Television – Page 13 – Spectre Collie

Would you just stop and ask for directions, already?

NOW look where the plot is! TVSquad.com has a link to an interview with Damon Lindelof about the upcoming season conclusion of “Lost.” I agree with the TV Squad guy — dude could stand to shut up for a while and lessen the backlash.

The part of the interview that annoyed me the most was at the end:

But I feel for the fans that are desperately waiting for the big answers. The reality is that there is an inherent catch-22 there, which is “Who killed Laura Palmer?” Once you give up who killed Laura Palmer, why watch “Twin Peaks”? Once Dave and Maddy kiss, why watch “Moonlighting”? So I feel like once we give up those big answers, the really compelling reason to watch “Lost” will be over and done with. I would really like to answer those questions because I think that the answers are very cool.

One of the reasons it bugs me is because I used to buy that schtick — hip young guy who loves TV, not just makes TV; can combine high culture and pop culture; and in touch with what fans are saying and what they want. That was before I read about a dozen of these types of interviews (and that’s only a fraction of what’s been published), and they’re all the same — unbelievably cool things are coming up in the series, so just wait; “Twin Peaks” sure fizzled out, huh?; and we want the show to be cool, but it’s all Disney’s fault.

This is going to make me sound like a Disney apologist, but I’m speaking more as a fan of the show teetering on the brink of becoming a former fan. But I’d bet one 30-second block of ad revenue that Disney just wants to make money off the show, they don’t care how it’s done. As long as the series doesn’t full-stop end, I bet anything would be fair game.

And mentioning “Moonlighting” and “Twin Peaks” is just weak sauce. What killed “Twin Peaks” wasn’t revealing who killed Laura Palmer; what killed it was having nothing planned for after the reveal. They’d put all their effort into one mystery, and didn’t start with the larger-scale Black Lodge stuff until it was already too late. “Lost” doesn’t have that problem; if anything, they’ve got the opposite. It’s all Black Lodge stuff, and they keep throwing more into the mix.

They could bring any of the big mysteries to a conclusion and keep the series going. They could bring all of them to a conclusion and — hey, here’s a thought — invent new ones. Hell, they’ve already got enough threads going; if they just devoted two episodes each to resolving every single one of the open stories, that’s at least two seasons’ worth right there.

And what about the stuff that’s been hinted at but never evolved to full-blown mystery? The Black Rock ship that’s over 100 years old — why not do a half-season of that crew and their flashbacks? I’d watch.

As for “Moonlighting,” it was on the decline a long time before they got the two leads together. Because they took a prize-winning formula from the start of the series and killed it by doing the same thing over and over again. They put so much effort into one gimmick (will they ever get together?) and didn’t have anything left over.

Sounds like “Lost” is going to waste its dozen interesting characters and intriguing premises with pointless, never-resolved subplots and more obfuscation. Look forward to the Shakespeare episode, all-musical episode, and black-and-white episode to come soon.

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Six hours of solid door-opening action! I don’t know if y’all have heard, but the SciFi channel has been running a miniseries called “The Lost Room!”

Non-stop promotions aside, this is actually a damn fine show. (It concludes tonight, which would make this blog post seem useless if not for the fact I’m 100% sure SciFi is going to be rerunning it frequently).

A lot of science fiction and sci-fi/fantasy stories start with a high concept, and then go on to tell a traditional story based on that concept. Every history of “Star Trek” mentions that it was described as “‘Wagon Train’ in space.” Most episodes of TV series like “The Twilight Zone” and all the Star Treks were standard drama plots with a high concept thrown into the mix (what would a love story be like if one of the characters were from a symbiotic race that could change gender?) or used the high concept as allegory for something else (can’t you see that I’m half-black and he’s half-white?)

The thing that impresses me the most about “The Lost Room” is that it’s all about the concept. A preview I read described it as being like a videogame, and that’s apt. It’s true on the obvious level — the story really just boils down to a standard adventure game, with a guy collecting inventory items to solve puzzles.

But the videogame comparison goes deeper, in that this is the most successful non-game art I’ve ever seen that conveys that feeling of engagement that’s unique to videogames. That feeling of being dropped in a world with new rules, and the satisfaction that comes from figuring out how to use the rules to accomplish something.

