White Collar + SGU
I was hooked at the 11 minute mark, after the first conversation between Peter and Neal. OMG. An FBI agent who is hella smart, competent, and isn't being portrayed as a moron. SHOCKING!! He's actually a nice guy with an incredibly cute and smart wife who doesn't bitch and moan and roll her eyes about him working too much. They have a good marriage! There is no faux angst! And he's capable of human emotions like empathy and such, too, and he isn't perfect, and he behaves like most husbands who've been married 10 years...amazing. Wow, I was starting to wonder if there'd ever be a show like this again, where the smart criminal has complicated feelings and has agendas and yet isn't a slick asshole, and the fed isn't an incompetent dickish dumbass. And here it is. Plus, BONUS, it stars Tim McKay, late of Carnivale (Jonesy!!) and Big Eden!! I can't get over it.
Also, the supporting characters are smart and wonderful - and as the cherry on the sundae, the show managed to work in a couple smart lines to tell the viewer (and Neal) that the probie is a lesbian. A show with competent law enforcement people. A show that trusts its viewers to catch on without being clubbed by anvils. There are no caricatures or stereotypes. And it's a buddy show! Pinch me.
I think the word bored best describes my reaction to these two eps. Actually, incredulous might be a better word for Light, due to the flying through the sun thing. Really? Really, show? I mean, I can turn a blind eye to the ostensible laws of physics once in a while, because they call it science fiction for a reason. I signed off on that whole wormhole to other planets thing years ago, and the being thrown back through time due to sunspots or whatever, and I was even trying to get with you on the million-year-old spaceship that has survived without any appreciable decay in space unattended for, you know, a million years. But then you had to go and fly your ship through a star with "shields" protecting you, notwithstanding the unfathomable nuclear reactions inside a sun and the gravity issues and whatnot. Did you hand out t-shirts later? I flew my spaceship through a star and all I got was this minor sunburn. Yeah, I just...yeah, I can't go with it. I handwaved so hard, I sustained a wrist injury.
On the character front, can we kill some people off now? I would like my team to be comprised of the following: Scott, Greer, TJ, and Eli. (Riley can be the backup; he's awesome.) Meanwhile, can we please put a red shirt on Rush and send him first through a couple gates without prior reconnaissance? I'm done with him.
Ming-Na: still wasted, and I don't even remember her character's name. Sad. I agreed in part with her speech to Young. Fate only gets you so far. As he pointed out, they are all the wrong people. I suppose he was leaving it to chance that there'd be a mix of soldiers and civilians on the shuttle, so that there'd be someone to shoot and someone to build stuff, but that's kind of stupid; odds can be improved by judicious plucking. Darwin wrote a whole book about it. Which clearly Young didn't read.
But hey, we got some first names! That's useful. Except for how getting a first name doesn't constitute character development, no matter what it says in the Stargate Spinoff Writer's Manual.
Everything else was pretty meh, for me. Gratuitous boob shot: meh. "Last night before driving into the sun" sex: meh. Telford basically thinking Young is incompetent: meh. Col. Young's tortured relationship with his wife: double meh. It's hard to care what these people do in their last moments, mostly because I haven't known them long enough, or known enough about them, to care. I would really like to see the cast thinned down and let's get into building character and doing something interesting and fresh featuring Greer, TJ, Scott and Eli (and bonus Riley).