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Man, there was a time when Lost was so exciting I’d blog about it here. When a series loses its way, as pretty much all of them have to in the merciless American format of multiple seventeen-hour seasons, it’s amazing how quickly it wipes your memory of how good it used to be. I was a Heroes fanboy, once. But a lot of the complaints you could level at the way Lost ended up sound superficially like things you could as easily have said about season one: it raises interesting questions but never answers them, it’s too mystical, and you’re given far too much backstory for characters that just aren’t that interesting. But I think a definable line was crossed somewhere in the middle, between unanswered questions that seem like they could have an interesting explanation, and just making arbitrary shit up in the same lame attempt to blow your mind usually reserved for the stoned, at parties, to the completely sober. Smoke monster, rips up trees, makes a mechanical clanking noise – I’m fascinated. Everything after that point sounded increasingly like a 12 year-old trying to bail himself out of a ridiculous lie by layering carefully constructed but painfully over-specific falsehoods on top of it. I never really cared about whether they’d answer the questions the series raised, only that the questions should hint at interesting answers. Once it strays into random land, there’s nothing for my imagination to chew on and I get bored.
At some point during Season Five – where one timeline is itself jumping back and forth through time – I stopped watching entirely – hence the 0. I never really came back, except for finales and premieres, and I only watched the two episodes preceding the grand finale this week. I think that let me enjoy it. It was complete hokum of the laziest, stupidest kind, but emotionally well judged and oddly satisfying. Getting a shitty answer to some of the central questions, even the really interesting ones, turned out to feel better than getting none at all. What they gained by deciding not to do anything particularly special in the whole two hours was the freedom to pace it to give each meandering, pointless story thread its own little send-off. I’m not sorry I skipped what I did – in fact I wish I’d skipped most of seasons 3 and 4 too – but I’m glad I tuned back in for the end. The crappy, crappy end. | ||
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Last one of these – I won’t do a music one because I didn’t really get into much last year, and everyone’s heard Florence and the Machine. The Music Downloads tag has everything I liked enough to share. Is this list in order? If you care, no. If you don’t, yes. 
Curb Your Enthusiasm 
Dollhouse Man-doll Victor’s been the other treat of this season – previously stuck in some pretty dull roles, he’s since been given three or four chances to mimic other characters when ‘imprinted’ with their personality. Each time, the performance has been creepily good. When trying to tot up how many times it had happened just now, it took me a while to remember that he’d ever impersonated Topher – I just filed that whole sequence as ‘the bit with two Tophers’. Update: just saw the latest. Whaaaaaat. 
Castle It couldn’t pick a more worn-smooth formula if it consciously tried: a police procedural starring a non-cop ‘consultant’ who helps the department solve crimes by a) having some special insight into the criminal mind and b) projecting an aura that prevents ordinary cops from grasping rudimentary logic until it’s phrased to them in allegorical form. The flavour this time is that he’s a best-selling crime writer. And that it’s brilliant. The twists are small but effective: Lady Cop’s disapproving relationship with him is complicated by the fact that she’s always been a fan of his trashy work, and there’s something almost cute about her determination to give him a harder time to compensate. Castle himself is a rockstar in the literary world, but a powerless underling in law enforcement – Fillion manages to be charming, funny and pathetic as both. And his profession gives him a boyish excitement for working with the police rather than the sneering smugness the genius character usually has.
His daughter, whose inclusion initially triggers a Pavlovian sense that this is where it’s about to jump the shark, isn’t used as a source of whiny teenage tension. Instead she’s just a bedrock for the character, convincing, likable and sweet. It’s so rare to see a father/daughter relationship on screen where they just seem to be friends, and neither of them is being an asshole – the highest compliment I can pay is that it reminds me of Veronica and Keith Mars. It’s only because all this stuff works that she serves the purpose most irritating daughter characters are trying to: she humanises a man who seems otherwise ghoulish in his enthusiasm for murder. 