It helps a lot that the series doesn’t insult your intelligence. Especially when it very easily could have; pretty much every single character in the story knows more about what’s going on than the hero does. That could’ve devolved into a lot of really tedious and clumsy exposition, but it ends up making the hero seem like even more of a bad-ass. Explain something once, and he’s not only figured it out, but figured out how to use that knowledge to get farther than any of these other people have been able to.

He’s not a hero because he’s been dropped into the role of protagonist; he’s a hero because he’s actually accomplishing things. The best example is when he uses the properties of the motel room and the missing objects to figure out how to open a locked safe. It was just ingenious.

I’ve been trained to watch TV from “on high,” sitting on a platform just underneath the writers as we both look down on the characters and wait for them to clue in to what’s going on and catch up with the rest of us. With this, I feel like I’m having to hurry to keep up. A villain will shout, “take all the doors and burn them,” and it takes me a minute to realize what that was all about.

And characters don’t spend a lot of time staring with Spielbergian wide eyes and open mouths at the wondrous properties of these mysterious objects; they jump right in and start playing with them. Testing them with stuffed animals, smashing them with sledgehammers, and using them to break locks, break out of prison, or spy on people. A lot of stories introduce the Ring of Power or the Bag of Holding or Portable Hole and then make you wait for that one crucial plot point to come where the hero remembers the object and uses it to save the day just at the last minute. In “The Lost Room,” people have already exhausted every possible use of an object a dozen times over by the time the audience has figured out exactly what it does.

It’s not perfect; the whole love-interest “don’t break my heart” bit was goofy, and I’ve read previews that suggest that the final pay-off is kind of weak (I’ve only seen four hours out of six). But I’ve been enjoying the hell out of it, and not only am I excited about the conclusion, I already wish it were an ongoing series.

My biggest complaint is that I wish Peter Krause would stop harping on about his daughter and the Prime Object and start trying to find the mysterious missing razor. Any guy over 18 (at least those of us who weren’t raised on estrogen-rich soy products) knows that the perpetual haven’t-shaved-in-a-day look takes a lot of effort, and watching six hours of it makes you feel uncomfortably itchy.

R.I.P. Peter Boyle

What shall we throw in now? I guess it’s a little weird to be upset when celebrities pass away, but then few celebrities are as cool as Peter Boyle.

He’s got a permanent place on my cool list just for his performance in Young Frankenstein, of course. But he was great in everything I saw him in — the “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” episode of “The X-Files,” and every episode of “Everybody Loves Raymond.” It’s a shame that series was so popular and long-running that it created a backlash, since it was consistently funny and frequently genuinely moving, and Boyle was always one of the stand-outs.

What always impressed me the most about Peter Boyle was that he just seemed to “get” it. He wasn’t just somebody delivering funny lines; he was a real comedic actor. The difference is knowing how to play a character as a real person — even an obnoxious or belligerent person — and work it so that it’s true to the character and still comes across as funny and relatable. Reading his obituary makes it sound like he had a pretty interesting life off-screen as well.

Update: Entertainment Weekly’s PopWatch blog has the best obituary of Boyle I’ve seen.

Stop winding it up so much please thank you.

All shall love me AND DESPAIR! I was watching “Saturday Night Live” this week (eyes over here, Mrs. Beatty) and the first musical guest was Gwen Stefani doing “Wind it Up” with an over-enthusiastic drum line and a throng of badly-dressed dancers.

It’s difficult for me to describe my reaction to seeing this, but in short: I became firmly convinced that the World is coming to An End. It started as an unfocused sense of unease from deep within my soul. Each yodel and every sample made it more concrete, more defined, until it became a concentrated pit of despair lodged in the center of my heart.

Imagine you’re a simple country villager in the outskirts of ancient Rome, and you’re asked to cater at one of Caligula’s parties. As you stand dumb-struck behind the buffet table, watching the proceedings, the servants wheel in another horse and some more lubricant, and you think, “Well, they’ve finally done it. They’ve destroyed civilization.” That’s the sense I got.

Now, I still like to think of myself as being on the fringes of hipness — not really genuinely cool, but at least at the VH-1 level of social awareness. But seeing this thing rocked my whole perception of what’s going on in American pop culture. It wasn’t just that I didn’t like it; I didn’t understand it. At all. I hated “Hollaback Girl” and “My Humps” like any right-thinking person should, but at least I had a sense of what they were trying to accomplish with them.

