Ships of fools
Three things about BSG 4.05 - "The Road Less Traveled":
* * * * *
Babylon 5 2.01 - "Points of Departure"
I was really pleased by the way the show worked Sinclair out of the picture, because although it was unavoidably abrupt, it did make sense, and it felt respectful of his character arc; I didn't feel cheated, after all of the buildup in the first season, the hints of his special connection to the Minbari and his role in the Earth/Minbari alliance. (It also felt like a mirror action to Delenn's transformation in "Revelations.") So, good job, show.
I had a mixed reaction to Sheridan. Part of it was just getting used to a captain whose face moves. It's WEIRD, y'all. Different. And since Bruce Boxleitner delivers a pretty hammy performance, it's really different. Also, I was really afraid they were playing his lucky speech straight, so it was quite a relief that the show was gently mocking his windbaggery. But, more than that, he comes across as much more military than Sinclair ever did. Sinclair was essentially a lawyer in uniform; he manipulated the rules to achieve the best outcomes. It's a nice indication of the political shifts on Earth that the new president recalled him, and appointed someone who could be regarded as a poke in the eye to the Minbari; and Sheridan solved the conflict with the Trigati peacefully too, but he wasn't finessing the rules, he was putting himself in the head of other warriors and guessing what they really wanted. A lot of people on both sides want to re-fight that war, it seems.
And in the department of things I did not see coming: the Minbari think humans are being born with Minbari souls? Huh!
Babylon 5 2.02 - "Revelations"
I was absurdly entertained by the etiquette problem of Delenn's cocoon. Lennier kept referring to it as being "indisposed," while other people used weasel words about her not being there or not being available. The station grapevine was apparently abuzz. Only Londo, bless him, told it like it was: "She's not indisposed, she's in a cocoon!" And because I loved that, it distressed me to see Morden ask for his first favor from Londo, and to see Londo get such a hungry look at the possibilities Morden held up to him. G'Kar did everything right: he followed the clues, he gathered information, he executed a good plan. What he thinks is happening goes so far beyond all of the petty differences between peoples on the stations. And Londo betrayed him, and betrayed, I suspect, his own people's interests as well.
Sheridan's sister has an odd face, and I'm not that interested in his angsty backstory and his guilt over his wife's death, but I do suspect it's significant. And, alas, I was spoiled for Delenn's transformation to half-human, half-Minbari by the credits. Stupid credits!
Talia's mind probe isn't admissible in court, but Garibaldi wants the information more than he wants to build a case. (I find the search and seizure aspects of psychic power, as treated in the legal framework on this show, really interesting.) That turns out to be a good decision, since all of the evidence gets disappeared. I have no idea what's going to happen next, obviously, but it strikes me that with President Clarke at the helm, the station crew is going to have to turn more and more to extralegal channels and non-human friends to get things done; something with very high connections carried that operation out, and the station's whole purpose is something that seems counter to Clarke's agenda, though it's evident that he's too sneaky to lay his cards on the table and commit to outright antagonism at this time.
* * * * *
The Office 4.11 - "Night Out"
This episode was full of so many lovely and unexpected reversals.
Dunder Mifflin Infinity has gone down in flames and social networking child molesters, while the sales guys on the phones kept on making the sales. Ryan, of course, isn't going to let them keep the credit for them at the expense of his pet project; he's too busy spewing buzzwords and being a poor manager to spearhead an effective project. And as full of it as he is at work, we learn he's even more full of it about his great life in Manhattan--he's hanging out in bars with a hobbit, sneaking off to the bathroom (to do coke?), getting beat up by women on the dance floor, living in a closet-sized studio, ridiculously happy to see Michael and Dwight when they show up because in their eyes he's such an amazingly better thing than he can ever really be. I loved that Dwight, relentless and clueless, wins the heart of the women's basketball team, gets them into all the hot clubs, doesn't care about any of it except for the fact that he's out on the town with Michael. And in the end Ryan might even agree with Michael that it's not the horniness so much as the loneliness, as he tries, it seems, to open up a little to Michael about his "friend's" problem, because he knows Michael, because Michael is real and not part of this fake new life.
In the meantime, smooth, cool, ironic Jim, the winningest loser on the show, has what seems like a good idea, a better idea than what Michael has planned, and it ends horribly. Not only does it end horribly, but it's probably his fault that the security guard isn't hurrying over to let them out. And quiet, fearful Toby literally makes a break for it: puts a hand on Pam's knee, announces he's moving to Costa Rica, and jumps the fence and runs into the night. Up is down; black and white; cats and dogs living together.