Dexter Funnily enough, despite an exciting escalation from the worst Thanksgiving ever to an extraordinarily grim finale, the episode that stuck with me was an early one-off. A sleep-deprived Dexter completely loses track of where he’s stashed a body, and consistently one-ups himself by avoiding all the places even he would think to look. I think the core appeal of Dexter is that, whether or not we’ve killed anyone, we all remember how it feels to have done something bad. Even if it was as a kid, the consuming fear of getting caught is scarier than any monster or murderer, because no-one’s going to be on your side. Flight of the Conchords She told me she was leaving and her life would be better Joan broke it off over the phone After the tone she left me alone Jen said she’d never ever see me again Felicity, said there was no electricity Carol Brown just took a bus out of town (He doesn’t cook or clean; he’s not good boyfriend material) Mimi will no longer see me Carol Brown just took a bus out of town Love is a delicate thing it could just float away on the breeze Mona, you told me you were in a coma Carol Brown just took a bus out of town 
Special Mention: State of Play It’s the story of two murders, a mysterious death, an MP and the journalists investigating their connection. S. It gets complicated at a rate of knots, but never arbitrarily, and making sense of those complications becomes a compulsion. It’s a single six episode series, and if you can make them last more than a week you’re a stronger person than I. I tried to watch the more recent film adaptation on a plane, but in trying to cram six hours of fast-paced developments into two, they’ve somehow managed to make it slower, less exciting and insufferably preachy. If you can watch the whole thing after seeing the series, you’re a more patient person than I. 
Note: Glee | ||
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Plumberduck: Man, I can't wait for Archer. Frisky Dingo was one of Adult Swim's best shows, and I'm very hopeful that Adam Reed will be able to recreate that.
Family Guy makes me laugh, but I'm not, like, proud of that. It's just a machine to make dumb jokes with. American Dad, surprisingly, considering how much I hated it when it started, is actually really interesting. Because it's not as married to the constant-gag format of Family Guy, they're actually able to do some interesting narrative explorations with it. | ||||
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A regular feature in which I ask you to listen to a sound file with no idea what it’s going to be. It’s an attempt to share the strange experience of rummaging through my old download folders, listening to forgotten MP3s with uninformative filenames. All I know about them is that I must have liked them at some point. Volume Four was the shortest I’ve ever posted, this one is the longest – don’t click play if you’re in a hurry. Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. | ||
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Andrew: Well, he sounds like an interesting guy :) You should do a post on it and put up some links :)
I'm sure you could put the files in a large archive.org batch if the original site is defunct for hosting. | ||||
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It turns out that if you start talking about Mirror’s Edge in the Future offices, pretty soon a small crowd gathers to weigh in. In a group of editors and writers – one who gave it nine out of ten and another who thinks five was too high – it turns out we mostly agree. We all love to run, and we all get angry when we’re stopped by something difficult. Most of my suggestions for the combat with cops would make it less difficult, and hopefully less awkward. But it can’t get so easy that you don’t feel threatened, and the grander issue is that it needs to be more avoidable. So this is about that. The police choppers already work well as a propulsive force for the chase sequences that doesn’t often lead to death or frustration. But I’d like to change each of the three types of ground enemies, and how they’re used.
Cops: Not allowed to fire until they’ve issued two verbal warnings (“Freeze!” – “Stop or I will shoot!”) giving you a window to take one out or escape. Obviously once you’ve attacked one, others in the area can open fire. When they do hit, damage is much more serious – two hits kill – but they’re still wildly inaccurate. It becomes more of a tactical puzzle about how not to get shot, and the way forward never depends on turning a slow valve, climbing a slow pipe or working out where to head.
SWAT: Armoured and with two-handed weapons, these guys can’t be disarmed. But they’re only ever sent after you, so you never have to get past them to progress. They can be killed with stolen cop weapons, knocked out if you drop on them, or pushed into danger by a melee attack.
Chasers: Right now these guys have tazers, which are just kind of annoying. I think they should have mace. They should be knocked back by any melee move – to their death if they’re on a ledge – but if they get right up to you, they grab you and spray a blinding teargas in your eyes, sending your vision haywire and making you scream. You can try to flee while blinded, but if you don’t get away your third macing incapacitates you, and it’s game over. Being chased was the perfect way to escalate Mirror’s Edge, but the Pursuit Cops are just so lame in combat; dancing about, tickling you with electricity and mild punching. I want to be freaking terrified of these guys. It would help if they didn’t look like dorks.
So one set is easy to deal with, another is hard to deal with but easy to avoid, and the last is hard to deal with or avoid – so do whichever you’re best at. I found lots of fun ways to lure Chasers into positions where I could knock them off a building, but bizarre rules meant that more often than not, I was the one knocked back by the crucial blow. I was saying the other day that no matter how often the game explicitly tells you to stop and fight, the player still tries to run right past. Replaying the early sections at lunch today, I realised there’s actually a forced pop-up message in the prologue chapter that says “Always try to get away from enemies.” It couldn’t feel more like two different games that were code-merged at the last minute.
More Amateur Hour, Mirror's Edge
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Post Maker: I'll have to give that a look then; the majority of levels were frustrating enough to play through once, so the idea of playing them while timed didn't appeal to me very much. If they have that ghost info though, I'm willing to give them a proper try.
