A couple weeks ago, my satellite went out, and I seriously considered just canceling the service altogether. Even if I were home long enough to watch TV, all the shows I’m most interested in are available on the internet. And if I ever do get free time, wouldn’t I be better off going outdoors, or at least reading?

Luckily, the DVR helped dispel all that nonsense by recording the Fuji TV programming block that runs in the bay area on weekends. One of the shows I caught was “Teppan Shoujo Akane!!”, which is about a teenage girl who uses a magic griddle named Ittetsu to battle rival teppanyaki chefs while searching for her missing father.

I know, right? But it’s even better than that: even though it was made in 2006, it looks and feels like it’s coming straight out of 1988. Her arch-enemy is a scenery-chewing rich girl of the Animal House/Meatballs school of villainy, and there are scenes where Akane takes long walks on the beach with her griddle as romantic music plays.

This is something that I never would’ve heard about had it not been for the sweet, sweet rays of entertainment broadcast to my TV. How could I ever have doubted it?

At one point in the episode I watched, Akane grows despondent over a betrayal, and she actually throws Ittetsu into the trash! After some soul-searching, she realizes her mistake and begins a chase through the streets of Tokyo, pursuing the garbage truck taking away her magic griddle. She jumps onto the back of the truck and bows to Ittetsu in abject apology. And I understood exactly how she felt when she caressed the griddle and said:

I’m not all alone! I have Ittetsu! I still have iron-griddle dishes!

This “half-season” of “Battlestar Galactica” ended last Friday with an episode called “Revelations.” I don’t really have much to say worth a spoiler warning, but if you want to know nothing about the episode, you might want to skip this post.

Maybe the series has always been like this, and I just couldn’t tell because I was watching the episodes out of order, but it seems like the show has been wildly uneven in quality. Two episodes ago was a muddled, directionless mess of an hour, immediately followed by one of the best episodes of the entire series (”Hub”). The finale was more of the same: there were story moments and individual scenes that were just fantastic, but I just wasn’t that impressed with the episode as a whole.

I liked pretty much everything they did, plot-wise, but I wish they had stretched it all out over the last 8 or 9 episodes instead of trying to cram everything significant that will happen to the human race into 45 minutes. Everything was rushed and muddled. Lately my biggest gripe about TV shows is that the characters’ motivations get lost; it doesn’t seem like they do stuff because the characters want to, but just because the writers need them to get from here to there. In this episode, it seemed like characters did stuff just because they were afraid they wouldn’t have time to before the scene ended and we cut to somewhere else.

But a few of the moments were great. It got so tense that I actually had to pause it and get up to pace around the apartment, which I’m guessing is the kind of reaction they were hoping for. But I was anxious only partly because of the tension the episode had built up, and mostly because I kept saying, “Don’t screw up the whole series, don’t screw up the whole series…”

I don’t know, maybe that’s an intentional dramatic device — they’ll show you an episode so bad, or a plot development so ridiculous, that you have to be a little scared of them. They’ve got a gun to the series’ head and are holding it hostage, “Keep watching, or we’ll blow it to hell! We’re crazy enough to do it!”

The ending was fine, but it was more “oh, so that’s the option they picked” than “holy cow, I didn’t see that coming!” I guess the last 10 or so episodes are going to be all about the Final Fifth and what happens next. I’m not so upset anymore that it’s going to be 2009 before any new episodes air. I’m curious to see how it all ends, but I think BSG and I could use some time apart.

Last month, news came over the wireless that Steven Moffat is taking over “Doctor Who” when its fifth season starts in 2010. I didn’t think much about the announcement, since I haven’t been paying much attention to the series. It’s turned into kind of a shrill, nonsensical mess with increasingly overwrought finales. Even though it has the occasional brilliant, best-thing-on-television episode, that hasn’t been enough to keep me interested.

Of course, what the brillaint, best-thing-on-television episodes have in common (with a couple of exceptions) is that they were written by Steven Moffat. I just finished watching his two-parter for season four, “Silence in the Library” and “Forest of the Dead”, and it looks like this hasn’t been just a coincidence. The guy is just crazy good. And he seems to understand the series on a gut level, and he knows how to turn it from goofy kids’ sci-fi programming into astoundingly good television.

What impresses me the most is how he manages to nail the formula of the series, without its feeling formulaic. The two-parter is a straight-up “Doctor Who” formula story: time travel, aliens, a little bit of horror, with new characters getting picked off one by one and a thrilling conclusion where the Doctor suddenly figures out a deus ex machina to fix everything. Not only that, but this episode is something of a mash-up of Moffat’s other episodes, with time paradoxes, a love story, a little bit of self-referential storytelling, and scary monsters from unlikely sources (in “Blink” it was statues, here it’s shadows) shambling around repeatedly saying creepy catch-phrases (in “The Empty Child” it was, “Are you my mummy?” here it’s “Hey, who turned out the lights?”)