“Wind it Up,” with its video and album and fashion line and interviews and promotions and YouTube and MySpace appearances, is such an engineered consumer product package that it’s as far removed from actual music as Lunchables are from actual wheat. Video didn’t just kill the radio star, it’s on Fox News promoting its new fictionalized account of the murder titled If I Did It.

I’ve heard and read a lot of people — usually well into their 40s by the time they say it — say they remember the exact moment they realized they were “old.” Usually it’s when a clerk calls them “sir” or “ma’am,” or when they meet a co-worker who was born the year they graduated high school/graduated college/were released from rehab.

For me, it was watching a woman (who’s two years older than me!) doing a performance on “Saturday Night Live” and me feeling like I just saw a series of mushroom clouds over the horizon.

Guilty Pleasure

I honestly can’t tell if “Heroes” has gotten significantly better since I first saw it (and mercilessly ragged on it), or if I’m just starting to come down off my high horse and admit that my tastes aren’t as highbrow as I like to think.

I’ve still got problems with it. Biggest is that the whole thing reeks of Major Network Television. There are the stupid catch-phrases, and the big event gimmicks (“One of the heroes will DIE!”), and the soap-opera casting. Is it just me, or does anybody else think the actress playing the congressman’s wife just looks weird and unnatural?

Plus, it still feels like a bunch of people who are late to the whole comic book party. “We’ve got a superhero who can borrow other superheroes’ powers. Does that not just blow your mind?!?” Well, no, because we’ve seen Rogue do it in X-Men comics for decades, plus there were these movies that came out a while back you might have heard of. The creator of the show has been quick to point that out in interviews — he’s said he’ll come up with ideas and then hear from a friend that there’s already a well-established character that does the same thing. Still, it’s fun to make fun of him for it.

Especially when they try to build drama around it. Their big climax for the first half season was what goes down at Homecoming, and it was all relatively cool. But is there anybody in the audience who didn’t know what was going to happen as soon as the episode started? The character who borrows other heroes’ powers is going to sacrifice everything to save the girl who can survive falls from great height. But oh no! We see a horrible painting of the future showing him fall from a great height!

Fifteen minutes into the episode, my mother, who’s not exactly steeped in comic book lore, said, “After he absorbs the cheerleader’s healing ability, is he going to get the bad guy’s power too?” And she wasn’t having a heroin-induced vision of the future, as far as I could tell.

Still, the show’s engaging, it always delivers some kind of pay-off (I’m not mad at you, “Lost,” just very, very disappointed), and I don’t know if it’s my imagination, but it seems like the dialogue has gotten less corny and the acting has been bumped up a notch to B-list.

And as cocky as I am, there’s stuff that I’ve been too dense to comprehend. One of my big problems with the show was figuring out what they were going to do with the Niki character. Multiple personality disorder isn’t a super power. It was only while I was reading a message board, trying to find out which hero is going to DIE next week?!? that some fan pointed out what I never picked up on: she’s the Hulk.

I don’t know if that counts as “subtle,” considering that there’s already a She-Hulk. And I’ve heard that a version of the real Hulk’s backstory says that he was created not from gamma radiation but MPD as a result of child abuse. Short of having her screaming “Hulk SMASH!” instead of using long-range rifles, I don’t know how they could’ve made it any clearer.

It can make your head hurt

Everybody knows that when you’re faced with an overwhelming amount of work, not because of outside pressure as much as because you’ve been slow to get things done, the best course of action is to procrastinate some more. The past couple of nights I’ve been hard-core with the procrastination; I did something I can’t remember doing in a long time: I just sat in front of the TV and flipped through the channels, watching whatever was on.

When you start channel-surfing after years of having a reliance on the TiVo, it really makes you stop and think. I just couldn’t shake the thought of how much research and effort and science and technology went into my TV setup.

Go back hundreds if not thousands of years, to when man first discovered sequential images. Then the discovery of persistence of vision, and the foresight to put those images together to create animation. Elsewhere, the principles of color theory that lead to the pointillist movement in art, and the ingenious discovery that the human brain can make up a complete image from discrete points of color.

