Television: What rhymes with "Screwed"?

We finally got some answers this week on Supernatural.  There is going to be some speculation on my part and some SPOILERS if you didn't watch the episode last night.  Consider yourself warned.  I'll also be discussing some other shows in a more general fashion, so if you want to skip ahead to those paragraphs, I won't be offended.

Supernatural finally told us what the weirdness is with Sammy, Samuel, and those freaky cousins of theirs.  I TOLD them quite loudly a while ago that they should have burned Crowley's bones when they had the chance.  Did they listen?  NO.  Idiots.  Now he's holding Sammy's soul hostage, and has some kind of leverage over Samuel (and can I just interject how stupid it is to bring back one of the relatives the boys are named after?  Having two Sams is confusing... Gah!).  My private guess is that both Sam and Samuel were brought back without a soul, but Sammy's soul is the one currently in Samuel... Samuel was a demon when he was killed.  I'm betting his soul is long gone.  And I'm thinking the leverage Crowley has on Samuel has something to do with Mary, they boys' mother. 

Okay, enough spoilers and speculation.

Stargate: Universe is chugging right along.  Our unhappy soap-opera in space didn't have any trips through the stargate, but plenty of romantic side-trips, discussions of babies, divorce decrees, and secrets and lies.  It's starting to piss me off.  You know, I don't care if the ship's computer can run battle simulations in the colonel's dreams... it was one big "Groundhog's Day" episode, without the funny.  My god, I'm ready for them to bring back the fugly aliens, and I really didn't like those guys.

Graham Norton has started a new season... check your BBCA listings (or your equivalent if you're not in the US) for details.  He has quite a few American actors on his show, which is surprising.  I don't get all of the political satire, but his bashing on Amy Winehouse is funny.

I like the addition of Sela Ward to the CSI: NY cast.  She's always been fun to watch in any of her roles, and her current one as a transplanted Virginian scientist in New York is cute and sassy.  I'm hoping Mac finally has a love interest that isn't going to run off on him.

I feel unqualified to comment on the Rocky Horror Glee show, since I must be one of the few people who has only seen it on DVD.  I did get the joke Sue told about throwing toast, but other than that I was pretty much lost.

I have a lot more shows I watch, but I think that's enough for this week. 

Television: Goodbye and Hello

After a bunch of interesting (and sometimes baffling) season finales last week, it was good to finally get back some of the shows I've been puzzling over all summer, most notably "Glee" and "Fringe".

How anyone can mistake the new "Glee" character Coach Beast as anything but a man in drag, I will never know but my husband gave me skeptical looks whenever I brought it up.  And I hope this trend towards Lady Gaga and rap music dies a slow and painful death.  Bring on the Billy Joel, I mean he did give you performance rights... make use of it.  Something from "Glass Houses" please.

Judging by the season opener last night and plot spoilers gleaned over the summer, "Fringe" means to draw out the events of last season's finale over the next season.  I wonder what big plans Joshua Jackson has that he's signed a contract dropping himself back to guest star status?

"Supernatural" returns tonight.  It's a miracle, but we will see the return of character "Castiel" despite the fact that actor Misha Collins recently ran a staggering 52 miles for a charity event.  Honey, since leaving the Army I don't even want to run 5 feet, and his kind of mileage just staggers the mind.  Check out the non-profit organization "Random Acts" that Misha inspired, and see what they're up to.

Television: Summer's End

Big summer-season finales going on for the shows who didn't rate being in the fall line-up.  Covert Affairs wrapped their season with a possibly-fatal gunshot while boarding a helicopter.  Will Ben Mercer live long enough for us to find out what he's up to?

I've been enjoying Lyndsay Wagner's role on Warehouse 13.  It's too bad they don't seem to be interested in expanding it very far.  I would almost prefer her character to be the current Big Bad Evil instead of Ms. H. G. Wells.  Imagine the damage a medical doctor could do with W13 knowledge?

