Torchwood Math

The second episode of the Doctor Who spinoff Torchwood: Miracle Day saw a dramatic decline in viewership: about 30 percent, according to Entertainment Weekly columnist James Hibberd.

This means:

* 30% of the first-episode viewers were spared the f'ing awful hour of TV that was episode two. Everything about this episode failed: characterizations, motivations, the acting, the plot, everything. Imagine the worst expositional and mock-action excesses of 24 mixed with the logic- and chemistry-defying stupidity of MacGuyver. I gave T:MD a chance because Torchwood: Children of Earth was a gripping British SF thriller in the tradition of Quatermass. Now I'm thinking much of Children of Earth's success had to do with the direction of Euros Lyn, the wise choice to never show the 4-5-6, and a terrific performance from Peter Capalidi. T:MD is much closer to seasons 1 and 2 of Torchwood: absolute crap, start to finish.

* the 70% of viewers who returned got to sit through such gems of dialogue as "I'm not gay but I'll let you feel me up if you get me a vodka" and "Water? I'm American, too. Can't I contribute to our global cultural hegemony with a nice frosty cola?" Who would ever speak either of these lines?!

* 70% of epsiode 1 viewers got to see Wayne Knight--in a glass-walled office on a busy floor full of intelligence analysts!-- look as shifty and squirmy and guilty as anyone ever looked as he planned the end of Torchwood. It's as if the director said, "Do that character you did in Jurassic Park, but bigger." Where, oh where, is a dilophosaurus when you need one?

* 30% of the viewers are obviously smarter than I am, but rest assured I'll be contributing to the dropoff in viewing figures between episodes three and two. It's time to put the torch to Torchwood. And give good actors like Bill Pullman something worthwhile to be in.

Standard Alien Invasion Story, take 768.

I'm not one to prejudge based on trailers, press releases, internet leaks, etc. but, man oh man, Falling Skies sure looks derivative, doesn't it? If it isn't, the producers sure missed a huge chance to show viewers how this is different from V, War of the Worlds, Skyline, and all the other films and TV shows it sure looks derivative of.

And so ends series seven of Peep Show

Damn, another season of Peep Show done.

There were lots of laughs this year, and the Christmas episode wherein Mark's family visits, is one of the best episodes of the season, but it ended on a bittersweet note, with the boys about to part ways, Super Hans admitting he's addicted to crack, Mark realizing his son will probably grow up "thinking Jeff is his father", and Alan Johnson acting like a complete asshole and throwing years of sobriety out the window.

It sure felt like they've laid groundwork for an eighth series. I hope so. Peep Show is one of the best comedies ever made, up there with The Office (UK version, of course), Fawlty Towers, and Steptoe and Son.

If you haven't seen Peep Show, early seasons are out on DVD, and readily available in video rental shops if you don't want to buy.

Doctor Who: A Christmas Carol (or, What? No Cyberking?!)

Compared to the Tennent-era Christmas specials, this year's Doctor Who Christmas special was a treat. There were no monsters, no Torchwood tie-ins, no giant Cyberking kicking the shit out of Victorian London; no RTD false sentiment, no farting aliens, and no flimsy plots. Instead, we got a charming, quiet Doctor Who take on Dickens' A Christmas Carol. It was a crazy, time-altering story that followed a well-constructed internal logic, but allowed for some unexpected twists. Smith, as he has been from The Eleventh Hour, was pitch-perfect, and guest-star Michael Gambon added some gravitas without being overwrought.

And the season 6 preview showed us we're in for a whole lot of River Song... what's not to love about that?!

BBC, whatever you do, keep Moffat happy and working on Doctor Who! He "gets" it, in a way RTD never did.

Fringe: Nope, Take the Quick Way Home

All of season three so far leads to... this?! Fauxliva goes back to The Other Side. Olivia, aided by alt.Broyles, comes back to Our Side. And no one gets hurt. Well, except for alt.Broyles who for helping Olivia gets replaced by a shape-shifting doppelganger. Everyone is back where they should be, albeit with a bit more information about the other's dimension.

Here's a nagging question... given that Olivia and Fauxlivia were basically improvising their respective ways home by the end, due to a series of complications, how did they both manage to do it within a couple of hours of each other? Oh, right. 10 cc of dramaticexpediencium.

Honestly, this has to be the most anti-climactic climax since Fringe began. The Olivia of two worlds story fizzled this week, faster than the John Scott or Newton storylines.

Cue the outraged message-board geeks who were counting on some Torv-on-Torv catfight action.

