than a little ticked.

But so far, it's lovely.

fringe: s02 eo1

2009-09-17T21:45:00.001-07:00

I got very excited a few days ago when I realized just how close this show was to returning, and I'm so glad I wasn't let down. The real review is over on Examiner (along with Bones, which is going to be tracked on the non-SF Tv Blog), so here I'll just give highly personal opinions and reactions, and we'll leave the proper synopses for next week.

- You know, for an actor who claims he sees the characters as a broken family, Joshua Jackson sure doesn't play Peter as if he sees Olivia as a sister. Brother don't cup your face in their hands so much, or look like they need to confess secrets in quite that way when they think you're about to die. And Rachel said 'she liked you, you know' and it looked like he wanted to die, too. And then he got drunk at a bar, and that's TV short hand for 'I love you'. Watch enough shows and you'll see it. I am all for them holding off so it makes sense and letting it grow naturally, but I have two issues here. 1) I don't see the point in denying something that looks pretty encouraging on screen, I never did, and if they want to avoid X-Files's pitfalls, they need to not avoid something that's there for too long, and 2) I don't see why people can't just be in love on TV-- I mean, in a family drama, maybe not, but in this show, there's plenty enough else going on, and it would be awesome to see someone fall in love and get married and just be married as part of their character. It worked for Zoe and Wash on Firefly. It almost worked for John and Aeryn on Farscape. It could work here. Just another detail like that Peter has a shady past and Olivia is probably a mutant.

- What happened to Rachel? She was in the hall when Peter went to say goodbye, and then she was never seen again.

- Broyles and Nina Sharp? I'm snot surprised, but I haven't wuite decided whether I'm totally squicked out or not yet. I think it'll depend on how that's played: if it's weird and manipulative, then I think I won't like it, or I'll root for Broyles to get rid of her or something, like you're supposed to do with a villain, but if it's sweet and mutual, then it's kind of tragic, since they seem to be on opposite sides at least part of the time. And I kind of thought she was involved with Bell? Maybe it's a polyamorous power struggle.

- Olivia can't remember anything but pieces, which I'm sure will come back in slivers that are convenient along the way, replacing her ghost boyfriend with latent memories and surfacing powers. Hm. But it goves alot of frama and urgency to the season, and that's a good way to start out: right in the thick of things.

- New agent Jessup was introduced like she was going to replace Olivia, which I thought was strange since the comercials showed us that Liv would wake up (and by the way, Fox, drama works better if your comercial doesn't give it away), so I found that strange-- until the end when Charlie's been monsterized and tossed in a furnace. That really got me. He's so normal and hard working and sturdy... and now he's replaced and out to get Olivia and probably everyone around her. Which is horrible for his loving marriage and his adoring fans, but really great for the pathos of the show. Liv's best friend in the agency has been replaced! What will happen when tehy find out! Will she have to kill him herself!? (probably)

- You know, for something 'above top secret', Jessup got ahold of the access code pretty easily off-screen, and then Peter just let her waltz in and start helping on the autopsy...

- Walter's obsessed with Peter's childhood all of a sudden, and some of those memories of Peter's early life have got to be about the other!Peter rahter than being just wrong, and if that isn't a ticking time bomb, then I don't know what is. Peter's only just starting to trust Walter again, only just starting to take charge and function as part of the team, and it'll be rough when he learns that he isn't who he thinks he is.

- Why did Liv say that Greek phrase that Peter's mom used to say? It'll probably be important later on, and it probably will have seventeen web pages devoted to it by now. And is she dead, or just extranged? If she's dead, maybe Liv can talk to ghosts as well as being able to affect things With Her Mind. Wouldn't it be a nice thickening of this plot if she's dead because of something that happened from Walter's experiments, which Peter also didn't know? And does / did she know about Peter?

- At the end there, that was awesome. Peter basically held the whole of the oversight board hostage with that one piece of broken trans-dimensional tech. I like hard-ass!Peter, and I hope we see more of him.

- Astrid is still great-- she takes everything in stride and totally knows how to handle Walter's weirdness.

A great start to the season, and it feels like it's found it's legs, which is a good season ahead of X-Files, of which it referenced twice, one of which seemed to indicate that they're sort of picking up where the X-files left off all those years ago. It did exactly what a season premier should do: get me ready to obsess over the rest of the season.

true blood: s02 e11

2009-09-03T13:10:00.000-07:00

So, we meet the Queen, and... I am underwhelmed. She's interesting, but she seems too light and entirely unthreatening to hold power over anyone, and she seems to have stalled out somewhere between the twenties and the fifties. And she's kinky, but in a way that's somewhere between cute and boring, rather than in a way that would seem provocative.

And she's as messy an eater as any of the others. Really, you'd think centuries upon centuries would teach you to eat cleanly.

Anyway, this ep was wheel-spinning-tastic. Everyone's waiting for something, and nothing can happen yet because it isn't the end of the season yet, so we get the following:

- Sam, Andy and Jason are holed up in the bar, waiting to see what happens next, which leads to Andy and Jason going to get weapons from the police station, and Sam taking care of Arlene's kids, and they seem to be the only kids in town (I'd wondered what happened to them; apparently they've been hiding off-screen for three days while everything goes down). They go looking for help, and wind up at Fantasia, talking to Eric, who's lounging fabulously nonchalantly in a silver suit, with Pam, who's pissed that the maenad ruined her shoes way back at the beginning of the season, hates kids, is aggravated by Eric's interest in Sookie, and is wearing too much makeup.

ps: Eric referring to kids as miniature humans and "teacup humans" was about the best part of this episode.

Eric goes to talk to the Queen, but arrives just as Bill is finally leaving, and there's some threatening between them, and it's all very alpha-male.

- Maryanne finds out that Sam got away and is pissed, and then doesn't really do anything right away.

- Bill is in the Queen's Day Room, which is set up to look like a beach during the day, and he's champing at the bit, but she's tottering around playing Yahtzee and not sharing her information, but there's no indication of what she could do to Bill if he decided to just up and leave. Very little tention in those scenes at all. But we do meet Sookie's cousin, who was mentioned once in the first season as having disappeared, and who doesn't know that Gran's dead.

- Hoyt is pissed that Jessica bit his mom, and drags mom off, which leaves Jessical dangerously unstable, it seems. Back at mama's house, though, she's being so horrible that Hoyt doesn't know what to do with her-- she tells him his dad killed himself, that he was as bad husband, and that she always wanted to go out and just get drunk or go home with someone like anyone else can, but she was always stuck taking care of him. This does not bode well for Hoyt, and I'll be terribly distressed if he doesn't make up with Jessica. We need at least one working relationship in this town.

- Tara's a horrible manipulative bitch to her mother, preying on her god-fearing and devil-fearing, and talks her into letting her go, so Lettie Mae holds LaFayette hostage with the gun, which sets off his stress disorder, and we get the second-best scene in the episode, which was Eric wearing Lettie Mae's going-to-church outfit, bracelets and all. So Tara goes right back into Maryanne's hands on behalf of Eggs, who is an idiot.

- Sookie and LaFayette talk a little about being tricked into being bonded to Eric, which is fun, before the crap with Tara goes down, then they break away and get to Sookie's house, where Sookie is horrified at what she sees. She negotiates various house-of-horror moments, makes it up to Gran's room, and finds Tara The Horrible and Eggs The Annoying smashing up Gran's things and building a nest on the bed around an egg about the size of an ostritch egg, and who know's what's up with that.

- LaFayette, who had gone to distract Terry and Arlene with drugs comes up behind her and he's gone all blackeyed, and we get an episode ending on Sookie's scream, which we haven't had since the first few eps of the first season.

So not the best of eps, but not really all that bad-- just sort of "get on with it already!"-ish. Remember how I said the pacing is weird? It's like they didn't really have enough story to fill this episode, so we got a whole ep of people waiting around for the plot to pick back up, and it won't do that till the next episode. And the coming-together of the two storylines feels a little... sloppy. Sookie went on over to her house after promising she wouldn't, catching Tara didn't really do much, since it was like the third chapter of a Doctor Who serial up in this place and she just got captured again, Maryanne was wandering around not really doing much... So yeah. All we really learned is that she has to think she's called up the God, finally, and that it's devouring her so that she's actually killable. Did we need a whole episode for that?

So here's to hoping the new ep makes sense.

the colony: episode 9

2009-09-01T21:21:00.000-07:00

This week, John V finally gets to do something.

We're up past day 30, and the Colonists have been at this for more than a month.It's beyond real to them; they've accepted this world entirely. But food is running very low, water is very low, morale is starting to get dangerously low. They go out to collect water, maybe some fish, and while they're there, a group of religious pilgrims or missionaries comes up the opposite way and asks if they have anything to spare; they say they don't, and the missionaries are fine with that, but John V, who came in with the strongest faith of the group, feels bad just turning them away, and gives them his own personal water. Before they all go their separate ways, a lady comes back and gives him a tin of vienna sausages, and that sets off a religious revival for him.

Later, when two travelers come asking for water, the Colony almost turns them away-- Joey tries to and Mike is all up in arms (and when is he not, really)-- but John V insists, and the girls go along and John C thinks everyone is basically good, and so they give the water and the sausages.

I see where the two are claiming it's a security issue and a survival issue, but they're supposed to be rebuilding society, and I think maybe they should be letting anyone in who can contribute and won't cause more strife than they already have, and it's nice to see someone being generous and helpful for once. We're hoping they get some sort of reward for this, like maybe those two come back and bring them food or another goat or something.

Other things:

We missed an episode a while back, and apparently soap was made, and it was tested and proven good this week.

The water needed to be purified in some way that didn't require boiling, because they've used up all their propaneand boiling it on the wood stove both uses their wood too quickly and takes too damn long, so John C starts work on an ozonater that will greate ozone, pump it into a bucket of water, and turn it from a horrible gray cloudiness to a pristine clear in half an hour per bucket, and that goes swimmingly. Mike helps with the pump, and he's so much better when he has something to do-- his voice is kinder and more level, there's less shouting, he seems way less threatened by the world... if I were there and had the luxury of noticing such things, I'd say we'd just have to keep him useful and busy all the time so he doesn;t have a chance to cause more fights.

Morgan saw the demoralization going on, and decided to fix a record player, which she basically had to rebuild from scratch, and managed to get working again, and when the music started playing, it was amazing. Everyone was dancing and laughing. It was moving, to say the least.

And John C found an old reel-to-reel player and fixed the lamp, and they played old videos without knowing what was on them-- they were old family movies, people on the Santa Monica boardwalk and the beach. It got everyone talking about what they miss for the first time, and sort of bonded them all in sadness. And it was amazing for the study: they talked about it all like it was really gone, like they wouldn't be going back in just over a month. They re re-devoted to saving themselves and culture and civilization, and it revived the need to build that truck and get moving for greener pastures... and it made me worry again about how they'll be able to survive the transition back to teh normal world when they go home.

Next week, someone from John C's family shows up, and they go on another raid for supplies, and it looks like that goes badly-- because this week there was almost no fighting, so they have to make it up next time.

Oh, and there was a comercial for a show where a guy teaches you how to live through any disaster, one massive cultural collapse each episode, and as soon as that hits the Hulu, I'm all over it (though it'll likely go on the other TV blog-- hypothetical is where scifi starts, not where it plays out).

being human: e05 - e06

2009-08-31T13:32:00.000-07:00

Oh my god, these last two episodes!

So! Mitchell has turned his back on humanity and is embrasing his vampire ways in an enlightened and helping-the-humans-evolve sort of way. Herrick has him recruiting from the hospital, turning people right before they die, and is constantly telling the other vamps stories about how great he was when he was newer. Mitchell meets an old girlfriend from the 60s and offers her the chance to live forever, and she points out that this is not evolution, it's stagnation; things have to change, people have to die and new people have to be born. It's part of what being human is.

Meanwhile, Annie is haunting Owen, trying to get him to admit what he did, and when they have their showdown, at long last, she's awesome and intimidating and powerful... and Owen isn't scared for more than a minute or two. He yells at her and overpowers her like he did when she was alive, and for a while, she loses all power over anything. She should have gone all poltergiest and scary on him, but she didn't blow a single light or anything, and it's frustrating to watch her getting beat up when that's how she died and she knows better now.

Mitchell finds out what the true plan is: everyone will be recruited whether they want to or not, the whole world gone to vampires except a small numberthat will be kept for food. He finds the first round of human cattle in the basement, and when Herrick finds him there, they hold him against his will.

When George finds out, he shocks Annie out of her stupor to go save him, saying that her friends are her purpose, and if she doesn't care about that, then she really has died. Together, they bust into the funeral home where the vampire base is, and fight their way through to where Mitchell is in the silliest way possible: George hasn't ever really picked a fight before, and Annie is still terrified of everything, but they find Mitchell before the vampires can force him to kill himself, and they get out with Lauren's help. She's been struggling with the lies and the manipulation, she's seen the cattle and fed from them herself, and she can't handle being what she is. She gets them to safety and then begs Mitchell to end her. He was the one who started this, so he should be the one who ends it. After some convincing, he does, and he holds her while she turns to ash and blows away in a really touching and kind of beautiful scene.

They get back home, and with Mitchell and George behind her, Annie faces Owen again, and this time, she won't be intimidated. She just fought off a horde of vampires; he's not nearly so scary as he was. This time, it works, and when she whispers something that only the dead can know to him, he stumbles away, terrified and distraught, and turns himself into the police to protect himself. With that done, the door comes for Annie, and when she's saying goodbye, there's a knock at the door. Mitchell answers it, and Herrick stakes him. Blood's everywhere, George is telling her to just go, that he can handle it, and Annie doesn't know what to do--

And the episode ends and I die. I just keel over, and I stay dead and zombie-like until we get to watch the next episode, because I really don't do well with cliffhangers.

The next episode shows us two years before, when Mitchell and George met: the vamp-thugs were attacking George shortly after he became a vampire and ran off, simply because he was a were and they don't like weres. Mitchell chased them off, and told him to leave, and George said 'What then?' because even then, he knew it'd never end.

Cut back to now, and they've gotten the stake out of Mitchell, but checking him into the hospital was probably a bad idea; he's obviously still alive, but they can't get a pulse on him, and though he's healing way faster than expected, he's not getting better: his body can't make replacement blood for all the blood he lost, and he refuses to feed because every time he does, he loses a little more of himself.

Annie goes home, the farthest she's ever teleported, and finds that the door is gone.

George and Nina have more fights, while he's standing vigil, and he finds out that Herrick's turned the lunch lady. There's a minor throw down in the cafeteria, but George is still too human to kill him.

That night, the Vickar (who's sarcastic and witty and wonderful) is called in to minister to Mitchell because the hospital doesn't think he'll live through the night, and George tries to tell him it's not such a great idea... until Mitchell comes to long enough to tell them that the baddies are in the hospital. George's star of david and the terrified Vickar's Bible quotes are enough to chase off the thugs, but the Vickar takes the reality of their inhumanness pretty badly.

In the morning, Josie goes to see Mitchell and convinces him that she doesn't have long to live, anyway, and he should think of her blood as an organ-donation thing so he can live. He tells her no, but in the end, he does it anyway, and leaves the hospital crying, as the nurse finds Josie dead. Ane he decides that this has to end. He challaenges Herrick to a one-on-one with the understanding that George and Annie are to be left alone regardless of how it goes (because Herrick could kill George outright, and without the boys, Annie's only tie to the world is the house, which he can then burn down). Everyone is unhappy with it, but George takes the chance he's given, and when Annie flips out, Mitchell tells her that she can't understand what it's like-- that when you aren't feeding, you're tortured by everything you've done in perfect, blinding detail, and he doesn't really want to live if it's bad and he has to remember. George convinces Mitchell to let him deliver the news and the location.

Annie doesn't like it, still, and uses her anger-- and the new ability she's discovered to hear the recently head-- to fuel something she can do: she frees all the human cattle and trashes the base. And it's awesome. Really awesome. Her clothes have changed (which is apparently an indicator of her mental state, according to interviews), and she's surrounded by wind. Doors blow open, furniture topples, the vamps have nothing they can use against her, and she's like an angel to the captured.

And I totally called the next part, but it didn't make it any better when it happened.

George tells Herrick directions to his dungeon. It's the night of his change, and he locks the door so that Herrick's trapped, and Herrick goes all threatening and superior and aweful on him, and doesn't even have the decency to feel scared as he watches George change before his eyes-- at least, not until George tells him that saving human lives means he's proving his own humanity, not neglecting it.

Mitchell and Annie try to stop him about the same time that Nina discovers a letter he left for her, breaking up. She's angry enough to follow them down to the basement, and busts in to see waht's up-- and has to be forced back out. She watches George transform, and she doesn't scream or anything, and seeing her manages to calm him, stops his rages dead in their tracks. After he's torn Herrick to shreds, of course.

Afterward, George and Nina are talking, and he finally tells her the truth about what happened to him, and she still hasn't run screaming. Downstairs, Mitchell and Annie are worried that he's been changed by intentionally killing someone, but she seems to be fine. Annie wonders about the door and her purpose, and Mitchell says it's like denying the afterlife let her tap into some new power she didn't know she had. All of them wonder waht happens now, and there's an attempt at a very fragile hope that it's over and they can live in peace. But Nina got scratched in the dungeon, and Owen's been talking to people in jail, and the nameless guy he's explaining everything to calls someone else and says "we've found them"-- and that's how the series ends: uncomfortable, unfinished, and awkward, with more horror to come, but calm now.

Here's what I think can / might happen in the next series, being filmed now:

- Annie will continue to self-actualize. She'll probably have to face the door again at some point, but maybe not this next season. She'll become a really kick-ass poltergeist-- and maybe will have to fight to stay human the way the others do, absolute power and all that.

- George and Nina will have to deal with what's happened to Nina; George will undoubtedly feel guilty, because he's good at guilt. Nina... it's hard to say. She has a short temper, but she's also strong enough to face it. But the fact that he wasn't entirely turned might mean something-- she's only partially infected, or she's different than him, or it'll be like finding out whether you've got some horrible disease or something, and there will be weeks of waiting.

- I'd still love Nina's injuries to have been caused by something supernatural; and maybe that'll change her path with the scratches, too.

- Mitchell will try to go off the blood again, and will be even more set against the rest of the vamps, but they won't give up on him. Someone worse will take over, most likely. H thinks they'll recruit Owen, which would be crushing and horrible.

- Hopefully this new guy and whoever he's taking to on the phone will be a new faction entirely-- monster hunters or paranormal investigators or something.

- I want to see the Vickar again. And I still maintain that they need allies in the rest of the world, a support system they can turn to.

classic who: the deadly assassin

2009-08-26T17:10:00.000-07:00

As if there's really any other form of assassin.

So! We finally got the next ep working, and settled in for a good old romp through the Whoniverse... except this one's weird. Sarah Jane's just gone, and he's been called back home with a vision of the President being assassinated as if he's the one doing it, and it's just the Doctor, talking to himself because he has no Companion for four episodes. And really, alot of the third episode could have been gone and it would have been the same story, to whit:

As soon as the Doctor is back on Gallifrey, he's taken prisoner, which he immediately breaks out ofand quickly gets framed-- while trying to stop the assassination, he gets caught up in it and goes wonky, and starts thinking he's in the vision (or something?), and then he's arrested again, and tortured for a bit. Turns out he was aiming for the real killer down amongst the High Council, and set up to take the fall.

Chancellor Goth (who isn't wearing nearly enough eyeliner for that name, and seems to be the only one comfortable in the roll and the clothes), starts a trial, and the Doctor calls on paperwork to get himself entered into the running for the presidency, which buys him time in the trial. He manages to convince Spandrell that he isn't the assassin, despite the evidence, and they turn up various suspiscious clues: The gun's sight was off, so there's no way he could have fired the actual death shot, the person running the camera that should have recorded it is missing, and when he's founf, he's compressed a la the master, the last reels are stollen, there's no record of the Master, and the Doctor's record has been tampered with. And then they hit on the fact that the vision the Doctor had can only be explained by being the result of the Matrix-- the shared memories of thousands of dead Gallifreyans that work together in a computer to predict the future-- rerouted to him so that he'd come play patsy and it wouldn't be recorded.

So the Doctor goes into the Matrix to get the Master, who's all gross and buggy-eyed and somewhat like Mum-Ra now that he's come to the end of his regeneration cycle and is holding himself together and alive by force of will alone, and that's when there's a whole episode of the Doctor stuck in Vietnam. ::sigh:: It's like getting captured and escapingand getting captured again, except there's no Companion to talk it through with, and escaping is replaced with the Doctor sliding down quarry walls. Repeatedly.

Eventually, he stops the one coming after him, and it's Goth! ::dun dun DUN:: He manages to make it out of the Matrix just in time, but Goth is still tied in when the Master tries to kill the Doctor, and he gets the worst of it. The Doctor traces the Matrix connection back to the catacombs, where they find the Master dead, and Goth not there enough to answer their questions, only enough to say that he brought the Master back and couldn't stop him from taking over. And he has a doomsday plan, but he doesn't say what it is before he dies.

Back in the offices, they tell Borusa waht happened, and he tells them a better story that will keep the faith in the Time Lords whole, and orders that the bodies be altered and so on to make the story fit. But the Doctor still wants to know waht the Master had planned, and why it mattered if his patsy was President, The only thing different than being any other Time Lord is access to the symbols of office, which the Doctor realizes are old relics of the sort of power that would let the Master regenerate all over again, and destroy Gallifrey and the Time Lords in the process.

Oh, and, you know, the Master's not dead.

So there's a whole one-on-one where the Master is releasing the Eye of Harmony that's the source of all Gallifrey's power (which has apparently been forgotten by this point), and the Doctor's stopping him. It ends with half the Citadel collapsed, but the world intact, and the Master down a fissure. Spandrell and Engin see the Doctor off, and witness the Master disappearing into time without trying to stop him, and that sort of spoiled the ending for me.

So here's a picture of the Doctor looking shifty in the 'seldom worn ceremonial robes' that they always seem to be wearing:

What I take away from this story are the following details:

- From the beginning, the Doctor was considered a renegade, but Borusa (an old teacher at the Academy) probably likes him anyway.

- Time Lords are, as a whole, pretty dumb. They don't know where their power comes from, they aren't the top of the technological totem pole anymore, and they live for ages and never do anything with it. Also, they're divided into assholes and doddering old men.

- There aren't any Time Ladies at all in this story, which seems odd.

- The Citadel is something like Superman's Fortress of Solitude and something like the Tok'ra crystal bases, and something like a melted freezy-pop.

- The Doctor wears long johns.

- I miss the presence of a Companion, and I'm glad this is the only one without one.

- Goddess above and below, I'm sick of the Master.

the colony: episode 6

2009-08-25T20:42:00.000-07:00

This week's ep was all about loss and communication.

Doctor George and Nurse Allison have been dealing with minor injuries, but they've realized that the first aid kit is getting very low and sooner or later, someone's going to need a hospital (some of them have already lost ten to twenty pounds), and so they build a nice clean little infirmary. To stock it, they go make a raid on an abandoned hospital not far from the Sanctuary. They find scads of useful things, scales and oil for the generator and bandages and basic medicines and things-- and George goes missing.

The search for him for hours, and can't find any sign of him, take all the stuff back, and then go looking again, and finally rule that he just isn't there, that he's been kidnapped or has gotten lost. There's all the stages of grief, and then they start doing something about it. Allison and Mike make a huge SOS sign and hang it like a billboard on the roof. Joey finishes the bed of the truck and they install the water tank that will allow them to bring water with them. Vlad builds fireworks to use like flares. And John C and Morgan start building a transmitter, a really old kind like they used to use on ships in the Atlantic in 1900, called a spark-gap transmitter. It shorts out the power, but they fix it and John C puts it on a battery so it won't do that again. Morgan rigs a reciever out of wire, a plastic jar, a phone reciever and an alligator clip, and that's one of the coolest things I've seen. Then she amplifies it with an old TV, and it gets cooler. And they work. The fireworks don't, but they've got the ability to transmit morse code in a way that people can pick up, and if George is out there, he can find his way home.

But over the credits, there was a voiceover where he basically said goodbye, so hopes are low now-- though he did say he's going to try everything in his power to get back. I wonder if something called him away from the show? I wonder if he knew ahead of time that he was leaving? He didn't have anything really dramatic to do, but he was a level head in a group of hotheads, and it was nice to have him around. It'll be scarier without him, though; how much can a trauma nurse do? Could she do surgery if she needed to? Maybe Amy, who was in Peace Corps will be able to do more; Allison is the Doctor now, and she'll need a Nurse if anything goes seriously wrong.

So now they're even more visible than they were, and they are getting low on resources and protein, and the stress is getting to them. The previews from next week don't tell us a great deal about anything other than that there'll be more yelling.

Here's what the offical site has to say about George:

"George grew up as an athletic, popular kid in Tampa, Florida to a family of doctors. After majoring in Marine Biology at University of Florida and considering a career as a marine mammal veterinarian, he decided to go to medical school because he liked to take care of people even more than animals. Medically trained in Tennessee and New Orleans, George is fond of traveling and has discovered a pleasant benefit to his job: he can do it anywhere. George is a thinker and doesn’t act before considering consequences of his actions because if he makes a mistake at work, someone could die. He is a strong fisherman, can start a fire and hunt. George returned to New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to provide care in makeshift medical units."

being human: s01 e04

2009-08-25T20:15:00.000-07:00

In this picture, Mitchell looks an aweful lot like Henry, doesn't he? But henry had hair that could be splict.