The Gates has been picking up for me.  Rather than the episode four revelation being a death-knell, it has led to some interesting plot developments.  The loss of Paul Blackthorne's character "Christian" brought an end to what I thought was an interesting exploration of addiction patterns, and began moving into adoption issues.  Meh.  And while it's trying to be a show that highlights relationships and communication in a supernatural setting, they seem to move past each point they're trying to make so fast that it really doesn't have time to sink in.  Maybe being limited to 13 episodes in a season causes this.  It's certainly been the case for HBO's True Blood this season.

Speaking of which, Alexander Skarsgaard is one sexy man, even dipped in concrete.  It's too bad this season spent so much time on inconsequential matters, like football players on V, that they had to flash through the main events.  At least Sookie has stopped being an idiot for the time being, although that maniacal cackle while using the garbage disposal makes me question her sanity.

Less than a week to the season premiere of Supernatural, and the advance trailers are making this season look really, really good.  They seem to really like evil Sammy, and since good Sammy is kind of a pill, I don't mind that in the least.

Television: The Meaning of Spring

For all of us living here on this planet, usually Spring is the time for new beginnings... green things start growing, new babies and animals are born, we clean out the stagnation of winter in our homes and begin letting air and sunshine in again.  So it seems odd that while new life is springing up all around us, in television it's a season of loss and endings.

Several shows have wrapped up their current seasons over the past two weeks.  Supernatural, Fringe, and V are some of the compelling season cliff-hangers I count among those.  This Sunday also marks the end of the era for LOST.  Some fans are excited, some are cautious, knowing either all things will either finally be explained or amount to a tremendous disappointment, depending on whether you trust the writers or not.  This very day I have seen people discussing things that confused them about Tuesday's episode, but claim that *something* will happen on Sunday that will tie it all together, and make it click for them.  I don't have their faith.  I think the writers *think* they've explained things satisfactorily, but honestly there are layers and details that they've either just plain forgot about, or don't care about.  And I don't think they're going to wrap them up.

I'm firmly in the "Science" camp.  I know the frailty of humans, and when it comes right down to it, even famous bigshot writers are human.  They'll forget things.  They'll explain something in a way they think is crystal clear, but is inscrutable to some or all of us.  They perceive their characters one way, while we perceive them another, and then they build on their own perceptions while leaving the rest of us confused when what they do doesn't mesh with our expectations.

The explanation of Adam and Eve?  I believe I've mentioned what a big disappointment that was to me... not in terms of plot, but in that it was supposed to be this big, huge proof of "a plan".  Dude, Adam and Eve could have turned out to be time-travelling Rose and Bernard, and you still could have intercut scenes from season one and it would have had the same amount of relevance.  That's not proof of a plan... that's proof that you own season 1 DVDs.

I've been burned by Bad Robot before.  The whole run of Alias after season two was a tremendous disappointment.  I just have zero faith that this ending on Sunday is going to be anything more than a big "Huh?" at the end of the day.  Maybe Jimmy Kimmel will wrap things up for them.

Television: Finale Time

Season finale of "Supernatural" aired last night.  It felt like a series finale up until the last ten seconds, but it's been confirmed that there will be another season next year.  Eric Kripke is no longer the show-runner, however, and with this season's big Apocalypse showdown, one wonders what they're going to be able to follow that up with.

I don't want to put spoilers in my blog... with DVR technology, and sites like Hulu, people can wait weeks to watch an episode.  I don't know why they'd want to with "Supernatural", but they can.  Let's just say the season finale was emotionally draining, in the most wonderful way, and they didn't go for the obvious "brotherly love saves the day" ending that I feared they would.  It was more subtly elegant than that.

"Fringe" was interesting this week, with a Peter-centric episode.  Martha Plimpton as a small-town Washington sherrif was very compelling... I smell spin-off potential.

"Chuck" is getting bizarre.  For a secret agent, I don't think Chuck is very secretive.  It seems like everyone who knows him (except the two goofy guys at the Buymore) are going to know his secret.  There seems to be a reappearance of Scott Bakula as Chuck's father in our near future, and I'm always going to be excited about that.