Huzzah! More Peep Show

Peep Show, the best British sitcom since The Office, Extras, and The Thick of It, returns for a seventh season, and the quality is still as high as ever. David Mitchell and Robert Webb slip effortlessly back into their hapless loser personae, and hilarity ensues.

No Canadian broadcaster (that I can find) but well, it's available, if you know where to look.

Fringe: Take the Long Way Home

10 random thoughts and questions about last night's Fringe, "The Abducted":

1. One of the Candyman's victims is alt.Broyle's son? How convenient!
2. Fringe Division been working this case for years, but only Olivia can crack it? How convenient!
3. Candyman isn't a serial killer, more of a serial... drainer?
4. Why do all serial killers and kidnappers have a second full apartment hidden behind a closet of the the apartment they live in?
   
5. The joining-of-the-dots between the Candyman's speech then the church, then the Candyman's lab and the minister require big leaps of logic.
6. If all the bad guys are after is life-force from children, why does the minster attack the alt.Broyles family?
7. Of course Olivia saves the alt.Broyles family in order to set up that alt.Broyles will save her from Walternate in an upcoming episode. I wish the the writers weren't so heavy-handed with the foreshadowing.
8. Why does Henry the taxi driver help Olivia a second time? She's never paid him for the very long cab ride she had when she first met him. He seems too altruistic, without justification. Hmm, maybe this is subtle foreshadowing...
   
9. Having been to the DOD lab only under supervised conditions, Olivia knows how to set up the sensory deprivation tanks, and find the right drugs to administer to herself, all in the space of five minutes? I know she has a photographic memory and high intelligence, but the other times she was at the lab, surely she wasn't privy to the settings of the tank or the combination of drugs administered. Yeah, yeah, dramatic expediency...
   
10. Fauxlivia: busted! Peter, sleeping with her: disgusted!

Lake Shore

Everyone's abuzz about how racist and homophobic the characters on the new "reality" show, Lake Shore, are. Forget that, how about just plain stupid?

Behold, the certainty and wisdom of Downtown D!

The jig is nearly up for Fauxlivia...

Fringe,"6955 kHz," was one of those stories in the series that plods along in service of a greater story. I'm feeling like I felt once I knew Walter was going to cross over and grab young Peter from the Other Side: a couple of steps ahead of the writers. That's not the most enjoyable vantage point to watch a story from.

Not much new happened in this episode, and all the characters got to do the usual things they do:

• Walter smoking dope? Check.
• Astrid decoding something not by hard work but by sheer luck? Of course.
• Peter observing everything but saying nothing until he has all the facts? Affirmative.
• Nina bringing out some device Massive Dynamic has made or studied which "coincidentally" ties into the investigation? Roger that.
• Broyles delivering exposition? Confirmed. Poor bugger, that's all he ever gets to do. One episode last season gave him a bit of a back story including a failed marriage. But that story ended up being told by his character rather than shown.
  
• The whole gang solving something in a few short days that has eluded hackers and crackers and cryptologists for decades, possibly centuries? Of course.
• Imaginary Peter telling the Real Olivia on the Other Side* some ominous truth? Yep.
  

Which isn't to say "6955 kHz" was a bad episode. For once, the threat of the week didn't maim, mutate or mutilate anyone, a nice change. Weirdo book collector Markham made an appearance, which always injects some humour. And Anna Torv is doing a great job playing one Olivia pretending to be another. Her performance is quite understated. Even though we as viewers have the benefit of knowing it's "Fauxlivia", Torv gives the impostor some subtle tics and facial expressions the real Olivia doesn't have. As an actor, she's thought it through. She and John Noble (Walter) seem to be enjoying playing two variations on their respective characters this season.

Fringe is very good sci-fi TV, but like most serialized US shows, it tends to have too much filler. I don't think TV in general has learned how to properly tell a long story in weekly installments yet. Perhaps the media and the format precludes it. Dexter season 1 came close, but it was based on a novel. The long arc of Dexter over five seasons and counting, isn't very cohesive. Things that in a long novel wouldn't be tolerated--plot holes, subplots that start and stop abruptly, and inconsistent characterizations--are rampant.
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*Yes, this does sound like nonsense if you don't watch the show.

Fake, or Impossibly Fake?

I couldn't agree more with this article, "How to kill a mockumentary", even though, once you get past the contrivance, Modern Family is a damned funny show. Interesting that the article doesn't call out the U.S. version of The Office for using the same fake technique.

Fringe: "Amber 31422"

An lot of setup just to start to get Olivia thinking about getting home, wasn't it? Not awful, but it has to be the weakest of the "That Side" episodes so far.