Goddess, this episode did it's darnedst to kill me. Right in the face. Tore out my heart, and then killed me in the face.

Mitchell defends a kid from bullies, and they become fast friends-- the kid reminds him of his young, human self, and he wishes someone would have stuck up for him. The mom's fine with it, he needs a father figure and a friend. And then Mitchell lets him borrow a DVD, but it's the wrong one in the case-- it's the snuff film from last ep, but the mom doesn't know that, all she knows is that there's a picture of a naked guy, all aroused and grinding, and then dead, and she assumes that Mitchell is a perv. And the townsfolk turn on them.

Meanwhile, George is trying to have a relationship with Nina, and he's scared that she wants the Wolf, but she's relieved that he's not always like that. But when things go south in the neighborhood, George crawls back into his hole and won't talk to her and breaks up with her, and it's terrible, because she's trying and she can't understand waht could be so horrible about him that he'd rather she thinks he's a pedophile.

Annie's gone poltergeist, but she can't control it, and even the thought of seeing Owen again makes all the lights in the house explode. When he does come by, she subliminally affects Jenny, and creeps out Owen, which makes him show his real self. He tells the boys they have to leave at the end of next month, and Annie burns off all her old harded pictures; he's taken everything from her, but he's not taking her boys or her house.

The cops, of course, are headed up by the vampires, and they basically tell Mitchell that if he turns his back on them permanently, they'll let this get all out of hand and he'll never live it down.

The kid in question, Bernie, tries to appologise to Mitchell, and the neighbors misunderstand and start a fight, and when Bernie's running back to his mom, Mitchell isn't fast enough, and he gets hit by a car. Because the dying nurses weren't heartrending enough, now they have to kill kids. The shock sends George to Nina's house, where he tells her what happens, and she calms him down, and they come back around to the secrets; he isn't ready to tell her what his is, and she makes them even by showing him some horrible scars and saying that she won't tell him, either. Everyone has secrets.

Mitchell goes into the hospital and confesses to Bernie's mom (Fleur, even though with her accent, it sounds like Flerr) what he is, and gives her the choice: let Bernie die in a coma, or let him help them by saving Bernie. It looks like she lets him die, but then when they're at the train station, she appologises to Mitchell, and Bernie comes up behind them, pale and cold, but not dead. He tells Fleur that she needs to stay with him, keep him good, implying that she needs to keep him human, and then he leaves them. Again. Like he did with Lauren, and like he couldn't do with deadnurse, and like he promised not to do again. And then he goes back to Herrick, and rejoins the nest.

Dammit.

Every interpretation along the way was the wrong one, every choice was for the worse. I don't know if I can handle it if it keeps going like that.

But it did have the best line: "I'm not suggesting we wear chastity rings like American kids, and don't shag because we're mental, just that we take it slow."

I'm liking Annie the poltergiest, but I hope she doesn't turn bad, and I hope resolving her anger doesn't set her free; the show would have to find a new ghost. I'm not liking Mitchell giving up on humanity and leaving another offspring behind; it's so nihilistic, and he was the one who wanted to regain his humanity so badly. I'm loving George making it work with Nina, even if every single thing he says is the wrong thing, and his awkwardness knows no bounds-- and I still think that if anyone can handle what they are, it's Nina. Maybe her scars even came from something supernatural that she hasn't faced yet (which would be flippin' awesome, and would really tie the room together-- I mean, the plot together). And telling her would go miles toward building some trust in George, since he lost everything and doesn't even trust himself. There can't be many episodes left; this is getting really tough.

being human: s01 e03

2009-08-24T19:45:00.000-07:00

Yay for this show! It's intersting right off the bat and stays that way. Good for us.

This week, Mitchel decides that Anie needs to 'meet someone with the same condition' after he finds her tearing up the house and tells them that they're only days away from when she was supposed to get married, and introduces her to Gilbert, who died the same year she was born and is stuck forever with Unfortunate 80s Hair. He takes her to see her grave, and imparts what knowledge he feels she should know, trying to convince her that she can go anywhere and do anything now, but what she gets out of it is that she needs to resolve whatever issues are keeping her on this plain. At first, she thinks that it's because she never got to be a wife, and she starts haunting Owen's house, picking up after him, ironing his shirts, finding his keys, cooking for him. Which doesn't work, and I'm glad of that because it's so unfeminist. But when she's following him around, he comes to fix the pipes in the house, which have been acting up since the first episode and are worse now, she witnesses him pulling a lacy thong out of the drain, and remembers that they'd had a fight-- that he pushed her down the stairs and killed her-- and that doesn't free her either. But it's Gilbert who's there to comfort her, and somewhere along the line, he fell for her, which was his resolution, and she watches him passing on (which is reminiscent of Dead Like Me a little, especially since Nina looks a little like Ellen Muth). I was starting to like Gilbert, and it would have been nice to keep him around and expand their circle of people on their side / explore his story that ended with him being dead so he could be the right age twenty two years later to fall for a fellow ghost, but, hey. Can't win them all.

So now she knows that the love of her life killed her, and she still hasn't passed on. Mitchel seems to be caring about her more than he thinks he does, and the house seems to be a part of her, the pipes acting as her subconscious, and as that point was stated explicitly in the show, I hope it gets explored more, because she's not really a person anymore, and she could be the house as well as herself.

Meanwhile, Mitchel has also set up George with Nina the Nurse, and George cooks dinner for her, and things progress up to the bedroom... where he starts scratching at her back and biting on her and spooks himself. It's very close to the full moon, and he can't control his animalistics, and since he can't explain what's actually wrong, he basically tells her he has a dysfunction (thought I think if anyone could handle it, it'd be her). This leads to her talking to him very seriously about all the things they could do other than have actual sex, and that gets him all riled up, as he's on his way to the Change when she waylays him, and he boinks her good and then leaves her grinning and flees to the woods, which he can't explain to her and which we haven't seen him have to face yet. I think it'd be awesome if he could manage to make it work; he's trying the hardest to be a normal person, after all. And it would be helpful to have someone in the medical profession on their side.

Meanwhile meanwhile, Lauren has come to the hospital to tell Mitchel that the video from last ep was forced-- the Big Bads made her seduce that dude with the tramp stamp and film her killing him, hoping that she could be bait to lure Mitchel back into their vampire politics. He convinces her to try to go clean, but she doesn't do very well, and when he gives in and lets her have some of his blood, that only makes her a junkie. Bloodbank doesen't help either, and she takes it that he isn't helping her enough, which drives her, half-crazy with hunger, out into the street, where Creepyface from the first episode is waiting for her, and she goes off with him before Mitchel can find her. Bummer. But she's weak and I don't like her much, at least not yet.

So we learned that Owen isn't all that great a guy, that Annie is possibly tied into the house now and that she's as scared to move on as she is to stay forever, Mitchel is getting used to her being around, George is capable of controlling himself enough to not eat someone he's having sex with, and young vampires are weak. The scenes for next week showed them getting found out-- or, at least that's what the comercials make it look like, but that's not the last episode, so something else has to happen. Like Annie finally coming into her power as a ghost! Excellent!

I'm getting a bit tired of vampires always being embroiled in politics-- especially while watching True Blood at the same time-- and that's one of the reasons I liked Blood Ties so much; Henry couldn't care less about other vamps most of the time, and they're pathologically solitary, something alot of these other shows could use. But this show doesn't worry about that too much, and it's a third or fourth-string plotline at best, which keeps it bearable. I do like, however, when Mitchel's trying his best to be human, which always seems to be outside in the cold, smoking a cigarrette, like last ep when he was on the stoop with Annie, talking to George and laughing, and this ep when he was being charming and evasive with Nina.

true blood: s02 e10 new world in my view

2009-08-24T09:12:00.000-07:00

Soon, this season will be done, and I'm starting to miss it already. Also, I think they took too long to get to this point, but it's getting exciting enough that I can deal with it-- I just wish they'd split it up better between dallas and home so that this ending part had as much attention given to it as the beginning part.

The episode starts moments after the end of the last one; Sookie is in that cute little gingham dress, walking down the hall, though H noted that she'd taken the time to straight-iron her hair. She goes into a room, and finds Eric, covered in blood-tears, devistated by the loss of Godric, and comforts him by kissing his cheeks (in much the way a fish might), which he takes as an invitation, and then they start making out (where he's trying hard to sell it and she's sort of bumping into him with her mouth). Out come the fangs, and she touches them, then offers her neck--

--and wakes up in the car, moments from home, with Bill in a coffin in the back. And then I feel bad for Bill, because he doesn't even know what's going on, and his love scenes with her are more convincing (which I'd be willing to bet are so because she's actually dating him in real life and is uncomfortable making out with anyone else, even on screen; though I think Eric is hotter, and I wish those scenes were better).

So anyway, they're finally coming home, and they find the whole town trashed, graffittied, full of lunatics screaming about the coming god and how they have to find Sam, and they go home and find it completely transformed, which really should have pissed Sookie off more. Seriously. This is, like, four days after her grandma died and she goes away for a minute and comes back to this? Why isn't she raging mad? And the mess includes a massive man made out of meat and plants and dead things, and she's not ready to light things on fire with her mind? Maryann is there, and she tells Sookie it's her house now, and when she tries to attack Sook, our little telepath reads her mind and finds out that she's the monster that attacked her in the woods and killed all those people. Convenient, that. Not having to figure stuff out or anything. But then she gets all glowy in the hand and bran-zaps Maryann, which amuses and confuses her more than it stops her. And somewhere in here, Bill jumps and drains Maryann, but it's horrible black blood and it makes him foam at the mouth and vomit, and she actually kind of likes it. And then there's several scenes of Bill vomiting profusely as they head over to LaFayette's to help with the tied-up and posessed Tara.

Meanwhile, Sam and Andy are trying to figure out what to do when they get a call from Arlene begging for help at the bar-- and Sam's dumb enough to let his soft little heart lead him there, where he gets jumped and locks himself in the freezer. Everyone tires to get them out, but Terry realizes that he can't go anywhere, so it's mission accomplished, and sends readheaded drunk lady to call Maryann, but she gets distracted along the way. So Maryanne doesn't know that they've cornered him. I'm still tired of this mess with the orgies and the black eyes and such, but I really love that Terry gets to be strong and leader-like; he's the most reasonable of the people taken over, and that's a nice switch from him being the least reasonable of the normals.

Sookie and Bill arrive at LaFayette's and try to get Tara to come back to herself; her mother's praying helps a little, but it takes Sookie and Bill double-whammying her with glamour and telepathy to get through the wall Maryann put up, and she remembers all the crazy shit that she did, and wakes up. I'm assuming that Maryann's power works by getting people to do this stuff and not letting them remember so that they won't fight back. So Tara's back, but now they know what they're up against.

Jason arrives at the bar and quickly ruins a chainsaw, which is probably his best weapon, and uses a nailgun to hold Arlene hostage, which gets Terry to call everyone off, and he gets the boys out of the fridge... and then they all get jumped again. This time, Sam gives himself over in hopes that letting them have him will save the town (thought I doubt that), and they drag him out to tie him to a car in the parking lot and prep him for sacrifice-- or maybe sacrifice him on the spot without Maryann. He's saved when the god they're calling arrives... in the form of Jason Stackhouse in a gas mask with a police light behind him and a flare in each hand. They're all messed up enough to belive it's him, and when Sam asks them to smite him, and he obligingly goes 'I smite you!' and Sam collapses into a pile of clothes, well, that's a pretty neat way out. And it works. Everyone leaves. Which comfuses Jason and Andy, but there's no time to explain, and we get to see Sam's butt. Hee.

Bill figures out what Maryann is and what she's doing because of that book he was reading in the twenties (which is why that scene was there), but he doesn't know what to do to stop her. He might know someone who can, though, and he goes to find that someone, leaving Sookie with Tara and making her promise to stay clear of her house. Which I'm sure she'll totally keep. In the next scene, Bill's at a placial estate, which was apparently not that far from Bon Temps, and he gets in to see the Queen, and all we see is a bare foot with blood dripping down. She's probably just eating messily or something, but it'd be awesome if someone offed her and the vampire politics are worse than we thought. Probably not, though, as the casting is already known, and it's not a nobody. ::sigh::

Oh! And meanwhile, Hoyt and Jessica have been trying to contain Hoyt's mom, and she's as messed up as the rest of the town, with her hair all big and spewing all kinds of viscious hate, which makes Jessica more and more mad-- until she attacks Mama Fortenberry. Which will be interesting for Hoyt next episode, I'm sure.

But see what I mean? This all happens back to back to back, practically all at once, and it would have been nice if they'd come home a few episodes earlier and this could be spread out some. We could have done without some of Stan's posturing, and without as much Lorena, and we didn't really need all those flashbacks, now did we? And soon the season will be over, and I'll have to wait until next year to see more Eric, and so see how that gets resovled, because I like Bill and I want the resolution to be fair to all three of them. Also: How are they going to defeat a god? And how are they going to beat that next season?

being human: s01 e01-e02

2009-08-23T08:33:00.000-07:00

She's never really ephemeral like this.

Anyway. We'd heard of this show, of course, through our various fandoms: vampire shows, BBC imports, Dr Who actors. Didn't know much about it, though. So when we got the fancy cable, and we found it on the On Demand, and when the latest episode of Doctor Whos Day (The Deadly Assasin) failed to work, we decided to see what it was all about.

And we liked it. All three of us.

Here's the deal: A fairly new werewolf lives with a hundred-year-old vampire, and the house they've moved into is inhabited by a ghost-- of the landlord's fiancee, who died fairly recently, and hasn't been visible to anyone until they move in. In the first episode, she's learning how to interact with the world again, and can sometimes be visible to normal people (if they're expecting to see someone there, like when she accepts the pizza order and stuff), and she can pick things up and move them around and so on. Meanwhile, the vampire has accidentally turned someone they worlked with (at the hospital), and is trying to go off the blood, feeling guilty about killing someone in true brooding vampire fashion, and the werewolf is about to turn, but his usual safe house is being renovated and he has to be locked inside his own house, where he trashes everything.

In the second episode, Marshal the Vamp has to deal with Lauren, the babyvamp that he made, who wants everything to be chaotic and wants him to take responsibility for what he did to her, while also having to deal with the mysterious plans of the rest of the vampires, who seem to be everywhere and look like they're getting tired of hiding in plain view. He decided to choose people over his own kind, and that means he's also decided to get to know the neighbors, to act more like a normal human-- and to go out on a date with a nurse, which ends badly for several reasons. Meanwhile again, George the Were has met a man named Tully (the same who was Shakespeare on Doctor Who, if you're keeping track), who promises to teach him how to handle being a were, how to outsmart his own animalistic self, how to embrace the strength and the raw power of it in his human life as well as his wolf life-- and turns out to be the one who turned him to begin with, wanting to get George on his side to build a pack to replace the life he lost. He starts out by charming everyone, and ends up by damn near molesting Annie the Ghost and entirely alienating George.

I can't wait to see what happens next.

It's got an interesting set up. George is a fairly standard Were, but he's such a sweet, awkward, timid guy that it's entirely alien to him. Marshal is a strange sort of vamp who seems to be free of alot of the curse part-- he can eat normal food, he can go out in the sun for at least short times-- but he's sort of addicted to the blood, and he doesn't age or die, so it's a constant struggle to not attack people. Even though he wants to. And Annie's tied to the house more by fear of the world and what's in it than by any metaphysical bonds, and can go through walls and disappear, but in general is trying to act like she's still alive, even though she can't eat or sleep or change her clothes or anything, and I'm willing to bet her death wasn't as accidental and innocent as we're led to believe. I'd like to see her embrace her ghostliness and poltergeist out, even if it's just once, though; it'd be awesome if she could blow out the windows or posess someone.

movie: inkheart

2009-08-18T22:05:00.000-07:00

I haven't read the book, but if the parts of the movie that work are any indication, I think I want to. If the parts of the movie that don't work are any indication... Well, I hope the book hangs together better.

I liked the movie for it's promise and it's premise: a few people in the world can read things out of stories and make them real in our world, and they retain the characters and abilities they had in their own worlds. One of these people lost his wife when he read something out of a book and she was traded for it, because there always has to be a trade, and for the last nine years, he's been looking for a new copy of the book so he can try reading her out of it. This is awesome.

And then there's Paul Bettany, who is always great, playing a character that should be perfect for him, but because of the screen adaptation? The editing? Something, he motivations are shaky at best and contradictory at worst, and this fun character is all over the damn place and never really changes. His arc is more of a wobbly loop? I want to reedit his part. Badly.

The daughter (Meggie? Maggy?) should have been better, too. A feisty girl who never knew her mother and grew up roaming Europe, who wants to be a writer and is supposed to be good at it? So little of that comes through, because she's mostly crying and being captured. She's so integral to the end, but she never really gets any volition of her own. Even when she's righting hte wrongs, even when she's editing the world for herself, it's because someone else told her to. And that disappoints me. And why is there so little trading / magical recoil when she reads? Does she just do it better, and they forgot to mention the fact, or is that another plot hole?

I do like Alladin the Flying Squirrel, but it's more because he's the only one aware of how cool all this is who isn't a greasy badguy. And where did 'you like her, don't you?' come from? The two minutes they sat next to each other in the car?

Rhyssa is dull. The Aunt is lovely and cranky and colorful, and then has nothing to do, though it looks like they wanted her to like the stuttering reader. Capricorn is not really all that threatening, and overacts. The henchmen are interchangable and disposable. The Shadow looks awesome, probably the best thing in the movie (except maybe the gorgeous settings), but doesn't do much and doesn't manage to convey what, exactly, lets it 'flay the skin off your bones' as was threatened. And if these are the characters the author created, I have trouble believing that it's all that great a book-- and I do so want to believe. Because there's something beautiful about the idea that our favorite worlds could be real, that we could meet our literary children and go on adventures with them, that they can develop lives and opinions of their own, and, best of all, that the sad endings might be different this time around (which is an eternal hope of mine). It makes me sad that it falls short of these good ideas, and then the DVD, at least this one, doesn't even have deleted scenes that might make the plot work better. Or even a scene that shows Dustfinger using his ever-present bag that we decided was holding all the plot-plugs to fill all the plot-holes.

So yeah. The movie has plenty of space for me to rewrite it, which is a plus. But the plot holes that require me to write them are too numerous, which is a minus. The ideas are great, which is a plus. But the character development is either not there, or reduced to one-liners that come from nowhere and don't replace lettin gus experience people changing, which is bad. So I'm going to find the book. And here's hoping there's a director's cut somewhere that makes more sense.

Also, Brendan Frazer obviously sold his soul for eternal youth, and it's getting a little disturbing now that he's started playing adult characters with kids who look roughly the same age. And if he's a great reader, why can't he read more naturally?

movie: ponyo

2009-08-17T22:17:00.000-07:00

What a sweet movie. I was unaware that goodfish looked like weird little girls in dresses, but from beginning to end, it was sweet, non-threatening, quirky, and beautiful-- entirely gorgeous. If you're going into this expecting Princess Mononoke, though, be warned-- it's much closer to My Neighbor Totoro in theme and complexity. Which is fine; it's a kid's story, and I'm glad it'll be around when I have kids.

It's (very) loosely based on The Little Mermaid, but when I say 'loosely', I mean it's like they took the extreme basic ideas and ran with them. A girl of the sea who wants to be a human? Check. A dad who doesn't want her to? Check. A supernatural sea-woman with magical powers? Check. Seafoam if she fails? Check. Everything else is new. And sweet. And there's alot going on, but the primary POV characters are five years old, and most of it doesn't really affect them so much as it affects the world around them.

Ponyo is a little goldfish who gets lost and washes up on shore, where she's rescued by a little boy named Sasuke. While with him, he cuts his finger, which she heals with a lick, but tasting human blood starts a transformation-- it unlocks all the primal power inside her, knocks nature out of balance, and lets her have capricious five-year-old control over the magics. It means she can will herself into having arms and legs and being a girl (although whenever she uses magic, she looks more like a frog muppet with chicken legs), and then she and her hundreds of sisters can cause a horrible tsunami that almost wipes out the town while she goes in search of Sasuke. Because she's fallen in love with him, in that entirely pure way that only kids can love. Most of the rest of the movie is them being kids while they look for Sasuke's mom and have adventures in cuteness; Ponyo's dad flips out a little at the imbalance in nature, but her mom, a huge magical sea goddess, finds it sweet and amusing, and convinces him to let it play out. They save Sasuke's mom and all the old ladies she's in charge of, and give the kids a choice: If Sasuke will love her as a girl or a fish, she'll be allowed to make the choice between the two, but she can't be both like she is now. She, of course, chooses him, and everything's fine.

Favorite parts:

- on the radio to Sasuke's dad on the ship: "HAM!"

- during her transformation: "TEETH!"

- when she finds him and wraps herself around his head and stays there.

- when teh tide is up to his door, and while they're figuring out what to do, an octopus is sidling into the house.

- "For milk!" and the Angry Baby.

- the theme song, which I want to sing to my kids. When I have them.

true blood: s02 e08 i will rise up

2009-08-17T21:31:00.000-07:00

The episode opens right when Bill is telling Lorena to bug off, and Luke is about to hit the trigger-- and goes immediately into the explosion, then it's aftermath without even a little lingering on the blowing up, which seems out of character with the show's love of lingering carnage. Maybe there just wasn't space.

So Bill busts in and finds that Sookie's mostly fine because Eric jumped in front of her and then fell on top of her, and goes to beat up the Soldiers who are lingering outside long enough to go 'oh shit' and then flee-- and he sends them back with the message to remember that the vamps could have killed them all and instead let them live. Meanwhile, Eric's dying, and he has Sookie suck the bullets out, and Sookie's dumb enough to do it. It's like a scene from some hentai: "Oh, my shoulder! Oh, there's one in my chest!" I totally expected "Oh, there's one a little lower...". Maybe Bill just came back before that point. And pointed out that Eric was a liar, and now Sookie's swallowed some of his blood, and now Bill's sharing space in her head with Eric, who is taller and older and stronger, and not nearly as much as a poor divided sap. Poor poor Bill. Where did all your spark go? Did you leave it at home when you went to Dallas?

Sookie has the decency to be grossed out, and Bill carefully explains that she'll always be tied to him, he'll always be able to feel her (which she realizes means he'll always know where she is and what she's doing), and that she shouldn't be surprised if she starts feeling attracted to Eric, because that's one of the side effects. They didn't make that leap, but his face sort of looked like he didn't want to tell her that part, which I'm assuming was because it was Eric, but I'm going to say it's because he knows that the implication is that she fell in love with him because she'd had his blood, and he knew that Eric's blood was stronger.

Then Sookie has really realistic sex dreams where she's laying in bed with Eric, and he's holding her hand trying to convince her she'd make a great vamp, and they're both naked and his hair is tousseled and he's smiling and she doesn't think he's scary at all. And Lorena keeps interupting and pointing out that she's already forgotten about Bill. She wakes up and goes to where Jason's staying, and they have a much-needed talk where they agree to grow up and be good to eachother because they're all they have left.

While all this is going on, Godric's getting everyone back to the hotel, to safety, and getting in trouble with Nan Flanders, who is a raging bitch with slicked-back hair and black clothes when she's not on TV. Godric feels responsible for everything that happened, and when Nan makes him not!Sheriff, he steps down gracefully and appoints Isabelle as his replacement. Which Eric doesn't like at all, and he demands that Godric fight back, as does Isabelle, and he won't-- he has ammends to make.

Sookie tells Bill she has to go see what's up, and won't let him go with her because it's almost dawn, and I'm going to assume she has some idea of what Godric's got planned. Bill's back in that stupid bathrobe, and lets her go, but his dallas-wimpiness is almost mitigated by the look of amazed love on his face as he realizes that she feels obligated because she has a good heart. So she's up on the roof just in time to see Eric begging Godric to go back inside, and then demanding, and then saying he'll Meet the Sun with him, and Godric saying that 2000 years is enough and he won't go back inside and Eric doesn't have the ability to make him, but he does have the ability to be sure Eric won't stay. Which he does, lovingly and tenderly, while Eric is on his knees, crying, and it's all pretty intense. His voice goes all squeeky and he stops speaking in English, and he begs, and-- wow. I'm sure he's going to be extra tough from now on, to make up for being seen crying and for losing his maker. Which happens right after Eric leaves. Sookie stays, and is afraid for Godric, and stays with him the whole time so he doesn't have to be alone. And he evaporates. Much faster than Bill did, so maybe there's a drying out that happens with age, if not a purification.

And that's the close.

Then, there's the story back in Bon Temps where Jessica and Hoyt are talking about what they'll do now that she's forever virginal, and they decide to deal with it. She's sure there must be something that can be done, because she can't have been the only virgin turned, and he says he'll go along with whatever she thinks is right. He won't let anything get in their way, and he wants her to meet his mom. But it's almost Dawn, and she has to sleep, and since he can't go with her, he sings to her so she knows he's still there.

I love these two.

