Category Archives: television

How we got here, or "12 days earlier"

I can’t recall what we were watching last week when Husband and I decided that someone needs to place a moratorium on the use of flashbacks in TV shows. If you write Lost you get a pass on this one. That’s a given since it’s a) a show with lots of wacky time travel and b) it’s almost over.

The rest of the writers out in TV land need to pay attention. I’m not kidding, Smartypants. Knock it the fuck off. Right now.

TV Tropes concisely calls this annoying device, “how we got here” and provides a handy and concise definition:

A type of In Medias Res / Whole Episode Flashback, where the story opens at a point at (or near) the end of the story, and the bulk of the story is spent showing how the character got to this point.

I swear 99% of the time that “3 hours earlier” caption is really saying to the viewer, “We’re phoning this shit in because we spent the weekend drinking progressively harsher varieties of hard alcohol and watching Emergency on Netflix and then we got back into the writer’s room on Monday and we had to pull something out of our ass fast for the sweeps week episode or the show runner was going to kick us to the curb.”

A few shows have made brilliantly effective use of the technique. Breaking Bad immediately springs to mind. About eleventy-million cop shows and procedurals can not make the same claim. TVTropes agrees:

Breaking Bad opens on a man driving an RV recklessly through badlands dressed only in a gasmask and underpants. He glances behind him: a flash of what looks like two dead bodies sliding around on the floor. Beside him is an unconscious man, also in a gasmask. Three weeks ago … now how are we going to get from this quiet suburban scene to there?

Speaking of Lost, how great is Miles? I don’t think it counts as a spoiler to take a moment to quote one of my all-time favorite Miles lines: “Well I lived in these houses 30 years before you did, otherwise known as last week, and I have no idea where the hell we are”. Otherwise known as last week. Fantastic.

Speaking of Emergency, which you must never do out loud or you run the risk of an ancient Incan curse elevating the temperature in your cranial cavity until your brains boil and gush out of your skull through your eyesockets, which will conveniently be empty because your eyeballs were liquified and then evaporated, Husband and I watched an episode a few nights ago. Unbelievable Badness.

If you inoculate yourself with a couple episodes of Emergency, I bet you could watch Galactica 1980 or Love Boat or any number of painful things without batting an eye. The thing we liked best about Emergency were the extended sequences of them driving to an emergency with the sirens running. These scenes go on for a long long time. How long? Mystery Science Theater territory.

You can watch the episode we watched on hulu: go to season 1, episode 2 (“Botulism”) and see if you can make it all the way to the end.

Go on, I dare you.

I doubledog dare you.

Hawaii Five-O

CBS is bringing back Hawaii Five-O and they’ve hired Daniel Dae Kim (Jin on Lost) to play the lead. Eonline’s Kristin dos Santos summed it up the best:

As evidence that good things do happen to good people (please don’t get me gushing about how throughly awesome DDK is in real life), Daniel pretty much won the lottery today with CBS’ Hawaii Five-O, as it is the one and only series shooting on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, which Dan and his wife and sons have called home now for six years. (And of course, the show is very lucky to have him, too.) This means no uprooting the fam back to the mainland.

Not to mention, CBS’ Hawaii Five-O is from the great minds of Fringe producers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, who are part of the JJ Abrams family (as was Dan’s previous series, Lost—duh), and the show is already getting substantial buzz and rave reviews from those who’ve seen it.

What does Michael Scott call that? A win-win-win!

What does the Island call it? Fate!

Awesome.

Abraham Lincoln

I’m a bit bored by the idea of Abraham Lincoln as a vampire hunter, whether in a book or a movie. Not because I’m tired of horror mash-ups – although I probably am – but because I think Mike Mignola’s Lincoln does such a bang-up job fighting evil in The Amazing Screw On Head that I’m not sure there’s anywhere else to go with it. If you haven’t seen Screw On Head, you can watch the entire pilot episode on google video or buy it on DVD. It’s worth 22 minutes of your time. Why? Because I said so.

The Sopranos in Space; Or, Tammy's got a gun (Caprica spoilers? Probably not, but maybe)

I like Caprica a lot more than I like (the re-imagined) Battlestar Galactica. I enjoyed BSG the first time I watched it. The suspense kept me watching – much like Lost, I wanted to see how it all resolved, despite the frequently turgid pacing.

I even enjoyed re-watching the 1st season after the series ended – that was fun. But that’s where BSG and I had to part ways because rewatching it past the 1st season was so frakking boring for me that I wanted to gouge my eyes out with a spork just to end the monotony. A spork, people. Do you understand how much torpor a show has to cause that the viewer becomes so lethargic that they can’t even get their ass off the couch to find a proper eye-gouging implement, like a spoon or perhaps a melon baller? A lot.

Luckily, I didn’t have a spork close at hand, so I still have two eyes. I also have a lot more room on our Netflix queue now that I’ve purged the rest of BSG. If you love BSG and want to watch it over and over, more power to you. I just can’t.

Nevetheless, I thought I’d give Caprica a go, if only out of morbid curiosity and because Eric Stoltz is kinda nerdy hot. Caprica is supposed to be about the creation of the Cylons and also about the relationship between Daniel Graystone (Stoltz) and Bill Adama’s father (Esai Morales, a talent that is seriously being wasted here so far). You’d think the story of Bill Adama’s formative years would be interesting. You’d be wrong. You’d be seriously frakking wrong.

The Young Bill Adama subplot, wherein the Sopranos, I mean, the Adamas, go about their daily lives is boring. We get it. The Taurans face prejudice and cultural stereotypes and some of them are involved in organized crime. We get it. We get it. We get it.

Do you hear me? Borrrrring.

It put me into such a stupor that I failed to even notice that a major(ish) character is played by James Marsters (aka Spike).

Do you even know who your audience is, dear writers? I made you a chart to help you out. This is a breakdown of the typical Caprica viewing audience:
capricaviewers

Now, let’s make with the rise of the genocidal robots already.

edited to add:
Sorry iphone users – the chart categories are:
-BSG fans
-People who think Eric Stoltz is kinda hot
-People who accidentally watched Caprica because they were too lazy to change the channel when they realized it was only Friday & they had to wait a whole ‘nother day for Dinocroc versus Megashark