Episode Notes: Sentinel "Switchman"
Okay, I posted my notes on Switchman here a while ago, but I hadn't yet discovered that I could add *screencaps* and make these neater and more interesting. So I watched Switchman again today (oh the agony) and didn't really add to the notes much, but I did add a bunch of screencaps. Really quite an excessive number of them, but with Jim and Blair so pretty throughout the *entire* episode how am I to resist?
So just remember that the *text* is not, by and large, new just the screencaps. (I did tweak the text a little to work with the 'caps, but that's it. There's no new textual content.)
Notes On: Switchman
--God it's neat watching this on the television-and the picture quality rocks. Particularly compared to my video-CD version in Amazing Squint-O-Vision.
--Mathis, the guy who was sent to recover the bodies of Ellison's men and "ascertain the status" of the one that wasn't buried, isn't a bad looking man himself. Maybe they only make good looking guys Rangers. :)
--Lord the picture quality is gorgeous--I mean there's such depth. It's like I'm watching in 3-D.
--Until it was pointed out to me that this was filmed in the rain forests of British Columbia, I totally bought into the fact that they were filming in the jungle. However, now that I have eyes to see, the conifers do look pretty odd. And the colors are wrong. :)
--The first vision of Jim Ellison is just so *glorious*. I mean he's beautiful, shit, the way he moves and his arms, and the slightly unshaven jaw, and his eyes so beautifully blue, like the sky, and just shit. But I also love the first vision of the character, he was ordered to train a militia and hold the pass and damn it he's done that, despite the fact that everyone else on his team died. And his quiet "And quite frankly, sir, I'm a little tired" is just wonderful.
--And again, because *damn*!
--Oh, it's the exposition scene--Why does Simon need to tell these police officers from elsewhere in Washington State about the weather and the coffee there?
--See and the second vision of Jim Ellison is almost as sweet. He's almost unnaturally good looking. And I love the picture quality on these DVDs--this is sooooo cool. Watching it on a 19 inch TV screen rather than a 3 inch rectangle on my computer monitor makes *such* a difference. Sweet! And he's clearly freaked out about zoning on the boiling water, but totally puts that aside to do his job. Nice.
--Picking at the plot a little here: Jim's been out on the stakeout of this lumber mill for a week, basically alone. But then there's a team giving him a heads up about the person arriving in the red jeep and there are like 20 guys and a helicopter and so on and so forth there. Where did they come from? Surely they weren't all trying to be subtle and stake out the building. What, were they just trying to be unnoticed while parked alongside the dirt road leading to this remote ruin hoping no one would spot a helicopter, two huge SWAT trucks and so on. And if they're trying not to be noticed in approaching this building a helicopter is definitely not the way to do it--there are very few *less* subtle modes of conveyance than a helicopter.
--I never would have spotted it on the first (or even the second) time watching this ep--but clearly when the red jeep drives into the building there's a motorbike on the back of it. Once the cops are in the building and walking around the jeep the bike is gone. One of the professional police dudes should perhaps have noticed that.
--I still don't get what Jim sees on the bad guy's helmet/mask that makes him fall off the bike. It appears to be a distortion of his face, but why would that startle him so?
--So, Carolyn with her bets on basketball games--gambling problem or trying to be one of the guys? My money's on her trying to fit in at the station by trying to be one of the guys. I bet she really doesn't give a damn about basketball.
--So why do so many fanfics have Simon liking gourmet coffees when he clearly says in this episode "They all taste like Maxwell House to me". On the other hand he appears to have someone in the family who runs a coffee shop.
--God, Jim's got such gorgeous eyes. Even when he's grubby.
--That conversation between Jim and Simon, where Jim admits to being scared about his senses to Simon kind of wierds me out. It's so uncharacteristic for Jim to admit to fear, to actually allow his fear to change his behavior--and yet Simon's so very, very unsympathetic. Jim must either trust Simon a lot to be willing to admit to being scared or, and this strikes me as far more likely, he's trusting his superior officer because he must and keeping his superior informed of information he *needs* to know. Whether he wants to admit it or not, he's got to keep his superior apprised that he's not capable of fulfilling his duties. He must have been gravely disappointed in Simon's lack of response. I don't get the impression that Jim and Simon are at all close friends yet, in this episode.
--I think Jim's attitude later at dinner with Carolyn is much more typical. There he's not admitting anything to her. Simon only got actual information because he needed it, Carolyn didn't need to see weakness, and therefore she didn't. Or at least, that was his original response.