Later, he tells his mom that he wants her to meet Jessica, and if she's not nice to her, he'll leave and never come back-- but being scared only makes his mom worse, and he confronts her with all the horrible things she's said and done and asks why she's so full of hate. She doesn't have a decent answer. But she does go to dinner with them, even though everything Jessica says gets a glare, and eventually they get into a fight where she points out that Jessica can't ever give him babies-- and Jessica runs out and Hoyt says he's never coming back, which leads his mother to drinking.

Meanwhile, in the other half of the story that I'm more than done with, Tara and Eggs wake up all bruised and again can't remember anything. Tara's getting really freaked and tired of blacking out, and Maryanne gets pissed that she won't just accept the gift of letting go and merging with diety.

Everyone's been getting arrested and thrown in jail for weird little misdemeanors, and they're all getting stranger and more wild the more they throw in that cell, but they've kept Sam separate, and when Maryanne comes looking for him, he becomes a fly and buggers off. This makes Maryanne even more pissed, and she goes to the bar looking for him, bringing the wind and the god!voice with her, and demand to know where Sam is, but no one knows. So she goes home and plays tequila-strip-poker with Tara and Eggs. Until LaFayette and Lettie Mae show up, trying to stage an intervention (earlier, LaFayette saw her bruises and assumed (rightly, but in the wrong context) that Eggs was to blame and they had a big ol' fight), and things go downhill. Maryanne tries to tempt Lettie Mae with vodka, while drunk!Tara is a bitch, but Lettie holds out and LaFayette takes over, and then there's fighting ::sigh:: But eventually, LaFayette just picks up Tara, creepy black eyes and all, and throws her in the car, and they make a getaway.

I'm so ready for this crap to be over.

But this part did have a very sweet scene where Terry's not looking at Arlene, and she starts crying and asks him to not be mad at her, and he says he isn't, and is happy at the idea that they had sex because it's been so long he doesn't remember the last time he did. And then they're both happy, even though neither remembers what happened, and they're about to kiss when some crazy woman demands her food and ruins it. The townsfolk are awful right now, and I can't wait until everyone gets back in one story and it gets sorted out. But I'm glad Terry gets to smile and be sweet. Even if this is like a different, suckier show without Sookie and Bill involved.

There's only a few more episodes, and it's looking pretty intense!

defying gravity: ep3, threshold

2009-08-12T21:59:00.000-07:00

So, last ep, Ted went into Pod 4 and faced whatever was in there-- and it communicates by showing severely terrifying pictures of sandstorms on Mars, which he doesn't take well. He withdraws and refuses to talk to anyone, even the people planetside that know what he's going through.

Meanwhile, Zoe and Donner are thrown together by circumstance when Paula starts barfing every few minutes, and her refusal to accept her illness makes her cranky and puts her on the outs with Woss, which leaves her without help when she needs it. Doctor Evram, meanwhile, is busy dealing with alcohol withdrawal, and Zoe is still hearing the crying baby when she needs to be somewhere to witness something. Like the lander that wants to go somewhere it's not programmed for rebooting with new uploaded info that Command wasn't going to tell them about.

Planetside, Ajay finds out he's fired when his card doesn't let him into the building anymore, and he doesn't know what to do about it. Rolly basically tells his wife to reconnect with Ted (they were an item in the past) to get him functioning again, and doesn't like when he sees it happening through the feed, and winds up being the one that kicks Ted in the head to get him working again. Eve can't connect with him because he feels betrayed by her not telling him about it, and because she's busy indroctrinating Claire when she discovers that all the team members have the same very specific gene mutations that are both very rare and not present before the mission.

Not alot happened this ep, even though alot of story was told. We find out that the relationship between Zoe and Donner was harder than expected; she wanted to keep things professional and kept shooting him down, and so far, hasn't said that she's so-far-still having his baby from their one-night stand. Maybe their breakup was more recent, which would be cool; and would tie the present and the past of five years ago together better. Jenn and Ted were very hot and heavy in the past, and there's apparently still a bit of spark there, but she married Rolly instead, and he married Eve, niy I think both aren't all that long-lived yet. Whatever that thing is, it seems to only give the same picture each time, and they aren't sure what it wants-- and it's only spoken to three people, Eve and Ted and someone we don't know about yet, so I'm thinking it's someone who went mad from it. Or died. And somehow it's changing them, all in the same ways, and including Eve and maybe the rest of the project. And there are people in black suits who know about it and aren't telling, and look very Men In Black. Who knows what they want.

So Paula's probably out for now, which leaves Donner as alt!pilot with Zoe-- though I think there's time for her to recover still? I don't know. The timeline of the mission isn't obvious. But they keep getting thrown together, mostly against their will, which makes any relationship between them kind of... weird. Do they like eachother because they really do, or because Beta wants them to? And why would it want them to? Is that dream of her being all preggers in space literal or symbolic? But best of all, it makes the idea of an in-office romance less of a chore, because it's something new-- it's manipulated and it's for some sort of other ends, and they don't know why or when.

I really hope everyone's dreams turn out to be glimpses of the future-- I'm enjoying the semi-non-linear storytelling, and if they're aware of bits of it, it's a little metafictional, too, which further complicates the plot and the interest. I hope the storylines in the past get more interesting though.

The world is pretty complete-- neat little readers, electric-looking cuty busses, money in the form of cards that pass funds to eachother without the middleman of a bank, the need for personal items to be tied down because there's only the illusion of gravity, super-sweet computers that still make sense to us, space ships that look feasible. It's near-future, and I think that makes scifi palatable; it's recognizable, possible, reasonable. But it makes the scifiness of the show seem less central, and leaves the drama sort of a weird blend of military and hospital. But I think it's finding it's feet. It knows what it is, and that's the best it can get.

the colony: episode 4

2009-08-12T14:14:00.000-07:00

Have you caught this show yet? I wrote about it on my Examiner column last week, and I've been following it since. I love this sort of thing. I've been thinking, pretty much since I was aware enough to know that I might need to worry about it, that I need to know how to survive, at least theoretically, in case the world collapses in my lifetime, and this show gives tons of that sort of knowledge. If they do another season, maybe I'll see about trying out.

A little background: ten people have been dropped into a post-apocalyptic LA, survivors of a plague that killed most of the world and toppled civilization. Their job is not only to survive, but to rebuild what they can of society, and stay sane while doing so. So far, they've daisy-chained car batteries to make electricity, figured out how to filter and store water, found a few sources of food, gone on one scavenging expedition, turned a lawn mower into a mini generator, built a shower, defended their warehouse-home from merauders, and decided to rebuild an old truck to give them mobility.

This week, they focused on building security. The attackers last week got in through a back door and smashed up the kitchen, damaging alot of their food and all the milk they got from their one adult goat(stollen from another camp outside the warehouse), so they filled up the stairwell with big heavy things, which is a great idea. They don't use that door, and even if anyone can still manage to get through it, the noise of moving all the stuff will serve as a warning alarm. They also reinforced some of the walls and added locking mechanisms to the doors. And while figuring out how to defend the front door, they found a little room up above everything, perched up in the rafters and without stairs or anything, where someone had been living. Inside, there was a bed, a bottle of vodka, a few magazines, and a safe with some money in it, which is useless now, but may come in handy later. And I'm sure that's foreshadowing; this show is a little like an RPG; you find things that will be useful later, but the results are entirely up to you.

As for the little room, I think they should move their sleeping quarters up there; it's the most defensible place there; no one even mentioned that fact.

Meanwhile, Leilani the personal trainer built a punching bag and declared one of the side rooms to be a gym, where she started teaching the girls how to defend themselves; Mechanic Mike couldn't see the value of that, and kept picking fights, but it should be obvious that the better able to defend themselves they all are, the better off the group is, right? And if someone was going to attack them while they were out foraging, they'd probably attack the girls first because they're smaller and more likely to be helpless, right? So I don't know why he's so pig-headed about it.

Also meanwhile, John C was working on mad-scientist weapons, and really looking the part with his dirty apron and wild hair and beard. He built a massive flame thrower and a six-foot-long taser; I hope the producers warn the merauders that these are real weapons, and to look out for them. The colonists don't know that no one can actually hurt them, and they've been at this for three weeks: it's real now. Vladimir managed to come up with a way to build non-lethal claymores, which is awesome-- and Amy went on about 'bread not bombs', so I think she's pacifist and that that might become a problem later.

They managed to get the truck engine working, after cleaning out the moving parts and getting the airflow, and now everyone is free to make it into some sort of mega monster mad-max machine, which should be awesome.

But the most trouble was the traders. Two traders on a big truck and with guns came, and they had things the colony needed-- namely, a brand new generator and the oil to run it, and fresh food. So the colonists traded away some of the power tools they didn't need for the genny, and then started fighting over the fact that Mike and Joey were speaking for everyone and making it all tense, and giving away all their canned goods-- their last can of tuna, among others-- and all the oranges, for perishables. Leilani wasn't having any of that, and there was a huge blowup, and that's distressing for survival. See, I understand that they know where the oranges are, and they know how to get them, but oranges aren't infinite or year-round, and no one in this group seems to know anything about plants, seasons, gardening or anything like that. They aren't planning, as far as we've seen, for the fact that the oranges might not be there when they go back. Maybe they just haven't mentioned the little garden out back, but it looks to me like they're ignoring a valuable resource, and so far, no one has mentioned anything about choosing foods with seeds they can plant and get more of for free.

But they did get two chickens, and if they can keep them well-fed, each will lay at least one egg a day, and if they don't lay, there's some extra protein in the form of chicken soup and / or roasted chicken. But a live and laying chicken is more valuable.

Next week shows a huge man and another woman returning to the warehouse and claiming that they already live there; I hope they're absorbed into the group. The point is to rebuild society, right? But it looks like there'll be more fighting. ::sigh::

scifi that isn't like scifi

2009-08-11T10:54:00.000-07:00

Have you noticed the way scifi is tricking it's way into the regular drama-tv world? And how people are gobbling it up until it shows that it's actually scifi? I don't see why people would love Lost and then get upset when it gets really weird; it started out that way, you just were distracted by all the pretty people.

I'm looking forward to Flash Forward, mostly, and I've sort of gotten hooked on the Colony and Defying Gravity (these two are reviwed in last week's Examiner), and I've been watching True Blood, so you'll hopefully start getting posts again. Jeeze, but I've been stretched thin lately. And we haven't been Doctoring, which is the backbone of this blog, so I keep forgetting to post.

This will be remedied.

books!

2009-07-29T22:02:00.001-07:00

This week, we've got City of Bones, Blood Ties and Dead Until Dark over on the book blog!

movie: harry potter and the half-blood prince

2009-07-21T13:12:00.000-07:00

See, here's the thing: I liked this moviw, and I'm not particularly appologetic about that. It was fun, exciting, sweet, a little scary, and it had all the important parts that move the plot along and develop the characters. So what if it doesn't follow the book exactly? The book is freakishly long, and a seven hour movie just isn't worth the time. The first movie was practically a read-along, and that was dull, dragging and opressive. I think the movies have been saved by the fact that the books were so long by the end; it means the directors and scriptwriters could cut the things that work in a book but are unnecessary in a movie, that they can pare the story down to it's basic components and show us what's needed to make a movie-- because movies and books are different things, even if they're telling the same story, and there's really nothing but agravation in trying to make them the same.

Half-Blood Prince had everything I wanted it to have: It had Draco being tortured by his own divided loyalties, lurking and brooding and crying alot, and I swear the kid got skinnier and paler as the movie progressed, as he should if he's really dealing with this horrible crap. It had Ginny getting to do stuff and have lines, and she's really good at the shining, compassionate better-person schtick. It had Ron totally missing the point with Hermione and Hermione realizing what all these weird feelings meant. It had Snape being subtle and divided and obviously unhappy and murky and snarky and wonderful. It had Dumbledor at a loss, damaged, and ready to finish the plan. Slughorn was wonderfully twitchy, Lavendar was exactly as clingy and weird as was necessary for us not to feel bad when she gets jilted. I hated seeing the Weasley house burn, I loved Bellatrix, the few moments we got of Fred and George were awesome as always, Luna was fantastic, and that scene where the whole school bands together to stop the cloud-skull-creepiness totally got me.

And best of all, it reminded me why I loved all these characters, and set up how horrible it's going to be in the next movies when they start offing people left and right.

Best parts:

- Hopped-up-Harry talking about the spider's pinchers

- "He likes my sister for her skin??" "Well, I'm just saying it could be a contributing factor."

- "I supposed you're wondering what we're doing here?" "Honestly, sir, after all these years I just sort of go along for the ride."

- "Why does it always seem that when there's trouble, the three of you are involved?" "I've been asking myself that for six years."

- The set design. Hogwarts looks more like a real place every time, and this time it was gorgeous, all stairs and vaulted halls and weird little details like the birdcage inside the birdcage and so on. I want my office to look like Dumbledor's...

- Ron and Harry hitting eachother as they fight over the book. Just like real boys.

There were a few weird things:

- They almost entirely cut Harry's obsession with the book and who wrote it, and then Snape is all 'I'm the Half Blood Prince' and I went 'Oh, right, that was the title of the movie...'

- Did we see Ginny break up with Dean? Because all of a sudden she was all over Harry, and it was very sweet and exactly what was supposed to happen, but I don't remember her stopping dating... And most of that relationship got cut, too.

- Where was Hagrid as his house was being burned down? And what happened to the Weasleys after the same? We just sort of skipped those parts, and I don't remember what happened in the book.

- Wasn't there more with Lupin and Tonks?

Over all, though, it was great fun and I really enjoyed it. Each movie holds together as a movie better than the last, the world gets more detailed and real, and the characters act and dress and speak more like real people. I loved it.

torchwood redux: everything changes and day one

2009-07-18T11:07:00.000-07:00

It's been ages since I watched season one of Torchwood, and last night H and D finally agreed to start watching, so we did the first two eps.

Season one is a whole lot of fun, but is kind of marked by being inconsistent. These two episodes establish that right off the bat: Ep1 is really solid, a great introduction to how the world works and how the show differs from Doctor Who, and Ep2 is just sort of silly and a little loose around the plot.

Everything Changes brings us Police Constable Gwen Cooper, decked out in all her unflattering uniformed glory, stumbling upon Torchwood and, being the good cop that she is, not letting it slide. She watches them bring someone back to life, and she wants to know how. She meets and alien, and she wants to know why. They walk in and out of her life, and she wants to know what they're up to. And it's great. I love Gwen. Right from the beginning, she doesn't put up with any crap from Jack, and even when she's entirely overwhelmed and more than a little scared, she stands up for herself and keeps following through, and tries to get them to be helpful to the city they live in, rather than just being these amoral others that don't care that crimes are being committed.

Jack is charming as always, but he's overlaid some of the cockiness of his first appearance in the world with some sort of secret knowledge of how things happen, with the understanding that he can't die (which is first shown here, in this first ep, after Parting of the Ways but before his return to the Tardis at the end of season 3)-- and with the steadying influence of this team that he leads and harasses and believes in. I like Grownup Captain Jack-- and I like that he's still a little smarmy, a lot irreverent, and not terribly secretive about the fact that he isn't normal, while still leaving most of the details to the imagination.

And the team is pretty great right off the bat. Owen is a creep, but he knows what he's talking about, Tosh is a bit of a prude, but in a wobbly and shy sort of way, Ianto is the best butler on the planet and always seems slightly amused by the wholw world, and Suzie-- I love Indira Varma. She can make even a little part like Suzie so great. And I know what happens next, but I'm not telling the boys.

Day One is... not so great. Gwen's in over her head, which is understandable, and she's pretty much the best part of the episode. The premise is silly: a space-druggy goes after orgasm energy because it's "the best hit in the galaxy" and goes about killing people to get it. Blah. Lots of gratuitous sex. Double Blah. There's better later. But Gwen's the one that accidentally lets it out into the world, and she's the one that figures out how to fix her problems. I love when chicks do things for themselves in TV. She's not a companion, and though she's the viewer's way in like one, she's more than capable of getting by on her own, of making do with what she has, and getting the job done in the best way possible. Excellent.

Jack has "life to spare" and can give it away if he needs to, and that's something interesting. but the best part is after it's all over when Gwen kisses Jack-- and gets him off-guard. That doesn't happen much, and the way he reacts shows (me, anyway) that he's not cocky and confident all the way down, and that's more interesting.

Who knows when we'll watch more, but I'm happy to review it all, even if D didn't like it.

books!

2009-07-16T15:05:00.000-07:00

This time it's Robin McKinley's Sunshine, over on the books blog.

classic who: the hand of fear

2009-07-16T13:53:00.000-07:00

And then we move on to The Hand of Fear. This one is Sarah Jane's last episode, and she gets to go out being herself-- or, at least, the mcguffin she frequently is.

They land back on Earth in a quarry (which is actually being a quarry, so that's two shots if you're playing the drinking game we made up and I haven't written about yet), just in time to be very nearly squashed in a rockslide created by blasting they don't pay enough attention to get out of the way of. The Doctor lands on top of the rubble, and they find him first, and they go looking for Sarah Jane and find her trapped under some massive bits of styrofoam, passed out and concussed, and holding onto a big stone hand. Which, of course, takes over her mind. ::sigh::

When they leave her alone in the hospital, she wakes up and steals the hand from the lab, sealing it up in Tupperware to keep it fresh, and uses the ring she found on it to blast her way into a nuclear power plant that may or may not be the same one in Inferno (in my head, it totally is, and it's just not a very nice place to work). She locks herself in the reactor, and the stone hand starts to come back to life. The radiation is critical, and the hand is controlling people all over the place, trying to get more of it. The Doctor manages to get Sarah Jane out, but she doesn't remember being taken over, and the hand has absorbed so much of the radiation that she isn't contaminated at all. Which is convenient.

Eventually, when the core implodes instead of explodes and the hand isn't stopped, the RAF tries to nuke the place, which I would think is pretty obviously not going to work, but maybe they're way dumber without UNIT to explain things to them. I miss the Brig. Anyway, the nukes only make the transformation complete, and Eldrad walks out of the reactor-- and is a chick, since the regeneration imprinted on Sarah Jane, the first person to touch the hand and the ring. The Doctor decides to try diplomacy (finally), and they talk Eldrad down from a massive attack on everything with the promise of taking her home, which they do, but it has to be now, millions of years after she / he was exiled and executed, so they can't mess with history. Eldrad leads them to the frozen-over capital and starts turning machines back on with the intention of rebuilding the world that was destroyed... and walks right into a trap, where a spear full of acid slams into her chest and starts cracking her crystaline structure.

The Doctor and Sarah Jane take her down to a regeneration chamber past a void and through various other traps. She's amazingly good at remaining manequin-stiff as the Doctor hauls her around, and she must not weight much (though if she's really silicon like quartz, she should way most of a ton) because he's hauling her around all over the place. They make it to the chamber just in time, and Eldrad is reborn as his true self, a big pointy man-thing with a crystal beard and a habit of extreme overacting. And he's a lunatic. He was the one who killed the planet, and his continuing punishment is to have a world where everyone chose to die instead of risking that he'd come back, even far in the future, and killed themselves. Jeeze. The Doctor and Sarah jane have to escape his crazy to get home, and they toss him down the needless chasm to do so.

And then Sarah Jane has to leave. She's complaing about always getting chased and mind-controlled and tricked and manipulated, and pretends to want to go home, and stomps off to get all her stuff together (which turns out to be a stuffed owl, two ugly jackets, a teeny tiny suitcase, a potted plant and a tennis racket)-- and while she's gone, the Doctor gets the Call home to Gallifrey. Humans aren't allowed there, and he has to leave her. So he drops her off where he thinks she lives, and she gets off with the sort of cheerfulness of someone who thinks she'll get to go back soon, and he leaves her. For thirty-five years. And I was very sad. The last few episodes, he called her his best friend, and he was so deflated-sounding when he told her she couldn't go with him, and she didn't really seem to know what it meant...

And so ends the Sarah Jane Years. She gets an abortive spinoff in the early 80s, and she gets to come back for the Five Doctors in a bit, and she's still around the expanded universe, but there's no more Sarah Jane Smith in the series until School Reunion in Nu Who, and the Sarah Jane Adventures after that. I'll miss her. Even with her really awful outfits and her sometimes hopeless ankle-twisting, she was sharp and clever and smart enough to keep up with the Doctor, and they were a good team.

classic who: the masque of mandragora

2009-07-16T12:51:00.000-07:00

Man, my scifi intake has really suffered since I stopped being unemployed / ran out of all the stuff I'd previously cued up for watching / had my Netflix cancelled for non-ability to pay. But we've gotten back on track with the Classic Who, and I, for one, am much greatful. I love this watching-through of the history-- I grew up with the show, but we moved around alot and lived all over the place, and it was never consistent. Even when I watched it every day on PBS when we were back in the states and didn't have cable yet, sometimes they didn't show episodes together, even when they showed lots in a row. I mean, really. What's that all about?

So here we have the Masque of Mandragora, Sarah-Jane's second-to-last story. It starts out with them wandering around the massive interior, full of hallways that all look the same, and doors that lead to greenscreens, and they come across the Old Console, which is delightfully steampunky and wood-crafted. They find that they're being swept into a power vortex that's semisentient-- the Mandragora Helix (pronounced man-DRA-gora, not man-dra-GORA as might be assumed). There's a ball of energy that buzzes the Tardis, and the Doctor literally swings Sarah Jane out of the way in a delightful show of how little she is, then they evacuate the weird.

The Doctor lands in Renaissance Italy, drawn in by some weirdness (as per usual), and they immediately stumble upon a Plot. Sarah Jane is kidnapped (also as per usual), and the Doctor is waylaid trying to save her-- so Sarah Jane is taken to be a fortold sacrifice to Demnos, an ancient god worshipped by a secret cult that was thought to be long gone, because she was found at the right place at the right time, and meanwhile, the Doctor is taken to the Prince and his court, and the uncle and Hieronymous the Creepy-Bearded Advisor sentance him to death as a traitor. Because there's civil unrest, you see, though that doesn't really matter all that much. Also, there's the Helix Fragment, flying around and turning people into blue jello.

They send the Doctor to the block, but he escapes with the help of shi clever scarf, and hides in the catacombs under the city, where he finds and rescues Sarah Jane just before she's to be killed (I guess they couldn't see all that well in their fancy roman masks), and just in time to miss the Helix Fragment arriving and creating a link between it's home-self and the cult. Or, more specifically, with Hieronymous-- annother of his prophesies fulfilled, since he was sure he'd get unlimited power.

The Doctor and Sarah are captured and think they're going back to the block, but are taken to the Prince (Guiliano) instead, and he's willing to listen to reason and isn't happy that his uncle won't. He's decided to have a party for his succession, and Frederico, the uncle, isn't happy about it. He wants a horoscope that declares Guiliano's death, with the death following before the morning, and Hieronymous isn't too into that-- he's got a cult to lead and a massive extradimensional power to unleash.

From here, it gets even busier. They go back to the catacombs and Sarah is taken hostage again, hypnotized and told that the Doctor is an evil sorcerer that needs to be destroyed with this poison needle they give her, and she's left for them to find. She almost does it, but the Doctor snaps her out of it just in time for them all to get thrown into prison. The Doctor talks Frederico into letting him show them what's going on, which results in Frederico getting pretty suddenly offed by Force lightning, after they witness Hieronymous becoming all glowy with Helix energy. He announces that their attack will happen tomorrow, when Mandragora swallows the moon and changes history; the guards switch allegiance and everyone is freed, and Guiliano takes over, deciding to keep the party on, since cancelling it would look like he can't control his own people.

The Doctor comes up with a clever plan involving a metal breastplate and alot of wire, and sneaks into the temple where there's apparently not even one guard to stop him from setting stuff up over the course of hours. When things go to crap, the Doctor tricks the cult into grounding out all it's energy, and then there's nothing left to cause trouble.

This one... it alternated between kind of dull when it was all palace intrigue, and needlessly complicated when that intrigue bumped into the plot, and I wasn't terribly fond of it. It wasn't bad, but it was confusing, and it felt just a little off... the Doctor's still being kind of a jerk, and the plot points all came too quickly to make much sense. There's been much better historicals. And it all seemed kind of contrived in a way that left me without much opinion of the story one way or another. It's not a great way to start a season, and I liked the last ep better.

books!

2009-07-05T12:49:00.000-07:00

All the books from here are going to be over on the new book blog Booksaholic Samnonimous, so here's your first link to something that pertains to this site: Peter S Beagle's The Line Between, featuring a new(ish-- new to me) Unicorn Story.

classic who: the brain of morbius and the seeds of doom

2009-07-05T11:40:00.000-07:00

We've finished another season of Classic Who, and somewhere halfway through the next one, SarahJane will move on and Leela will show up. All I know about Leela is that she marries a Time Lord-- in the Ten Doctors comic, she's got something like fourteen kids and is very old, but still a warrior.

Anyway, we started with The Brain of Morbius! Which was not so crazy as it seemed. Actually, it was kind of like watching Dark Shadows-- alot of standing around in Gothic settings, talking about one thing and meaning another. So the Tardis lands on a stromy planet that has a ship graveyard and a bunch of headless bodies on it, and though the Doctor is feeling cranky and thinks it's the Time Lords using him as their errand boy again, and is determined to not do anything at all, just to spite them, Sarah Jane immediately finds a body and they're in trouble. The rest is alot of back-and-forth between Solon, a semi-criminal follower of the worst mad Time Lord ever (the Mobius of the title) who's trying to build a body to bring his master back, and the Sisterhood, a group who look like the ones in The Fires of Pompei, and worship a holy flame that produces an elixir of life. Their flame has been dying down, and they're almost out of the elixir, which means they're almost out of eternal life, and things get tense when they start to think that the Time Lords are trying to steal it from them. They don't like Solon, and he doesn't like them, but with the Doctor and Sarah Jane going back and forth and the two sides having cross purposes, they start to work against eachother. Meanwhile, Solon builds his monster, though he had to give up the idea of using the Doctor's head for it. I don't think Morbius's massive glowing and pulsing brain would fit into it anyway.

