Nightmare Fodder

via WTF Japan, Seriously?

Fringe 4.1

"Neither Here nor There"

That was the fourth season opener for "Fringe" on Friday night. Why am I posting this Monday?

In a word: beer.

Never mind that. Let's get to the episode.

So... if you haven't finished Season Three, there's spoilers.


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Warning taken care of. Moving on.

At the end of Season Three, Peter Bishop (aka The Character The Writers Don't Have A Clue What To Do With) merged a portion of the two warring universes then was apparently erased from history.

Just roll with it.

Season Four begins with "our" Universe's version of Lincoln Lee, the awesome leader of the "Over There" team getting enmeshed in a Fringe-style investigation that results in the death of his partner.

Olivia is back to her Terminator-esque personality. Walter is reanimating birds with milk. Broyles is still Broyles. Astrid is a bit more frantic, but still Astrid.

There's weirdness. There's gruesome deaths. There's Observers. There's flickers of Peter, who I guess has not been completely erased from existence. The Observers seem keen to correct that and completely erase him, but then our favorite Observer (I think his "name" is September?) has second thoughts.

Oh, and there's a new batch of villainous, homicidal shapeshifters who appear to have an agenda that may be unrelated to either "our" universe or "Over There".

Overall, it was a nice intro. Adding Lincoln Lee to the main cast gives another much-needed sympathetic character, especially given that Astrid will never get the spotlight at this point. He's a welcome change from the bland and undefined Peter Bishop and the emotionless Olivia Dunham.

I have high hopes for this season.

Foolish me.

Closing Time

Yeah... I'm not even going to bother with an intro.

Spoilers.

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"Stormageddon, Dark Lord of All."

Love it.

Yeah... so "Closing Time".

Cybermats! Cybermen!

Craig! Stormageddon, Dark Lord of All!

Craziness in a shop!

There was baby stuff. Comedy. Sonic Screwdriver shooting sonic bolts of green.

"Don't worry, I have an app for that."

"Come on, Bitey."

It was a clever little one-shot. Very good stuff.

Have a problem with Cybermen being "centuries old". Continuity... is it really that hard?

The episode was heavy-handed, ridiculous, fluffy sentimental bullshit.

For all that, it was entertaining, but it might have been all the beer I've had to drink this evening.

And so it begins...

Seven blissful days of slacking.

I start it with a tweaked neck from a bad fall (literally landing on my head).

More reason to drink.

Complex Gods

Saw "The God Complex" yesterday.

Spoilers follow.

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The prologue has a policewoman walking through a maze that looks like an 80's style hotel. In each room she enters, there's something creepy.

Like clowns.

She's keeping a running diary and finally has some kind of mental breakdown. With a blissful look on her face she's snagged by something that sounds bestial and hungry.

Enter the Doctor, Amy, and Rory. They landed randomly and start exploring. While there, they encounter four people: a medic of some sort, a paranoiac blogger, a cowardly alien, and a crazy dude tied to a chair.

The crazy dude is in a room of ventriloquist dummies. Oh but that's creepy. Crazy dude says that he's ready to be snacked up by the thing behind it all and advises everyone that there's a "room for each of them".

Cue the creepy encounters. Crazy guy gets snacked on by the creature. It doesn't physically harm him. It just takes out his life somehow.

One-by-one the blogger and the medic also fall to the creature. The alien dude, a member of "the most conquered race in the universe" manages to stay alive. Rory seems unaffected while Amy winds up in the creature's sights.

The creature is essentially a minotaur (old-timers of the show will catch the reference to the Nimon of the old Tom Baker era episode "The Horns of Nimon"). It snacks on the faith of those who wind up in its prison/lair.

The episode devolves a bit into clumsy storytelling. The Doctor seems unaffected by the creature's lure. Rory isn't affected for reasons very unclear to me, but in order to save Amy, the Doctor gives some kind of bullshit-ish story to make Amy lose faith in him.

'Cause the creature wanted to eat Amy's faith.

The defeat of the creature was weird and a bit nonsensical.

The alien guy from the most-conquered world survived and remained intensely-annoying.

The episode ended with the Doctor parting ways with Amy and Rory (after giving Rory a nice, red sports car). The parting was awkward and weird. It wasn't terribly well-done in my opinion.

In a nutshell, "The God Complex" was pretty typical fare for the Smith era offerings. It had a great setup but crapped out on delivery. As a horror-ish episode, it's weak tea next to the Tom Baker era horror fare or even the McCoy era stuff.

Two more episodes left before the end of series six.

Sing it!

The Daily Show
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It really does call out what a bunch of assholes came out of the woodwork a mere two days after the terrorist attack.

9/11 Merlot? Seriously?

Alpha bits

I've been watching SyFy's "Alphas".

There. I said it.

It's sad that I feel embarrassed by watching anything on SyFy these days. All the same, I felt intrigued by the concept and have been watching it continually since the show started.