--So why is he apologizing to Carolyn? Maybe for shutting her out, maybe for shutting her out throughout their marriage. And why did he go after her. I guess he realized he was pushing her away, and being rather rude about it, and felt guilty.
--Okay, Jim kissing Carolyn, much as I don't like her and totally think he ought to be saving himself for Blair, is quite hot.
--Our first vision of Blair. God he's funny--I love the way he looks with his hair back. I mean the cheekbones and the lips and the glasses and the *enthusiasm* is just so intoxicating.
--And again, just because I can. Mmmmmmm.
--But why does Jim go see him? I mean it's pretty obvious when the real Dr. McCoy goes in that Blair was just blowing smoke. It must speak to how desperate Jim is that he's willing to give the obvious impostor even a moment of his time.
--That's a pretty swanky office for a grad student, dumpy as it is. I mean, when I was a grad student there were two grad student offices and we all shared both of them (one was quiet and the other had mailboxes and was pretty noisy).
--This isn't really a screenshot of amazingly gorgeous Blair, honest, it's the office. Yeah.
--I love Blair's hands while Jim's got him up against the wall, kneading his shoulders like a kitten. They both have such gorgeous blue eyes. I wonder if they retouched them on the DVD version or something. Certainly they never looked that gorgeous when I saw the episodes on SciFi.
--Blair obviously hadn't really thought about how he was going to tell his Sentinel about the whole thing before he met Jim because the "throwback to a pre-civilized breed of man" approach was awful. After he got slammed into the wall his presentation was much clearer and better.
--Okay, I wanted to screencap almost every shot in this scene in Blair's office and resisted...but finally my resistance wore down, because, really, how much am I supposed to take. So here's Blair looking *amazing*.
--And here's Jim looking amazingly gorgeous as well.
--Ah! Blair saving Jim from the trash truck. I'm not sure if I like this screencap or not. It's kind of funky.
--Lord is Blair pretty afterwards. So nice! Pretty much a random cap, but I like the way he's touching Jim. :)
--"When a sentinel's working his deal he usually had a partner along." Our first sense of how Blair fits into Jim's life. ;)
--So how does Blair know that Jim needs concentration and focus and all the other things he teaches him right out of the box. How does Blair know all the things that Jim can learn to do. Fanfiction very, very often has it just that Blair knows all this stuff instinctively. That's not a good explanation to me--I think it's more likely that he's just been thinking about it, for years, maybe.
--For some reason I was thinking I was going to find Blair a total geek when I re-watched this (God knows why), but he's actually just *gorgeous*. Gorgeous and engaging, and maybe a little dorky, but I like dorky.
--When the bomb at the train station goes off, I wonder if the producers maybe didn't have a specific cue they were triggering at (or at least maybe the actors didn't know when exactly the bomb would go). Carolyn looks so genuinely surprised when the explosion happens right behind her.
--God Jim's good looking. Shoot!
--Jim's little smile when Blair's griping about being in the tree is so cute. I think he's already falling for him, or already feeling closer and friendlier than one would expect from a angry and emotionally reserved cop meeting up with a bouncy, talkative, grad student who claims to know all about his problems. Unfortunately the little smile doesn't screencap very well. I tried and tried.
--Love Jim following along with Blair to the perfume shops, even though he's starting to get a headache.
--Jim drives the same red jeep the bad guy did at the lumber mill? :)
--God, I love Blair's hair. I mean the way it moves and floats in a breeze and frames his face and yeah. And his cheekbones. And his lips. And his eyes which are just practically *luminous*. Sweet!
--Wait, Jim just hijacked an elevator, so what window is he looking out of when he watches the bus drive away? Maybe it's a glass elevator.
--Oh, that poor cab driver--I sure hope the city reimbursed him for both the damages to his cab and the lost wages for the downtime he'll have while it's being repaired.
--Jim jumping on to the top of the bus is so cute and so silly. I mean honestly. Surely there was a better way for him to catch up with the bus and get it to stop. :)
--Ooh, I've always loved Jim shooting into the barrel of Veronica Sarris' gun. First you get the awesome zooming eyesight effect.
Then you get the neat bullet going into the barrel sparky thing.
--Something about the lighting in the bus just makes everyone's eyes so gorgeous. I mean--Blair's eyes just *glow* and Jim's are aquamarine and just *beautiful.
--He could have thrown that bomb a little harder, seriously. A good frisbee throw and the bomb would have gone far enough away that it didn't blow up the back of the bus.
--Jim calling Blair his partner!!! Squee!!!!
