Review
Television
- Battlestar Galactica
- Space, Friday 10:00 PM (orig. SciFi)
- The final season of the well-regarded political space action soap has arrived, with the first of its
twenty promised episodes picking up the instant after the previous season’s unhinged cliff-hanger.
Despite a chaotic space battle and a fair bit of tension about who's going to do what, the premiere
doesn’t feel like a massive television event. That may be because it's a middle episode, picking
up from the finale and promising that the story is To Be Continued next week. Here’s hoping
that strong inter-episode continuity holds this season together, and that some of the series’ mysteries
are solved before the curtain comes down.
- Doctor Who
- BBC, Saturday
- Season Four is off to an auspicious start, with a well-paced story of alien meddling gone wrong.
Catherine Tate’s Donna Noble, last seen in the Christmas special The Runaway Bride,
has the potential to be an entertainingly no-nonsense companion for David Tennant’s Doctor to
pal around with — until, inevitably, something terrible happens to one or both of them.
- Intelligence
- CBC Television (concluded)
- Chris Haddock’s Intelligence lived on in a second season, with a slightly smaller cast
of characters but still plenty of intrigue to go around. Season One is reportedly coming to DVD, but Season
Three’s fate was uncertain enough to have prompted a thousand people to join a Facebook group advocating the
series’ return — in vain, alas. Intelligence, like the later seasons of Da Vinci,
was something of an experiment in long-form television. Story threads stretched out and out, promising to fade
completely and leave us with an almost sculptural structure of characters and situations that just twists and
unfolds without any evident or predictable end in mind. If only CBC had give poor Chris Haddock a couple of
full-season orders to work with, he wouldn’t have had to peddle a compromised version to Fox.
- Torchwood
- BBC
- A spin-off project that, as Kim Gravelle quickly realized, is to Russel T. Davies’ Doctor
Who as Angel was to Buffy — right down to the immortality
and the trench coat, really. CBC aired first-season episodes cut down from their original fifty minutes; if
they pick up the second season, a similar approach seems likely. It does slightly injure the nuance and
pacing, qualities that are already not rock solid on this show.
As expected, the tone and content aren’t as much in the family fun mould; given
the way Doctor Who has tended to uncork the trauma toward each season’s end,
there’s no telling where things are headed. Second-season episodes were more consistent in
quality, but the series is still not as tough as it pretends to be and would do well to embrace
warmer subject matter and to approach its hi-jinks with a lighter heart — more 1.9 “Random Shoes” and 2.1
“Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang”; less 1.6 “Countrycide” and 2.2 “Sleeper”.
- The Border
- CBC
- It’s hard not to bear a grudge against The Border, taking over as it does
Intelligence’s time slot, but it’s not trying to be the same kind of show.
Nicely put together technically, The Border wants to tell exciting and topical tales of action
and intrigue about a small group of people preserving national security despite the occasional meddling of their
political masters. Alas, the political intrigue is simplified to the point of silliness, and the Nerdy Super Hacker
character, an expedient cliché in this genre, is presented with a shameless lack of irony.
It’s not wrong to aspire to be Spooks, but why not aim for The Sandbaggers?
At least then, falling short would leave you with something really good.
- jPod
- CBC (concluded)
- It takes watching a few episodes of jPod to confirm that it’s not just a pack of random, rude
silliness. Given that confidence, you may find that this one-hour satirical absurdist fantasy grows on you —
and be disappointed at the news that the CBC has not renewed it for a second season.
- Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
- CTV (orig. Fox)
- With a title that makes it sound exactly like something you don’t want to watch, Sarah Connor
exceeds expectations within the first minute of its first episode, opening with a monologue that manages to be
expository and moving, setting out the premise of the show in an accessible emotional context. Which is not to say
that the story is short on guns ’n’ robots, following on more or less directly from 1991’s
Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
The character work is not insubstantial, however, and the early episodes are constructed with obvious care,
with the time-travelling, apocalypse-resisting concept framing an accessible parent/teenager relationship in
which Sarah Connor is simultaneously the world’s worst and best mother. Worst because she’s demanding, anxious,
and refuses to let her son, John, settle down and be himself. Best because, well, she’s doing it all to save him
from the unstoppable killer robots and a future in which humanity is doomed. Sarah Connor is founded on a
literalized metaphor for parenthood that also gets you limitless opportunities for shooting and explosions.
- Knight Rider (2008)
- NBC, pilot
- Don’t bother to get out of the car. It may have looked promising on the page, but at the end of its
first hour this TV movie had built exactly zero interest — unless you like spotting the low production
values and dialogue clangers. Nonetheless, NBC has scheduled a weekly series for the 2008 fall season.
Print
- Spook Country
- William Gibson, 2007, 371 pages. 978-0-399-15430-0
- Gibson’s latest and perhaps most mainstream-accessible novel has some things in common
with his previous Pattern Recognition, but the continuity is slight and will
go completely unnoticed by new readers. Proper review pending; in the meantime, there are
notes from a recent promotional appearance by the author.
Film
- Blade Runner: The Final Cut (1982, 2007)
- Harrison Ford, Sean Young, Rutger Hauer; Ridley Scott (dir)
- The most important thing about this version of the 1982 film is that you have a chance to see
it on the big screen, where you can best appreciate the set design, the aggressive lighting, and
the flight through the city. It’s essentially a cleaned up version of the Director’s Cut,
so there will be no surprises beyond the fact that its influential, now-doubly-retro future is still so
effective. The bits that have never made sense still don’t, but there may be something about the
edit, or just the opportunity to read tiny facial expressions, that seems to improve the flow.