TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Firefly

The opening spiel summarises the background rather concisely, so I’ll quote it for anyone who’s never seen it (which is potentially a high percentage, because it’s only in the first run of its first series in the US, and has never been aired in the UK):

Narrator: The Earth got used up, so we moved out and terraformed ourselves a whole new galaxy of Earths. Some rich and plush with the new technologies, others not so much. The central planets, them's formed the Alliance, fought a war to bring all the worlds under their control. Some idiots tried to fight it, among them, myself.

Notice no mention of aliens. There are no aliens. This is a stroke of brilliance – one that I’ve always been poised to paint myself, were I ever spontaneously commissioned to write a sci-fi series. The new galaxy is comprised of countless planets – the human population must be hundreds of billions – but no aliens, and not even anything in the way of separate evolutionary lines taken by remote cultures (it’s only three hundred years in the future). Who needs aliens? In other sci-fi shows, they all play human roles with a few crudely applied trends common to each species, which could as easily occur as traditions within a cut-off human society, of which Firefly’s universe has plenty. And you don’t have to lamely pretend a human in elaborate but wholly superficial make-up is from an alien race whose evolution shares nothing with that of ours.

Another piece of intelligent sci-fi on the part of the creator is that there are no sound effects for the space-scenes. I keep wanting to say they take place in perfect silence, but in fact gentle guitar music usually plays over them, but the point is that this makes sense – even when giant laser cannons destroy a whole ship in a massive fiery explosion, no-one who wasn’t aboard the target vessel would hear a thing – no air in space! No sound! Listen to a space-scene in Star Trek, and you’ll notice even the noise of the Enterprise drifting by is a deafening roar.

This intelligence is carried to every part of the vision, but there are other things that make Firefly great. The characters and their relationships in particular are wonderful – Mal is a funny and inoffensive captain (sounds like mild praise, but it takes some doing), the enigmatic preacher manages to be witty about being a Christian, and tough-guy Jayne (yeah) manages to be stupid, evil and arrogant in an enormously likeable way. The doctor, like virtually every sci-fi doctor, is brilliant, but it’s hard to characterise why – he’s just inappropriately civilised and doesn’t like Jayne. The pilot Wash is the true star, though – one of those meek, witty characters Joss Whedon always crafts more lovingly than the rest, like the blond geek from Buffy. This was meant as a list of my favourite characters for people who knew them, but it’s about 80% of the crew, so it might have been easier to specify the few I don’t find especially interesting. I’m not wild about Inara. That’s it. Oh, and the mysterious ‘hands are blue’ guys are easily the freakiest, most unsettling bad guys in TV. I hope that even if we find out what The Alliance did to River, we never get told why their hands are blue.

Lastly, it tries to be funny and is. This – and the captain’s slight resemblance to Angel* – is the only link I can see between it and Buffy: Firefly is firmly funnier, but the humour is kind of the same vein, and I have to admit it’s a vein to which I’m receptive.

* I now find out that he was actually considered for the part of Angel in Buffy, and in a series that hasn’t been on in this country yet, plays some other guy. In other cast notes, Zoe is a bad guy in Alias.

Series Notes: there’s only one series, and the last three episodes were never aired. Also, the two-part pilot was aired after the rest of the series, or rather what of the rest of the series they aired, and however much we all may despise Fox for this and all their other many, horrible crimes, I think we have to admit that the people responsible for all the fantastic programmes Fox has inexplicably cancelled would have gone with a different network if they could. In other words, they are the only ones prepared to show this stuff in the first place, so they’re doing something, they’re just doing it very badly. Anyway, more importantly the whole series, unaired episodes and everything, is now available on DVD, and hence on file-sharing programs. The DVD is around £20, $35, which is a total steal in my books, so I actually bought it.

Oh My Fucking God

There’s a film, the trailer is here, and it’s out on 30/09/2005. I’ve never been this excited about a film.

Quotes:

(Mal has inadvertantly been given a wife as part of a trade, and she wants to sleep with him)
Preacher: If you take advantage of her in any way whatsoever, you are going to a very special hell reserved for child-molesters and people who talk in theatres.
(Later)
Caylee: Hi shepherd. Captain was just telling us about his kiss with Saffron.
Preacher: Oh, how… special.

Preacher: I just feel such a fool.
Jayne: Yeah, all those years of priest training… taken out by one bounty hunter.

Futurama

It’s incredibly rare, even among these great programmes, for the main character to be my favourite, but Fry definitely is. He doesn’t fit easily into any established stereotype – he’s an idiot but not to the extent of Homer, he’s a loser but not everything goes wrong, he’s hopeless with women but dated Amy, and he’s inept at everything except computer games. To me, he’s a modern-day hero: vain and stupid whilst nerdy and unpopular.

