Sunday SciFi Friday blogging
SGA 3.11 - "The Return Part 2"
One thing I really ended up enjoying about this episode is that in the pressure cooker, when their lives were on the line and everything looked hopeless, these people were BITCHY. Jack was the worst. (And what was up with singling out poor Beckett when he was disappointed that all he had to work with was an unofficial, rag-tag rescue mission? On a practical level, Beckett has more useful skills than Elizabeth does when it comes to combat and its aftermath.) Rodney was merely being Rodney, but John was also in pretty rare form.
Jack was even bitchy with the replicators! I like his world-weariness, his been-there-done-that attitude toward robots sticking their hands in his head; it was a nice contrast to Woolsey, the civilian who was so obviously out of his league, and a good support for the fakeout where they used Woolsey to misinform the replicators. I didn't think Rodney had that kind of stealth in him, though, and I'm still not sure I do.
The robots had silly clothes and a terrible case of Evil Overlord Syndrome, but given that the whole situation arose because Rodney, in his arrogance, thought he could mess with their programming, I thought that the riff on Plans A through J worked. And I liked that Elizabeth called Caldwell "Stephen," invoked their personal relationship, and that that's what led Caldwell to trust that it was really her, and that she later approached Jack in that same unofficial and informal way, trading on herself and her history with these people to get what she wanted for all of them.
Also, shut up General Landry!
My review of Stargate 10.11 - "The Quest Part 2".
Painkiller Jane was really awful. I know pilots can be uneven, but when you're laying down that much exposition (asta77 called it "Exposition Jane," and she's not wrong), the audience should be able to emerge with some understanding of the show's basic premise. There are some kind of mutants who do evil things for unspecified reasons? Or something? And hopefully they're actually all genetically EEEEEEEEVIL, since the government seems to be all about chipping them like animals, and this is treated as an unproblematic and straightforward situation. I think. Throw in a bunch of dialogue no real people would ever speak, some really wooden acting, flashbacks that make Tru Calling look like it thought its audience was smart, a stereotypical evil corporation, and what I think is supposed to be some "chemistry" between Jane and McBride, frappe, and serve. It's possibly that it was just an extraordinarily sucky pilot, but wow.
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youknitwhat barfed out about 20 entries on my friends page in its final swan song, and the cumulative results were particularly eye-searing. Elvis has left the building.
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This list of the 100 best books published since 1982, as ascertained by the staff of a major British chain bookseller, reads like a laundry list of fiction that made a very specific sort of splash in reviews. It's not that there aren't some very good books on the list, but it's so safe.
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The TV listings on my Google home page inform me that Drive premieres tonight at 8pm. Since I thought it was scheduled for Thursday, this was news to me; TiVO tells me the second episode is running tomorrow night at 8pm, which is also not Thursday.