LOST was... confounding.  As Jimmy Kimmel said, if this had been "Seinfeld", this would be like the third-to-last episode being all about the soup nazi.  I get that a big part of understanding the series is understanding the island, but the huge focus on Jacob and his brother (and after 12 years they still didn't pick a name for him?  Ridiculous) was an odd way to go.   I still maintain they wasted half of this season on nothing but crap, now they're rushing through the end.  And the "Adam and Eve" thing is supposed to be proof that they planned this all along?  Bull.  All it proves is that they own a DVD player and re-watched the first season.  Anybody can write crap to fit after the fact.  Unless the man in black and his mother are named Adam and Eve (which would still be stupid) a handful of lines from season one spliced in doesn't prove anything.

A lot of people disagree with me on those points, but it's how I see it.

Television: A Week of Glee

I guess "Glee" came back from a long hiatus this week... FOX decided to have musical episodes on a lot of their shows to plug celebrate, including "Fringe".  There must have been some kind of financial compensation for participating, because the episode "Brown Betty" has to be a low point in the "Fringe" series.  Don't get me wrong, it had its cute moments, but honestly you could tell that there was no effort to integrate the singing with flair or panache.  They had a minimum to achieve, and they stuck to it.

"Supernatural" is kicking ass... and apparently, they can say "ass" on the CW now, because they said it with serious punch at least twice during "The Devil You Know".  Mark Shepard made the episode, though.  His portrayal of Crowley was snarky and fun as usual.  "Oh, I may have let it slip that we're lovers in league against Satan... Hullo Darlin'".  If you want to relegate an upper-level demon to a tormented future, I think that's the way to get it done.

I think the dueling hellhounds would have been more impressive if we'd actually seen a glimpse of one once in a while.  You know, "Hollow Man" style.

LOST took a week off, inexplicably.  I think there must have been a delay somewhere in the post-production pipeline, because we were promised an interruption-free end of the season.  Oh well, I'd rather have it polished and late than on-time and sloppy.

Television: Not your average apocalypse

Supernatural surprised me this week with a relatively cerebral 100th episode.  I was expecting a condensed version of "Die Hard" and instead we got something thoughtful and poignant.  Jim Beaver, who plays Bobby, amazed me with his subtle facial expressions.  Sam and Dean actually *talked* for the first time in a long time.  Sure, there was a crap-ton of angel-slaying, with Misha Collins as Castiel kicking some major ass, but all-in-all this was a thinking-person's episode.  Very cool in my book.

I did not get to watch V this week.  Getting  my husband hooked on the same shows as me is both a blessing and a curse.  I like having an in-house sounding board for all my crackpot ideas and theories, but if he doesn't have the time to sit down and watch with me, I'm kinda screwed.  I'm just getting him caught up on Fringe right now, I'll see what I can do about V this weekend.

LOST finally answered the question of what's going on with the whispers.  I'm a little surprised they went in the direction they did, because it's still feeding that whole "the island is purgatory" nonsense.  Maybe they denied it was purgatory way back in season one because they were peeved people figured it out so fast.  Dunno.  I won't pronounce anything proven until the credits roll on the last episode.

On the DVD side of things, I've re-watched the first season of Fringe, the first season of Castle, and gotten farther in the old canceled "Witchblade" than I did last time.  All to serve my afghan knitting.

Television: Gobsmacked?

**I have a dentist's appointment early Friday morning, so this is being written Thursday night.  Please excuse any errors in... continuity?  Tenses?

Well if you read my food post on Monday and my Knitting post yesterday, you know I went nuts on TV watching over the weekend, and this week's normally scheduled shows were right in there.  There's a lot to cover so I'll try to stick to the high points.

I had a serious backlog of "Caprica" episodes... the last six of the season, I found out.  Whether this is a normal season, or an "extended hiatus" as seems to be very popular lately, I don't know.  But the show has gotten really good.  Not just my usual "ooh it's techy and cool" good, I mean "wow, these characters are going to some very interesting places" good.  The Adama father going into V-world to find his dead daughter Tamara's avatar, only to be rejected when he finds her because he's killing himself spending so much time in the virtual world.  And to be pushed out of it by Doc Fraser from Stargate SG-1, well that's just a shocker.  Clearly she's had her eye on him for a while.