He’s a pizza-delivery boy who falls into a cryo chamber on the turn of the millenium and is defrosted a thousand years later. He befriends a heartless alcoholic bending robot called Bender (it takes a few episodes to get used to the fact that one of the characters is called Bender) and a renegade career-implant officer, the one-eyed Leela. They find work as the illegally underpaid delivery company owned by Fry’s descendant, the senile mad scientist Professor Farnsworth. Also in the company are Zoidberg, an incompetent lobster-alien doctor; Amy, a rich and clueless intern the Professor keeps on because she has the same blood type as him; and Hermes, a Jamaican bureaucrat.

The other main component of Futurama’s appeal is that it’s set in the future – the world is richly imagined and exciting, which takes it to a completely different level to The Simpsons. Cleverly, the satire of The Simpsons isn’t lost in the transition to the year 3000 either – roughly half of everything in the future is a comment on something in the present – and the humour itself is somewhere further in the senseless and crazy directions than The Simpsons. In one shot of a storage cupboard, two folders on a shelf are labelled ‘P’ and ‘NP’ – implying that by 3000AD a mathematical conundrum over the computability of a certain class of algorithms has been resolved. Matt Groening is kind of a nerd himself, but here he’s teamed with David X Cohen, and the team nerdiness level is at such dangerous heights that one DVD commentary mentions they regularly play D&D in their lunchbreaks.

Lastly, the sideline characters that crop up in just a few episodes are among the greatest ever devised: most notably Clamps, Flexo, Morbo, the Robot Devil, the generic fat mechanic guy, Santa Claus, Horrible Gelatinous Blob, the Harlem Globetrotters, That Guy and Elzar. I think quotes do more good conveying the appeal of Futurama, and luckily I have thousands of them.

Series Notes: the first three series are interchangeably great, then the fourth starts with a run of mind-blowingly good episodes, the premiere being probably my favourite ever, and so epic and exciting that it leaves me feeling like I’ve seen Futurama: The Film. It doesn’t stay that good, though, and then series five has two, maybe even three episodes that are basically worthless. The others are as great as the old stuff, but those few anomalies don’t even have a single joke in them that makes me feel bad about writing them off like this.

Quotes:

Soldier: This is the worst part: the calm before the battle.
Fry: And then the battle isn’t so bad?
Soldier: Oh, right. I forgot about the battle.

(a crustacean confiscates Bender’s cigar)
Bender: Wait, I need that to smoke!

(Bender is caught having stolen the priceless atomic tiara)
Bender: Wait, I can explain! It’s very valuable!

Bender: (to a turtle) Maybe you’d feel better if I had a drink.

Bender: (to a turtle) At least we’ll die on our backs, helpless.

Al Gore: And next up we have Professor-
Professor Farnsworth: I demand the floor!
Al Gore: Well, yes, it’s your turn to speak.
Professor Farnsworth: Well nuts to me! I’m taking the stage.

Fry: Hey, you have no right to criticize the 20th century! We gave the world the light bulb, the steam boat and the cotton gin.
Leela: Those things are all from the 19th century.
Fry: Yeah, well, they probably just copied us.

Fry: It’s just like the story of the grasshopper and the octopus. All year long, the grasshopper kept burying acorns for the winter, while the octopus mooched off his girlfriend and watched TV. But then the winter came, and the grasshopper died, and the octopus ate all his acorns. And also he got a racecar. Is any of this getting through to you?

Leela: We’re going to deliver this crate like professionals.
Fry: Aw. Can’t we just dump it in the sewer and say we delivered it?
Bender: Too much work! I say we burn it, then say we dumped it in the sewer!

Leela: That’s Zapp Brannigan’s ship!
Fry: The Zapp Brannigan?
Fry: (confused) Who’s the Zapp Brannigan?

Leela: Stop it, Bender, we don’t need to beg.
Fry: So what do you suggest? A daring daylight robbery of Fort Knox on elephant-back? That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.

Leela: Where’s Fry?
Bender: I didn’t kill him. Professor?
Professor Farnsworth: No, I’ve been busy.

(Fry has Bender dig up his brother’s grave to take back a lucky clover he stole)
Bender: Paydirt! I got the clover, and his wedding ring. Sorry ladies, I’m taken! Hey Fry, you want me to smack the corpse up a little?

Bender: (carrying pillows) These aren’t very heavy, but you don’t hear me not complaining.

Bender: (locking Leela in the laundry room as part of a mutiny) Don’t worry Leela, soon we’ll be able to look back on all this and laugh. Ahahahahahaa!