--Okay so their deal is that Blair's going to be studying Jim, with an eye to eventually producing his dissertation. But any other publication is verboten--so no articles along the way. And Jim's obviously very concerned about secrecy, though it sounds at the end of this episode that he's mostly concerned about secrecy until he gets a "handle on things."
All screencaps are my own. Feel free to use them if you want.
So just remember that the *text* is not, by and large, new just the screencaps. (I did tweak the text a little to work with the 'caps, but that's it. There's no new textual content.)
Notes On: Switchman
--God it's neat watching this on the television-and the picture quality rocks. Particularly compared to my video-CD version in Amazing Squint-O-Vision.
--Mathis, the guy who was sent to recover the bodies of Ellison's men and "ascertain the status" of the one that wasn't buried, isn't a bad looking man himself. Maybe they only make good looking guys Rangers. :)
--Lord the picture quality is gorgeous--I mean there's such depth. It's like I'm watching in 3-D.
--Until it was pointed out to me that this was filmed in the rain forests of British Columbia, I totally bought into the fact that they were filming in the jungle. However, now that I have eyes to see, the conifers do look pretty odd. And the colors are wrong. :)
--The first vision of Jim Ellison is just so *glorious*. I mean he's beautiful, shit, the way he moves and his arms, and the slightly unshaven jaw, and his eyes so beautifully blue, like the sky, and just shit. But I also love the first vision of the character, he was ordered to train a militia and hold the pass and damn it he's done that, despite the fact that everyone else on his team died. And his quiet "And quite frankly, sir, I'm a little tired" is just wonderful.
--And again, because *damn*!
--Oh, it's the exposition scene--Why does Simon need to tell these police officers from elsewhere in Washington State about the weather and the coffee there?
--See and the second vision of Jim Ellison is almost as sweet. He's almost unnaturally good looking. And I love the picture quality on these DVDs--this is sooooo cool. Watching it on a 19 inch TV screen rather than a 3 inch rectangle on my computer monitor makes *such* a difference. Sweet! And he's clearly freaked out about zoning on the boiling water, but totally puts that aside to do his job. Nice.
--Picking at the plot a little here: Jim's been out on the stakeout of this lumber mill for a week, basically alone. But then there's a team giving him a heads up about the person arriving in the red jeep and there are like 20 guys and a helicopter and so on and so forth there. Where did they come from? Surely they weren't all trying to be subtle and stake out the building. What, were they just trying to be unnoticed while parked alongside the dirt road leading to this remote ruin hoping no one would spot a helicopter, two huge SWAT trucks and so on. And if they're trying not to be noticed in approaching this building a helicopter is definitely not the way to do it--there are very few *less* subtle modes of conveyance than a helicopter.
--I never would have spotted it on the first (or even the second) time watching this ep--but clearly when the red jeep drives into the building there's a motorbike on the back of it. Once the cops are in the building and walking around the jeep the bike is gone. One of the professional police dudes should perhaps have noticed that.
--I still don't get what Jim sees on the bad guy's helmet/mask that makes him fall off the bike. It appears to be a distortion of his face, but why would that startle him so?
--So, Carolyn with her bets on basketball games--gambling problem or trying to be one of the guys? My money's on her trying to fit in at the station by trying to be one of the guys. I bet she really doesn't give a damn about basketball.
--So why do so many fanfics have Simon liking gourmet coffees when he clearly says in this episode "They all taste like Maxwell House to me". On the other hand he appears to have someone in the family who runs a coffee shop.
--God, Jim's got such gorgeous eyes. Even when he's grubby.
--That conversation between Jim and Simon, where Jim admits to being scared about his senses to Simon kind of wierds me out. It's so uncharacteristic for Jim to admit to fear, to actually allow his fear to change his behavior--and yet Simon's so very, very unsympathetic. Jim must either trust Simon a lot to be willing to admit to being scared or, and this strikes me as far more likely, he's trusting his superior officer because he must and keeping his superior informed of information he *needs* to know. Whether he wants to admit it or not, he's got to keep his superior apprised that he's not capable of fulfilling his duties. He must have been gravely disappointed in Simon's lack of response. I don't get the impression that Jim and Simon are at all close friends yet, in this episode.
--I think Jim's attitude later at dinner with Carolyn is much more typical. There he's not admitting anything to her. Simon only got actual information because he needed it, Carolyn didn't need to see weakness, and therefore she didn't. Or at least, that was his original response.
--So why is he apologizing to Carolyn? Maybe for shutting her out, maybe for shutting her out throughout their marriage. And why did he go after her. I guess he realized he was pushing her away, and being rather rude about it, and felt guilty.
--Okay, Jim kissing Carolyn, much as I don't like her and totally think he ought to be saving himself for Blair, is quite hot.