The Office 4.12 - "Did I Stutter"
My reaction to this episode was more or less a bunch of unrelated glee:
* * * * *
It's probably a bad sign when you clear a bunch of undergrowth from your front yard and find, perfectly preserved in its blue bag, a September 2007 New York Times, isn't it. *cringe*
On the other hand, I made gnocchi for the first time today. It was something of an exercise in recipe triage, since my dough remained sticky and loose and, after a certain point, I decided that adding more flour was just going to make them tough and hard. It would have helped to print the recipe, because it's hard to check the laptop when you're in the middle of cooking, and I peeled and cut up the potatoes before boiling them instead of boiling them in their skins; I'm not sure if that was the problem. The results were kind of deformed, but so very good. I almost never eat gnocchi, because packaged gnocchi, even from very good pasta makers, tends to be gummy and tough, but this recipe was so easy that I'm going to have to make it again. And it made so much that I've got an entire cookie sheet of gnocchi in the freezer, almost frozen enough to pop off the sheet and into a plastic bag.
In completely unrelated news, guess what we're having for dinner Thursday night, laurashapiro!
Other potential highlights of the week: Aztec Rex! "A SciFi Original Motion Picture" + "Written by Richard Manning" + Aztecs + dinosaurs + 90210's Steve Sanders + Steve Sanders's really, really awful wig = GOLD*.
* For values of GOLD that equal THIS LOOKS SO TERRIBLE IT COULD BE SURREAL.
- I continue to not be able to hear most of what the people on the Demetrius are saying without the volume cranked to 11. Are they wrapping the microphones in a t-shirt for extra "atmosphere"?
- "War has broken out between the Cylon," Leoben tells Anders. He's still referring to them as a single entity, but he pinpoints the difference: the conflict between those who embrace their nature and those who fear it. That conflict is also playing out between the fleet Cylons, it seems, and if there's a common thread between the Demitrius and the Galactica scenes, that's probably it. But it wasn't strong enough to tie together the episode. Which brings me to...
- Maybe this is all going to make more sense a couple of episodes down the road, but right now, not so much. It feels like an exercise in being careful what you wish for at this point, because the show is giving us all arc all the time, and the arc is spinning out into increasingly mystical and strange directions, and--to mix metaphors--steamrolling a lot of the characters in the process. I'm a little alarmed.
* * * * *
Babylon 5 2.01 - "Points of Departure"
I was really pleased by the way the show worked Sinclair out of the picture, because although it was unavoidably abrupt, it did make sense, and it felt respectful of his character arc; I didn't feel cheated, after all of the buildup in the first season, the hints of his special connection to the Minbari and his role in the Earth/Minbari alliance. (It also felt like a mirror action to Delenn's transformation in "Revelations.") So, good job, show.
I had a mixed reaction to Sheridan. Part of it was just getting used to a captain whose face moves. It's WEIRD, y'all. Different. And since Bruce Boxleitner delivers a pretty hammy performance, it's really different. Also, I was really afraid they were playing his lucky speech straight, so it was quite a relief that the show was gently mocking his windbaggery. But, more than that, he comes across as much more military than Sinclair ever did. Sinclair was essentially a lawyer in uniform; he manipulated the rules to achieve the best outcomes. It's a nice indication of the political shifts on Earth that the new president recalled him, and appointed someone who could be regarded as a poke in the eye to the Minbari; and Sheridan solved the conflict with the Trigati peacefully too, but he wasn't finessing the rules, he was putting himself in the head of other warriors and guessing what they really wanted. A lot of people on both sides want to re-fight that war, it seems.
And in the department of things I did not see coming: the Minbari think humans are being born with Minbari souls? Huh!
Babylon 5 2.02 - "Revelations"
I was absurdly entertained by the etiquette problem of Delenn's cocoon. Lennier kept referring to it as being "indisposed," while other people used weasel words about her not being there or not being available. The station grapevine was apparently abuzz. Only Londo, bless him, told it like it was: "She's not indisposed, she's in a cocoon!" And because I loved that, it distressed me to see Morden ask for his first favor from Londo, and to see Londo get such a hungry look at the possibilities Morden held up to him. G'Kar did everything right: he followed the clues, he gathered information, he executed a good plan. What he thinks is happening goes so far beyond all of the petty differences between peoples on the stations. And Londo betrayed him, and betrayed, I suspect, his own people's interests as well.
Sheridan's sister has an odd face, and I'm not that interested in his angsty backstory and his guilt over his wife's death, but I do suspect it's significant. And, alas, I was spoiled for Delenn's transformation to half-human, half-Minbari by the credits. Stupid credits!
Talia's mind probe isn't admissible in court, but Garibaldi wants the information more than he wants to build a case. (I find the search and seizure aspects of psychic power, as treated in the legal framework on this show, really interesting.) That turns out to be a good decision, since all of the evidence gets disappeared. I have no idea what's going to happen next, obviously, but it strikes me that with President Clarke at the helm, the station crew is going to have to turn more and more to extralegal channels and non-human friends to get things done; something with very high connections carried that operation out, and the station's whole purpose is something that seems counter to Clarke's agenda, though it's evident that he's too sneaky to lay his cards on the table and commit to outright antagonism at this time.