Bender: (the ship is going down with Leela, Bender and Fry still aboard) Leela, save me! And yourself I guess! And my banjo! … And Fry!

Zapp Brannigan: (explaining his military plan) If we can hit that bullseye the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate!

(Fry is styling his hair in the exhaust of the ship’s engines)
Leela: Fry, do you have any idea how long it takes to reconfigure those engines?
Fry: When you look this good, you don’t need to know anything.

(Leela is proposing staying at her artificially reduced age rather than returning to her normal one)
Professor Farnsworth: (horrified) But you’ll have no way to return to your normal age except growing up, as God intended!

(Leela and Bender confront the Professor)
Leela: We’ve got to talk to you about Fry.
Bender: Yeah! We want some money! Wait, what’s this about Fry?

(Fry is staying with Bender)
Fry: Where’s the bathroom?
Bender: Bathwhat?
Fry: Bathroom.
Bender: Whatroom?
Fry: Bathroom!
Bender: Whatwhat?

Bender: Of all the friends I’ve had, you’re the first.

(Fry is preparing to revive his fossilised dog)
Bender: A dog, eh? Interesting… no wait, what’s that other one? Tedious…

(Bender and the others are ascending the side of a hotel, Bender looking in on the guests)
Bender: Get a room, you two!
Man: We’re in a room.
Bender: Then lose some weight!

Clips: native.avi (12MB) rock.mpg (3MB)

Game Of Thrones, The Shadow Line, The Killing, Running Wilde

Chris’s blog is reminding me I haven’t talked about what’s on in ages. Here’s what I’m watching and why. Continued

Great Moments In Television, 2016

These are all suspiciously recent so this is probably only the best three moments of the last few months, but that does at least mean I could get clips. Until they’re taken down. I put them on Streamable in the hope they’ll stay up longer, which has the side-effect that they loop when they’re done. Shrug emojii.

These are not spoilery except for The Crown, in which nothing really happens. Continued

He’s Gone Too Far

That’s it, Intro Guy. You are now so bad that you entirely counter-act the greatness of the programme that follows your intolerable gloat. I actually regret watching this episode, the intro was that bad.

It’s not just that an intro is unnecessary, it’s this intro in particular. It’s an intro made by people who don’t just look down on their audience, they actually hate them. It’s the kind of intro I’d produce for I’m A Celebrity And The Suffocating Numbness Of My Life Has Driven Me To New Lows Get Me Out Of Here. It’s openly an advert for the very thing it is a part of. It doesn’t stop at explicitly summarising the themes and symbolism of the preceding season, it actually explains in bullet-point form what’s going to happen in the following episode, and shows clips of it. At first you think it’s going to insult your intelligence, but it quickly becomes clear that the disdain, the spite its authors hold for you far exceeds their restraint, and the insult is merely an appetiser for the flurry of gashing, wrenching, deep and bloody wounds they plan to inflict. And the salt in your mutiliations is a voice-over whose patronising sickly smarm is so drippingly viscious you could choke on it.

There’s no mistaking the venemous cynicism behind this – I spend most of my days feeling it – but attached to something as great as Heroes it becomes an even darker spectre. This is disdain for one of the few remaining wonderful things on television, and only the blackest of burnt, drowned, dead, dead souls could feel it with this level of vacant dispassion. I don’t know who writes these, but I can tell you that they have no irises – their obsidian pupils fill the entirety of their lidless and unblinking eyes.

Heroes Season Two

The trailer is on YouTube, and it doesn’t look very good, but! I’d like anyone else who’s watched the first two seasons of Alias to say it with me, when the moment arrives:

Sark!

Alias became terrible after – perhaps during – season two, but it was so much fun until then. Heroes has already borrowed one of its best actors, and shown that he was responsible for most of his character’s likeability. Now it’s got the other. I only hope he’s smarmily yet competently evil, and crops up unexpectedly in almost every storyline – it’d be just like old times.

Sark!

The rest is just depressing. Sylar’s still in it. I don’t even trust them with the guts to keep the Petrelli’s out. Last season’s finale was riddled with so many tedious tropes that I have no faith left in their ability to excite me. Entertain, probably.

If Things Go Right

Well, now there’s nothing in my room. This monitor is balancing on this PC, and this keyboard is on my lap as I slouch against the wall on the floor, wearing a suit for some reason. The room is shaking with the bass of Cat Power (still great), Sufjan Stevens (still amazing) and Sondre Lerche (new! Awesome!), reproduced with extraordinary fidelity and volume by my £25 surround sound system, which is in a heap on my bed, underneath a lamp. I have, officially, moved out of this place.