Then there’s all of the genius that went into the discovery and use of radio waves and the idea of broadcasted transmissions. Research into sound and acoustics, so that a signal can be recorded, transmitted, and reproduced on a remote speaker. The study of phosphors, which can generate light when hit with electricity. The idea of representing information digitally, so that a single coherent image can be broken up into discrete pixels and then reproduced on a display device. The evolution of the cathode ray tube, which generates a complete two-dimensional image several times a second using a single beam of electricity that moves faster than we can easily conceive. Then the development of plasma and liquid crystal displays, which create images and animation on a flat surface. Not to mention all the technology that went into the construction of flat, high-resolution screens and tiny speakers and circuit boards.

On top of all that, there’s the study of propulsion and rocket science. And the evolution of that from the obvious applications like space exploration and blowing up people, to the ingenious idea of launching a piece of machinery into geosynchronous orbit with the earth so that you can transmit these digital images to far distant points on the planet almost instantaneously.

And all those centuries of research and toil and brilliant discoveries from the most genius minds of the human race all work together to bring us “Deal or No Deal.”

While we’re all contemplating the significance of that, I have to go use a bunch of miniaturized transistors that perform millions of calculations in a second, and ultra-thin liquid crystal displays and tiny radio transmitters that communicate with an extensive cellular radio network to provide instantaneous communication with points halfway across the world, so I can vote for Mario Lopez to win “Dancing with the Stars.” Slater’s got the moves, yo.

I Don’t

Ha! Boom! Suck on that witty post title, “Lost!”

Looks like the show has finally hit me with the one-two punch: a mediocre episode followed by a long break to completely ween me of any sense of involvement in the series. It’s their own fault; they’ve been hyping this thing since even before the season started, saying that we were going to discover all kinds of stuff and it was going to change our perception of the series forever.

It didn’t do either. It set up a cliffhanger that has enough maybe enough weight to it to ratchet up the tension for about a week. Not two months. And they didn’t answer anything. Unless you count “which guy will Kate choose?” but really, who the hell cares? It’s an ensemble cast with smoke monsters and polar bears and electromagnetic machines and mysterious codes; don’t we have more significant things to think about?

I’m still going to be watching come February; I’d be lying to say I won’t. But this was just a huge triple-A Anti-Climax.

Subtropical Homesick Blues

Oh boy! My blog’s first post-by-request. Granted, it’s about “Lost,” so I would’ve ended up talking about it anyway, but still.

It looks like the “Lost” backlash is in full effect on the internets, to the point that even the complaints have gotten stale. For my part, just over the last four or five weeks I’ve gone from being excited enough to stage an ill-fated “Lost”-watching party at my apartment, to being disappointed, to even forgetting that it was on last night until I was reminded. Still, I think the episodes this season have steadily been getting better.

I’m not the gushing fanboy that I used to be, but I kept thinking last night that there was some really cool stuff going on, stuff that reminded me of a show I used to like an awful lot. I didn’t really care about the big developments last night, and/or I saw them coming from a mile away even without the internet spoilers, but I still thought it was a very well-done episode.

The episode could just as well have been called “The Cost of Success,” because at this point, the show is clearly a victim of its own hype. The production quality and the performances haven’t gone down, and the series still has one of the highest cool-stuff-per-episode ratios on TV, but they’re just not delivering on everything they promised, and it’s wearing down viewers’ patience. I kept being reminded of the series “Heroes.” It’s really not a good show. It’s got enormous plot holes, terrible terrible dialogue, mediocre performances, and is full to bursting with tired cliches, stereotypes, and gimmicks. “Lost” is better in just about every conceivable way — so how come I’m more interested in what’s going on with the former than I am with the latter?

Now, the “Lost” guys have painted themselves into a corner, and they’ve got an obscene amount riding on the next episode. It’s going to be the last for a long while, so they stand to lose a lot of viewers. As if that weren’t enough, they’ve been hyping it even since before the season started, saying that it’s going to be the most stunning thing we’ve ever seen on television. If it doesn’t deliver on a lot of the mysteries left dangling since the pilot episode, then there are going to be a lot of pissed off viewers, and those of us who are still watching the show are going to have to hear about it incessantly for the next four months.