"Fringe" finally told us the story of how "our" Peter died and Walter crossed over to a parallel universe to find his alternate.  It might be more accurate to say that Walter told Olivia the story, and we happened to be observing at the time.  Either way, my empathy for Walter's predicament was played upon just right.

"Supernatural" is heading down a dark path.  While the boys were in heaven, they didn't see much that would make them want to strive to be there.  And the angels were just rude.  As I mentioned in the Ravelry SPN group, I don't see Dean wanting to help out God's warriors any time soon.  But I'm keeping an eye out for a trumpet player all the same.  The showdown isn't far away.


In the crime-procedural oeuvre, CSI: NY now has Madchen Amik in a recurring guest-star spot as Mac's new love interest.  Lucky girl.  And "forgotten"'s Christian Slater has a new gal on his team as well.  Wasn't Valentine's day a few months ago?  What's with all the detectives getting dates all of a sudden?  Even Bones and Booth are getting frisky-ish.

"V" has come back with a bang, thank goodness.  They can stop splashing big bright red letters all over my precious "Lost".  We know it's still here... shaddup about it already.

This week's LOST was excellent, too, offering great insights into Desmond's role in everything, just WHO the heck was sitting in the rocking chair way back when Locke was still Locke and not Smokey, and tiny subtle clues as to how it all ties together.  The conversation on Ravelry this week turned to the rabbits in the lab, and I made an observation, which I will cut and paste here: 

One of the chapters in Stephen King’s “On Writing”, a non-fictional book about his thoughts on writing and how he thinks he became a writer, there is an exercise where he’s trying to illustrate how writing a novel can be a form of time travel and telepathy at the same time. The exercise asks you to picture a rabbit in a cage, on a table with a tablecloth. The rabbit has a large number 8 painted on its side. His point is that he, the writer, wrote this several months before you read it (that’s the time travel part) but you’re both seeing pretty much the same thing in your heads (the telepathy part). Some small details might be different, such as the shape of the table, the color of the cloth and so forth, but you’re essentially picturing the same thing.

When I read “On writing” for the second time, it was after several seasons of LOST had passed, but it was written in the late 90s I think, and I was struck by the similarity with the rabbit, the number, and the concept of time travel/telepathy all tied together.
I don’t know if it means anything but I thought I’d throw it out there.

Chuck, unfortunately, did not record properly this week because COMCAST sucks.

Television: A Trio of Time-Travellers

"Supernatural" is still continuing to amaze and delight.  The Winchester boys, along with Castiel, the friendly angel, travelled back in time to save the boys' parents... again.  Because it worked out so *well* the time before.

"Fringe" dropped the big plot bomb on us last night right before they quit until after the Olympics!  They return on April Fool's Day.  Olivia manages to recapture her ability to see what things have travelled to our universe from alternate ones.  Rabid fans of the show can guess what happened last night without a spoiler.

Speaking of Time Travel, LOST is back, baby!  The two-hour premiere makes me think that they squandered two hours they could have spent *answering* questions creating new ones instead.  Oh well, they're the ones that have to figure out how to wrap it all up in one season, not me.

"The Mentalist" amused me last night.  Jayne once again used his carnival-huckster skills to solve a crime, but he managed to dump a $100,000 car off a cliff in the process... and gets a free Mercedes out of the deal.  Tell me what universe THAT happens in.

Ladies, don't forget you're losing the television all day Sunday for the Superbowl.  The signs are there, you just have to look for them... bags of chips and salsa mysteriously appear, your husband has dragged the grill out from the garage, and for one week of the year you don't have to remind him to take out the trash.  Just hope that a few of the ads during the bowl mention Valentine's Day, and it should even out.

Television: Recycling X-Files Scripts... go GREEN!