Sarah Jane gets to be pretty resourceful in parts, though for a big chunk near the end, she's been blinded and blunders around getting into trouble, too. But she saves the Doctor, who gets to bea tricked and manipulated alot this story, and that's fun. The Doctor, meanwhile, does alot of solo running around trying to restore sarah Jane's eyes, which is both proof that his own safety comes after that of his companions, and that the companions are his weakness-- Solon sends him to the Sisterhood to get her fixed, but it's a lie that's supposed to get him killed and out of the way. And this is the only time so far that the Doctor has outright tried to kill someone: he makes a poison glass and lets it get to Solon.

The monster is creepy and neat and cheezy all at once, and I think it'd make an excellent action figure if they start making classic monsters. Morbius is megalomaniacal and whiny, and doesn't really do much because of brain damage; first he's trapped in a jar, then he's dropped on the floor, and it's probably true that he was already mad.

Overall, the story is a direct ripoff of Frankenstein, if it was set on a remote planet in the vecinity of Gallifrey and if the monster was being built to hold the brain of a crazy ex-cult-leader. Not bad, but a little confusing needlessly, and not as original as some.

And then we had Seeds of Doom, which was kind of like two related three-parters. The Doctor and Sarah Jane go to the antarctic (without the Tardis for some crazy and unexplained reason) to help some scientists with a weird new plant they've found, and wind up trapped by weather in a research station, which is always fun plotwise (like the Ice episode in X-Files). Side note: in this half, Sarah Jane wears cute little bright yellow overalls, which are entirely useless against and arctic blizzard, and a fur coat alot like the one Donna wore in the Planet of the Ood. The Doctor wears what he always wears, and I love that temperatures never seem to bother him. It's another of those little touches that remind us that he only looks human-- though in these classic episodes, he eats pretty frequently, as opposed to the new ones, where he doesn't much, and usually avoids eating all together.

Anyway. The scientists have found this weird pod about the size of a softball, and it's germinated in the warmth and taken over one of the crew, turning him into the broccoli from Garth Merengie's Dark Place. And then into a blobby green mansized creature that starts sabotaging things and killing people. back in England, a leak in the Ministry of Environment (I wonder why they aren't working with Unit here?) tells a manic and extremist plant collector / plant rights activist / lunatic about the new plant, and he pays alot of money to get his best mercenary there to get the plant for him, ignoring that it's an alien creature that eats animal-things (instead of the usual animal-thing eating plant-things).

The first half ends with the plant-dude blowing everything up, but not before the mercenaries get the second pod back to the crazy collector dude. Sarah gets to change into a different weird seventies outfit that looks like it has too much pattern and too many hems in it, and then they're off to find who took the other pod. He's encouraging it to take someone over, and tries to give it Sarah Jane, but the Doctor saves her, and leaves it to take over someone else. Side note again: the Doctor is very angry and yelly, like he's channeling Six over here, and punches alot of people rather than building clever machines or something.

So the scientist is taken over and the baddie feeds it and nurtures it into the full-size Krinoid. There's an old lady who is what I want to be when I grow up: a little batty and silly and vague, but cherrfully serving as a spy and loveing every minute of it. She gets information to Sarah, and then takes her message back to the Ministry, which brings in Unit. There's no Brig (I miss the Brig), but there's some other dude from Unit who can't pronounce the word "fire", and they show up and start attacking the estate-sized monster with the vaguest laser cannon ever. To no avail.

After alot of being trapped inside the estate, alot of plants coming to life and trying to strangle them, alot of running down halls and escaping monster tentacles, and several attempts to wood-chipper the Doctor and turn him into com-pos-t for the garden, eventually the massive creature is killed by fighter jets.

The monster is mostly dumb, but when it gets up to estate-size, there's a pretty nifty shot where it looks like c'thulu humping a mannor house that looks pretty cool. I couldn't immedaitely see how it was done, so that adds a little reality to it, you know?

The story was neat, but I'm not sure how I feel about four being angry and violent; that's not his thing, usually, and it bugs me. The monster was an actual threat, and it's one of the few times when the Doctor couldn't fix things-- it took the big guns of Unit to get anything done. And it sure was a big bang to end the season on. Literally.

true blood: s01

2009-07-05T10:52:00.000-07:00

Don't know what you've done to me, but before this night is through... I'm gonna do bad things to you...

Man, no kidding. I watched the first few episodes as they came out until I couldn't get ahold of them any more, and recently, with the return for season two, H got all of them and I devoured them in slightly less than a day. And all together like that, it really sucks up your brain. And so much happened in those twelve little episodes.

Here's the basic impression: goofy at the beginning mixed with alot of pornyness and some sweet will-they-won't-they while punctuated with alot of blood. Alot of blood, all the time, in good and bad places (vampires are really messy eaters here, and even messier die-ers), and alot of sudden violence. I mean, Sookie's beaten almost to death right off the bat. Then it gets sexier and tenser, and weirder and even more violent and involved, and it ends really crazy.

I love Sam and feel horrible for him, since he can't seem to win, and I want to know what's up with Maryanne (who I knew was trouble as soon as Ensign Ro walked on screen-- it's like seeing John Delancy show up: nothing but trouble), and his past! How horrible.

Tara's life keeps falling apart by degrees, and I'm waiting for the other show to fall now that she's mixed up with whatever's going on with the afore-mentioned Maryanne. I was hoping she'd get to figure something out with sam and get some sort of human interaction going, but maybe that'll come after that other shoe... or maybe not at all, since they just introduced Eggs (though it annoys me that he's black-- why do the black characters have to wind up with other black characters? I liked her with Sam partly because inter-racial relationships that work are still not that common).

Bill's got a psychopathic little vamp-baby to deal with just as vampire-marriage becomes legal, and that aught to make things interesting. And she's fun, wild in every way that he isn't. Poor Bill, he's kind of a stick in the mud when it comes to being a vampire. And her existence is a thorn in his side, since he Made her against his will as a punishment he doesn't think he should have had... That had better continue.

LaFayette. Oh poor, poor, crazy, entirely amoral LaFayette. Looks like you're donefore. Apparently in the books, he wasn't even a character, just a body in a car, so maybe that's why he wound up like that. But we'll see, won't we?

And Jason never got any smarter, though it looked for a minute like he might, and now he's going to an extremist church, which will probably be more annoying than him boinking everyone in sight. But I was glad to see how happy he was to see Sookie after all the Crazy at the end. Speaking of, I was scared it was going to be Jesse, since they keep making him so strange in between all the sweetness, and I'm glad it wasn't him-- though I'm sad it was Renee.

So what does the new series hold? I can't wait to find out.

the avengers: return of the cybernaut

2009-07-05T10:44:00.000-07:00

We've been watching The Avengers sporadically-- and by sporadically, I mean, like, one episode ever two or three months, usually on a whim when we remember that A&L have a computer hooked up to the TV and we can watch Netflix on demand there-- and I've been forgetting to post on it because of all the other things we've been doing. This show, however, should not be forgotten.

Return of the Cybernauts is a sequil of sorts to an episode we haven't watched yet, but is self-contained enough that it doesn't really matter. Grand Moff Tarkin is the brother of a scientist from the previous ep who recreates his brother's metal thug to kidnap scientists to make machines to get revenge on Steed and Mrs Peel-- the sort of revenge that will torture them without killing them. They crete mind-control watches. Posing as their friend this whole time, it's not too hard to flatter Emma with a gift of hers and to sneak a replacement of Steed's own watch into his office. Emma's been courted by Tarkin enough that she willingly puts her's on and gets mind-controlled when the baddies jump the gun a little and activate the device-- but Steed hadn't put his own yet, and, worried about Emma's weird behavior, rushes out without his watch and is therefore unaffected.

The save the day, of course, but it's a technological fluke that allows them to do it: the watch, suposed to be forced onto Steed, goes onto the Cybernaut by accident, and conflicts with it's own programming, making it go berzerk and kill Tarkin an a steel-banded death-hug that looks kind of... homoerotic.

This is all in the last quarter of the episode. Most of the rest is Tarkin and his lab assistant kidnapping and pushing around the scientists, offering them alot of money and threatening them with death. One gets out, but is immediately captured and thrown back into his pink cell (all the cells are single-colors), like this was the third act of a John Pertwee adventure.

Speaking of, it's impossible for me to watch something so strikingly Brittish without comparing it to Doctor Who of the same time period-- and The Avengers comes out WAY on top. It's an adult show vs the Doctor's still pretty child-oriented show, so we'll say that's why DW comes off so much more silly even though the scripts are about as tight and similarly-plotted. But it's the quality of the show that gets me: the film stock is clear, sharp even on our moderately modern TV with a NetFlix feed, with extremely saturated colors and no blurring or ghosting, and though the Cybernaut is not the best effect in the world, it's better than the Cybermen or the Autons, both of which it resembles (mod Autons with really snappy shoes and a peacoat). And it's perpetually amazing to me how Steed can be constantly leaning into Mrs Peel, flirting so close to her face that he has to turn his head to drink so he doesn't hit her in the nose with the cup-- and yet he comes across as charming and kind, whereas people I've known in real life that do exactly the same thing to me come off as skeezy and invasive of personal space. Maybe it's the Brittishness; maybe it's that she's flirting back. And the best part is that at the end, after Steed's mistrust of Grand Moff Tarkin is justified, he doesn't even try to be all 'told you so'. Doean't even mention that he could be. He just takes Emma home and they have a nice moment where he fixes her toaster not at all.

A fun, good episode. One of my favorites so far.

linky links: scifi edition wk26

2009-06-29T12:54:00.000-07:00

Links, comin' at'cha.

Yeoman Rand in Star Trek 2? I liked Nurse Chapel better, but how awesome would it be to have more than just the one strong woman in this series? And I'm very excited about seeing how she can be updated and worked into the new continuum.

National SF / F Writer's Day: We missed it-- I think almost everyone did-- but there's a Facebook page linked there, and I've joined, and I'm planning on getting it next year. i love Arbitrary Holidays. And it's appropriately also Joss Whedon's birthday.

Remember when the apocalypse was fun? I didn't either until I read this article.

Augmented Reality: The article is about how it's already happening, but I can't wait until it's pervasive. Until holograms hover in front of things, telling you all about them, until the internet can be linked to your brain, until books can have hyperlinks embedded in them, and until tv can be fully referential and linked to everything pertinent. I love this definition of the information age, and I want it now!

A spoilery pic of the last two Dr Who Specials -- Not the last of the timelords? Awesome. i'm still desperately sad to see my future husband go, but I'm so excited about a whole season run by Steven Moffet that I don't even mind that RTD is sort of overdoing it and undoing all the pesky history that made the revival so new.

I'm not, however, all that pleased that there will still be Daleks: They've been so overdone. I will trust the Moff until I have a reason not to, and I will hope that he can make something cool out of them again, but I can't forgive them for The Daleks Take Manhattan.

Another peek for SGU: They keep emphesizing 'sexy' and 'gritty'. I still don't think it needed to be turned into BSG, but I'm more worried that they're going to off the big name actors. They like to do that in the first episodes. And I really like Robert Carlyle.

Eleven Doctors for this years Childen in Need? That's almost one Doctor per minute of screentime and might be too much, but it'd be fun to see how they explain Tom and Colin being so much older than they should be...

Ideas for ITV to get some scifi: Now that they've offed Primeval. The bastards.

Saturn's moon Encaledus might have the conditions for life: You know, even if they never find life in other worlds, I love that they're looking, and I love that the conditions seem to be so easy to find. It means scifi always has something to work with, and it's always sort of there, hovering around the zeitgeist.

A new robot can move around and emote at the same time: Previously, it was one or the other, so this is pretty sweet. I hope we get into I, Robot territory before I shuffle off-- I want to see whether something that seems to have sentience and emotions actually does.

How to meet and woo a nerdy girl: I would define the girl in question as a geek, but hey, that's just me. Actually, it's entirely me.

A discussion of International SF: This seems to be the hottest thing in SF/F scholarship, and I embrase it fully. We're not the only people telling stories about the future.

Geeky kid names: I love the idea of a kid named Whedon.

Salon says Spike ruined Buffy and io9 says it's Buffy's fault vampires are weak. I think there were always a few repentant vamps who sort of veered into the spotlight at that time and took over the world, allowing Edward Cullen to be the new ideal...

The Internet Review of Science Fiction: Something I want in on.

Google Voice threatens cellphones and I can hardly wait. For many of the same reasons I want holograms and a fully-interactive world.

The Tv Fandex! It racks how often shows are talked about on blogs, Twitter, fansites, FaceBook, MySpace and the like. And ranks them. And proves that TV ratings have nothing to do with popularity.

books: the blue sword

2009-06-15T16:09:00.000-07:00

This is probably the seventh or eighth time I've read this book; I first picked it up when I was... what, fifteen or sixteen? I think it was of my own accord-- I'd already read The Hero And The Crown for summer reading when I was somewhere around twelve, and I'd only just discovered that people who write one book I like probably have other books I'll like. And I did.

It's an easy read, but in a good way, no less complex because it's easy, though it is much simpler and more affected than her more recent stuff (I think Sunshine is the most beautiful and complex one of her's I've read yet, but I haven't picked up Chalice yet, and I haven't read everything she's written)-- but affected in the way of an early book, no in a way that I hate. Harry is relentlessly unpretentious, and that probably saves the book, though she does get a little too formal at the end. I mean, she just saved the world. But I understand that she was fully accepting the Hill Ways at that point, and they're formal and traditional, so it's okay. It makes sense in the context of the book, and it's charming enough in it's own right.

It's set after Hero by, like, five hundred years, but written before, and not everything said about Aerin comes out in the next book that's actually about her, but the large timespan makes that okay, too. She's mostly legend by then, and the core of who she is is in Hero the same as it is in this one. Though I do wish that there were more Damar books; it's a wonderful place perfect for semi-YA high-fantasy, but I'd rather have these few wonderful stories than a glut of ones I don't like that were just written because she thought she should.

So, here on the eighth reading, even knowing how it all goes, I can say it's still great fun, and with enough space between readings, still surprising. I forgot about the Trials and Mathin, I forgot they went to see Luthe, I forgot that they split up and had to be reunited; I think maybe I forgot on purpose so it's like reading it for the first time again-- a first time with a lot of deja vu.

review: the sarah jane adventures s02

2009-06-15T15:50:00.000-07:00

In these trying times without my Doctor Fix, when we seem to never be watching Classic Who and there's no Nu Who to sate me, I'm glad I had a whole season of Sarah Jane to watch, even if the fact that I watched it all in one sitting means I'm back where I started and now I have to find something else to do.

Season one was brilliant, and season 2 follows suit. There's the obligatory Sontaran episode (these producers are so friggen fond of the Sontarans, but I find them generally dull), but it serves as a really kind way to write out Maria, with all the emotional resonance that sort of thing means-- and maybe because this is more of a kid's show than Doctor Who, she doesn't have to die or get trapped in an alternate dimension, but only moves to America... though that might amount to the same thing*. I liked Maria, and I liked her interactions with Luke and Sarah Jane, but she was given the time for us to be sad and her to be sad about it, and it was okay. And Rani is bright and adventurous in a different way, that I like also, and we all know that Companions have to go so new ones can come. And she and her exceedingly cute dad have a cameo later anyway. Plus, Rani's family are fun and three-dimensional, and they fit into the series well, though her mom really needs to work on not getting hypnotized quite so much. And we got to finally meet Clyde's family, which is great, since he's sort of been this dislocated child all this time. And Luke and Sarah Jane's relationship is tested and comes out true. Yay!

Plus, there's a quarry!

This season was surprisingly scary and tense. I don't remember if last season was like this, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was; these aren't the sorts of shows that really talk down to kids, but rather simplify complex topics so that kids can relate, without having to dumb them down at all. I love that. The kid in me that was so annoyed at the shows that assumed I was an idiot (thank god I had Press Gang and such like to keep my brain from mushifying) loves it, too. It was nice to see that the unflappable Sarah Jane has real fears that aren't really at all related to being a Companion, and it was beyond lovely to see the old Foxbridge and The Big again. He's much older, but he's still got that voice and that sardonic tone that I do so love.

The info on Series 3 says Sarah Jane is getting married; if it's a serious thing, and not some coercion, there was no indication of anyone she might like to marry here. Whoever he is, he'd better be amazing.

* ... as I learned when I moved from Scotland to Florida, and promptly lost track of everyone I knew. Except for that one kid who inexplicably wound up in my PE class.

review: primeval s01

2009-06-15T15:32:00.000-07:00

I got season one a while ago, but I watched something like five minutes of the pilot and decided to watch something else. Then, about two weeks ago, I caught an episode of season 2 on SciFi, and that was it: a new fandom. All in that one second-season mid-story episode.

So I went back and found season one, and watched it all day over this weekend while out internet was out (yet again). Season one is six episodes, which is short for a Brit Scifi show (at least for the ones I've seen), but that doesn't damage the over arcing storyline at all-- in fact, I'd say it improves it, by eliminating any chance to spin wheels, fill in with lame episodes, or get repetative.

This is the story of Nick Cutter, who gets involved with these rips in time called Anomalies that generally open up from some prehistoric place into our time (which means, temporally, our time is awfully cluttered with them, as the rest of history is so much larger, but maybe that's dealt with later?). He's a dinosaur specialist, and together with his research assistant / tracking expert / ass-kicker Steven, former student and all over tech-geek Connoor, and herpetologist and assistant zookeeper Abbie, the tracks the mean beasties that come through the Anoamies and rome around England causing trouble. His ex wife Helen is the main villain, his new love interest Claudia is their PR expert, and their boss Lester is a jerk. And the story is fun. Connor, especially knows how cool it is that they're chasing dinos, and all of them appreciate the awesomeness of getting to see them in real life. Plus, there's subplots! Helen, whatever she's up to; Nick and Claudia getting to like eachother despite the fact that they're often at odds; Connor liking Abbie while Abbie likes Steven and Steven has an off-screen girlfriend; Connor's friends who cause trouble midway through the season; the research into the Anomalies; the appearance of future-centric Anomalies and what that means; and, of course, the chasing of the monsters that keeps the show from getting too cerebral and plot-y. The characters interact well, and each has their own reason for doing what they do and for being how they are. The world isn't exactly feasable, but the science is consistent, and what they say about each creature, as far as I can tell, is pretty acurate before the necessary shinying-up for the screen.

I loved it. It makes me remember how much I liked dinosaurs as a kid, and makes me a little sad that Anomalies aren't real (unless all of SciFi is real, in which case, I feel cheated that it's being denied me). It's cool, it's fun, it's cheeky and a little intense, and it's short enough to watch in an afternoon, like a movie marathon. I've already moved on to season 2.

movie: land of the lost

2009-06-09T13:30:00.000-07:00

When I was sick recently, I stayed up all night watching a marathon on SciFi of the original Land of the Lost. I'd always thought it was silly and cheezy-- which it was-- but I didn't expect it to be fairly well-written. I was surprised at names I recognized (like Ben Bova) on the author list, and at how consistent the storylines were. Before I watched that, I wanted to see the movie; afterward, I was actually excited, since I had a little background on it and knew enough that I could now catch any in-jokes.

The movie's been doing really poorly by the reviews. Like, dismally poor, last time I checked. In my opinion, they're missing the point. I found the movie silly and more than a little rediculous, but that's what I was expecting: that's what the show was like, and it never once claimed to be a serious interpretation, anyway. It's fun, cheerful, silly, a little crude but never really terribly insulting, and has more plot than I expected it to have. It's full of really great references to the actual show and how this isn't the same thing, and it's quotable enough that it's already made its way into our personal lexicon. Sure, there are plot holes, but they generally don't matter much to the story as a whole; it won't be winning any awards, but it's not the trainwreck it's been made out to be. I mean, Holly gets to take on Sleestaks with only a belt and some feistiness! Marshall gets to ride and dinosaur! Watch it with an open mind, and love it for the silly little bit of brainfluff it really is.

If I had been given the choice, I wouldn't have made Enik's story arc the way it was, and I would have had everyone stay, but then we wouldn't have gotten the triumphant return to the Today show at the end. Ah well.

I'll probably buy it and watch it when I don't want to have to think too much, like when I'm doing housework or I can't sleep or something-- it's not at all challanging, but it makes a rip in time and space look awfully fun.

Plus, there are these neat-ass Sleestaks.

nu who redux: fires of pompeii and planet of the ood

2009-05-31T07:41:00.000-07:00

You know, one of the best things about rewatching a whole season of the wonderfulness that is Nu Who, is you can see how they start the threads really early. I mean, right here in Fires, we've got 'she's returning' and we've got 'there's something on your back' and we've got warnings that the end is near, there's a missing planet, they mention the Medusa Cascade. And we've got the new companion, though at this time, she wasn't even in the running, because my-future-husband hadn't announced he was leaving yet.

This was a fun episode. This whole season is more fun than poor Marfa's previous season. The Doctor takes Donna to Rome... only his aim is off again, and it's Pompeii, about twelve hours before the word Volcano is invented. I love the translation discussion-- and I love that if they actually speak in the language, the Tardis gets glitchy, and they sound Welsh to the listeners (and I think they should play with the idea that the Tardis translates-- sometimes inconsistently-- more often. Think how much fun it would be if the Doctor suddenly isn't speaking English because even though he can, he relies on the Tardis to translate whatever the hell Gallifreyan sounds like into English when he's there...).

I digress. Poor Donna gets pushed into the captured-companion role, but she fights all the way and the Doctor saves her, of course. What I really like about this ep is how Donna fights everything-- the Doctor says it's a Fixed Point, there's nothing he can do about it, and Donna disagrees, keeps disagreeing until they find an excuse for something to be done, and then disagrees more when he's gone all hard-hearted and wants to just leave. But she knows, as we know, that the Doctor isn't like that, and she reminds him of who he is just enough to make a little bit of difference. Which is what the Doctor is all about.

I don't know what's up with the caption on this picture. The Beeb is weird sometimes.

So here we go on Donna's first off-planet adventure. She's so excited that we can hardly understand what she's saying-- and then it's a glacier world with a secret slave trade. I feel bad that she's in the Whoverse after everything has gone to darkness and sadness, but I'm glad it's her, because she fights and she finds the silver lining and she tries to change things. Good on her.

The Ood are... problematic. They're creepy in the face, but we're supposed to see them as something ordinary and not at all gross. They live to serve, but that's because we lobotomized them. They're supposed to be harmless, but both times we saw them, they were being mentally manipulated by stronger minds... But they're also really cool. They share consciousness and sing to eachother across the galaxies. They're not really individuals, I'd guess, though it isn't explicitly said so-- the Ood Brain would be the actual entity, and they are it's eyes and ears and hands in the universe. And that's cool.

And maybe their low level telepathy translates into something of psychicness-- they are the first to bring up the Doctor's song ending, and it's not the last time we hear it. H thinks Ood Sigma will be a big part of 10's Final Story, since they keep saying everyone is coming back, and I think maybe that's true. There's alot of weight on that Ood's words in this ep.

I like that Donna is adapting quickly; her first sight of an alien is an Ood lying bleeding in the snow, and she gets over it very quickly. She refuses to treat them like slaves, and she even works to actively free them. And she reminds the Doctor that this is what he does. Because after all the sadness and screaming of the last series, he needs it. Maybe that's why he keeps getting younger? It's to counteract the natural hardening and darkening of a very old soul? But at this rate, Doctor 12 will be, like, sixteen, and Doctor 13 will be in second grade...

movie: up SPOILERY SPOILERS

2009-05-31T07:13:00.000-07:00

You know how we've all been fine tuned by a lifetime of watching Disney movies to react with desperately strong emotions about every big eye and lonely wide shot? I went to the MGM Studios once when they still had the actual animators there, and there was that little 'fifty years of Disney' montage thing where they splice together all the parts that we know so well-- and are overwhelmed with the force of our hardwired emotions: all the sad parts all together, and the audience all sobs, all the happy parts all together and the audience laughs, all the scary parts, all the angry parts, all the cute parts. It was... distressing. I didn't particularly like knowing how I'd been manipulated, and I've been somewhat suspicious and resentful of Disney movies since then (not that I've stopped watching and loving them, only that I can see what they're doing now and I resent it a little).

Pixar does that, like, seven million times stronger, does it with a more delicate touch, and best of all, does it without any resentment from me. It's impressive. I go into Pixar movies knowing I'm going to sob like I'm made of tears, knowing that it's going to be a breakneck rollercoaster of emotions-- and I don't care. And it gets worse every time. I thought Monsters Inc was the most I could cry in a sweet movie aimed at kids. And then I saw Finding Nemo. I managed to hold off through most of Ratatooi, mostly because I was working at a restaurant at the time and there were kitchens full of rats, and then there's that part where the critic is transported back to his childhood, and I was undone for the whole rest of the movie. And now there's UP.