Buckaroo Dexter

Gah! The minute I give up on Dexter, they add Peter Weller to the cast! No... still not going back...

God, I feel old.

Twin Peaks is 20 years old

RIP Dexter

That's it. I'm out. Dexter season five has far too many plot holes and "what the hell--?" moments. To watch any further will just annoy me.

It's been an up and down ride. We went from the brilliant expansion of the slight novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter in season one, through the overlapping but opposite obsessions of Doakes and Lila in season two, then down into a sludgy season three nearly derailed by the bombast of Miguel and a completely lacklustre foe called, I think, the Skinner, who was never explained or explored. Season four saw a return to form thanks to a cohesive story, a grotesquely dark turn from John Lithgow as Trinity, and an unexpected final scene.

Which brings me to the end, my arbitrary end, one-third of the way through season five. This is not the Dexter I've come to enjoy and expect. It's horribly unfocused yet everything is telegraphed. Most the characters are chasing their own tails because the writers can't think of anything new to do with them, or can't be arsed to expand on established traits or plot points from previous seasons. And, just in case you're too slow to follow the meandering story or Dexter's internal monologue, don't worry: Harry, aka The Ghost of Plot Present, will pop up to keep you on track.

Even this episode's "huge reveal" at the end won't bring me back. I've taken my blood slide, already chopped up the body, and taken down the plastic...

Fringe: Not to be Negative, Man...

In early issues of the Doom Patrol (DC Comics), The Chief recounts how Larry Trainor became the Negative Man.

CHIEF: I know how and why you became an outsider--a strange one! Disaster struck as you tested the K2-F, the experimental rocket plane that flew higher than any manned aircraft had ever gone... You lost ground contact... blacked out! For hours your jet skimmed through the still uncharted wave belts of inner space until it suddenly began to nose downward..."

Larry crash-lands the plane, only to find that a "negative energy being" has merged with his own body.

The Negative Man looks like this...

In Fringe, season 2, episode 6, "Earthling", A man sent to space came back with a dark entity in him. Walter learns that the man and the entity are connected and cannot be separated. The entity looks like this:

Swipe or homage? Discuss.

Fringe - another "homage"

Challengers of the Unknown No. 1 (April-May, 1958), DC Comics:

This is how the thieves get in... beamed through the walls...

Fringe, season 1, episode 10: Thieves steal scientific equipment. They enter and leave undetected. How? Beamed through the walls, of course!

I'm digging all these swipes. More as I find them.

Fringe, s03e04: Fringe Lite

This episode felt like filler. I was jolted from my torpor only by the few false starts, wherein Peter says something that could be interpreted as him having figured out that Fauxlivia has replaced Olivia, but then those comments turn out to be about some other things, and Fauxlivia heaves a sigh of relief.

I'm still not sure why Fauxlivia was put in charge of the other-dimension's forces on this side when it has been shown time and time again that Newton was doing a pretty decent job and was extremely capable and single-minded (in this episode he kills agents who deviate from the mission). Now he's just a pile of goo/mercury and Fauxlivia has upped her resolve, giving herself to Peter physically in an attempt to keep him distracted. M'eh.

Despite a few comedic moments with Walter and Astrid, and a couple of tiny revelations about the Shape-Shifters, this episode didn't do much for me. The idea that "Shape Shifters could be impersonating people in power and could have been doing so for years" is a such tired sci-fi cliche, it no longer instills the intended dread in viewers. Well, at least not in this viewer.

Two Alan Moore items

1. A TV project.

Yay! and

2. A comics store in Florida refuses to sell Neonomicon.

Boo! I mean, it's a free country, sell what you like, but why the need to label Moore's sexual philophies as "bizarre"? Neonomicon is fiction; perhaps the sexual philosophies being espoused belong to the characters, not the author?

More troubling is the blog posting's title, "Secret Headquarters Censors Alan Moore And Jacen Burrows’ Neonomicon". Someone might want to look up the meaning of the "censor".

The Event Canceled

After one episode. By me.

Dexter, season 5, episode 3

I think Dexter as a concept is played out. We are now in the Zone of Diminishing returns. Tighten the Kyle Butler noose all you like, it's still not very interesting. Someone has seen Dexter kill or knows what he is? We've seen this before. Twice. Dexter has to hold the person who knows his secret hostage? Wake me when it's over.

Unless there is some sort of way-out plot twist coming, one that actually makes sense in terms of the story, it's time to put Dexter in the kill room.