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Dealing with the categories for this mini-redesign, I realised I hadn’t mentioned television in ages. Here’s a quick round-up of things you’re mostly probably not watching and mostly probably shouldn’t be. Lost: Season one: I like everything about this show except Jack. Damages: Something about the style, tone and performances is still gripping, but every part of the plot this season is inferior. The main one’s a really tired cliché, Timothy Olyphant’s feels arbitrary and improbable, and the callback to the last season hinges on someone we saw shot still being alive – don’t ever, ever do that. 24: These tropes are still fun no matter how many times they’re repeated. Jack having to achieve the impossible in service of the terrorists is a classic. I notice Fake Hillary Clinton is the first president of 24-land to act in any way presidential – the others seemed to think their advisors outranked them. The Fringe: This ought to be trashy fun, but something about it really doesn’t work. I think it’s that it takes itself so goddamn seriously, and the lead actress, while talented, is so scowlingly concerned that she sucks the joy from the surrounding nonsense.
Lie To Me: Smug but entertaining. Tim Roth as a human lie-detector. The science is both more convincing and interesting than guff like CSI, and more relevant than the hilarious nonsense of Numbers, but of course still wildly exaggerated. The decision to back up some of their claims with quick flashes of famously ashamed, guilty or angry people showing shame, anger or guilt is a great trick. Flight of the Conchords: Caught bits of this a few times when jetlagged in the States and it never clicked, but this new series has just been sublime. The Conchords are a real band and a fictional one, and this is a mockumentary made by the real one about the fictional one, with the story of their bad, meek indie performances sometimes told via the medium of their smart, genre-hopping real songs. This is their manly answer to the Black Eyed Peas’ famously dismal My Humps: | ||
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Jason L: Presumably everyone knows about Mr. Deity who wants to, but I had somehow overlooked Words and wonder whether others may have as well. http://www.youtube.c... ...RCw-Hfnpxo I'm putting it here because it's the closest to a commentable Seinfeld piece. A look into the 'real lives' of the Mr. Deity cast, it has the same terrible recognition of privilege that you pinned down in the Media page.
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A few good ways to win me over, if you’re thinking of making a TV show with just me in mind: - Female protagonist I don’t hate. Wendy Watson hereby joins the other… three. - A character who doesn’t take half a fucking hour to get over every surprising turn of events. Writers! The stuff you’re writing didn’t really happen, so watching your characters refuse to believe it happened is not actually terribly entertaining for us! - Conversely, disbelief at just how idiotic your plot is makes them highly entertaining.
- Max Payne references. - Scenes where a character starts to say something about what we’re seeing, then thinks better of it. - Ultra-mild curse words, ideally accompanied by a character who actually does swear her face off at the appropriate times. Somehow that makes the gosh-darnits seem extra mild. - Ending an episode with a Russian Futurists song. This one was laser targeted at me. | ||
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Yub Yub, Commander: Another thing: Brilliant episode titles.
"The Pilot Episode Sanction" "The Manicoid Teleportation Conundrum" "The Ectoplasmic Panhellenic Investigation" etc. | ||||
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After proudly announcing a return to normal programming, I studiously wrote the first line of eight different posts and then watched Futurama until I passed out. I’ve been working for fifteen consecutive days at this point and I don’t sleep for long, so you might have to bear with me a bit. This needs blogging about urgently, though, because it’s an online televisual event that will happen at an actual time! Tomorrow! Written by Joss Whedon and some other people, starring Nathan Fillion, Neil Patrick Harris and my close personal friend Felicia Day, it has two things in common with Firefly, and it’s about a supervillain, and it’s got Felicia Day, who is interviewed in the issue of PC Gamer on-sale in two weeks. Run, don’t walk, to your newsvendor. But run slow enough that you get there around the end of July. It’s also a musical, and admittedly I haven’t liked one of those since Dancer In The Dark, but still. The three acts go up Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and stay up till Sunday, but I’m particularly keen on watching it as it comes out, because I am as mentioned in love with the idea of international premieres. The premiere is something the internet’s sort of destroying and recreating at the same time: movies are splattered across the release schedule as people pirate them early, wait for the DVD, or wait to pirate the DVD. TV is Tivo’d and DVD sets are Netflixed bit by bit, but increasingly significant things are getting put out as webisodes. And in that, we’ve got the communal excitement of every fanatic devouring new content at the same time, world-wide instead of country-wide. … S’cool. Update! Spit! This thing is the exact opposite of what I just said! It’s being broadcast via the evil Hulu, which is US-only. Way to defeat the whole spirit of the thing, jerk-wads! Nevertheless, it is live now, and if you just grab Hotspot Shield or another sneaky proxy service of your choice, you can disguise yourself as an American and watch. Think of it as a baseball cap and a few extra pounds for your browser. Update! It’s good! But doesn’t get very far in its 14 minutes. I now advise waiting till it’s all out on Saturday and watching then, since someone blew the whole worldwide premiere idea. Felicia suggests non-US people wait ‘a bit’, and adds a smiley face. Make of that what you will. Update! As Iain and Graham note, the US-only restriction seems to have been removed. Update! Act 2 is out and even better! Also, the whole thing is getting crazy popular, which is awesome. Provided they can refrain from fucking up the region thing, more of this sort of thing! Update! It’s over! What did you think? Spoilerific comments below. I thought it went from good to great and back to good. The end seemed to be leveraging an emotional investment that I didn’t really have. I was there for the lols. | ||
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Thomas Lawrence: Waitasec, I just noticed it's back up for free in it's entirety. How.. huh. Ok. Anyone know why that happened?