I loved it. The first fifteen minutes manage to show a man's whole life, his love, his dreams and how they're put off, his pain, his loss-- a whole life and all it's backstory and motivation in that first fifteen minutes with hardly any talking. And before the story even started, I was sobbing. Sobbing so I could hardly breathe, when the short beforehand (which I think is my new favorite one) had me choked up and teary-eyed already. And then I was immediately laughing when Carl is being so crochety and Russel being so hopelessly awkward-- and right back to crying when Carl tries to keep his home and has to go to court. Then back to laughing when he lets the baloons go and floats off, smug and crochety now, and Russel's on the porch... And it's like that throughout, with the chacaters dragging me along and the plot moving so swiftly that I don't have a chance to recover from one before I'm back on the other. It's amazing how they make us care about these weird little characters so quickly.

Favorite parts:

- Dug-- all of him. I want collars that make dog-talk into people-talk so I can have a dog like Dug. I especially like "I have only just met you but I LOVE you" and "Will you be my prisoner now?" and "I am warning you, bird, I am jumping on you"

- Russel and the bird. Every time we cut back, there's something silly going on-- the bird is cuddling him or tossing him around, or, the best part, where he's standing on the bird's feet and using it's legs like stilts.

- Young Ellie and her crazy hair and sudden decisions.

- Carl when he's crochety but not unreasonable; there are a few places where he gets unreasonable, and though we understand why he is, they aren't the places I liked the best.

- The Cone of Shame!

- Alpha's old voice!

- Russel's winderness badges: you only get glimpses of them through the movie, but at the credits, they show the best ones, and they're awesome. I also loved how he can have all the badges, and know so little about the training; it's both funny and really sad that someone's been letting him pass without doing anything for real, especially since he takes it so seriously.

The villain gets the Standard Disney Villain End, which is nice, because I didn't want him being so easily redeemed when he'd been loony for, what, sixty years? And he's really loony, both brilliant and animalistic all at once. And the secondary villain, Carl's inability to break his promises to Ellie so much that he can't ever let go, that's done away with too-- and I'll admit that more than a little of my sobbing at the end was because I know how hard it is to let go of things that remind you of better times, and I wanted so badly for him to be able to keep it all AND win the day, and I knew that that's now how plots work.

And it's a new top for Pixar-- I'm glad merging with Disney didn't ruin it. I never know how they're going to beat the last movie, but they did again, and I can't wait for next time.

classic who: the pyramids of mars and the android invasion

2009-05-27T20:28:00.000-07:00

This week, we took a lazy day and watched two episodes. The first was Pyramids of Mars, which finds Sarah Jane playing in the wardrobe and wearing Vickie's dress, which is convenient, as the Tardis crashlands in the early 1900s, just after an eminent English archaeologist uncovers and untouched Egyptian tomb that turns out to be full of badness, rather than mummies.

The contents of the tomb have been sent home, and a moderately racist but not terrible Egyptian is taking care of it all, waiting for his return-- and praying to the slightly crap-looking sarcophogi. Turns out he's a loyal worshipper of Sutek / Set (which makes me think of the sumb first-season villain from Stargate, because that's what they've done to Egyptian myth in my brain), and he's working to un-trap him from his 7000 years of prison that the Osirian aliens put him under. Because he's not a god, he's an alien war criminal.

So the Doctor has to stop him. There's much creeping around in and out of windows, the Doctor gets help from the archaeologist's brother, there are really pretty neat robot-mummies, and there's a plot to bomb Mars and get the pyrimidal preison deactivated. At one point, the Doctor poses as a mummy and sneaks explosives into the rocket the mummies are building, and Sarah Jane turns out to be a sharp shooter-- even after she's been captured and used against the Doctor. Eventually, the Doctor has to face Sutek on his own, and winds up under the evil influence to save Sarah Jane, but when they reach Mars, all is well because Sutek, though powerful enough to control people in England from Egypt, has trouble concentrating on two mind-control victims at once, and lets the Doctor go, thinking his robomummies have killed him.

The Doctor prevails, of course, though trickery and misdirection, and all is well.

And it's a good episode. There's almost no backing up at the beginning of the next episode, and there's a minimum of getting caught / breaking out / getting caught again. The story is tight and makes sense as much as Classic Who ever does, and in the end, there isn't alot of that weird morally ambiguous feeling it sometimes leaves you with.

Then, on to The Android Invasion.

Sarah and Four land on earth, but something weird is going on, with all the townsfolk acting like pod people, and all the money being newly minted and none of the phones working. Turns out they're all androids. Through various runnings around and splittings up, sarah Jane loses the Tardis, the Doctor figures out that things are wonky and why, Sarah Jane gets duplicated and sent to trap the Doctor, they're foiled, Sarah twists her ankle, and both barely escape the end of the simulation before the aliens take off-- because, you see, none of it is real. These aliens that look like Sontarans with really blobby heads and tricerotops noses are building a perfect simulation to test out how best to conquer earth, now that they've ruined their own planet, and they have a lost human astronaut to help them-- a guy who feels he's been betrayed by the humans who never came to look for him, and who's been in contact with earth for months, telling them his daring and made up story. The aliens told him they'll live in peace, but in reality, they're just going to infect everyone with a virus they're trying to test on a captured Sarah Jane.

She, of course, totally randomly uses the water to conduct electricity to escape instead of drinking it (which is great, because she both gets to be techy and gets to note be poisoned in the cliffhanger, which is what I was expecting), and doesn't even know about the virus.

There's running around on the ship and on the real earth, where key people, including Harry, Benton and Not!TheBrig have been replaced by duplicates already, and they have to exit the ship the way the robots do, which leaves more duplicates of them-- though Sarah's is killed by just knocking it over. I got confused as to who was a robot and who wasn't in the last part, because isntad of acting like emotionless doids, they're acting like their real confused selves, but in the end, the Doctor reprograms his own duplicate offscreen and uses it to stop the baddies and the invasion never comes.

Yay earth!

This one was good, too, but there's the introduction of the idea that Sarah Jane wants to go home and that the Doctor keeps having to find reasons why she can't, and that makes me sad. Sarah's my fav so far except for Rose, and it'll be rough watching her go. But the story was pretty well-paced and except for that one part when I had no idea who was who, made as much sense as a show full of doppelgangers can. And it was entertaining. I like when Classic Who is in space; that's where it seems to belong.

fringe: season finale

2009-05-13T08:07:00.001-07:00

So, this last episode was… not as amazing or action-filled as the commercials made it seem. Walter has run off, and it’s up to Peter to find him, and meanwhile, Olivia and Charlie are looking for Jones, who is all slimy and wrapped in bandages, because of his self-induced radiation poisoning from when he teleported himself. Seems Jones has stolen a powercell from Nina Sharp’s robotic arm and is using it to power a computer monitor that opens a window into that alternate universe we keep going back to. And he keeps getting it wrong. First he brings through most of a semi—except for the back end—that crashes and kills the driver, and has no a single registered part on it. Weird. Then he opens a window on a soccer field that gets a kid chopped in half. Eew. Finally, he heads for this creepy old lake in the woods outside town. He wants to find William Bell and kill him for what he did / is involved in.

All this time, Olivia’s tracking him, and she gets the idea to map the strange events they’ve been tracking and the events they hear about that they haven’t been tracking. When the marks the places where Jones used his transporter, the random dots line up into something along the lines of shatter marks (which is really cool, if they run with the idea that the transporter and the windowmaker sort of shatter the world and let the other worlds through, otherwise, this is not necessary except to look cool). But there are still other sites—centered around that creepy lake. So they head off.

Meanwhile again, Peter finds Walter in the old beach house they used to visit when he was a kid, going all crazy and not able to remember what he’s supposed to find or where he put it. There’s a lot of scenes of Walter flipping out and Peter trying to get him calm, and finally, Peter remembers something from his childhood and the memory sparks Walter’s memory, and he digs up a device that will stop the windows—a sort of reality plug. And they head for the creepy lake, too.

So everyone’s at the lake. The goodies fight some, then Liv and Charlie head for Jones to stop him, and Peter goes to close the gateway—which he does rather anticlimactically as Jones is going through and right before Liv would have followed him. And that’s done in about three seconds, after this whole second half of the season was about getting there. Suck.

But the episode isn’t over yet! Liv goes to Manhattan to meet with Ms Sharp, and gets stood up. Walter goes to a grave and it turns out to be Peter’s grave, and I KNEW IT! That’s why there was all that talk about Peter being so sick and him not remembering it, or remembering anything about his earliest childhood! And that had better cause problems and drama later, because that’s the coolest part of this episode. And Liv goes down the elevator and skitters through a couple alternates, then it stops on a different floor than she asked for, which is all white and clean and futuristic looking, and an aide takes her to meet Spock. I mean, Leonard Nimoy, who is a remarkably cheerful William Bell, considering he’s supposedly hiding out in an alternate reality so Jones won’t kill him (or whatever weirdness there is that we don’t know about yet). And then I have to wait until Fall to see what happens.

It wasn’t a bad episode—it just seemed like it was sort of a let-down when I was watching it: it’s cooler-sounding when I line it all up like this.

And season-enders always make me grumpy.

book: odd and the frost giants, neil gaiman

2009-05-11T09:15:00.000-07:00

(picture borrowed from Neil's own post about it)

It constantly amazes me how flexible Neil Gaiman's style is. There's a whole lifetime in core audience between American Gods and Odd, and yet, both feel like Neil Gaiman. They have the same delicate understanding of how people work, the idea that there's more going on in the background that doesn't directly impact the current story but definitely informs it, the bone-deep certainty that this is how the Gods are.

Odd and the Frost Giants is lovely. Being older than eleven, it took me about three hours to read it, but it was a whole story-- it didn't feel as thin and substanceless as a lot of stories aimed at kids do: it was written in such a way that the fact that Odd was orphaned and abused and strange to boot could be generally ignored by those who aren't old enough to know what that means, but also so that all of it comes through for those of us who are, and makes the story fuller, rounder, easier to read as an adult. And that's how the best kids books are written: in layers that let us still enjoy them when we're technically too old for them. I wish Neil had been writing when I was seven; I wish I could have incorperated all these books into my psyche when it was still forming. As it is, I'll incorperate them into my already weird adult psyche, and I'll write my own stories informed by his sensibility, and I'll save these lovely books for my own kids, mixed in with the ones I did read when I was seven.

I love stories where Gods have the be helped by people. People are neat; they're changable. Gods are what they are, and sometimes that gets them into trouble. Odd gets us out of the trouble by being quiet, sincere, and very clever. It's set in a violent, cold, Viking world, but the violence is all background; Odd is quiet and determined and smart enough to figure things out, and that's a lovely thing for kids to see.

I only wish he could have stayed a kid at the end, though I understand that children always seem to want to be adult; the reverse comes after you realize how much being grown up sucks.

random fan news

2009-05-10T11:42:00.000-07:00

I'm all of a sudden excited about the new Stargate. Which almost pisses me off, because I'm pretty sure it's at least partly to blame for the other two going down. But read this, from Den of Geek:

Stargate veterans line up for Stargate Universe

Simon Brew

The upcoming Stargate Universe has added some familiar-looking guest stars to its casting list…

Published on Apr 21, 2009

The latest television series based around the world of Stargate is well into production, and some familiar faces will be popping in to lend a hand, it's been revealed. SGU: Stargate Universe, as the show is called, already stars Robert Carlyle, Lou Diamond Phillips and Ming-Na, and the crux of the show is about a group of survivors on a not-hugely-impressive ship who aren't able to get back to the Earth.

And joining them in the midst of their adventures? The small matter of Stargateveterans Amanda Tapping (who we've had the pleasure of interviewing here), Richard Dean Anderson, Michael Shanks and Gary Jones. It'll be good to see their friendly faces in there, too.

The show is set to premiere in October, with an extended debut episode planned.

I love Robert Carlyle. No question. And Ming-Na is a mainstay of at least three of the shows I used to watch. So I'm excited. Damnit.

Other news:

Is Gillian Anderson the new Rani? How sweet would that be? She's smart, beautiful, she's local to the UK now, she knows her way around scifi, and it'd be interesting to see a new take on the Rani. And I love when my fandoms collide.

Day One is coming up, and it's made of lovely post-apocalypticness! Den of Geek says it sounds like Jericho, which I kind of liked, so they'll have to do something else with the same general setup to be anything but a knockoff. And hopefully they won't have to fight so hard just to stay on the air.

(What is it with scifi and early cancellation? It seems like half of it doesn't get ver far. For every Star Trek or Doctor Who or Stargate, there's Firefly and Jericho and Sarah Connor... There's obviously a market for it, but I think they need to check the numbers differently; the people invested in SciFi will likely also be invested in Tivo and hulu and off-schedule viewing.)

Fringe will get a second season! Which I think is due entirely to how JJ can't fail right now. If he didn't have the first summer blockbuster and Lost under his belt, I'm sure it'd get dumped too, because Fox has no faith in it's own shows. Even though that's where X-Files came from.

There's still the Gaiman-on-Who rumor. I think it'd be awesome. I also think that if the fans circulate it enough, it'll be an innevitability. So here's to spreading the news.

sarah connor chronicles: last four episodes of s02

2009-05-10T11:07:00.000-07:00

My god. Talk about heavy. I watched them all back to back when I should have been doing more productive things that get me paid, but man. There was no way to stop this freight train, not when then episodes were just sitting there, waiting for me. I'm glad I waited until they were all done; I might have gone ballistic and killed people otherwise.

So here's what we've got. Sarah found a lump, and fearing it was the cancer she's fated to have, went to the doctor and found that it was a tracking device. Which sent people after her, which she had to kill. Around this time, she contacts Charlie and tells him that she thinks it's cancer and gets him to take care of John, planning on ditching him to spare him. Charlie's in a bad emotional place, but he loves John like a son and agrees. But the people in grey come to his house while Sarah's getting beat up, and John gets away, but Charlie doesn't. Damnit, I liked Charlie.

Meanwhile, Derek is cleaning out the weapons locker with Cameron, and she mentions that Jesse had been pregnant and now wasn't, and that since he lost a child, he won't allow the same to happen to Sarah. As if he would before-- except that his secret affair with the lunatic almost did get John killed, and did get Reiley killed.

John Henry gets hacked and wakes up aware of what it feels like to die-- and aware that the virus that got him has the same base code as he does: Skynet, as far as I can tell.

Those same people in grey were after Savannah Weaver, which means I was right, and she was around for a reason. John Henry helps her (until the headset goes out of range) when a terminator and a bunch of non-terminators break into her house and kill her nanny. John, Sarah and Derek take over from that point on, and get her away to safety. Derek gets killed in about the most offhand way-- a bullet through the forehead as he's coming around a corner. Damnit again. Savannah thinks they came because she was talking to John Henry, who her teacher interpreted as an internet pedophile; John tries to convence her that's not it and they find out about John Henry.

Sarah wants to meet Weaver. They set up a return of Savannah in exchange for a talk, but sarah gets captured by teh cops and thrown in jail instead. Ellis swears it wasn't him; they don't really say so, but I think it was the other FBI guy, who's brough in because kidnapping is a federal case, and looks shifty to me. While in jail, Sarah seems to have convinced her lawyer (who looks familiar, but I can't place) that it's all true, but she doesn't trust him and he can't help her; she insists that John's dead and sends a message with the priest from the episode where cameron went all glitchy to tell him to leave and never come back for her. John, of course, having just lost two father figures, isn't willing to lose his mother, too. They get fake papers through the Latina moll, who gets to talk this time, but they don't use them; they plan a breakin and free everyone, thereby causing a massive distraction to get Sarah out. Which works, but gets Cameron very damaged.

Back at Zeira Corp, things go to hell. Weaver thanks them for getting her daughter back, and then they start to talk about the Future, but a huge thing that looks all Skynet-y slams into the building and she reveals her true form to protect them. She insists that John Connor needs John Henry to effectively fight Skynet in the Future, and they all go down to the basement to save him-- and find Cameron without a chip and John-Henry gone through time. Weaver activates the bubble thing and they start to go, but Sarah stays. John won't leave Cameron and Weaver won't leave John Henry, and they pop up in a future where John hasn't led the rebellion (yet? or at all?), Derek and Keyle are still alive, and Allison isn't yet a Terminator.

And then it's over, and I'm on the floor twitching because I'll probably never get to see what happens next! Bastards! Fox needs to check download numbers and hulu hits and all that and see that it's not really as poorly watched as they think, and give me at least one more season. There's too much left unsaid!

- John seems to have realize how much he actually likes Cameron-- he goes through time to save her, for gods' sake, even though she probably gave up her chip voluntarily-- and he's lost everyone now. He's dropped into another alternate future where he wasn't there for 20 years, and all the people who died in the past are still alive because they never left, but it's got to be ten times worse than it was without them all saving the world along the way, right?

- And who the hell is Weaver? We've been assuming that she's building Skynet, but now it seems she's building something to fight Skynet, but she's using Skynet's own techniques to do it? And she may have been asked to partner with Future!John, and declined, but came back in time to do the same thing anyway?

- And will sixteen year old John stay in the future and start saving himself in the past so as to correct the timeline? Is that why we never saw Old!John? Because he isn't old? If so, there's something really odd, and maybe a little creepy about him and Allison / Cameron. He loves her already as a robot, so he buddies up with the real one, knowing the Ts will replace her, catches and reprograms her, and sends her back to make himself fall for her? As if the timeline wasn't f'ed up enough, now there's a branch where nothing ever changed it and it's all awful, and Young!John is there...

Man, I need another season. Here's waht I think: John would have found some vital information in the Future, and gone back to somewhere around the time when he left, maybe far enough back to stop Derek from getting killed so ingloriously, or to replace him with this other alternate Derek that didn't lose a brother and go batshit. Then he starts in earnest to build the Rebellion, since he knows more and doesn't have to depend so much on his Future self. One way or another, Cameron or Allison would have come back (unless they're going with T3, in which case they need to convincingly replace her with Kate). Sarah would have gotten sick, but they'll find a way to cure her or to cyborgize her so that she can survive, because John needs his mom. She's his only constant. In the Future, he starts sending people back and in the Present, he works with Weaver to send people forward or to set up the means to fight more effectively or something.

There may be fanfic in here.

fringe: the road not taken

2009-05-09T12:08:00.001-07:00

The Fringe world gets weirder: now Olivia’s seeing into and interacting with alternate realities.

The case is of a girl who spontaneously combusts, but a look at her house shows that she’s combusted before. It’s not spontaneous, and it’s probably not natural. Meanwhile, Liv keeps seeing more than one body, and it gets worse. She sees the city burning. She sees the office in an uproar handling the outbreak of a terrorist plague attack. And when the trail goes dry here, she can get info from the other universe, which means she finds out that the victim (and probably the others she finds along the way) has a twin. They track the twin, but get there too late. Peter, who’s been working on a mystery project, reveals that it’s a machine to read sound waves off objects, and that it can be modified from it’s original purpose of decoding Walter’s old warped records to read the sounds in the room at the time the twin was kidnapped. It works well enough, of course, to get a phone number, and Liv’s phone has an app that can dial from the tones: and gets Harris’s phone. That’s right, the guy who’s been trying to get her off the case and out of Fringe Division is in on whatever’s happening to these people.

Liv and Charlie track him and find the girl, but Harris’s tests to activate her have made her unstable—Liv stops her from blowing the two of them up, but the girl combusts Harris instead. Ha! but now their trail is literally in ashes.

Meanwhile, Nina Sharp is agitated by a phone call and eventually shows up at Broyles’s door late at night with a warning of the Observer and something big on the way.

Liv knows Walter was in on the experiments on kids: the twins were from Jacksonville, and are about the same age as her. She wants answers, but he can’t provide them; he can’t remember.

Walter goes back to his office to find the original manuscript of the ZFT book to prove that Bell had a whole removed chapter on ethics that the movement isn’t using, and therefore that Bell isn’t to blame for them, finds it, and then is visited by the Observer, who tells him ‘it’s time’ and they leave together.

What’s going on now? The season’s almost at an end! And suddenly this show is very fiercely interesting.

star trek (the new one—DON’T READ THIS IF YOU DON’T WANT SPOILERS BECAUSE I”M TOTALLY TALKING ABOUT EVERYTHING)

2009-05-09T11:53:00.001-07:00

Oh, man. I didn’t want to like this movie. The old one holds such a special place in my heart* and mind, and I didn’t want to see it ruined, which seems to be how all but a few modern remakes seem to go. And the posters didn’t really do much for me—I mean, really, a blur that might be the Enterprise? Kirk looking like his hairline and his eyebrows are fifty miles apart while Spock looks like he’s got no forehead at all? I was expecting something along the lines of Episode I, all flash and resentment, no story or emotion at all.

Man, I’m glad I was disappointed. This is the best sort of disappointment, where everything comes out much better than you expected. JJ, you’ve reached Whedon-levels of devotion in my pantheon of fan-saints (as if Lost hadn’t already won you that).

I loved it. I loved it so much, I went to see it again four hours later with one of the same people I saw it with the first time.

The ship looked delicious, retro enough to sate the fan in me, but new and bright and futuristic and wonderful enough to surprise me and make me want to be part of it all over again, like when I was a kid and had that same fresh feeling of wonder. It felt right, like this is what they’d intended it to look like before, but they just didn’t have the budget or the techniques to get it right. The loving and sexy first shot of the Enterprise at spacedock (why it gotta be spacedock? you don’t call a regular dock a waterdock.) was beautiful—I wanted to reach out and touch her hull with my bare hands. She looked real. She looked like the flagship should look, shining and beautiful and fresh and unchallenged. And the effects, whether battle or just cruising were great, flashy and brilliant and yet still somehow real enough to feel like something that could actually happen, something people could make and could live in. The first space battle, with Kirk’s dad and mom’s entirely human conversation as this massive monstrosity ends their marriage in fire and heroics set the tone for a movie that’s very tech, but also has the emotional connection that was desperately missing from all the Star Wars prequels. It’s what SciFi should be.

On to the characters. Like I said, I was most resistant to these new upstarts playing my beloved crew, but they won me over. Kirk wasn’t nearly as weird-looking as the posted led me to believe, and he had exactly the right amount of offhand charm and deep-seated anger mixed with problems with authority and a willingness to get severely beaten to get the job done. Which he did. Alot. He’s like the Harry Dresden of space over here, beaten up every three minutes by someone faster and stronger than him, and yet coming out on top every time. “I’ve got your gun” indeed! And he wasn’t as smarmy as Shatner!Kirk could sometimes come across, though he kept the cheerful disregard for protocol that always made him interesting (and, really, made this branch of the franchise more interesting than the story overall—I agree with Pike: the Federation had lost something in the perfect regimentation of the human race).

Spock was fun. I didn’t like Zack’s Syler until recently when he got something to debate over, and Spock always had that: something to battle out in his own head. I like that Spock’s whole emotional issue comes from the fact that he can’t reconcile the fact of loving his mother with the logic of not allowing emotions to rule him. And I love that he can love Uhura and still be remote, logical, radical, rebellious Spock. his eyebrows bothered me, but his real eyebrows bother me, too. I’m just happy that there wasn’t any of the idea that Vulcans are tantamount to androids that so many non-Spock actors seem to think is the case. I love that he’s devoted to being the best Vulcan he can be, but is just human enough to rebel when he needs to, to be the much-needed radical faction within the solid, ancient, entirely controlled Vulcan culture.

And I loved the deserty-cave imagery of the Vulcan homeworld. Amazing. And alien in that way where it’s obviously not here, but is recognizable enough that it’s not off-putting.

Sarek was pretty great, and Amanda was perfect—a bright human woman willingly living within an alien society, but daring to keep her sense of self and to be openly proud of her alien son. I didn’t even realize it was Winona Ryder until I saw the credits. She didn’t seem Winona-like.

Uhura was a little skipped on the character development, but we got enough in her acting to know that she’s strong and brilliant and has an actual talent—she’s naturally adept at what she does, not just a space-receptionist. She really cares for Spock, but doesn’t let it get in the way of her job, she wants to be an upstanding officer, but she speaks out when things are unfair, and she follows orders, but makes it known that she doesn't necessarily agree with them. That’s a lot of complexity to get into a pretty narrow role that she was given; i hope there are Uhura out takes in the special features. I hope there are dozens of deleted scenes, not because there are parts where I think something was missing, but because I want to see more of this lovely shiny world.

Chekov is adorable, a bright little baby dropped in the middle of this crazy, much older crew on a lunatic mission that doesn’t make a lot of sense in the context of usual fleet missions, but he has enough confidence to keep up, to do what he knows he can do and to do it well. I love that he’s still got his speech impediment. And I love that he’s excited about it all. And I love that he never once gets punched in the jaw and knocked out.

Sulu was also great fun, sardonic and a little sarcastic, unhappy with how things are going but loyal and skilled enough to trust and act accordingly. And fearless enough to volunteer for a skydive from space with combat training that includes not much more than fencing—and apparently some hack-and-slash.

McCoy was cranky and fussy and angry as I would have expected, but I missed the taunting that they hadn’t reached yet between him and Spock—trying to get a rise out of a Vulcan was always his most entertaining work. He makes more sense this way, a man who’s already been through medschool before joining Starfleet, who knows exactly what can go wrong when you leave the surface of a planet. Of the crew, though, I would have liked to have seen more of him, to get to know him a little more. Maybe to have seen just a moment when he was more at ease and less exasperated with the world.