So it’s amazing that it all mixes together to make something that works so well. I think the last time I’ve been genuinely creeped out by a TV show was when I saw “Blink,” and the last time I’ve been so genuinely happy at a happy ending was when I saw “The Doctor Dances.” Lesser writers are afraid to save a character because they think it’ll look like a cop-out, but Moffat really earns his happy endings. And earns his scares, as well — the monster in these episodes is basically the haunted spaceman from “Scooby Doo.”

If we can expect a whole season of episodes as good as these two, then the next full season of “Doctor Who” could be amazing. Of course, it’s over a year away, but it’ll be worth the wait.

Via Andrew P Mayer’s blog, there’s an announcement that almost everybody who ever appeared on Mystery Science Theater are going to be speaking at a panel at the San Diego Comic-Con:

We now have full confirmation of the upcoming panel at Comic-Con in San Diego, Friday, July 25, 7:15 p.m.

On the panel will be: Trace Beaulieu, Paul Chaplin, Frank Conniff, Bill Corbett, Joel Hodgson, Jim Mallon, Kevin Murphy, Bridget Nelson, Mike Nelson, Mary Jo Pehl and J. Elvis Weinstein. Wow.

Holy monkey! Could that get any cooler at all?

The moderator will be Patton Oswalt.

In unrelated news, I’m going back to the San Diego Comic-Con this year.

After last time, I swore I never would, but right as I was wondering if maybe it wouldn’t be so bad this year, I got asked if I wanted to go for work. (I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I’ve got a cool job.) Now I’ve got another reason to look forward to it.

It’s an old cliche that Hollywood takes the hard work of creative people and squeezes all of the originality and innovation and intelligence out of it, to dumb it down for the mass market. I never really believed it, though: instead of this big, faceless, creativity-sucking entity, isn’t it easier just to assume that some people just aren’t as talented as others? If a movie like National Treasure is all Hollywood’s fault, then how do movies like The Life Aquatic and Adaptation and Miller’s Crossing get made?

But I’m starting to think that cliche might have something to it, the more movies I see from Guillermo del Toro. This weekend I watched The Devil’s Backbone. Like Pan’s Labyrinth, it was made in Spain. And unlike Mimic, Blade II, and Hellboy, it was very good. Original, innovative, intelligent, and above all, uncompromising. So either del Toro’s talent has been wasted by Hollywood, or he only knows how to make movies set around the Spanish Civil War.

The movie’s weird, not even so much for what it shows but for how it kept turning into something other than what I’d expected. Before it started, I’d thought it was going to be like The Orphanage, another Spanish movie set in a haunted orphanage. But it’s much more interesting than The Orphanage, and it’s a period piece, and it’s not really a ghost story. Except it kind of is, except for when it veers off into melodrama, or character study, or coming-of-age tale. Plus, there’s an explosion.

You can tell that del Toro’s a fan of Mike Mignola, or at least why he’s a fan if he weren’t already before making this movie, because there’s that same feeling of simple stories interwoven with the gothic and gruesome and just plain strange. If I were to describe just the plot, it wouldn’t sound all that compelling, but then you watch the movie and there’s something interesting going on in just about every scene.

The new kid at the orphanage meets the principal — who’s got a half-wooden, half-metal prosthetic leg. He finds a father figure in the kindly old science teacher — who keeps fetuses in glass jars and drinks the liquid when no one’s looking. And he runs into the orphanage’s spooky ghost — who’s called “the one who sighs” by the other kids, and who has a constantly-bleeding wound from the crack in his skull, and is always surrounded by particulate matter as if he were still underwater.

The Devil’s Backbone turned me into a bona fide fan of Guillermo del Toro, and I wish I’d seen it sooner, and now I’m really, really looking forward to Hellboy II this summer. The best I can say about the first Hellboy movie is that it was clear del Toro was a big fan, and while the movie didn’t add much to the character or even really capture the spirit of the comics, it had some good ideas and didn’t do anything awful. But the trailers for the sequel seem to have a better feel for what it is that makes Hellboy cool.

Plus, del Toro’s riding on the success of Pan’s Labyrinth, so I’m thinking he’s got enough clout that he can stand up to the nefarious Hollywood talent-suppression field, and make an American Big Summer Blockbuster that’s as cool as the ones he’s made in Spanish.

Speaking of TV shows: did anybody else understand what the hell was going on with this week’s “Battlestar Galactica?” (Called “Sine Qua Non.”) It felt to me like what would happen if you took all the components of a BSG episode, fed them into a computer:

• Stand-off at gun-point
• Apollo makes speech about making tough choices to survive
• People see things that aren’t there
• Character thrown in brig
• Fist fight
• Idyllic near-death experience
• Character in brig paces
• Political discussions
• Spaceship does faster-than-light jump
• Mention Raptors and Vipers
• Return of bit character from past episode
• Include Starbuck: yes/no

and then hit the “Randomize” button. Okay, we’re good to go! — wait, we didn’t click the “Lucid” checkbox? Damn, too late. Maybe no one will notice.