* * * * *
The Office 4.11 - "Night Out"
This episode was full of so many lovely and unexpected reversals.
Dunder Mifflin Infinity has gone down in flames and social networking child molesters, while the sales guys on the phones kept on making the sales. Ryan, of course, isn't going to let them keep the credit for them at the expense of his pet project; he's too busy spewing buzzwords and being a poor manager to spearhead an effective project. And as full of it as he is at work, we learn he's even more full of it about his great life in Manhattan--he's hanging out in bars with a hobbit, sneaking off to the bathroom (to do coke?), getting beat up by women on the dance floor, living in a closet-sized studio, ridiculously happy to see Michael and Dwight when they show up because in their eyes he's such an amazingly better thing than he can ever really be. I loved that Dwight, relentless and clueless, wins the heart of the women's basketball team, gets them into all the hot clubs, doesn't care about any of it except for the fact that he's out on the town with Michael. And in the end Ryan might even agree with Michael that it's not the horniness so much as the loneliness, as he tries, it seems, to open up a little to Michael about his "friend's" problem, because he knows Michael, because Michael is real and not part of this fake new life.
In the meantime, smooth, cool, ironic Jim, the winningest loser on the show, has what seems like a good idea, a better idea than what Michael has planned, and it ends horribly. Not only does it end horribly, but it's probably his fault that the security guard isn't hurrying over to let them out. And quiet, fearful Toby literally makes a break for it: puts a hand on Pam's knee, announces he's moving to Costa Rica, and jumps the fence and runs into the night. Up is down; black and white; cats and dogs living together.
The Office 4.12 - "Did I Stutter"
My reaction to this episode was more or less a bunch of unrelated glee:
- Dwight's org chart, with the yellow zigzags and the pink lines and emergency transparent overlay that gives him total control, is so frighteningly well thought-out. As is his hard sell technique; Andy never knew what hit him, though Michael, to his credit, seemed to be pretty well aware of what was going on and resisted stubbornly.
- Pam and her glasses--adorable!
- As far as I'm concerned, the heart-rendering romantic angst is nowhere near done with: Dwight is still killing me. He's not over Angela, even if he's made a little more peace with the situation, at least to the extent that he's no longer moaning like a wounded animal in the halls.
- Darryl! Oh, the look on his face when Michael asked him if he'd ever been in a gang; you could just see that he was trying to resist temptation, but he's only human.
- I really like that Jim does sort of deserve the warning, because he's a slacker and he doesn't like working at Dunder Mifflin, and yet the politics of it are so icky, between Ryan's vendetta and Toby's jealousy, that it still feels undeserved. And it's a complicated, hard situation: Ryan is truly playing organizational hardball, and Jim doesn't have much defense against the truth.
- Michael's fake firing of Stanley was a horribly bad idea, and Jim, who'd just received a real HR warning, was in an excellent position to understand that. What was most painful and cringeworthy about it was the way it stripped Michael of all of his illusions: that he's a good boss, that Stanley's hostility and lack of respect are a joke. The confrontation put him in a place where he had to acknowledge that Stanley was serious; the only way he could come out of it okay was by constructing an alternative narrative. And that's what he did: accepted that Stanley was serious, pointed out to him that Michael's still the boss, forged a new understanding between them, and then told himself that the good guys never get the respect. Oh, Michael.
* * * * *
It's probably a bad sign when you clear a bunch of undergrowth from your front yard and find, perfectly preserved in its blue bag, a September 2007 New York Times, isn't it. *cringe*
On the other hand, I made gnocchi for the first time today. It was something of an exercise in recipe triage, since my dough remained sticky and loose and, after a certain point, I decided that adding more flour was just going to make them tough and hard. It would have helped to print the recipe, because it's hard to check the laptop when you're in the middle of cooking, and I peeled and cut up the potatoes before boiling them instead of boiling them in their skins; I'm not sure if that was the problem. The results were kind of deformed, but so very good. I almost never eat gnocchi, because packaged gnocchi, even from very good pasta makers, tends to be gummy and tough, but this recipe was so easy that I'm going to have to make it again. And it made so much that I've got an entire cookie sheet of gnocchi in the freezer, almost frozen enough to pop off the sheet and into a plastic bag.
In completely unrelated news, guess what we're having for dinner Thursday night, laurashapiro!
Other potential highlights of the week: Aztec Rex! "A SciFi Original Motion Picture" + "Written by Richard Manning" + Aztecs + dinosaurs + 90210's Steve Sanders + Steve Sanders's really, really awful wig = GOLD*.
* For values of GOLD that equal THIS LOOKS SO TERRIBLE IT COULD BE SURREAL.