I still have faith they can pull off something good, even though there’s no way it’s going to be everything people want from it. I thought last week’s episode was pretty cool if forgettable, and last night’s showed they can still hand out the reveals when they need to. But for that I need spoilers, so don’t read the rest of this post if you haven’t seen the last two episodes.
Continue reading “Subtropical Homesick Blues”

Hellboy: Sword of Storms

Mr. Boy The Cartoon Network is airing an animated Hellboy movie called “Hellboy: Sword of Storms” this Saturday at 6:30pm. I’d heard about the series at the local comic book convention last year, but it’d dropped off my radar until seeing it in a magazine this week.

Because it’s 2006, you can find an online production diary for the series in blog format. I haven’t read it yet, part of my stay-completely-unspoiled policy (which is cleverly disguised as having no free time at all).

My knee-jerk impression based on nothing other than the pictures on that blog: it looks like a more standard animation style than trying to do an exact duplicate of Mike Mignola’s style. That could be good or bad; The Amazing Screw-on Head was clearly made by people who were huge fans of the comic book and ended up being a slavish reproduction. It was neat to see my favorite comic book in motion on a major network, or even the Sci-Fi Channel, but at the same time it felt like there was nothing there I hadn’t already seen. And I haven’t seen or heard anything about the continuation of that series, so I’m assuming it didn’t make a huge impression.

Hellboy (apparently it’s intended to be a series) looks like it’s going for a more easily-animated style, and the synopsis of Sword of Storms sounds like it’s faithful to the comics while leaving plenty of room to be an ongoing action-heavy series. If you want to grab the anime market, start your story in Japan: good idea.

At this point, I’m expecting to have the same reaction as I did to the movie: good effort, nice to see the characters in motion, but on the whole basically forgettable. I’m open to being pleasantly surprised, though.

You Taste Like Fish Biscuits

DirecTV still sucks. I’ve been trapped in my apartment since Wednesday, missing all the rich, juicy television that’s been airing, waiting for the FedEx guy to finally show up with my new receiver. Now I’ve got to be trapped in my apartment Monday as well, waiting for a service guy to come out and fix the new receiver.

The tech support person on the phone kept going on about how these new receivers were so much in demand, and every time I pointed out that they don’t work, she found a way to spin it. I’m one of the lucky few to be on the bleeding edge of technology, apparently. Ditching TiVo to make their own bug-ridden and less-functional PVR wasn’t a colossally selfish and short-sighted business move on DirecTV’s part, it’s the beginning of a brave new world.

Anyway, the point of all that is that I finally got caught up with the last two episodes of “Lost” by watching them in tiny, pixelated format on ABC’s website. I liked them better than I liked the season premiere, but the whole thing still feels weird. Not the kind of weird that you watch “Lost” for in the first place, but the kind of weird where you can’t quite tell what the people making the show are doing.

It seems like they suddenly forgot how to make a great show and are feeling their way back to it, just based on somebody else’s written description of the series. (And yeah, I said “suddenly.” Remember that I think that season 2 was great.) They know that an island’s involved, and strange things keep happening, and the characters have flashbacks, and didn’t somebody mention a polar bear at one point?

(By the way, spoilers apply from here on out, in case you haven’t seen the two episodes).

So each episode has a really cool sequence — the guy landing on Jin’s car, and Locke’s vision quest. After each, I thought, “Yes! This is the show I got into.” But by the end of each episode, I was back to thinking, “Wha? But I… huh?” The flashbacks seem unfinished; are they going to be extending them across multiple episodes now? What’s the resolution of the guy landing on Jin’s car? Did he really just jump, and that’s the whole story? I kept waiting for Sun to flash back, right before she shot one of the Others, to show her pushing the dude out the window.

And what about Locke’s flashback? The whole point was for him to say he used to be a farmer but now he’s a hunter? No sudden gruesome death of undercover police guy? The pot farmers get arrested, and that’s what he meant by “bad things happen to people who hang around me?” I can see why he waited 69 days for that flashback, because that’s a totally boring memory.

On the whole, it seems like they’ve only got enough material for three episodes, and they’re trying to stretch them out to fill six. And the big revelations are okay, I guess, but they’re stretched out to the point where my reaction isn’t “whoa!” but “whatever.” Jack is going to be tempted to betray his friends, okay, and… here, look at the Red Sox winning the World Series! How weird is that? And Desmond can now remember the future. Yep, he sure can. Look at him, there, standing there on the beach, rememberin’. Hurley sure is freaked out by that, even though that rates about a 4 on the scale of Weird Shit Happening On This Island.