I was glad to see (spoiler?) Adama admit he totally loves Roslyn 4-ever, but they could’ve done that in a future episode, just by having the Basestar return and find him there in a raptor, reading her book. That’s all they needed. Apart from that and the little revelation that Cylons can indeed get other Cylons pregnant, this seems like a filler episode that could (and should) be easily forgotten.

But Lucy Lawless is back next week, so that’s promising.

Okay, the “Lost” people are totally making this stuff up as they go along.

At least, I hope they are, because if the season finale of season 4 really is what they’ve had planned since the end of season 3, then they’ve been yanking our chains for a year.

It’s not that it was bad; it’s just that the story started off so strong, and it hinted at all kinds of fantastic twists and turns that were going to be coming. And then it ended with pretty much the most obvious resolution to every new plot point that was introduced. It felt so predictable that I don’t want to believe that was what they predicted; I want to believe that they had more in mind, and then fell back on plan B.

What I like best about episodic television is those moments when it seems like the writers have painted themselves into a corner. And then right as you’re about to give up on them, you turn around and see that not only have they painted the entire room, they’re pointing at the elephant in the center of the room and saying, “What, you didn’t notice that before? It’s been there the whole time.” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” was best at this; there were several times I’d thought the series was in a nosedive, and not only did they manage to pull up in time, they started doing loop-de-loops. (If that’s too many metaphors for one paragraph, I’m talking about the bit where they turned the awful “Initiative” storyline into a Frankenstein’s monster story with one really awesome and unexpected scene).

Season 4 of “Lost” started out so well, it was promising even more than the beginning of season 2. And the season’s been solid overall. It’s just that all they did was gracefully close up most of the loose ends and set up the next batch of episodes. They didn’t do all that and drop a bombshell on us.

(And the rest is spoilers for the season finale and the season in general).

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Memorial Day weekend seemed like as good a time as any to make some progress on the Netflix queue, in the form of a style-over-substance double feature.

In one of the special features for The Orphanage, executive producer Guillermo del Toro describes a couple of scenes as “pure cinema.” He’s talking about the scenes without dialogue that work just on the basis of some really creepy visuals, but he could just as well be describing the whole movie.

Because The Orphanage could only work as a movie, and it does so surprisingly well. It relies on suspense instead of cheap scares — except for one shot involving an ambulance, which works because it’s timed perfectly — but any of the suspenseful scenes, taken out of context, would just seem silly. Its plot is an almost insultingly simple and straightforward ghost story, but the movie knows exactly how much emphasis to give to the plot and how much to give to the psychological drama. And the drama would turn into overwrought or cloying melodrama without the performance of the lead actress, and the careful way scenes are staged and filmed.

You’ll frequently see it compared to The Others and Pan’s Labyrinth, but that’s not just a case of lazy movie reviewing, comparing it to the only other Spanish-made horror-like movies that Americans have heard of. It exists squarely between those two: it’s a better movie than The Others, with more depth and without the need for a twist ending, but with a very similar look, a similar premise (a mother trapped in a cavernous, haunted house), and an “old-school” ghost story mentality.

And it’s not as good as Pan’s Labyrinth, but thematically it’s extremely similar. I wish that they were more similar: there are scenes where the mother is playing with her son that are just wonderful, but they’re quickly relegated to being plot points, instead of reminders of what it’s like to think like a child. And they tacked on two completely unnecessary short scenes at the end of the movie (and flashbacks during the climax) to explain everything; I wish they’d stuck with the ambiguously happy ending of Pan’s Labyrinth.

People who get paid to review movies frequently toss around the term “dream-like,” and I’d use that here, but in a different context: it’s like the kind of dream that feels so vivid and meaningful right as you wake up, but the second you try to explain it or even remember the details, it seems trite and meaningless. I really enjoyed The Orphanage an awful lot, and everything it tried to do — from horror to drama to joyful “childlike wonder” moments — totally worked for me up until the end. But I’m wary of thinking about it too much, because I’m afraid it’ll evaporate.

Snatch, on the other hand, is just plain bullshit. I don’t even like calling it style over substance, since it’s been less than eight years and already there’s no style left. It’s an hour and a half being assaulted by a jackass who believes he’s a hell of a lot cooler and smarter than he is. I can’t remember the last time I’ve wanted so much to physically smack the smug dumb-ass expression off of a movie.

And I’m really tired of seeing movies that prove Quentin Tarantino knows what he’s doing, and how awful it is when some tone-deaf person tries to do the same thing. Hey, why don’t you spin the camera around one more time, cool guy? That is what we in the movie business call style, man, that shit never gets old.