And Scotty! He had the smallest part yet, but Simon Pegg just shone! Cranky, a little bit cracked, perfectly willing to go through a transport he hadn’t tested, to get almost drowned, to be taken hostage by security, to defy the captain, to be dropped into a role he hadn’t been assigned to, and to do it well. He was entertaining, to say the least, and sort of stole the scenes he was in—I’m glad they let him do most of the talking in his three scenes.

Old!Spock was exactly what I always loved about Spock in the movies: he knows who he is, and he knows exactly when logic doesn’t apply and how to rationalize so that irrationality seems rational. He willy-nillys all through the timeline, manipulating in that way where you could be mad at him, but you know he’s doing it for the best, so you aren’t. He delivers his best line as if it were new, and he fits flawlessly into a movie full of new people playing his old friends.

They’re all a little crazy. I love that this fact was played up. To work so well as a nontraditional crew, they’d all have to be on the adventure-seeking side, the lunatic fringe, and that’s exactly where they are. It makes sense. It’s not just loyalty to the captain, because he wasn’t the captain yet: it’s the fact that they’re all of a mind to find the best way to do something, even when it’s the crazy thing to do.

And the villains. Nero is a weird choice of a villain, really familiar and matter-of-fact, and I think that makes him scarier: he matter-of-factly destroys a whole ancient world and goes on to destroy another with the intention of wiping out something like 150 more. He falls through time and deals with it by spending 25 years obsessing over a plan to ruin the lives of everyone instead of going home to a world that hasn’t yet been destroyed (or even realizing that if he takes out Starfleet, there’s NO chance that it won’t be destroyed). He’s another rogue, someone not only separated from his home, his empire and his government, but also from his time and his previous life: a madman who thinks nothing of changing history.

And that’s what this movie does. half-way through, I realize that JJ wasn’t going to fix it. That this is how it is now. And I was just floored. It’s so bold. There was a moment of sadness that everything that came after won’t happen now, but there’s this immense feeling of freedom and excitement: anything can happen now. Anything. Maybe we’ll meet all the people we loved from after this point in the original timeline, but maybe we won’t**. Maybe we’ll meet all new wonderful people, have all new amazing adventures, fall in love with this world all over again.

I’m so ready to find out.

Other notes:

- JJ, that’s not how black holes work. You could have solved this easily by saying wormhole instead. Also, if one drop of red matter makes a time-traveling black hole, how come a whole ship full makes one the same size and strength? And why was so much needed anyway?

- I miss Nurse Chapel. And if Uhura is Spock’s love interest, then maybe in movie 2, Bones can meet Chapel and she can be his? He needs a good girl.

- I wonder what this more industrial-factory sort of a ship’s crew quarters would look like? We didn’t see a single private space in this movie (understandably, since all of it happened in, like, three and a half minutes), and I’m curious how the people all lived. individual quarters or barracks-type? Is there a lounge? Are there offices? Do they have toilets?

- Yay for understanding the three-dimensionality of space and the relativity of up-down orientation! That’s how space should be! And yay also for the perfect use of silence in the scenes that happened in space. There’d be no noise, and that makes them creepier and more stunning.

- * My personal memory of the OS comes from being very young in Japan and being locked un during typhoons: the USO channel would halt normal broadcasting and show OS marathons so they could break at any time for weather updates, and we’d sit on the floor all day and watch one of my dad’s favorite shows with him—which was quite amazing since we hardly saw him because of the hours he worked.

- Was Kirk’s mom in Starfleet? She seems to have been the only family-member on board, and he was just a Lieutenant, not important enough to have a live-in wife aboard. They say later that she was off-world…

- Did we really need the scene with kid!Kirk and the car? We needed the one with kid!Spock so we’d know what his weakness was, but I think Kirk’s was just to offer symmetry. We got that he was a roughneck from the bar scene.

- Uhura’s room-mate and maybe best friend was killed on the Farragut on that first mission, and she never got a chance to realize it. The only reason she wasn’t killed also was because Sulu left the braking dampeners on.

- ** I’m hoping we still get to meet Savik, Picard, Worf, Dax, Odo, and the afore mentioned Nurse Chapel. Doesn’t Kirk have a brother in the OS? I guess that got changed. I hope we don’t have to meet the Borg. I’m so over them, and it’s Voyager’s fault. I also hope we get to see the villains of the OS, all those tacky weird low-budget necessities turned into something cool and flashy and worthy of this movie.

- I’m pretty sure the entire purpose of the second crew was to wrangle lens-flares. Which I loved. I hope the future really is bright and shiny and flarey, and not dull and beige and monochrome and so well adjusted that people are flat and boring.

fringe: unleashed, bad dreams, midnight s01e16-18

2009-05-03T05:07:00.000-07:00

I really am happy Fringe is back.

I just don't seem to get to watch it every week, but that means you get several episode reviews at once, and I get to pretend I'm watching it on DVD and don't have to wait for episodes.

So, onward! We start off with Unleashed, where a group of PETA types are raiding a lab and setting all the animals free-- and one of them is a man-eating monster. Sweet. There's alot of hack-and-slash while the creature goes on a rampage, but the fun part is when they're tracking it: it literally goes underground, and they have to go into the old catacomb-like sewers to get it. Walter, of course, knows what it is, and blames his own research for it, and so takes it upon himself to stop it. Meanwhile, this week's ick-factor: it lays it's eggs in it's victims, and a day or so later, they burst out of the body and squirm all over the place. The dead kids are gross enough. but Francis gets stung and is still alive when it's happening to him, and you gotta think, did they just go 'hey, we've got this gross plot point, you know what would make it grosser? if the vic were alive when it happened'. And you know what? It totally was.

So he's got larva in his sixpack, and we get to meet his wife-- that chick from Indipendence Day who got blown up because she went to the welcoming party. But with red hair, and not playing a stripper-- and it's very sweet, her thinking he's just calling in from the office and him knowing he's dying and wanting to hear her voice one more time just in case. The cure is in the creature's blood, and that's why the tram has to go kill it where it's hiding. And they do. Well, Walter does. He locks Liv and Peter away, and goes after it himself, and when it tracks him down, he freezes, but we get to see a pretty awesome Samael-type chimera thing; Peter manages to distract it, and when it goes for him, Walter shoots it with a BFhandG, and voila, cure. Charlie's saved, his wife doesn't know any better, and the episode is over.

Fringe is most like the X-Files in these monster eps, and that's good. The first season of X-Files was bearable because the monsters broke up the Core Episodes, and really, conspiracies are better as a sideline, not the main plot. It gets too heavy.

Was this the episode where Liv tries to pretend she isn't jealous that Peter is calling her sister? I think so.

Next: Bad Dreams. Liv dreams she kills some pretty lady by bushing her in front of an oncoming train in front of her two-year-old daughter, and then finds out that it actually happened-- in New york, as she was asleep in bed in Boston. She has a really nice bed, by the way. It must be nice having a job where it's purpose is to investigate weird things and a boss who has come to trust your instincts, even if he doesn't tell you anything; Broyles lets her go investigate, and she finds a straightforward suicide. Then, she dreams a lady in a restaurant flips out and stabs her husband, and Liv holds her hand and helps her do it. Peter doesn't believe she's killing people or that she's capable of it, but Walter takes her seriously, and Broyles lets her keep investigating, even though it's against regulations to investigate yourself. This point in the show is the best, character-wise: Liv is coming apart at the seams, being erratic, feeling frantic, not sleeping for fear that it'll happen again, and Peter is very sweet and calming and comforting. An eyewitness of the guy who was in the seat Liv dreamed she was in leads them to a guy who she recognizes from the security cameras of the subway suicide-- and she realizes it's him. They track him down and he turns out to be one of the test subjects like Liv, and he remembers her. They knew eachother as kids, and he sent her the dreams to call for her help. She tracks him in a hypnotic state, experiences a little second-hand sexiness, dreams she's making out with a stripper who doesn't get a single line, freaks out and gets calmed by the very presence of Peter's hand on her's, and winds up on a rooftop with this guy who can infect people with his emotions-- a runaway empath-- and something like ten people who have been caught up in it and want to jump off the roof with him. Liv talks him down enough to get a bullet in his leg and release all but one captive. He wants to be killed, to be stopped, but she can't do it, so we have a link to her past kept in a permanent medical coma, and I'm sure he'll come back later. Also, he's kinda pretty.

So now Liv knows that she was definitely tested on, and that it was for the purpose of being a soldier against this coming invasion ZFT keeps talking about. They were supposed to forget until needed, but he didn't forget, and he remembers her-- and says that she was always the one who could stop him. And right at the end, Walter finds a VHS tape with a little blonde girl they're calling Olive, curled up in a corner of what looks like a trashed, burned up room, with him and Spock / Leonard Nimoy talking about her.

Dun-dun -DUN!!!

And now there's Midnight. This one is a little Core-ish, but it doesn't start out that way. The news says someone is butchering people and leaving the bodies (the newslady is not a very convincing newslady), and we see this guy going on the prowl while his girlfriend's out of town-- and I totally called that he wasn't the killer, though he was pretty greasy. Vindicated when he becomes the victim-- his pretty conquest tears open his spine and sucks up all his spinal fluid. Yum! No, wait, gross. They find that the corpse has an extinct form of syphillis, and that leads them through the CDC to the only place in the area that's ordered a sample of it: a so-called lab that is based out of some dude's apartment. And they catch him because he can't run away: he's in a wheelchair.

He claims that his wife is being held hostage as a punishment for him and that the monster is some innocent that was dosed to test the virus-plague thing he was working on; he'll help them stop her if they free his wife. Only the wife isn't in the second secret lab behind a Chinese restaurant that they raid, only the samples of the poison, which he has them bring back and tells them that the innocent is his wife and they were keeping him from making a cure. She kills some more, and they agree to let him work with Walter to find a cure so she'll stop killing. He's in a wheelchair because he was feeding her his own spinal fluid trying to save her-- the poison burns off your own when you're infected and makes you kill to replenish it-- but when he had to stop, she got out. It's all a ZFT plot, and he was trying to get out, and if they can bring her back alive, he'll tell them everything he knows.

So they track her, using the raised body temperature the syphillis causes, and she almost gets Liv's spine, but Peter manages to drive and trank her, and they bring her in. Cured, sure, but the procedure requires a little more spinal fluid and that kills the doctor-husband, as soon as he knows his wife is alright. He left a video, though, and Liv knows the names: including William Bell, Walter's old lab partner and none other than Spock himself.

The best part? When Broyles goes 'Are you telling me we have another monster?'. I love when characters seem to know what's going on around them.

I think this show is hitting it's stride, and if it makes it past the scariness of Cuts Season, I can't wait for the next season, after everything is all set up!

st:tng redux: encounter at farpoint

2009-05-03T04:28:00.000-07:00

It's been ages since I sat down and watched a whole episode of TNG. When I was a kid, it aired on the night my parents had their darts tournament at the officers' club, and since we were living somewhere with only three channels, there wasn't any alternative. I remember not liking it at first; it was so different from the Original Series, which was very dear to my heart, and I had the unyeilding outlook of an eight year old. But by the time it got to the second season and I'd been watching it for a year, I loved it. The last episode aired during my birthday party in 1994-- the first one that was allowed to be co-ed-- and I actually stopped the festivities for two hours so I could watch it. That's how geek I am. And most of my friends were equally geek enough to appreciate how much I needed to see that last ep as it aired.

But I haven't watched it seriously much since then. It's on at night on several different channels, and at least two have mini-marathons during the day, so if I'm channel surfing and I see an episode I like, I'll stop and watch it, but that makes for some very scattered viewing. H, however, likes to refresh his mind on things before their movies come out, and so we found ourselves watching the beginning of a(n old) new era in TV SciFi, twenty-odd years after the fact.

This isn't my favorite episode. Never was. It effectively sets up the show, but half the characters weren't defined yet, they were in those rediculous spandex suits that looked terribly uncomfortable, and the effects looked like most of the money went into the sets, the story is irritating, Q is an obnoxious way to start off a show, and I knew that there were much better episodes later on. But when the monologue starts, and the world's most famous split infinitive is first uttered in Patrick Stewart's perfect voice-over voice, I can forgive all that. It's old enough that the things that botered me as a kid are sort of nostalgic now, and I can watch it the way I watch old home videos of my parents or read the first novels of favorite writers: it's not quite there yet, but it's interesting to see how it started, how things came together, a

nd I know it all turned out well in the end.

I think Stewart knew exactly who Picard was before he started on day one of that show; he was exactly what he needed to be-- entirely different from Kirk, principled, thoughtful, grumpy, and with a whole load of old history that they hadn't filled in yet, but he managed to convey without any lines to convey them with. I'd say the same for Riker, though they hadn't decided that he was a ladies-man yet, and Crusher was about as pointy and pointed as she ever was. I always forget that she and Picard stared out at odds, but I can see that they didn't want to be, and that makes the friendship more meaningful later. And check out her poofy hair in this picture! Westley was still sweet and awkward, and this was long before he became such a fan problem. Whill Wheaton looks pretty much the same now, but with a beard and a grownup life. Jordi hardly got a word in edgewise, but I think Levar Burton managed to have the most natural-sounding lines of the whole show-- he was the one most comfortable with himself and his storylines (that hadn't happened yet). And, oh, the banana clip. Worf... was almost entirely unformed, but they got the balance of wanting to fight everything and trying to be perfectly Star Fleet in the broadest sorts of strokes, and he didn't really get to shine until Yar was gone, anway. Speaking of, Yar was overacting and annoying, just how I remembered her, but I give them points for having a moderately pretty blonde female as the security captain, and she got her history-establishing line just right. Data wasn't quite as cold and dispassionate as he later could be, nor was he as earnest and confused about humanity, though he did have the little quirk of wanting to understand it all. And who doesn't love that scene of hopping down the rocks to save Westley? Troi was... silly. I never quite got her accent, and she looked fiercely uncomfortable in her clothes (though I can't blame her, what with being the only one in a miniskirt), but she was never at her best in other people's stories. And started with a sort of... handicap, being the one who is all emotionally 'sensing' everything all the time while everyone else gest to have more defined and concret roles. Ah well.

Hey, remember how the saucer section can separate and how it doesn't really do anything for the plot? Yeah, that's awesome. And make sure you remember that it's awesome when they do it alot in this first season, okay?

And I think the prettiest scene in the whole episode is the one where they show the two space-jellyfish space-swimming away tentacle-in-tentacle. Followed by the loving pan of the huge bridge when Riker first gets there.

I hope we get more of this: I miss the cleaness of TNG, even though I's still irritated at the lack of relationship-consummation; maybe it's just that so many people live so long these days that ten or twelve or fifteen years isn't that big a deal to wait for a well-deserved wedding?

lost: the variable s05e14

2009-04-29T20:56:00.000-07:00

Faraday Flashback for the 100th Episode! We learn that his mom's a bitch-- in many directions and at many different times in his life and her's. This one is all over the timeline, so bear with me.

Baby!Daniel is a piano virtuoso, as well as adorable, but mother says he needs to focus on science because his brain is too good to waste on piano. It's a distraction. Completely ignoring that piano is good for the brain that deals with math, and that it's what he wants to do.

Now!Daniel is leading the Losties around blabbing stuff all over-- that Miles is Chang's son, that they need to talk to the Hostiles, that his mom is one of them, that there's a bomb that can kill the EMP that the Hatch was built to keep track of, that Charlotte needs to never come back, that Chang has to evacuate everyone... It's refreshing. He thinks everything can be changed, whereas everyone else is always 'what's done is done' and that has been frustrating me, because, as I said in my last post, innevitability is boring, and even with all this cool shit going down and things starting to finally make sense, all of it is pre-ordained. They just didn't know the story yet. I really wanted Ben to die as a kid, and I really want them to be able to change things anyway. Jack's all onboard, being all Jack about it, but I'm kind of with Sawyer on this one: let it be. They all had craptacular lives before the crash, and they can just start over somewhere else on the island. What's another weird faction? And there's still, like, an entire coastline where we've never been.

Back to the story.

We see Daniel's life: his mom's a bitch at him when he graduates Oxford with bad Oxford hair and the youngest phD the place has ever given; he's all broken post-accident that turned his girlfriend into a vegetable who can't keep track of her own timeframe, and it's damaged his memory, made him simple and incapable of the math that got him that far in his life, made him emotionally fragile, and left him weepy and terrible in a delicate way that makes me want to hug him, rather than making me want to kick him, as when similar things happen to John or Jack; Widmore tells him he needs him to go to the island; his mom looks in on Penny and Desmond and we learn who Daniel's dad is (E totally called it), and that dear old mother might be yet another opposing faction; we see the context of Daniel down in the place where the Frozen Donkey Wheel is, but he doesn't do anything, and that disappointed me a little, because it seemed like he was working there before, and that would have been sweet; Widmore wants him to go to the island to further his research, but the plane crash footage is upsetting him and he says no-- until his mom is a manipulative bitch and tells him to go.

So he goes, and he runs around on his own mission, as he always has, and gets himself in trouble. He talks jack and Kate into getting him to the Hostiles to talk to his mom, gets Richard instead, and gets shot. And I almost burst into tears, because he was one of my favorites, and one of the few that I still cared about by this point. That just leaves Miles.

I wonder if we'll get Mr Hawking's backstory, and why she's so awful? The story shows that she needed certain things to happen, but not why she was so terrible about it along the way. And she finally doesn't know what's going to happen, so maybe she'll be less awful now?

And there's six hours until the Incident that Daniel was trying to stop / would have wound up the maker of, and three episodes left, and there's not been any Locke for a while, and there's only one season left after this. So! Onward!

books: imago, octavia e butler

2009-04-29T20:37:00.000-07:00

This book is... not one of my favorites. It has all the things that should make it right up my alley, but it somehow didn't come across as the sort of thing I like-- and yet I couldn't put the thing down. Even with it's ugly cover and my copy's massive copy errors that kept kicking me out of reader mode and into editor mode. It was a short book. It shouldn't have had so many errors, mispelled words, repeated words, missing words. And it wasn't an advance reading copy, either.

Anyway, enough of that particular hobbyhorse.

Imago is the story of Johdas, half-human and half-alien, going through metamorphosis and becomign what he'd/ she'd/ it'd become as an adult. There's five parents, two human and three alien, various siblings, various normal and mutated humans. There's a post-apocalyptic vibe going on-- there was a terribly destructive war a generation or wo before-- mixed in with a preapocalyptic one-- the aliens will eventually leave the earth a broken and used-up husk. Johdas comes out of metamorphosis as an ooloi, the third gender that helps the aliens breed with the new species they encounter, as well as letting them correct genetic abnormalities, collect DNA of anything that has it, and being the lynchpins of their society. It wasn't supposed to happen in human-pairings; they were designed to be male or female, and a human-ooloi is not just unexpected and unpredictable, but also dangerous, they claim, because it could damage DNA without knowing it.

Sounds good, right?

But Johdas doesn't really damage much, and what it damages, it fixes. And never damages humans or plants or microbes, only alien-things like them, their ship and their town-beings. And he gets that under control with little enough trouble. His sibling has a rougher time, but he fixes that, too, with almost no trial and error-- which would have made the book more interesting a read. He goes looking for human mates, and that, even, is sort of uninteresting; there's lots of weird alien sex, but all of it so oblique as to be ignorable, and the people are put in a position of physical dependance on the alien presence of him: they're addicted to him and have no choice. And he knows it. And he doesn't tell them.

Maybe that's my biggest problem: Johdas is kind of a jerk, his people are all jerkish, and the narrative is told from this jerkish point of view, where humans are constantly being called treasure and wonderful and interesting, and then being kept as breeding stock, too addicted to thin straight, even when they think they should be. There's so little choice in the whole story. It's innevitable, and innevitability is dull, even when the actual events-- preparations for leaving a dead world, unheaval in the alien societies, human resistance and how it's overcome-- are really pretty interesting ideas. It was constantly bothering me on fundamental reading and writing and plooting levels, and yet I kept reading it. I didn't even like it, and yet I kept reading it. It's like it was making me, like the book itself was that alien jerk, addicting me. And I have a problem with that-- if she could accomplish that on a dumb story, think what she could accomplish on a good one.

People keep telling me to read Butler's books, and I'm not all that impressed with this one, but it had good ideas. Hopefully it's just an early one and good ideas don't always come out this annoying.

books: turn coat - book eleven of the dresden files

2009-04-29T20:14:00.000-07:00

Book eleven! Though they've totally stopped numbering them, so I guess it's indefinite. Which I'm totally alright with. Because it's really becoming an addiction now-- I've caught up with him, and now I have to wait, and I think the only thing that will keep me from going bonkers is a combination of the fact that he writes a new one every year, and the fact that I can write my own stories to fill in the gap.

Anyway.

Harry's having terrible headaches that are never really incorperated into the story when there's a knock at the door and a bloody and beaten Morgan says he needs help. Harry, being Harry, doesn't tell him to bugger off, and instead decides that he'll fight for the underdog, even if the underdog is a right bastard and doesn't deserve it. It seems Morgan's been accused of a Senior Council murder (one of the ones we never had to deal with), and Harry doesn't think it's him, despite all the mountains of evidence against him. Let the craziness ensue while Harry shelters a criminal, Molly keeps getting herself almost killed, Mouse proves he's the coolest dog in the world, Murphy kicks ass and does it well, a skinwalker almost walks off with everyone's skin on multiple occasions, a minor criminal wizard named Binder turns out to be pretty fun, a new PI horns in on Harry's turf, Thomas gest kidnapped, Madeline is a vampiric skank, Lara is a vampiric mob boss, Harry has relationship issues with Anastasia, Morgan bleeds on everything and keeps picking fights, and the Black Council makes moves. Lots of moves.

I totally called the villain before the half-way point, but Butcher's good enough that I thought I'd miscalled and was surprised anyway.

New developments, characterwise: Harry seems to be feeling his age a little-- he keeps talking about how long he's been doing this, and he's finally starting to think ahead and think in new directions. He's also still crazy old Harry, forming psychic bonds with myterious old islands, throwing around Soul Fire and making bold challenges to everyone he meets. Which is how we love him.

He hand Murph both said the L-word (not 'lesbian') and it almost made me cry-- both because it was sad and heart-wrenching and uncertain, and because it was totally not the sort of culmination of passion that I want. But it's still there, on his side at least. C'mon, Butch! Stop being all Mulder-and-Scully on me! It's been ten years!

Molly is nursing some serious demons, and she keeps slipping up. Sooner or later, this is going to be a plot, and it's so not going to be pretty.

The Senior Council is half made of jerks. But we knew this already. All of them, however, finally get a little character development, as well as Morgan and Luccio, and this is all good. But Morgan? Remember when we got backstory on Snape? That's all I'm saying.

The Pixies are getting bolder and more devoted to Harry and so much more organized that people are noticing. And Toot-toot is still the coolest.

I'm going to have nightmares about skinwalkers for the rest of my life now.

Thomas-- no! But I suppose the way things were just couldn't last, story-wise. It's been done, and it'd eventually get boring, though I hadn't reached that point yet. (note: one of the things I like best about these stories is how I can tell he's always got a mind toward what will make a better story. Poor Harry's been beaten repeatedly by everything under the sun, including his personal life, and there's still new stories to tell. And he's always unexpected. I've read eleven of theses books now, and I'm still greatly enjoying them and waiting with rapt attention for the new ones. Maybe I'll have to actually buy all the previous ones (I've been borrowing them) and re-read my favorites periodically)

And the plot thickens without once causing everything to get too dense. The Council denies there's a Black Council. Harry and McCoy decide to do something about it. Politics are all up in arms all over the world. Everyone's a threat! Nothing is sacred! And it's still an endge-of-your-seat compulsive read. I'm getting good at devouring these things in three days flat.

classic who: planet of evil

2009-04-27T20:38:00.000-07:00

It seems the Evil is not really all that Evil. This is another mining episode-- 30,000 years in the future, the Sun is running out of power and on a world at the very edge of explored space, several galaxies away from Earth, they find these colorchanging crystals that happen to be the vagues antimatter ever, and six pounds of it will power the sun for centuries, making the planet basically inexhaustable.

The Tardis goes off course a little, and materializes here, and of course, the locals think they're spies, that they're responsible for the deaths of everyone (one at a time, because there's only the one dessicated corpse in the prop vault), and that they're trying to ruin everything. Much talking ensues, and I kept losing interest-- this is one of the episodes that has long recaps and alot of escaping and recapturing, which we haven't had to deal with in a while.

Sarah Jane is particularly feisty and doesn't have to twist her ankle at all, but also doesn't get to do anything much but stand around with people in silly uniforms holding onto her arms. The Doctor is extra weird, but what's really strange is how... intense and non-silly he is. Like a flash forward to Six or something. The Captain is a jerk whose name sounds like Saladbar, the second in command keeps going along with him entirely and then disagreeing at the last second, and really there isn't much for anyone to do but yell and not agree with eachother. Oh, and there's a monster made of antienergy that's the actual killer-- and doesn't get enough of the story to matter. It is, however, a great use of the weird way blue screen makes things semi-see-through. And there's the scientist who was the last survivor of the survey team, the one who came up with the plan to steal the antimatter, who keeps drinking it and turns into a werewolf.

So, yeah, not that great.