There are three episodes left to go, and hopefully my TV situation will be worked out by the time the next one airs. One of the creators has said that by the end of the sixth, before the hiatus, there’ll be this major revelation that takes the show in a whole new direction that nobody saw coming. I hope they’ve got the goods to deliver.

Jetlag is the worst kind of lag

EX TERM I NATE! Do you know what’s the best thing to do for jetlag your first night back home? If you said, “sleep through the day, then stay up all night watching a marathon of ‘Doctor Who’ episodes on DVD,” you’re wrong! Don’t worry, though, because that was my answer at first, too.

I’m definitely no stranger to unnatural circadian rhythms, but being this far out of sync is weird, even for me. Usually I can have a somewhat normal day, just offset a few hours from the rest of the world. Today and yesterday have felt as if I’m stuck in some kind of limbo — I can’t do anything, and can’t seem to get back on track.

It doesn’t help that I had to stay by the apartment all day waiting for the FedEx guy to not show up. I’m still without a functional satellite box, so I’m missing all the TV shows airing this week in addition to all the ones I missed last week. “Lost” and “Battlestar Galactica” and even “Heroes” and “How I Met Your Mother” are all going on without me, and I’ve been trapped here without any contact with non-televised humans, either.

On the bright side, though, I can’t say enough how much I like the new(-ish) “Doctor Who”. The ones I watched ended with a two-parter set during the London blitz, and it’s the two most enjoyable hours of television I’ve seen in a long time. Everything in the story was telegraphed way ahead, and none of the “surprises” in the plot were all that surprising. But still by the end of it all, I was laughing at just how well-told a story it was, and by how well the ending worked. It’s not going for gritty realism or “adult” complexity; it’s just great, well-crafted storytelling.

And creepy as hell in parts, too. You can tell that the creators of the new “Doctor Who” are going for the same kinds of indelible images imprinted on them from the original series, more of an iconic, emotional reaction than a cerebral one. It’s the same kind of phenomenon that lets us instantly recognize a Dalek and the “EX…TERM…I…NATE!” cry even if we don’t remember watching the original series. And I think the image of a gas-mask wearing boy who wanders the streets of London during air raids, repeatedly asking “Are you my mummy?” is something that won’t be going away any time soon.

Bad-touching the Internets

If you missed last Sunday’s “Venture Brothers,” like I did, because DirecTV sucks, and they broke their deal with TiVo to reinvent the wheel and release a buggy-as-hell crippled DVR that you have to use if you want HDTV but it breaks just a few days after you get it and so you have to go without TV until they send you a new one, then don’t worry!
It’s available on Adult Swim’s “Fix” site but won’t be for long. The episode was called “Showdown at Cremation Creek” and is a 2-parter. Make sure you click the link quick, or you’ll have to watch a promo for “Squidbillies.”
SciFi.com has interviews with Grace Park from “Battlestar Galactica” where she answers questions posted on the message board. I know I came down hard on hot geeks earlier, but I get a funny feeling deep down inside when I see her talk about Cylons and how Boomer is not the same character as Sharon.
Seriously, I get a real kick out of seeing and reading interviews with the “hot” cast members of the show, because they all seem into it. They’re not in denial about whether it’s science fiction or political drama; they’re completely aware of what they’re making and they’re putting their energy into making it work, even if it means having to know the difference between a Viper and a Raider.
According to 43folders.com and upcoming.org, John Hodgman is reading from his book The Areas of My Expertise in San Francisco this Thursday.
The New York Times Magazine ran a long article about Spore (registration may be required). It doesn’t really cover anything you haven’t heard before if you’ve been following the game, but it does give a little perspective.
Most interesting to me was the quote from Will Wright: “I’ve had a few people ask me if I think Spore will help teach evolution, and the ironic thing is that, if anything, we’re teaching intelligent design. I’ve seen a few games that relied on evolution — I’ve even designed some of them — and it’s just not as fun.”
Check out Dave Grossman’s Pumpkin House of Horrors. No new entry yet for this year, but it’ll help you get in the mood. (For Halloween).