There's a few spoilers contained below. If this show even remotely interests you, you should be aware of that.

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Okay, moving on.

The show is a tepid, weak-tea attempt at doing "Heroes" and "X-Men". I think I posted on this a few months back. It's not a great show by any means, but it has promise.

Monday night it realized some of that promise.

The premise is pretty straightforward: there's people in the world who have special abilities. These abilities are often offset with some kind of psychological or physiological issue.

Example:

Bill Harken (Malik Yoba): an ex-FBI agent who can jack up his adrenal glands to give himself super-strength and an inability to feel pain. As a result, he's got rage issues and is a bit of an aggressive dickhead. If he uses his super-strength too often, he gets all woozy and light-headed.

Gary Bell (Ryan Cartwright): A mildly-autistic guy who can "see" radio/cellular signals (except Nokia phone signals... gotta love that). He's easily the most interesting character of the lot.

Rachel Pirzad (Azita Ghanizada): A former FBI forensics student (maybe former agent? I'm unclear on this) who can jack up any of her senses at the expense of the others. So she can smell what you had for breakfast this morning or when you bathed last, but she couldn't hear you talking right next to her. Or she could see the details of carpet impressions at the cost of similar senses. She's actually starting to grow on me.

Nina Theroux (Laura Mennell): A woman who can make you do whatever she says provided you can see and hear her. *Yawn* Boring character.

Cameron Hicks (Warren Christie): A former Army sniper with perfect coordination and a number of substance abuse issues. *Yawn* Boring character. Oh, and he has a very uninteresting fling-thing going on with Nina.

As super-powers go, the good guys don't have much in the way of flashy abilities. They're a mix of dysfunctional, issue-driven nuts who work for the Department of Defense in a vaguely brownshirt capacity as enforcers.

Am I the only person disturbed by the trend of TV shows in which the "heroes" completely ignore the Bill of Rights?

Anyway, this team is led by Doctor Lee Rosen (David Strathairn), a hippy-dippy, and vaguely sinister, psychologist who has no superpowers but understands them pretty well. Actually, Rosen may well be the most interesting character in the lot.

They fight "monsters of the week" in the form of people with superpowers.

Last week they started to move out of the bush leagues. The guest stars were Brent Spiner ("Data" of "Star Trek: The Next Generation") and Rebecca Mader (one of the many walk-on roles in "Lost"). Spiner played a blind guy with the bat-like ability of echolocation. He can apparently amp up his sonar powers over time and eventually bring down buildings. Pretty badass, really.

Mader played a mercenary who can hide in the "blind spot" of the eye through some pseudo-scientific method. It was kind of cool, really.

What started as a clear contest between the so-called "heroes" and Spiner's character (a representative of the so-called villain group "Red Flag", a group who feel a need to sound like an insecticide) turned into a three-way throwdown as Mader's character "Griffin" (loved the Invisible Man reference) entered the fray and expanded the mythology a bit.

It's sad that the walk-on characters are generally more interesting than the main cast.

The show does have promise. There's a vague sense of moral ambiguity as some of the characters (specifically the otherwise-uninteresting Hicks and Nina) have doubts about working for the DOD to take down people with similar abilities and talents.

The show would benefit immensely by ditching Hicks as a character. His backstory is tired and cumbersome. His relationship with Nina feels contrived. The character's abilities are cool, but sadly-underused.

Similarly, the writers should either make Nina less of a vamp-like character or ditch the character altogether.

Certainly both characters could benefit from having their backstories spiced up a bit. Maybe make Hicks a "Red Flag" mole or something.

And "Red Flag"? Really? That's the name of the bad guys? Seriously?

Ye gods.

It would also be nice if the show could figure out if they're going the route of "Heroes" and introducing superpowers where people can read minds, throw lightning and all that or staying low-key (and thus low-budget).

Those Weekend Moments

It's exhausting to try to avoid all the 9/11 insanity.

Seriously.

Don't get me wrong. I thought (and still think) 9/11 was a terrible, terrible crime of epic proportions against the United States. That said, I watched all the crazy, over-the-top coverage back in 2001. I don't feel a burning need to see all that shit again and get drenched in the over-the-top faux-sentimental bullshit that most media outlets serve up in lieu of actual news.

So I tried to keep the television off all weekend long.

I spent a few hours in a local pub, enjoying local beer and tasty, tasty food. I really ought to cut back on that. The food is very, very tasty and the beer is very, very tasty and strong. Neither is going to help me lose weight.

Bah.

It was hard to otherwise stay motivated to do anything at all. None of my books are keeping my attention for very long.

The latest "Doctor Who" served as a lovely distraction for a bit, but the second half of this season isn't exactly knocking my socks off.

Simultaneously, I'm trying to wean myself off of social networking (both Facebook and G+) so that's two less distractions.

