fringe: s02 e05 dream logic

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...

fringe: s02 e03 fracture

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

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.

fringe: season finale

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.

fringe: unleashed, bad dreams, midnight s01e16-18

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!

fringe: bound s01e11

I totally didn't report the catching up I did, but before the midseason break, Olivia was kidnapped by men in unmarked black cars. That means she was held captive when this ep opened-- only not for long. Creepy Mask-Face gives her a spinal tap, then she tricks the soft-hearted Evil Interns into letting her loose for a cup of water, then punches her way free in true action star style, and I was cheering that she didn't need to be rescued (no matter how sweet it would have been to let Peter be the knight in shining armor for once). Along the way, she steals some samples and burries them, then calls in for backup and is greeted by Infernal Revenues who tase her and take her into the hospital, where they chain her to a bed.

It's all to make an I-Don't-Like-You point, of course, since the one in charge is the one she sent to jail sometime I don't remember ago in the past.

So she's free, and pissed off and sporting a nice bump on the head the whole ep. Peter's concerned about her to the point where when she says "Who care about me?" (meaning there's more important things to worry about), he says "I care about you!". Olivia looked stunned, then awkward, Walter looked pleased as punch, and I went "Squeeeee!" so much that I had to back up and watch the next part over because I was distracted.

They're looking for the killer of two epidemiologists by way of two giant spiky slugs, who they've already established is the same person as her kidnapper thanks to the evidence she hid. The trail leads back to Agent Loeb-- the dude who had the heart-bug, then who got Crazy Brit out of the German jail by way of teleportation right before Liv was kidnapped-- and his wife, Meg March of Little Women fame. While she's breaking and entering and getting caught and pretending she's just being neighborly, Peter's being asked to be a criminal in the stead of the FBI who can't, and is getting wire taps. They pick up a call from Meg March to Hubby Heartworm where they decide to kill Olivia, and manage to warn her-- and it's MM who winds up dead, but HH doesn't know that, and they trick him into 'meeting' her. Liv uses the crime scene pics as a not so delicate way to break him so he'll confess, which he does, but says that he was trying to save her, that they were the only chance (for what, he didn't mention), and that she doesn't know what she's done.

Very tense.

He's hauled off, and Liv can finally relax, but what he said makes her look all lost-puppy, and Peter stands too close trying to get her to relax / let it go, and Walter keeps insisting that Peter was a little more worried than might be expected when she was missing. Which we didn't get to see.

Not a bad ep, but it seemed a little like a well-edited two-parter that was condensed into a one-parter for whatever reason. Lots of stuff going on, lots of movement, lots of tenseness, but not alot of time for reactions-- it would have been nice for a little emotional growth while she was missing, but she wasn't missing long. If she was checked out in the hospital, it wasn't mentioned. She went right back to work. You'd think that JJ could make it emotionally dense with only a few characters the way he did on lost, but I guess that's not what he's going for here. X-Files is what he's going for here, and he's got the questions and misdirections feeling down perfectly... just not the pacing, though it is improving as the season moves along. Maybe they just haven't quite settled their writing team yet.

And why did her sister move in with her? She's got to be a plot device waiting to happen. Like, she's being paid to spy on her or something. That'd be sweet.

Weekly Roundup 4 - Sept 28 to Oct 4

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

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

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



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

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

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



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



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



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

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



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

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

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



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

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

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

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


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

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

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