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 The interminable filler episodes between each premiere and finalé were doing a pretty good job of killing my enthusiasm for Lost. And towards the end of season three, the silliness was just getting silly. There’s a character called Taller Ghost Walt. Jack’s dead dad got better. Ben isn’t really in charge, he takes orders from an invisible man who can cure cancer and lives in a teleporting shack but hates technology. But then I enjoyed the very end of that season, in an I-don’t-really-care way. And now I’m enjoying the start of the new season, in an oh-wait-actually-I-do way.  Starting on a Hurley episode was a quick way to my heart. I could have done with less teleporting shack action, particularly since it now apparently has Jack’s simultaneously dead, undead and never-died dad in it, but even that is sort of entertaining from Hurley’s perspective. Glad that the factions finally split, glad that Jack’s was so unpopular, and glad that, after he made his choice, it became woefully clear that The Other Others weren’t here to rescue them. Daniel, the nervous physicist with a gun, does such a dismal job of reassuring them that his every scene is comedy. The Other Others, unlike most of The Others and The Tailenders, are mostly welcome additions to the cast – Daniel’s loveably neurotic, the pilot’s likeable, Miles The Angry Semi-Evil Techno-Exorcist is likeably dislikeable, and the woman will hopefully die soon. I couldn’t tell you why the wilfull absurdity of Miles’ profession doesn’t grate with me the way the invisible cancer-curing teleporting luddite did. I think because it’s brief, and no big deal is made of it. That understatement also does wonders for the scene with Daniel’s bizarre experiment – it doesn’t overplay what happened there, but it’s fascinating if you got it.  Hello, dude from The Wire! Explain chess to us in Baltimore gang terms. But the main thing I love about Lost at the moment is the darkness implied by what we’ve seen of the future. I’m really pleased they stuck with the great idea of switching to flash-forwards instead of flash-backs, leaving the island in the past and making it feel like the plot’s finally progressed. And I’m even more pleased about what they’ve shown. Kate hates someone so much she can’t even be civil about his funeral (my bet is Michael, by the way). Jack hates his life so much he spends it trying to get back to the island. Hurley’s so haunted that he jumps at the chance to spend the rest of his life in an institution. And Sayid – Sayid is a hitman for Ben? That’s the worst – and hence best – of it. They’ve escaped the island and they still haven’t escaped Ben. The weasely mass-murderer who seems to spend most of his life at their mercy, yet always end up back in charge. Hopefully the reasons for this won’t be as feebly contrived as Abram’s scoffable methods for keeping Ron Rifkin’s character ahead in Alias.  Graham points out that Lostpedia (from which these stills are stolen) is overflowing with absurd theories. My favourites are that a change in photo frames during the Miles flashback indicates an entirely new timeline, that the island is keeping Jack’s father alive so he can pay Sawyer back for a drink, and the entire Theories section on the nature and causes of Jack’s beard in the final episode of last season: Jack’s beard
Seeing the Lost game recently, which Damon Lindelof describes as “RIDICULOUSLY AWESOME!”, had made me forget that anyone involved with Lost was ever talented. I’m glad the fourth season started to remind me. | ||
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Finally, On Lost, by Tom Francis: [...] there was a time when Lost was so exciting I’d blog about it here. When a series loses its way, as pretty much all of them have to in the merciless American format [...]
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A Life In Questions
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The Best And Worst Of Mass Effect 2
Tim Edwards
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Although I am bothered by posts tweeted and unmade; I'm on tenterhooks to find out what our robot overlords think is 'bad'. Not really though.