In the end, the Doctor figures out that all the antimatter has to go back to the planet (that looks like a meatball) or it'll never let them leave, and he runs around risking his life to do that. He frees the scientist and makes him think he came up with a better plan while he's confused enough to be open to it, and they all live happily ever after. Or something.

books: small favor - dresden files book 10

2009-04-27T20:37:00.000-07:00

Yay more Harry Dresden! This one is centered around a favor Mab is asking of Harry, one of the ones he owes her: save Marcone-the-mobster from the people who kidnapped him. Turns out those people are the Dinarians, the fallen-angel-demons from a few books ago. And then the story is all about them, with not much to do with Mab, which made me a little sad because she's so weird and messed up, but I see why she isn't there tangling up the already-tangled plot. Because in true Dresden fashion, there's not just fallen-angel-demons on his tail, but there's ever-larger and more powerful champions of Summer out to get him, too, because they think that he's tipping the balance too far by helping Winter in this matter. And there's the return of the Archive / Ivy, who I love and was glad to see, even though Butcher seems a little vague about how big an eleven year old should be (which can be overlooked, as she's not really a normal eleven year old, anyway). And there's a new mobster who's trying to snap up some of Marcone's territory while he's out of the picture, who mostly just messes things up and gets inconvenient. And there's a Mab-induced blizzard going all through the book. And there's the Carpenter family and the return of Sanya. And there's Murphy trying her damndest to get right in the middle of things, which, for once, Harry allows because by now, he should know that she isn't going to listen to him if he tries to protect her.

Here's the deal: The Nickelheads want Marcone to be turned, and will get all his power and influence for themselves. They also want to get Harry to call in the Archive so they can kidnap her and turn her-- getting all the knowledge in the world and unleashing the End Times that they so enjoy. Mab wants Harry to get Marcone back, and never really says why, escept that she's repaying debts. Summer wants Harry dead because he's working with Winter. The Nickelheads didn't know that one of their own was in on the raid on Arctis Tor that Harry came in after. The holy sword Harry's guarding becomes a major player, both as a bargaining piece and as something that's looking for a new weilder. Michael's life changes. Molly gets to be helpful a little, but comes to grips with the fact that she's no good in combat. We get to learn something about Ivy's history and maybe something interesting in how Kinkaid fits into it, though I'm hoping it's a red herring for my own personal amusement. Marcone isn't as much a jerk as usual. His guards might be in love, and Gard is seriously a bad-ass-chick-- she remebowels herself when she's disemboweled by a demon. Seriously. And Harry gets the attention of the other side, and a gift from an Angel. And there's the beginings of a new love life for Harry, though it annoys me that it still isn't Murphy-- I mean really, they both admit that they like eachother, and they're sort of in the same mindset now, but they still aren't together? What gives? Maybe jealousy will get through to her?

Anyway.

Overall, another enjoyable read, as always, and I devoured it in about four days. As per usual. I don't think it was as tight as some of the previous ones, but the looseness works for it, too, and there were some twists that I didn't even see coming, which is amazing. Usually I can spot a plot twist a mile away. There's alot of new plot going on: the good angels have joined the fray a little, Harry's got new powers, Michael's changed, there's romance, Harry and the Biggest Gruff reach an understanding, there's more to Ivy and Kinkaid than we knew before and more to come, I hope, the Dinarians aren't obliterated, one of them has gone rogue, maybe more, and Winter is on a sort of slow rampage, Harry is good at leading the lesser magics and being a Warden, and we didn't have to deal with Morgan at all. Never a boring day here, is it?

fringe: inner child s01e15

2009-04-14T09:07:00.001-07:00

A couple of construction workers find a hidden tunnel under a building they’re set to demolish—tunnels that aren’t on the blueprints—and inside, they find a kid who’s never seen sunlight. Liv and the team are called in because that’s weird. Meanwhile, and old case from before Liv was on the X-Files surfaces: a guy who sedates, kidnaps and kills women so that he can ‘improve’ them and turn them into public art.

The kid turns out to be an empath and he gets linked to Liv, so when she really needs to know something about the case, he’s the one who gives her the plot points. Normally, that sort of thing is annoying, but in a show about weird stuff, it works, and in this episode, it’s actually pretty touching.

I missed Fringe. It’s not a crazy obsession like other shows, and I sort of don’t think much about it when it isn’t on, but now that it’s back, it was a relief to have new developments and it was a solid example to come back on: Walter’s weirdness had a purpose, Peter wasn’t just a snarkfest, Liv was devoted to her job without coming across as a bitch. And Broyles was as helpful as he was opaque. And there’s new developments: the kid looks an awful lot like the Observer that was… well, observing him, and the ‘social worker’ assigned to him is actually a CIA agent that feels like he’ll be back—and he has an interesting way of working with Liv, which might be interesting later. Especially if they stay at cross purposes. Also, he said ‘we’ve got another one’ to whoever was on his phone, which implies that there’s more than just this one kid, and maybe that someone is making them on purpose.

So yay!

Technorati Tags: fringe,season one,plot developments,empath,feral children

nu who: planet of the dead

2009-04-13T21:21:00.001-07:00

Yay! My Who fix that I know will last all of about six and a half minutes before I start feining like woah. I mean, they throw me this delicious little bone, and then I have to wait until November, knowing that the last story is a two parter that will have a month—A MONTH—between parts.

But I digress.

Planet of the Dead starts out with a robbery and a Torchwood-ish escape-and-chase. Lady Christina-who-is-not-the-Bionic-Woman-and-is-cooler-anyway hops on a giant red bus to escape the cops, and our lovely Doctor waltzes in and introduces himself and his new hobby: following tears in reality. (I hope this hobby sticks around. Really, it’s so random and will be so useful for future stories if the right writer gets his /her/ it’s grubby hands on it) This one goes wonky and the bus falls through into Dubai where once a thriving society lived.

The Doctor is great in this one, sparkling and sparky and chattery and fun as all hell—and a little more honest then he’s been lately: he says at one point ‘the worse it is, the more I love it’, which just about sums up the entirety of the Doctor’s best traits, and in the end, he tells Christina to bugger off because he isn’t having any more companions. He’s finally gotten tired of losing them. (This is brilliant. Think how weird he’s going to be without anyone to reign him in! Think how dark and closed off he’ll be when he meets his first real companion as 11!) He’s gripy when no one’s paying attention to him, he’s genius when he needs to be, he’s absolutely batty, he talks to aliens in their own language, and he doesn’t quite tell people what he’s doing, and he has the most gloriously insane expressions through the whole thing, and it’s just wonderful. I’ve missed my Doctor so much, and I’m so glad this fresh story has the Doctor exactly how I love him. The Next Doctor was fun, but it was melancholy also; this one holds off the darkening until the end when the psychic sets up the plot for the rest of my love’s run: The darkness is returning, his song is ending like the Ood said, and when it comes, whatever it is, it’ll knock four times. Ominous!

And Christina is fun. I wasn’t all that thrilled with Bionic Woman, so I was a bit ick about her casting, but she’s fine. Strong, mysterious, cheeky, clever enough to keep up with the Doctor, confident and self-sufficient. She’s the sort of companion the Doctor needs—one who can keep up and have as much fun as he does as the world falls down around him. And he tells her no. Beautiful. Maybe he’s finally getting over his codependency issues, even if he is replacing them with a fear of intimacy. Ha! Our Doctor’s just a different sort of basketcase now.

I’d heard that the story was silly, but it wasn’t as bad as I’d expected. Maybe my standards just aren’t as nonsilly as others, but I found it pretty tight and well-put-together, even if they didn’t really deal with the fact that an entire planet was dusted. Or that the neat creepy bug-aliens (at least one of which had definite weevil body language and is probably the same actor) we very conveniently gobbled and gone. Or that UNIT was sort of a sideline that didn’t really need to be there and could as easily have been Torchwood or the usual cops, who must be getting used to this crazy by now. But I was glad to see them, and the nuBrig (who’s a captain) was appropriately badass, and Malcom is just lovely and so Welsh I could die.

Dear Moff: here’s a spinoff about a royal jewel thief in a flying bus for you. Also, here’s a lovely mad scientist who loves the Doctor like the very best fan; keep him around.

So! Next time, we’ve got a space station, which I always do love and get so little of in nu Who. And there’s people screaming and running down corridors, good good. As to be expected. And there’s water. On Mars. That seems to take over / come out of people. And it may or may not be an anagram for War of the Master, which would just make my year.

Technorati Tags: nu who,doctor ten,special,planet of the dead,series 4.5

PPS

2009-04-11T10:06:00.001-07:00

There’s also the nu who redux: voyage of the damned coming up, and we’re due to go back to weekly classic who as well as reduxing series 4. And I’ve got a Conference report, a paper snippet, a game review for Shock!, Fringe is coming back, and if I decide to do fan-tangents (so that I can keep the number of blog-proliferations to a decent amount—there are already twelve that I write), I’ve got Castle, the Unusuals, and I suppose I can throw in The Mentalist (because of Robin Tunney –> The Craft) and Bones (because of David Boreanaz –> Buffy / Angel, and if you really needed that why are you reading a geekblog like this?). I sort of fear it might water down the scifiness, but I’ve already started on Raines, and really, fans watch tangentially-related shows too, right?

Plus, you know, it’s my blog. I do what I want. Midseason replacement shows and all the reduxes over the summer will save it. It’ll probably still be mostly Doctor Who anyway!

testing testing

2009-04-11T09:58:00.001-07:00

This is me, making an exploratory post off Windows Live Writer to see if the little widget works as well as they say. If it does, hopefully posting will be easier and therefore more consistent.

PS: I’ve got reviews for Coraline and a Lost update waiting to get typed up, and very soon there will be a Doctor Who Special that will require attention. Bear with me?

comic / cartoon: watchmen motion comics

2009-03-03T10:57:00.000-08:00

Wow. Really.

I have a geek-fession to make: I never read the comic. People kept telling me I should, and it was on my reading list, but I just hadn't gotten to it. So when they started making these motion comics and H started making me watch them, I didn't try too hard to avoid them. And I'm glad. This is amazing. Dark, weird, frequently disturbing, shot through with bits of amazing clarity and wonder, detailed with these beautiful bits of stark humanity, both for the good and the bad... Just mind blowing.

I admit it: I should have read it when all of you told me to.

I think my favorite are the Doctor Manhattan bits-- he makes no sense in a human scale and humans don't really make any sense to him, and I'm just in love with his atemporality: everythign is now. The whole story is now. His chapter where he tells his own story is just amazing to me, and the one, later, where he and Laurie are on Mars is almost as amazing-- he knows what's going on in all timeframes, but he still has to react to them in the way he also knows he will.

But there's also Rorschack, who's seriously messed up-- but at least half of that messed-up-itude is a lifting of the veil: he sees what things are really like, and he doesn't feel a need to play along with society's lies to get things done. That's almost admirable. And he doesn't compromise through the whole thing, even when he admits that he isn't easy to get along with, even when he should, for the betterment of mankind. He likes his friends as much as he can in his limited way, and he lives for his job, and that's all he needs.

I'm kinda meh about Ozymandias, but at least he had a purpose-- somewhere in the middle, it looked like he wouldn't.

Nite Owl and Silk Specter... also sort of meh, but mostly because of all the victimyness; once they step up and start doing something about the world, it's easier to like them and to root for them.

It's a pessimistic view of the world, but even as that, things turn out the best they can, and everyone stays true to who they are.

I like that.

nu who redo: utopia, sound of drums, last of the timelords, time crash

2009-03-03T10:18:00.000-08:00

These last three episodes nearly save the season for me. I've mellowed on it some since the first time around, and I don't think it's as bad as I once interpreted it, but it's still laced through with these emotional tones that I find uncomfortable, and it's so unhappy, so thwarted and sort of dark-verging-on-bitter... But these last episodes are great. Silly, way over done in that climax, but overall, very likable.

Utopia brings us Chantho and the return of Captain Jack Harkness, and all the bouncy fun of him intereacting with the Doctor and the Doctor knowing all his tricks. Love the running joke about Jack introducing himself, the Doctor shooting him down, and everyone not minding. And it brings us Professor Yana, who's a genius and a weirdo and a sweet absentminded professor-- and how utterly different he is as soon as he opens that watch. And that poor doomed hope of saving the human race from the end of the Universe (and how horrible would it be to be witnessing the last moments of the whole Universe?). We finally get to see the Doctor dealing with what happened to Jack and admitting that Rose isn't just hidden, she's gone and he can't see her again. Big news. Marfa doesn't get to do much, but the sweetest scene in the episode is her's-- when she gets Chantho to talk without saying 'chan' and 'tho'.

And the Sound of Drums / Last of the Timelords brings us the Sexy Master who is just as overbearing, but way more entertainingly insane than the old one. He's the dark image of the Doctor-- his companion gets messed up by traveling with him, he gets very involved with her (they're making out all over the place, her marries her, and he beats her), he enslaves Marfa's family, he kills people left and right, he humiliates the Doctor... He's like when MyFutureHusbandDavidTennant took over the role-- manic, bouncy, fast-talking, fresh, twitchy-- but all warped in the direction of badness, evilness. And yet, there's still this little bit that makes him almost likable, almost three dimensional-- he wants the drumming to stop, and wants the Doctor to make sense of it, to be as messed up as he is; he's almost sweet to Lucy when he isn't driving her insane, pulling the chair out for her before he sits down himself, comforting her when she freaks out that someone has figured out their plan...

Poor Doctor. What a way to cap a bad year-- that's actually several bad years. He traveled with Marfa, but our count, somewhere around a minimum of three years experienced time, and we just saw the highlights, all of which were rough. And then here comes the end of that phase of his life, and he has to ask Marfa to Walk The Earth while her family is beaten and enslaved, he has to take the Master's mistreatment for a year while he works on his plan, he has to watch the world being taken down, the Toclaphane proving to be the people he tried to save, his Tardis being cannibalized and used to warp reality... It's awful. And then the whole world believes in him and he's a god for a moment, all be it one that's made so by tapping into a technological feedback loop, and then he's so entirely the Doctor. There's no vengance there. For once-- and maybe he finally worked through that angry and destructive phase. He forgives him. He takes responsibility for keeping the Universe safe from him, and seems to think maybe he can help the Master-- which is a nice nod to their history: he was never one to kill or damage the Master, only to stop him when he needs stopping and maybe to find a way to contain him, to help him.

But the Master won't be contained, and he's entirely himself, too-- better to die once and for all then be contained by the Doctor, who he knows is better than him, and who he hates because they're opposites. One last wound for the Doctor.

So he gets a Vader death, though I don't know if he deserves it, and then there's that last shot where a lady's hand with red nails claims his ring. So there's an out if they want him back, though hopefully they won't overuse him like they did in the past and the daleks have been used in this series.

Other points:

- The Doctor eats. I find this weird because he never is shown eating in the new series, though he always was in the old one, and I'd kinda decided that he doesn't eat and doesn't sleep because he's an alien who's only pretending to be like a person and who gets sustenance some other way. I suppose it could still be that, and eating and sleeping are just human affectations he's taken on as part of his obsession with Earth... which could be why broken-hearted season 3 Doctor doesn't do either until this episode: he's not trying to seem human these days...

- Jack is the Face of Boe? It would make everything make sense, but it's a silly way to do that.

- Torchwood in the Himalyas? Really? You couldn't think of something better than that? ::sigh::

And then there was Timecrash! With the return of Peter Davidson, who is lovely. My second favorite Doctor before 10, now about tied with 4, who was my previous fav. It's a nice little antidote to the sadness of the season right before it, and it's fun. Joky. Written by the Moff, who so far has written all the best episodes. Well, most of them. And it plays with the Doctor Who mythos without being mean and while still being a good little episode-- the Doctor gets to be self-aware on both sides of the rift, there's sciencing the fiction, there's averted disaster, and it's lovely. I know the sadness will continue into Voyage of the Damned, but I also know that Series 4 is lighter and brighter and more fun, and this little moment of relaxed joyfulness in being the Doctor is enough to get me through.

show of note: raines: e01 and 102

2009-03-02T17:53:00.000-08:00

This might be stretching the definition of a ScFi (::ahem::and fantasy::hm::) blog, but I think it's weird enough, and as it's my blog, I'm doing it. At least until I get bored. Hoshi from Enterprise is a regular, and Jelff himself has scifi chops, even if the show is scifi-lite, so for now, this'll just be a quick mention.

The premise is that Jelff Goldbloom is a long-time cop who recently lost his partner of 13 years in a shooting, and now he sees dead people. Only he knows that they're only hallucinations, and they don't know any more than he does, though they can help him work it out.

The first episode has him following the case of a girl found dead in a parkinglot with a bullet hole in her back. Turns out she was an escort, working the high-priced streets to save her mom from an abusive husband.

The second ep is a man who washes up on shore and turns out to be an illegal immigrant with a double life.

The fun parts come from the interesting cuts as Mike's POV shifts on the topic-- when he finds out she's a hooker, the camera pans behind him and when we see her on the other side, she's dressed like a trampy cheerleader, then it pans back and she's not. And it's full of that. And little hey-we-know-you-like-genre assides: Mike asks the sketch artist to do it "like a comic book with motion lines and a few 'Blam's" and reads 'therapist' as 'the rapist'.

And the show is remarkably low-key, with mello background music, no chase scenes, and alot of Jelff / Mike thinking and tiptoeing delicately around emotional and interpersonal issues-- almost reminds me of a british show. And it's charming. Quicky. A little sad and alot weird.

mvoie: futurama - into the wild green yonder

2009-02-24T21:08:00.000-08:00

The last of the four contracted futurama moviesodes, and that makes me sadface. But a fun one, back to the way futurama always was, and that makes me happy face. I liked Bender's Big Score ("Scarab Forearm Bird Bird Bird!"), which felt like Futurama and had all the scifi weirdness that we all know and love about it. The Beast With A Billion backs? Not so much. Icky, mostly, though I do like the idea that Leela has elbow spikes that she hides... Bender's Game was fun, but the advertized parts took forever to happen, and the rest is a totally different story. But this one was back to the truth of the show-- scifi spoofing itself with characters we like and storylines we care about.

In typical Futurama fashion, it gets around to the main point about half-way through, but the randomness is less random than it could be-- it all comes together perfectly in the end, and it's a good send off if it should happen that no one wants to pay for more of them (though I hope they do). It's like this: Green waves make new life around a little violet star. Amy's parents are blowing stuff up in order to build more stuff where it was-- namely, a bigger better Vagas to replace the already improved one they just blew up-- and one of those things is the universe's biggest minature golf. Which means the violet star has to be turned into the ball return at the end. Feminist environmentalists try to stop them and wind up killing Agnew, and Leela winds up as their leader, on the run. Meanwhile, Fry has been brain-stabbed and now can read minds and is recruited by a whole secret society of mind readers who are working for the green wave and against the Dark One that will try to stop it-- they want him to infiltrate Wong's business and stop him from blowing up the star. Along the way, there's Zap Brannigan and Kiff, there's Bender robbing and plundering and having an affair with Don Bot's wife Fanny. There's Hermes and Zoidberg and Amy and the Professor not getting enough screen time, but being funny when they do. There's Morvo and Lurr. There's a cameo by Mom. There's even Scruffy. It's everyone all at once.

I like.

lost: s05 e06 - 316

2009-02-20T06:07:00.000-08:00

I seem to have missed one or, like, two... or three... I watched them, but they aren't posted here. Go fig.

Anyway, FINALLY an interesting mainland ep. After all that It has to be all of you crap, Daniel's mom makes do with Jack, Sun, Desmond and Ben. Des is all 'fuck this jazz' and leaves, and the rest set about getting on a plane that will recreate the crash so they can go back. Can you only reach the island through disasters?

Ben goes to fulfill and old promise and gets really roughed up. Jack goes to take care of his grandpa and gets something of his dad to give to Locke so he can stand in for Christian Shepherd's dead body, and when he comes home for some more binge drinking before The Land Without Alcohol, he finds Kate crying her new mascara all over his bed, and they have sad sex that was totally unhot. I hope they were attempting to show disfunction and mysery, and not two people who love each other, because I totally got squicked by the afore mentioned dysfunction and misery. Anyway, Aaron's gone and we're never to mention it again. I think she ate him.

Next morning, we get to the plane, and they reenact getting onto the original plane; Jack's having trouble with the coffin-baggage, Sun's lurking in the background, Kate shows up anyway, even after three episodes of her screaming that they're all crazy and she wants no part of it. Hurley's there, semi-inexplicably, and he's bought up all the free seats on the plane so no one else has to die, which is very sweet. And Sayid's there, all handcuffed and with a marshall, being Kate for this reenactment. There's one other dude, who had, like, one line. New Losties! Just what we need!

So plane plane plane. Turbulence, and Jack looks relieved and Hurley doesnt' even take is eyemask off. More turbulence, and the stewardess gets tossed across the cabin (I'd so never be a stewardess on TV-- you always die), there's a flash of light, and then Jack's waking up in the bamboo, Kate's unconscious on the rocks and Hurley's in the water, drowning. Jack goes all hero and saves them, but where's everyone else? And how did they not crash? Is the plane still there, going merrily on it's way without anyone on it?

A Dharma VW pulls up and we all go 'Oh no! They're in the 70s!' and then Jin climbs out and both sites are confused. So yay, it's a friend! But they might still be in the 70s, and if they all die when stupid young!Ben kills Dharma, I'll be pissed. If they join the Others instead, and then we learn that they were there all along and young gets to meet old, that could be really neat. Maybe Christian Shepherd the Ghost is actually Old!Jack stuck in the past and torturing himself now that he's had 30-odd years to figure it out.

Other things:

- Dharma has at least one mainland hatch, too, and that means there are probably more. And tehy never really updated their computers at all. I'm wondering if they're going to work that into the plot, or if it's just supposed to show that other people are always moving into the old Dharma places after they're gone? Or is Dharma still active on the mainland? She said there were other weird places like the Island and that they're all connected, so has Dharma set up secret hatches all over the world?

- There was a note from Locke to Jack that we really wanted to be important, but it was lame and told-you-so-ish.

- The capitain was Frank Lepidus, all cleaned up and looking weird-- I like him better rough-- and he was sharp enough to know what they were doing, and steady enough to pilot them through it anyway. Reminding us that he was supposed to be the capitain of the original flight anyway.

- They're back on the Island already?? What's the rest of the season going to be about??

- What's up with the rest of the people? Why didn't they all land in the same place? Are they scattered across time now? That'd be weird.

Next week, we get to see the other half of the ep, how Ben got roughed up, how Hurley got out, what happened to Kate and Aaron, and how Sayid got caught and for what and why the hell were they flying him to Guam?

movie: steamboy

2009-02-10T15:57:00.000-08:00

This should have been right up my alley. I mean, really. Anime? Check. Steampunk? Check. Science saves us all? Check. And yet... I'm used to anime being back loaded and havign to watch through alot of character development before we get to the point of the plot in the last twenty minutes or so-- that's just standard procedure-- but this just seemed to take forever to get anywhere, even though there was action all over the place, and then when we got there, it was all full of crazy people all being crazy at eachother and no real moral compass at all. I'm okay with movies that have a different morality than I would follow-- I don't go to movies to be agreed with-- but this was all over the place. Science is good. Science is bad. Science id good but your dad is bad. No, it's HIS dad who's bad, and you need to listen to me. No, wait, it's Robert Louis Sevenson who's a jerk, so be sure you stay away from him, but we're all totally trustworthy... Yeah. No. Just no.

I mean, the movie was entertaining, but I wasn't able to figure out what point it was making. And there were other annoyances: The father is half steampunk cyborg, and that's hardly touched on at all. No implications what so ever. Millions of inhabitants of London are frozen / burned up / crushed by falling debris / exploded, etc, and none of that matters. What the hell is the little selfish and unrepentent little American girl about? Editing was weird, too-- things happened without us seeing them, even though they act as if we did.

I'll stay with my Miazaki, thanks.

nu who revisted: 42, human nature, family of blood

2009-02-02T09:00:00.000-08:00

What a good stretch! The first half of this season is still iffy, though I resist it less knowing that these episodes come after, but these really are some of the best.

42 has a feel similar to Impossible Planet and Satan pit, which are some of my favorites, and it's got a literal ticking clock that makes everything so imperative. And the neat creature being a living sun, how cool is that? Super-cool, that's how cool!

The Human Nature / Family of Blood double feature is just great-- MyFutureHusbandDavidTennant gets to act differently, and gets to comment on the type of person the Doctor is, and since I'm a huge fan of metafiction, these eps are just great fun. He's so very ordinary as John Smith, so distressingly normal and boring and so very well integrated that he does and says things that are not in the Doctor: he lets the one kid beat the other, he teaches children to kill, he tells Martha to keep her place... and he's so useless in an emergency situation.

And there's so much screaming in these episodes. So much screaming. It made it hard to watch the first time around, being so in love with the joyful!Doctor we've seen through the first two seasons, but this time around, the sobbing emotional breakdown of John Smith was almost worse to watch. It's so unlike the Doctor, so raw and human and hopeless... And then there's that miraculaous and perfectly smooth transition from the helpless John Smith to the wonderful restored Doctor, that has just a little bit of mixed feeling-- we're glad to see the Doctor back, but at the same time, we're sad to see John go and so proud that he gave himself up so the Doctor could save everyone.