I hit a local street-faire but that bored me pretty quickly, though I did get a couple of swanky new hats. Unfortunately, said head-gear makes me look like a goddamn hipster so I feel a burning need to shove my head into a garbage disposal and turn it on when I wear said swanky new hats.

For all that, it was surprising how fast the weekend blazed by.

I suspect the beer had something to do with it.

A Drop of a Pond

Just saw "The Girl Who Waited", the Amy-centric episode of "Doctor Who".

Spoilers below. You know how this works.

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And... you were warned.

It's a non-story arc episode. The Doctor, Amy, and Rory land on a world. They get separated and find out there's something on the planet that's lethal to the Doctor. To make matters all the more fun, Amy is separated by both a different time stream and being in a physically-different place.

Good times.

I won't do a full recap. It pays to see the episode in its entirety. It's very much Amy-centric and Karen Gilan gets an opportunity to shine as she plays herself across some wonky time-travel craziness.

You do get a bit of a sense of what an utter badass and genius Amy is capable of being. It's a little far-fetched, but it's "Doctor Who", so one must make allowances. They certainly explain a little of how River Song is such an unbelievable Mary Sue. I mean, if her mom is this freakin' preternaturally-capable and her dad is a badass in his own right, it stands to reason that River would inherit genes of the purest unstoppable.

One hopes they live long enough to have more children so they can go about conquering the Universe.

The episode sort of screws Amy over in multiple ways. It does a fine job really putting the polish on the whole Amy-Rory dynamic and how their relationship really works. Arthur Darvill had several fine moments as Rory. I have to hand it to Darvill, he's quickly made Rory my favorite male Companion.

I'm fast becoming tired of the threats-that-are-so-bad-that-the-Doctor-can't-regenerate meme that Moffatt-era "Doctor Who" writers feel a need to bandy about. Seriously. It's like every other stop the Doctor is having is a specific, fine-tuned threat to his existence based on his Time Lord physiology. I mean, c'mon... first River Song has access to a poison that works against Time Lords and then in this episode, there's an illness that Time Lords are vulnerable to but humans aren't?

Good lord.

The Doctor is quite a bit of a dick in this episode as well. I get where he's coming from, but another tired meme is "the Doctor lies". That fast becomes tired when he lies in every damn episode.

I enjoyed "The Girl Who Waited" far, FAR more than "Let's Kill Hitler" and "Night Terrors". For all that, I have a hard time understanding why Amy and Rory choose to continue to associate, much less travel with, the Doctor. With all things considered, it's astounding they haven't just packed up and left.

Maybe that will be the season finale. Who knows?

Night Terrors

Standard spoiler disclaimer.

Do not read further if you have not yet seen the "Doctor Who" episode entitled "Night Terrors".

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You were warned.

Per IMDB: "George, a young boy writes a "Help" note after fearing monsters in the closet and having multiple fears. The Doctor hears the cry and the team goes to visit."

That's a pretty accurate description of the premise. The Doctor, Amy, and Rory are in the TARDIS and the Doctor suddenly gets a psychic call for help from poor little George, a strange kid who is terrified of everything.

He's especially terrified of his cupboard.

There's a reason, of course.

So the episode starts off with promise. There's weird things afoot. People start to disappear. Creepy stuff happens.

Then there's the monsters. They push the buttons of creepy oh-so-nicely. The setting has a claustrophobic feel that compliments the introduction of the monsters delightfully.

It's not a bad episode until about halfway through. Suddenly the Doctor figures out what's going on and the episode just falls apart.

The final payoff for the episode is just anticlimactic and pretty much the standard fare of the majority of the Smith/Moffatt era episodes of "Dr. Who". The monster just isn't really a monster and the sinister threat is somehow diminished as a result.

It's cute as kid's fare, but ultimately disappointing given the more visceral menace promised by the Silence in the season opener or by the original Weeping Angels in "Blink".

For all that, I still enjoyed this episode more than "Let's Kill Hitler".

Ponderances

A friend of mine asked me for a list of science fiction programs I enjoy.

It was harder than I expected to put such together. What I came up with (in no particular order):

* Doctor Who (duh!)
* Blake's Seven
* Babylon-5
* Farscape
* The Invisible Man (the 2000 tv series back when it was the SciFi channel and they aired shows that didn't suck beyond words)
* Red Dwarf
* Fringe

I'm actually at a loss after this. I enjoyed the classic "Star Trek", but it's not something I regularly return to. The subsequent "Star Trek" series have not stood the test of time, in my opinion. They have no place on my list of greats.

I personally can't recommend the "Stargate" series in all its flavors. It just never grabbed me.

I'd recommend the re-imagined "Battlestar Galactica" up to about midway through season three. Then I'd recommend hunting down the writers and producers and beating them.

Beyond that, I got nuthin'.

The Importance of Armor