I’m not feeling too bad about the thunderous noise because Rich is out and the guys in the flat below are playing bland reggae loudly anyway. Rich has dubbed them Jonnie Potsmoker and Smokey McPot, and having watched Dude Where’s My Car on a whim the other day, I now get the reference. We’re not going to miss these guys. Although now I’ve tried this cinema-volume music thing, I may miss that. The better half of Predatory Wasp Of The Palisades Is Out To Get Us sound amazing like this.

I’m hearing a pretty muted or negative reaction to Graham Linehan’s (Father Ted, Black Books) new sitcom The IT Crowd from, like, the three people whose opinions I’ve heard. This is wrong! It’s fantastic. The second episode more than the first, perhaps – some of the actors seemed to ham it up a bit in the first, Chris Morris included, but I was still won over by it.

It’s not really a satire of an IT department, any more than Black Books was about a book shop or Father Ted was about being a priest. Like them, it’s an elaborately orchestrated farce of secrecy, politeness and bureaucracy with a twist of the surreal. What distinguishes it from inferior comedies like The Green Wing is its reluctance to write any of its characters off: none of them are dehumanised charicatures, all of them are at least somewhat likeable, and for me sympathy is essential for humour. I can’t laugh at people I entirely hate.

What made me use the word ‘fantastic’ instead of great, apart from a reluctance to resort to the absurdly over-used sentence “It’s great,” is that I keep suddenly thinking of a particular scene and cracking up – the only real litmus test for a sitcom. It’s the fire scene, but not specifically the:

Moss: (writing an e-mail in front of a fire) ‘Fire exclaimation mark. Fire exclaimation mark’

That they picked out for the preview clip – it’s the line before.

Moss: ‘Dear sir or madam. I am writing to inform you of a fire.’ (backspacing) No, no, that’s too formal.

I’m skirting the real subject of this post, mostly because I’m pretty sure I’m not allowed to talk about it. But it’s happening soon, it’s both figuaratively and literally a dream come true, and I’ll tell you all about it as soon as I’m no longer under contractual obligation to shut the hell up.

Justified

“You let Messer get away?”
“One of your boys let Messer get away, I got the driver. Besides, these boots aren’t made for running.”
“And yet chasing fugitives is a marshall’s primary function.”
“It’s ironic, isn’t it?” Continued

Keeping The Peace In Mirror’s Edge

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.

Lost

Lost is almost inexplicably better than it sounds – a bunch of people stranded on a tropical island after a plane crash, brought together by FATE, each with SECRETS, which we find out about through FLASHBACKS. I should have known it wouldn’t be long before amnesia featured in the plot. JJ Abrams’ last series Alias was good, but it’s not any more and it was never this good. This is genuinely brilliant television, the kind you could just string together to make a great film.

If Alias was defined by its ridiculous cliff-hangers, Lost is defined by ridiculous mysteries. Since the start of the series twenty-five episodes ago, the following elements have cropped up and been developed to the extent detailed here:

• The Monster: We don’t know anything about the monster. It might be big. It might not exist. It could also be robotic or organic, or ethereal, or none of these.
• Jack’s Dad: Jack’s Dad appeared. We don’t know why or what was going on.
• The Hatch: Locke discovered a hatch. We don’t know what it’s doing there or what’s inside, or what the thing is it’s built into. Since the hatch was discovered, virtually every episode has been about it. So far, we have discovered: nothing. Once the hatch lit up. We don’t know why.
• The Numbers: Hurley won the lottery with some numbers. They might be cursed, or not cursed, or it might be fate. Or magic.
• The Others: There might be others on the island, or there might not, or they might not be on the island, or they might not be others. If they are and they are we don’t know who they are or what they’re doing there or what they want.
• The Kid: The kid knows something about the hatch. We don’t know how or what and now he’s gone forever.
• The French Woman: There is a French woman on the island. Something killed the crew she was with. We don’t know what and now she’s gone mad.
• The Polar Bear: A polar bear appeared. We don’t know why or where it came from or how it got there. It was killed and never mentioned again.
• The Other Half Of The Plane: We don’t know where it is or what happened to the people on it. They might be still alive, or dead, or trapped sixteen years in the past with a magic time-traveling radio.
• The Island: The island might have a will of its own, though it might not and if it does we don’t know what it is, why it has it, or how it works.

Whichever of these wildly vague concepts you might be hoping for clarification on, you’re perpetually disappointed. The appeal is that by failing to resolve any of these plot lines, they’re never cheapened by specifics. Their enigma gives them a lasting menace that only improves the tapestry of sinister threats mounting around the ever-diminishing survivors. All of them verge on the mystical without being scientifically inexplicable – given a degree of imaginative license. We still don’t even know what genre we’re working in – sci-fi, fantasy, supernatural or real-world.