The Doctor was so dark in season three. Always walking into sure death, always burning things up and yelling and screaming and critisizing. Always being hurt. Always being half suicidal. But in these three episodes, we can see him being the best that he can be, even with all that brokenness.

fringe: s01e12 - the no-brainer

2009-02-01T16:30:00.000-08:00

What an unfortunate name for a show about people's brains leaking out their ears. Which is this week's grossness: melty brain goo.

Turns out it's a computer virus that everloads your brain to the point of blenderizing it. We'll just ignore the fact that it's targeted, and it can be traced before it's actually active on a computer that isn't turned on yet. One guy is sending this massive multi-media brain-melting file to the family members of people who screw him over, including... Olivia's neice? I'm not sure how he knew she was tracking him before he saw her on the webcam after she stormed in and saved Ella. Also, the sister always seems to be making pasta. Like, every episode.

Once again, though, it's the side stories that make more sense and are more interesting: Peter's being overprotective of Walter, and is keeping the mother of the woman he was accused of killing from meeting with him because he thinks it'll push him back over the edge. Adding to that is the fact that there seems to be one of those annoying offshoot-romances forming between Peter and Olivia's sister (whose name I don't remember, and who is more approachable than Liv, but also more boring and insipid)(not to mention the fact that main characters always fall for the siblings of the people American TV won't let them be with. my only hope is that there will be a sister showdown that makes her back off and makes Olivia fess up. jj keeps promising the show won't go for the typical storylines, but that's kinda heading in that direction.).

So Walter meets the momlady of his supposed victim, and she turns out to be nice. She just wants to talk to the last person to see her daughter alive. They start to share, and Walter hugs her, and won't that be a weirdness? I'd love to see crazy old Walter trying to be in a relationship-- especially if he's doing better at it than Peter is.

I didn't see the Observer, but the brainslody virus looked alot like the ARG videos that were getting leaked to the interwebs before the show launched, and I'm sure there's all sorts of interesting things in there-- I'm just not one of those people who will spend hours going through it frame by frame.

Other bits of note:

Internal Affairs is still dogging Liv, and because of that, she's paying less attention to protocol than ever before, and he's trying to make it personal. Broyles sees what he's doing, however, and stands up to him on her behalf, which makes me happy. It's nice to know that he's on her side, even if he is witholding information from her.

Drunk!Peter thinks it's a good idea to show up all sweet and muzzy at Olivia's door, and after the confession of caring last week, this makes me happy.

They didn't really properly tie in the car salesman in the plot.

Astrid is cooler every time we see her, as if the fact that she gets so little screen time means they have to cut to the chase for the coolness.

A solid ep, and I think it was due to the lense flares. Whenever there's artistic shooting, the show is better.

lost: s05 e03 - jughead

2009-01-30T10:11:00.000-08:00

So everyone's still bouncing around time, but not so much as before. Locke finds the rest of them, then goes to finish his convo with Richard. Sawyer has no idea what's going on. Juliet doesn't have much to do but be calm and reasonable. Daniel knows way more than he's letting on, and is possibly jumping around more than other people, or at least did so in the past. Also, Daniel is in love with Charlotte, and she's got the brain-asplody. Richard, looking the same again, is in charge of the british soldiers, who turn out to be the proto-Others, based on the secret code called Speaking Latin, which anyone with a degree in medicine, science or philosophy can break. They've landed in the 50s, two years before Locke is born, and he's insisting to the Richard who hasn't met him yet that he's the new leader of the Others, even though these are the old Others, who seem to be rather trigger-happy over something involving someone having come to their Island to do experiments and attacking them... even though this is, like, 20 years before Dharma is supposed to have existed. Meanwhile, Daniel is taken to defuse a bomb which looks like it's been caught-- it's haging from a scaffold only a few feet above the ground, but it's got a cracked casing, and he's trying to convince them to let him burry it because it's too dangerous to try to open it up with the seal busted. It'll be okay, because 50 years from now, it's okay. See?

Meanwhile, Miles is getting no love except from some dead ghosties, and is otherwise pretty much ignored, which he points out. And Charlotte keeps getting dizzier and sicker, and Daniel "won't let anything happen to" her, which is a sure sign of impending doom whenever it's said. She goes all bleeding and twitchy at the end.

And Desmond is trying to find Daniel's mother, and instead finds a girl who went loony and was trapped jumping back and forth through her own timeline-- Desmond knows what it is, but the people who care for her apparently think that Daniel just made her crazy somehow, and then ran away and left her. And all the funding came from Charles Widmore. So he confronts Widmore and gets the addy for Daniel's mom, and Penny wants to leave it at that, but knows that Desmond won't give it up if he can help his friends, so off they go to LA to find the lady.

Oh, and one of the soldiers is a very young Widmore, and he was a jerk then, too.

So, more crazy, more superdense plotting. It's everything we love about Lost. I especially liked that we got to spend so much time with the Freighter People, who have been pretty marginalized since the cast split up. And I liked when Daniel tried to get tough in his twitchy, slightly crazy way.

We're back to the main crew next week. I'm really not handling this waiting-between-episodes all that well...

games: aggravation and nuclear war

2009-01-30T09:51:00.000-08:00

Aggravation is a game we've played before: You get a board with little holes in in a definite pattern, you get four little marbles that are vaguely the colors of vegetables, and you have to make it all the way around the board without getting sent back to the start. Like Chinese Checkers meets Sorry. The fun part is that you can only leave Base and start around the board if you've rolled a 1 or a 6, and those are both the rarest rolls. You can't get into Home unless you've rolled exactly the number you need to get there. You can't jump your own pieces. There are shortcuts around the board, but they're places where others are likely to try to go, and you can get bumped and wind up back in your Base to start over. If someone else lands in the same spot, you're back to Base and have to start over.

It's fun, more than aggravating, but it's also fun to point out how aggravating it is, and after everyone has their dudes on the board, it gets meaner and therefore more fun. Personally, I like these sorts of games with different colors that all look the same and definite rules with lots of possibilities-- probably because one of the first games I ever played was Parcheesi, which is similar.

Aggravation is a quick game, and can be played with up to six players, which makes it more fun.

Nuclear War is one of those weird topical games that came out back in the Cold War-- toward the end when it was starting to be a joke, I guess. Basically, you have bombs and you have delivery systems, and the goal is to wipe out all your opponents' populations. No one knows what your population is-- that's determined by random card-passing at the beginning-- and no one knows what bombs and rockets / planes / space platforms you have. There are secrets that come to the fore as you replace spent cards, and some of them are against you, and all of them means someone is losing population in any number of ways-- defection, plague, rebellion, mysterious vanishings. There's even something that allows a virus to keep wiping out everyone until the one card that can stop it is played, and something that brings dead people back to your hand as zombies.

We declared ourselves to be random small nations and made up the story as it went-- when the only thing in a missile was propoganda, we said they were getting showered in leaflets; when bombs went off without missiles, we said there was testing or accidents; when there were only missiles, we said the people were getting desperate and were loading the rockets inside eachother in a last-ditch effort.

Again, a fun, quick game, and not terribly hard or terribly complex-- and you get to nuke your friends! Not politically correct, socially insensitive, very low-budget, and fun because it's so obvious, if you can find this beastie, I say go for it.

movie: repo - the genetic opera

2009-01-28T17:13:00.000-08:00

Oh my god, the badness. It makes no sense. They sing for no reason-- even given that they're in a musical, there's huge swaths-- like the whole first twenty minutes-- where they don't need to be singing what they say. They repo organs, okay, sure, but there's only one guy in charge of all the reposessions, he's got a sick daughter, and he tears things out and throws them around. It has Anthony Stewart Head wasting himself in something that was probably abour half-baked as far as his plot went. It had Joan Jett for absolutely no reason. It has Paris Hilton in probably the best movie she's ever done.

It's utter crap.

But it's also really pretty, and I want Sarah Brightman's holographic eyes and all the eyeliner in the world. And I'll probably go around the whole rest of my life saying 'reeeeeeeppppoooooooooommmmaaaaaaaannnnnnnn' and 'epilogue!' for no other reason than because it's catchy and rediculous.

Fun, but i think it rotted my brain.

EDIT: Also, there's Paris Hilton's face falling off in totally the least useful way, visually. And there's various incesty-flavored interactions. It would have been better with choreographed dance numbers. And the potential romance bits totally didn't happen, replaced by the afore-mentioned incesty bits.

find: real-life scifi

2009-01-25T13:30:00.000-08:00

Classic Lunar Exploration Art from here, over at io9.

I love these old pictures. It made everything seem so reasonable and innevitable, which was very exciting. It's still exciting-- and I'm hoping the world can get back there, what with our lovely new Pres being so hope-inducing and all. He's got other things to worry about now, but I still maintain that being able to live off-planet indefinitely is a sort of safety valve: it can ease overpopulation, give us options in the event of asteroids or other such catastrophies, and the space program has always spun off interesting and useful new tech that can't help but make things better.

Recycling more things you probably didn't think about needing to be recycled.

This pretty and futuristic little dohicky takes the steam that comes off boiling water and makes it into water again, directly to the roots of little growing greens like grass and herbs, and serves as a centerpiece the rest of the time. Not necessary, but nifty.

news: catching up on geeks of doom

2009-01-25T11:54:00.000-08:00

Vital Video for the new Watchmen movie!

Down at the bottom of the list of all the promos, there's the youtube video of the 70s new report that talks about the tenth anniversary of Dr Manhattan. Pretty nifty. I think this guy playing him is a little too built, but that might just be my interpretation of the art. I wonder if he'll be naked? He was always naked in the comic...

A surfaced and mysterious Japanese Half-Blood Prince trailer.

I'm so excited! This is the one where everyone makes out before it all goes south in death and drama in the next one! Really, that's all I wanted out of this book, and it's all I want out of this movie, but I was glad to see a little character development of Malfoy, and I'm looking forward to that, too. It's going to be fun.

SciFi has picked up all sixteen eps of Moonlight.

And has put them into the SciFi Friday slot, which is woefully empty now that they've bumped SG1 and SGA, and now that BSG is ending soon (all fo which is their own fault). I hope it's fiercely successful. The story isn't done yet, and I hate unfinished stories, especially sweet ones involving strong women and pretty vampires that are different enough from the norm to make it interesting. (also, it's on DVD now and I needs must own it)

GofD is running a Coraline Prize pack with all sorts of neat things.

Just enter your addy and contact info, and off you go! This is another movie I'm really excited about-- I mean, anything with Neil Gaiman's fingerprints on it and I'm there, but the trailers look wonderful-- charming and clever and a little spooky in that quirky way we all have come to expect.

Classic SciFi comes to film in Rolland Emmerich's Foundation Adaptation.

I have a hard time reading Azimov's long fiction, and a long series of long fiction kinda makes me shy away like a nervous horse, but I love the short fic, and it's such a visual thing-- all of hard scifi is-- that a good movie can do wonders for speeding up the story and translating it into something I can digest. Just don't make it suck, you hear me, Rolland? This is SciFi Law here, the basis of huge chunks of the genre, and you better treat it as such. I'm getting so tired of big-budget shiny scifi that looks good but has no soul. No connection to the characters. It's supposed to be about the people, not just the guns.

Wall-E director Andew Stanton takes on John Cater of Mars.

Even more-classic SciFi is on the way up, too! My brother had these books, and I used to look at the covers and wonder why the women were all naked and the guys got all the rayguns, but they're some of the basic scifi stories out there. This could be really neat... though it's Disney, so it might be really sanitized. But still, I love that there's still this idea of an alien-populated Mars that we might be able to go to.

Guillermo Del Toro is writing vampire books.

That's two of my fav geekeries together: GTD and new-vamps. Now if he and Neil Gaiman would work with Tim Burton to make a movie about vampire monster-hunters starring Dough Jones, I could die happy...

McG to do a new 20,000 Leagues.

Which is super-nifty. I wanna see a kracken! Movies are so good-sounding lately...

Except for The Day The Earth Stood Still.

Which I still maintain didn't need to be made, and makes me worry for Keanu's starring role in the new Cowboy Bebop movie. Here's a whole bunch of random WTF moments in TDtESS. Also: how come Jennifer Connolly, who is a long-time standard of genre fic and who is a genuinely good acress, keeps getting stuck in the turkeys? If someone remakes this again next year and casts Liv tyler in her role, I think she should rethink her casting agent.

not really scifi, but still exciting:

The VM movie is closer to being in the works then ever before! Rob Thomas has been working on s script, and he's looking for the moolah to get it paid for! I'm hoping for first-season VM, with all her insights coming from ghostly hallucination-dreams. That was kind of scrapped for the second movie, except for, like, one episode, but it was one of the details that I thought made it different from being just any old detective show. Without it, it was still really good and amazingly well written and complex, but it didn't have that little fizzon of weirdness that set it apart.

lost: s05 e01 and e02

2009-01-25T11:03:00.000-08:00

Okay, I'm pretty confused, but with everythign happening at once and big new plot devices moving into place, I'm thinking it's okay. Like when the show was new and shiny. I'm excited for the confusion because it means new things are happening and we're actually getting somewhere, which is great.

Here are my fav parts:

- Desmond is still sliding back and forth through time (even though I thought he was past that? didn't they save him before his brain melted and stop the disjoint?) and it's maybe caused by the fact that Daniel is apparently also darting around time and now the whole island is. Which is just brilliant.

- Not only is the Island skipping all over time and space (that computer looks like it's tracking it everywhere), it's picking up all the anachronisms that they've already found-- so far the plane with Mr Echo's brother, and if that's happening, then maybe we'll get to see the bear and the Black Rock and whatever else. Which is very exciting. I love that it's physically going to where these things are, rather than being all Bermuda triangle-ish and dragging things to it. Nice turn-around!

- Sweety-faced old lady from Desmond's crazy is now all over Ben, who's trying to be a goodguy... in so much as he's the same as he was, but now the Losties are finding themselves on his side.

- Hurley continues seeing dead people-- and I'm rooting for him to start seeing dead people that he never knew, like those English soldiers that Locke just killed, which would mean that he's not crazy and he actually is somehow tied into the mind of the Island. That's probably not going to happen, but a girl can still dream. Also, I love that his mom believes him. And I love that the dead people know things that he doesn't know.

- Jack is in with Ben, who seems to be trying to get him clean, and that's great. Sayid is against Ben because he thinks Ben was manipulating him (and probably was), but he's such a cool assassin, this is fine. It makes a new devide.

- And what the hell is up with Sun? She's got a little daughter, but she's globe-trotting, talking to Widmore, out to get people, being all cold and hard... It's like she became what Jin was before the Island out of the trauma of seeing him asploded. But what's she doing? Everythign she says sounds like doubletalk.

- And who's out to get Kate? And why is she now seeing Claire, who looks pretty much the same as she did before? Is she getting Hurley's power, or something Hurley-adjacent? Did Claire learn to astral-project after she went all spacy with a ghost?

This is going to be a fun season, I can tell. I'm just sad it won't last the full 24 eps.

nu who: news

2009-01-25T10:57:00.000-08:00

We already know that the Bionic Woman is the current companion (which still sits strangely with me, as I wanted to like the new show and pretty much found myself bored and depressed and rooting for Starbuck the Crazy, and I'm not sure how much of the blame is due to writing / editing, and how much is due to her being boring)-- and I think that qualifies as at least a potential problem.

Now, however, there's actual problems with my next fix: the plot-integral red bus is busted up to the point that it can't be used, and as it was shipped overseas, there's no second option. Major rewrites.

Hopefully, it'll turn out well, and then we can get the 'leaked' original script afterward to compare and contrast and see about what might have been, and it'll prolong the fix a little.

I seriously don't know how I'm going to get through the year.

But I'm loving the idea of a bus that transports people to strange worlds. (If that's what it really is) I already love red double deckers-- they're so iconic-- and there's one in UnLunDun that makes me happy. There's even that one in Harry Potter. I like multi-text interpretations.

movei: penelope

2009-01-25T01:14:00.000-08:00

Yay for modern fairytales!

This one has Christina Ricci as an hieress who's been cursed in the sort of situation that is apparently unslightly but not unheard-of: she's got a pig nose. The curse can only be lifted by unconditional acceptance by one of her own, so this is interpreted to mean that she needs to get married. She's been meeting eligible upper-class boys through a one-way mirror, and so far, even the ones who liked her as a disembodied voice run off screaming in fear when they see her not-that-terrible piggynose. And she's getting a little fed up.

Meanwhile, there's this dwarf with one eye from where he was attacked trying to get pictures of baby Penelope years and years ago, and they've faked her death to keep the tabloids off, so all these rich boys have to sign paperwork saying they won't talk, and the tabloids are getting fed up with not having any real solid info. Enter Blondy McAwfulpants who teams up with him to find a down-and-out blueblood to pay off for pictures. And then enter pretty pretty James McAvoy as said chump / Max in something similar to the agreement of Heath Ledger in Ten Things I Hate About You, though this is less with the bitchiness and more with the exaggerated 'deformity'. They hit it off when he's distracted and doesn't see her showing everyone what she looks like, so he doesn't run away. He tries to steal her favorite book out of all the books available, all of which are expensive first editions. And he comes back. Even after he's seen her nose. And keeps coming back until he deels bad about selling pictures of her, calls off the deal, and ditches.

She's crushed and rejected, but doesn't want to do this again, so she runs away, and even knowing very little about the world, manages to do pretty well for herself by being sweet and lovely and friendly. She makes friends with a grouchy bartender and a sassy delivery girl / Reece Witherspoon. And she exposes herself. Pretty quickly, too, though the movie says it's been weeks. Either way, people like her already, so it's less of a big deal than it could be, and she's suddenly very popular.

While she's having adventures, Max is trying to get himself back together and gives up gambling, gives up drinking, and gets a real job before turning back to music, which he'd given up at some point in the past. He left telling her he couldn't marry her, which she takes to mean he can't deal with her nose, when he really meant that he didn't have the power to help her.

She eventually comes home and agrees to marry Blondy McAwfulpants, who's basically been told he has no choice and tells her he's had a change of heart, but when they get to the actual wedding, she says 'no' and runs back to her room. Her mother's trying to get her to break the curse, and she says she's fine with who she is-- and the curse is broken. She's one of her kind. So then her mom feels bad that she didn't love her unconditionally, which would have broken the curse right away (and still tries to tell her how to improve herself), and she finds herself in posession of a normal life. She starts teaching kindergarteners. And after a while, there's a Halloween party and Annie drags her up to where Max lives, and since she's wearing a mask, he doesn't know it's her. He's packing up to move, and as she's asking him questions and commenting on things, he figures it out and there's a really great grab-and-kiss before he knows that her curse is broken.

And then they live happily ever after.

It's really adorable, without being at all sappy or insipid-- she's a strong, interesting character, and everyone else is clearly-defined and very much their own, even if the world goes a little more smoothly than the real world goes and there's never really any danger to it. I love that here's this classic cursed-princess, and she takes control of her own fate, selling her own pictures to the tabloid when her family-funds wear thin, and finding her own life in the world. And I love that the prince is broken and sad, and not really a prince at all, but still turns out to be the exact right one for her. And I love the way she's pert and smart and sharp in a way fairytale princesses rarely get to be, and he's tense and sexy and conflicted the way princes rarely get to be. It's great, and fun and sweet, and just enough different that it's worth watching again and again, and I think it could grow up with you.

I do not love lovely Burn Gorman putting on the worst American Accent I've heard in years, though the very fact that he's in here makes me happy.

Plus, it's fun getting James McAvoy-induced whiplash when you think he went from Mr Tumnus to Wanted to Penelope in just a few years, and with other, more serious and more fluffy things in between.

classic who: revenge of the cybermen

2009-01-25T00:27:00.001-08:00

Revenge for what? I don't know. This is the first time I've seen the silver beasties since we started out Grand Classic Who Project. I think there was something about them having been enemies of the buddha-faced aliens of the Golden Asteroid, so maybe that's what for...

So, anyway, having been freed by the Cheesy Time Ring, the crew lands back on the Space Station Nerva, where all this started ages ago in the future with the bug-monsters. This time, they've gone back in time to an earlier point, also in the future, where the station is highly populated by non-frozen people, because these people are all dead of a plague before freezing had been invented. Except, as the Doctor discovers almost immediately, it's not a plague so much as a biological weapon. So, of course, Sarah-Jane gets infected almost immediately. Hey, remember when she was a feisty feminist? Anyway, the Doctor has to get around all the bickering and paranoia to try to save her, because there's only a few minutes before she's dead.

It just so happens that there's this mysterious asteroid that's actually a hollow world called Voga, full of the afore mentioned Buddha-faced aliens. The humans have been down and set up a transmat array, and the Doctor thinks he can widget it so that it'll filter the poison out of her before she's kaput, but parts are missing and he has to stay behind to do it manually, which means that Sarah-Jane and Harry wind up stuck on Voga while the Doctor is stuck on Nerva. There's a great moment when the Doctor gets blinded by a short, and there's such dispair that he's run out of time and she's going to die, and then when his vision clears and he sees that she's safe, it becomes such joy. That's why I like me some Tom Baker so much. And also really one of the main reasons I like David Tennant so much-- wild emotional swings conveyed without words and in minimal amounts of time. The Doctor is bigger than life, so it's appropriate that his emotions are, too.

So down on Voga, there's a miners-vs-thinkers social struggle going on, because it's always about miners. Head miner wants to sell off the gold that the whole place is made of of make his people rich, while head thinker, who has lovely long bouncy hair, wants to remain locked away from the world / universe because of past damage done to their people. Sarah-Jane and Harry are captured by miners on a ludicrously small train, and hauled into the middle of this arguement. And the Vogans know that the Cybermen are monitoring them.

Even though gold is toxic to the Cybermen, and they'd already lost a war with the Vogans previously. But we won't think about that too much.

Miner-man questions SJ and H and lets it be known that there were supposed to be only 4 survivors, and none of those 4 were these two. And we figure out that it's the Station the Cybermen want, to continue their guff with the gold-plated buddha-faced enemies they couldn't defeat before. This makes it a three-way musutal self-destruction: moners against thinkers against Cybermen, and the humans in the middle going 'wha? huh? Cyberwhatnow?' and the Doctor trying to keep the sides from killing eachother. There's a big bomb from the miners that is getting loaded into a rocket and sets a clock ticking.

Sarah-Jane and Harry get into trouble, and there's much running from guns and slogging through mines. The Cybermen dock and the Doctor is stot down-- only that's totally just the cliffhanger, and it's eimmeidately revealed that it's a stun ray. He wakes up with the last two humans and three big bombs strapped to them. The Cybermen want to send them down to the center of Voga, then to blow them up, and the aster-world with them, scattering gold dust all through this region of space and making their ship malfunction... no, wait, ending the war with them victorious. Yeah.

More slogging through both real and set-built caves, much mud, several film-stocks, lots of pretending it's not as cold as it is, everyone moving around in different directions, and then they're suddenly all together again. Except the Doctor's still all a-bombed. And Srah-Jane's now captured on the Station, having gone back trying to warn the Doctor wbout the rocket.

Side note: this invasion is, like, six cybermen. One of them is a little chubby, and one has a really nice kaboose. All are not terribly mechanical in voice or action or logic, and I guess I've been spoiled by images of millions of seven-foot-tall cybers, but six normal-sized ones mostly look dumb.

Anyway, onward. Cybermen have beamed down (??) and are slaughtering the Vogans, regardless of class. Some of them are taken out by brave sacrifice and their own cyber-bomb, allowing the Doctor to continue on with his attempts to stop the coming war. Which he dould be really good at by now. But the explosion allowed the Doctor time to disarm the bombs, and now everything's peachy, though Sarah-Jane didn't know that when they ordered a detonation and she tried to stop them, getting herself tossed asside and then tied up. The Cybermen notice the lack of explodedness, and decide to use the Station as a massive bomb, and commence loading it with explosives. By this time, the rocket is ready, but the Doctor goes all fair and loyal and asks for 15 minutes to rescue Sarah-Jane and try to stop the asplody. Which I loved. Very dramatic, and the loyalty was just great. When he gets there and does save her, there's this great moment when she has to remind him that it's a good thing that he saved her, and he looks sweetly embarased and chucks her on the shoulder because they aren't allowed to hug on what's still basically a kid's show.

So they fail to stop the Cybermen, and get tied up again. The rocket is launched. The Doctor gets the thing under his control, and there's drama as he steers them through a gravity asist to freedom. They tell the Vogans to send the rocket ofter the Cybermen, and they do-- and then it's over. Because that's how these things work.

The Tardis catches up with them, and they all board and head out. And that's the end of that. They've gotten a telegram from teh Brig that says he needs them urgently, and so they head on back.

Asside from the fact that blowing up the gold doesn't make any sense, it was a fun, fast-paced story, and there weren't any lags or boring parts. It was four eps, and we watched them all together, so it kind of reads like a fun movie-- lots of action, not too much running through corridors and getting thrown back in jail, multiple plotlines that come together in the end, and the usual suffen ending that I've come to know and tolerate. I've missed the Brig, though, so I'm glad we'll be getting back to Earth to spend a little time with his gruff disbelief and short temper. I believe this is the last of Harry... and I'm kind of alright with that. He wasn't bad, but his habit of calling everyone 'old girl' and 'old chum' got to be a bit much, and he never really came in much use, though he at least seemed to enjoy himself.