TV is back on again!  If you're like me, the hiatus over the holidays makes for some serious boredom.  Fortunately, we've made it through another year, and the shows are starting to trickle back in through the office building doors, dragging their feet back to the cubicles.  Much like we (okay, you guys) did.

Fantastic things this week, I don't know where to begin!

First, the premiere of a mid-season replacement series... Human Target.  Since you all are not the rabid Rick Springfield fans that I am, you are not aware that they tried to create this show several years ago with Rick in the leading role.  Now they have some Daniel Craig wannabe.  Once I got past that, I enjoyed this show.  Nice action, interesting characters, and enough mystery to keep me shouting at the TV (The bartender has a gun!  DUCK!!).  As long as the blonde cylon chick isn't a recurring character, I'll be happy.

Supernatural had a new episode last night, but I'm saving it to watch later today when I can cackle with glee.  Apparently Dean drops his pants.  *snicker*

Fringe was also back, with what looks like a recycled X-files script that never made it to production.  How a 75-million year old virus fits in with "the Pattern" is beyond me.  Are they even touting "the Pattern" as a plot point anymore?  You know, I was hoping that Fringe would keep the mythology episodes to a minimum, but now this is getting ridiculous.  I take it back, okay?

LOST is still premiering on February 2nd, despite a brief scare that the State of the Union address would conflict.  Now there are nutballs in some LOST forums I frequent claiming that the president must be a fan, or that public pressure made him reschedule.  Puh-lease.  I hope they're joking.  It would be nice if he'd schedule that during the holiday hiatus... like say, a week ago?  I'd bet more people would watch.

Now, if only V would come back.  I miss it terribly.

Knitting: Designer Dreams

The Brown Silk Socks for hubby are finished! I was sitting there over the (slightly boring) New Years long weekend, contemplating casting on yet another project to amuse myself, when I smacked myself in the forehead and just picked them up and finished them off. I mean, I'd already turned the heels, I just had the leg and cuff to do, which was mindless stockinette and ribbing until the yarn ran out. So I fired up the Matrix trilogy and finished them off. There's something about the exciting action and the musical soundtrack that makes my knitting speed really, really fast.

Kind of like how the theme song from NCIS makes my spinning wheel spin faster, but on a shorter scale.

I have also started my foray into designing knit garments. It's going to be a linen-blend nightie just in time for Valentine's Day, hopefully, if I'm not a complete spaz. If your New Year's resolution is to use up some of your yarn stash, or your budget can stand a $40-$60 yarn purchase, and you'd like to be a test knitter, drop me an email at tilandra(at)gmail(dot)com. Please put "Test Knitter" in the subject line. I'm still working out the details, but I think I can swing a discount for the test knitters I select who want the final, "prettied up" pattern in their Ravelry library. I'm working the prototype in a sport-weight cotton-linen blend from Knit Picks, but I'm sure the Louet linen line would work well, also. Any decent, non-stretchy (don't want it to grow, lol) soft sport-weight with a drapey feel will work too.

It's knit in the round, and there's a long stretch of straight stockinette. I've found it's a perfect project for practicing getting my knitting speed up. I cast it on after I finished the dreaded socks, and I'm about half-way done.

Next up after I finish the prototype is a hoodie sweater for my daughter. She's been wearing a fingering-weight sweater I knit for myself every day to school, and while she looks ultra-adorable in it, it's not nearly warm enough (the light yarn makes for a drapey but not very warm fabric). I've picked the "Jill hooded sweatshirt" pattern from Knit Picks, and the yarn for it should be arriving today, if the USPS has their act together.

Then, the long cabled cardigan from Patons. I was totally crushing on this amazing sweater Helen Shaver wore in an episode of Supernatural. Here's a link to the Ravelry discussion I started in the SPN group, looking for a comparable pattern. There are a few pictures. It was surprisingly difficult to find one that fit all the requirements from the original that I wanted. Mostly I wanted that amazing collar, so that's why I chose the one I did, but the gals had several great suggestions.

That's it for knitting this week. I still haven't touched my Chinook Shawl in the living room, but it's not like I need it to keep warm. :D