--Our first vision of Blair. God he's funny--I love the way he looks with his hair back. I mean the cheekbones and the lips and the glasses and the *enthusiasm* is just so intoxicating.
--And again, just because I can. Mmmmmmm.
--But why does Jim go see him? I mean it's pretty obvious when the real Dr. McCoy goes in that Blair was just blowing smoke. It must speak to how desperate Jim is that he's willing to give the obvious impostor even a moment of his time.
--That's a pretty swanky office for a grad student, dumpy as it is. I mean, when I was a grad student there were two grad student offices and we all shared both of them (one was quiet and the other had mailboxes and was pretty noisy).
--This isn't really a screenshot of amazingly gorgeous Blair, honest, it's the office. Yeah.
--I love Blair's hands while Jim's got him up against the wall, kneading his shoulders like a kitten. They both have such gorgeous blue eyes. I wonder if they retouched them on the DVD version or something. Certainly they never looked that gorgeous when I saw the episodes on SciFi.
--Blair obviously hadn't really thought about how he was going to tell his Sentinel about the whole thing before he met Jim because the "throwback to a pre-civilized breed of man" approach was awful. After he got slammed into the wall his presentation was much clearer and better.
--Okay, I wanted to screencap almost every shot in this scene in Blair's office and resisted...but finally my resistance wore down, because, really, how much am I supposed to take. So here's Blair looking *amazing*.
--And here's Jim looking amazingly gorgeous as well.
--Ah! Blair saving Jim from the trash truck. I'm not sure if I like this screencap or not. It's kind of funky.
--Lord is Blair pretty afterwards. So nice! Pretty much a random cap, but I like the way he's touching Jim. :)
--"When a sentinel's working his deal he usually had a partner along." Our first sense of how Blair fits into Jim's life. ;)
--So how does Blair know that Jim needs concentration and focus and all the other things he teaches him right out of the box. How does Blair know all the things that Jim can learn to do. Fanfiction very, very often has it just that Blair knows all this stuff instinctively. That's not a good explanation to me--I think it's more likely that he's just been thinking about it, for years, maybe.
--For some reason I was thinking I was going to find Blair a total geek when I re-watched this (God knows why), but he's actually just *gorgeous*. Gorgeous and engaging, and maybe a little dorky, but I like dorky.
--When the bomb at the train station goes off, I wonder if the producers maybe didn't have a specific cue they were triggering at (or at least maybe the actors didn't know when exactly the bomb would go). Carolyn looks so genuinely surprised when the explosion happens right behind her.
--God Jim's good looking. Shoot!
--Jim's little smile when Blair's griping about being in the tree is so cute. I think he's already falling for him, or already feeling closer and friendlier than one would expect from a angry and emotionally reserved cop meeting up with a bouncy, talkative, grad student who claims to know all about his problems. Unfortunately the little smile doesn't screencap very well. I tried and tried.
--Love Jim following along with Blair to the perfume shops, even though he's starting to get a headache.
--Jim drives the same red jeep the bad guy did at the lumber mill? :)
--God, I love Blair's hair. I mean the way it moves and floats in a breeze and frames his face and yeah. And his cheekbones. And his lips. And his eyes which are just practically *luminous*. Sweet!
--Wait, Jim just hijacked an elevator, so what window is he looking out of when he watches the bus drive away? Maybe it's a glass elevator.
--Oh, that poor cab driver--I sure hope the city reimbursed him for both the damages to his cab and the lost wages for the downtime he'll have while it's being repaired.
--Jim jumping on to the top of the bus is so cute and so silly. I mean honestly. Surely there was a better way for him to catch up with the bus and get it to stop. :)
--Ooh, I've always loved Jim shooting into the barrel of Veronica Sarris' gun. First you get the awesome zooming eyesight effect.
Then you get the neat bullet going into the barrel sparky thing.
--Something about the lighting in the bus just makes everyone's eyes so gorgeous. I mean--Blair's eyes just *glow* and Jim's are aquamarine and just *beautiful.
--He could have thrown that bomb a little harder, seriously. A good frisbee throw and the bomb would have gone far enough away that it didn't blow up the back of the bus.
--Jim calling Blair his partner!!! Squee!!!!
--Okay so their deal is that Blair's going to be studying Jim, with an eye to eventually producing his dissertation. But any other publication is verboten--so no articles along the way. And Jim's obviously very concerned about secrecy, though it sounds at the end of this episode that he's mostly concerned about secrecy until he gets a "handle on things."
All screencaps are my own. Feel free to use them if you want.