But the writers seem content to leave that ambiguous too – they’ve got plenty of stories to tell in flashbacks to the castaways’ previous lives, and some of those have been extraordinary. The glimpses of the mysteries, too, have been expertly judged. The one ‘Other’ we’ve seen – despite being just some guy – is one of the most unsettling bad guys ever. Even small things like making sure you realise dynamite is dangerous – they have the dynamite expert annihilated by it when handling it as carefully as he can, and from then on you’re screaming at the characters to walk slower, don’t put the dynamite in their packs, don’t use flaming brands for torches.

Locke: Hugo, take these extra sticks back a couple hundred yards.
Hurley: Me? Oh, okay. Got it. ... Can I have a flashlight? 'Cause, er, the torch-near-the-dynamite thing's not making a whole lot of sense to me.

Which leads nicely into the other reason it’s great: Hurley. On paper he sounds awful – a fat comic relief character who just says “Dude,” “Yo,” or “That was messed up” at oppourtune times. But that fails to take into account the sheer brilliance in the timing of his Dudes, Yos and That-was-messed-ups, and also that he says them flatly, rather than in the Keanu Reaves surf-slang drawl. Essentially he’s just a guy who watches a lot of TV, in a TV series, saying the things you feel like saying yourself (as above).

The comments below assume you are up to date with the story as it’s being aired in the US – they may spoil things for you if you’re not.

Lost Season 2

Holy- what the hell was that? Urgent meeting regarding Lost, season 2, in the TV section! Bring cigars and brandy. Spoilers galore there, none here.

Lost, Season Four, Spoilers, Obviously

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

• Jack grows a beard because he’s become an alcoholic addicted to pain killers who doesn’t take care of himself because he is depressed.
• Jack’s stubble appears Grey on the island, but his beard is not in the flash forward.
  • He could have just dyed his beard.
    • Jack has become “an alcoholic addicted to pain killers who doesn’t take care of himself because he is depressed” but cares enough about his appearance to dye his beard to not look old.

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.

Maths Cop!

Holy shit, they finally made a TV series about cops who solve crimes with maths! This is like all my dreams come true at once, except only one of them, and one I haven’t actually had yet, but totally would have if I’d thought to. It’s called Numbers (ignore unreliable sources such as the official site calling it ‘Numb3rs’ – that would mean it was stupid), and I’ve only seen five minutes of the first episode so far, but already there’s been an educational speech on the relevance of mathematics over the credit sequence, and straight off the bat some dude with odd eyebrows is correcting a woman on her use of the word ‘exponential’. Now he’s said “We can create a Bayesian filter!” and I am sold.

In other news, I have this week off, then next week I’m going to Moscow. Having masses of free time seemed like a good chance to try Black And White 2 (as did getting Black And White 2) and so far it is surprising me. I thought it would be pleasant but insubstantial, but in fact it’s got more substance than Colombia. But it’s extremely irritating. I thought it would again be an aimless playground from which no satisfying game could be sculpted, but in fact it’s alarmingly close to a truly brilliant RTS. It’s just definitely not one in its current state.

I have uncensorified my Serenity thoughts now that the film’s out. I may go and see it again in the middle of the day at some point this week – I used to love being able to do that at university; it’s just you and a few old ladies, and you emerge blinking to discover that the day is still in progress. But if you’ll excuse me, I must get back to CSI: Mathematics.

Phineas And Ferb

This made me laugh.

Povenmire and Marsh still found themselves fighting for some of their more surreal material. In several episodes, for instance, a character named Major Monogram interjects—apropos of nothing—the phrase “Ever since… the Academy.” A Disney executive quickly flagged the line, arguing (correctly) that it was utter nonsense. Povenmire assured him that it was exactly the kind of nonsense kids would parrot to one another at school. In fact, he felt so confident, he told the executive he expected to one day hear children repeat the line. The skeptical exec pledged to give Povenmire $100 for every time Povenmire heard it (unsolicited, of course). Continued

Pilot: Boardwalk Empire

Prohibition-era Sopranos. Steve Buscemi is a corrupt county treasurer in Atlantic City in the 20s, and it’s lovely to see him play a position of power. I’ve got so used to him as a snivelling loser that it’s surprising how well his perpetual sneer works as one of superior disdain. The tone is just right, for me: Buscemi’s character is a villain, but not repulsive so far. It’s possible to enjoy the early twentieth century opulence of his life without being put off by the guy himself.