Random TV Roundup

So Heroes is back and The Office is back. I've stopped having any hopes for Heroes; it goes in too many inconsistent directions. This season doesn't seem as bold as last season's Villains arc, but that also means it isn't as weird and stupid as last season's Villains arc. The Office is hitting that point in a show's lifespan where it feels like it has said everything new it was going to say, and now it's just continuing because people are still making a salary and they don't want to be unemployed. I mean, I like the characters, and I still laugh, but it feels sort of tired and obligatory so far this season.

I'm watching a few new shows as well. Glee is fun, although I have trouble suspending disbelief on this show a lot. I understand that the musical numbers are supposed to be communicating "emotional reality" rather than "real reality," so that's not so much my problem. It's more stuff like the extreme disconnect between the cartoonish aspects of the comedy followed by an attempt to make you feel some real emotion for the characters. The comedy is so extreme that it undercuts the drama, I think. Or maybe it's just me getting old. But the music and singing are good.

Of course, my bigger problem is with the basic premise of the show. Glee takes place in a high school where Glee Club singers are looked down upon as the lowest of social pariahs. And I understand that social stratification in high school may not make a whole lot of sense. But seriously, in a world where American Idol draws tens of thousands of hopeful applicants a season and huge ratings, is there anybody who buys the idea of a school where singing is basically despised by all but a few freaks and talented singers are shunned as pariahs? Really?

I finally got around to watching Flashforward last night. If you don't know, the premise is that everyone in the world blacks out at the exact same time for 2 minutes, 17 seconds. And during that time, they experience a vision of life six months in the future. Joseph Fiennes stars as an FBI agent whose vision was of himself investigating the cause of the flashforward, leading to his being hunted down by mysterious assassins in masks. So of course, he starts up the investigation.

It was an intriguing premise well handled. But one weird little detail jumped out at me from out of nowhere. Fiennes's wife is played by Sonya Walger, who plays Penelope Widmore on Lost. In Walger's flashforward, she saw herself cheating on her husband with another man, who is revealed to be Jack Davenport, who played Norrington in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies.

But here's the thing that jumped out at me. Before Davenport played Norrington, he played a character named Steve Taylor on a British sitcom titled Coupling. And before Walger played Penelope, she played a character named Sally Harper on the American version of Coupling. Now the two of them are going to do a little coupling of their own on a new show. Easter egg.

There's a new sitcom on NBC titled Community, about an oddball group of students at a community college who initially come together to study Spanish. The show is pretty good, but still trying to find its footing. However, this bit from the end credits of the second episode is gold. These guys are partners who were supposed to come up with a simple conversation using sample phrases in Spanish, such as "Donde esta la bibliotheca." People get loopy while studying. Click and enjoy.

Big Audio Wednesday - Dragnet

Not much of an entry today. The program is the radio version of Dragnet, starring Jack Webb. Like Gunsmoke, the radio version feels grittier than the TV version did, but at heart, they're the same show, from the opening theme, to Webb's opening narration, to the clipped dialogue and Webb's unfunny final punch line, to the announcer telling us that the story is true and what sentence the perps received.

Included here not because I have a special love of Dragnet, although I watched a lot of it when I was a kid. But in this episode, :Big Genius," not one, but two characters have the same names as Heroes villains. Having one character with the same name is not so big a deal, but when two characters are named in the same sentence, it gives you a weird twinge of recognition.

So here's Dragnet from July 12, 1955. Enjoy. Click the widget to listen.

Don't Get Me Wrong

I like Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. And I love Lost. And I'm still hanging in there with Heroes.

But it just sort of came home to me that three of the series I watch on a weekly basis are dealing with time travel this season. And it's getting a little exhausting.

Still, just finished watching last night's Lost and I've got to say, "Holy crap, what a twist at the end." I love this show.

TV Round-up

I still haven't watched last night's shows, so the Chuck and Heroes impressions aren't completely up-to-date, but oh well...

I don't watch Bones, but I have enjoyed some of the episodes I've watched. However, the other day, I decided to watch the recent episode involving the death of a woman in a Renfaire-looking outfit. Turns out, it was a booth babe from a science-fiction convention. I can't believe how awful it was.

The main character, Brennan, is supposed to be this brainiac who's a little out of touch with the everyday world, but they were having her miss even the most obvious of "Star Wars" references, like some alien in a 50's B-picture. I mean, I halfway expected her to say, "Is this one of your Earth jokes?" Plus, the vibe around the convention and the characterization of the fans bore only the slightest resemblance to any kind of fan activity I've ever seen. Chuck would have gotten at least a little of it right.

For instance, Chuck's big episode after the break, "Chuck vs. the Third Dimension," had Chuck protecting a rock star. Now the rock star just happens to be played by the most famous hobbit rock star ever, Dominic Monaghan of "The Lord of the Rings" and Lost. But the rock star's name is Tyler Martin, which was just incredibly weird, because the day before I watched this episode, I listened to an interview with Tyler Martin, web-cartoonist and developer of the Comicpress plug-in for Wordpress, which I use on the Hero Go Home site (Boom! Review of TV show turns into reference to obscure geek hero turns into plug for my own site! Trifecta!). Maybe they weren't giving a nod to that Tyler Martin, but Chuck is just geek-aware enough that they could have been.

Interesting nod toward plausibility in the newest episode of Chuck. One of the problems with Chuck's premise is that he was infected with this huge intelligence database that was then destroyed. Now Chuck's got all the intel in his head. But intel goes stale after a while. What you knew about someone three weeks or months or years ago might not be relevant to what they're doing now. So Chuck has to get updated every now and then or else all he's got is a head full of old secrets that are currently useless.

So in the latest Chuck, he gets reinfected with an evil version of the Intersect database. However, this one comes from a computer with the latest high-speed datalines running into the building, not from an email attachment sent from a cell phone. Better.

Fox has a new show called Lie to Me. It's a mystery series starring Tim Roth as a guy who has spent his life studying lies and the way people act when they're telling them. So the camera is always focusing on twitches the actors make as they deliver their dialogue. It's a pretty good show, but the dialogue between the main characters gets awfully tiresome. (note: this is not actual dialogue from the show)

Character 1: What's wrong?

Character 2: Nothing.

Character 1 (pointing at 2's face): No! See? Right there. Mouth shrug indicating deception. You're lying. And I know what you're lying about!

Character 2 (pointing back): Ha! One-sided shrug! You don't know and you're just fishing.

Character 1: Maybe I don't. But something's wrong and you want to tell me.

Character 2: No, I don't. I'm fine.

Character 1 (pointing): Ha! Smiled with your mouth and not your eyes. Liar!

God, give it a rest.

Heroes continues to be Heroes, half-awesome, half-annoying-as-all-get-out. The characters are now fugitives from a government pogrom, which is led by the The Flying Senator who has turned Judas Goat. They've managed to make Suresh less ridiculous than in the "Villains" arc, but they've stolen Hiro's powers and turned him into a petulant whiny brat. I don't want petulant whiny Hiro. I want a Hiro who's on his way to being the ass-kicker we saw back in Season One, with the silly soul-patch and the katana slung across his back.

Other than that, Terminator is back and Dollhouse has premiered. I like what I've so far of Dollhouse, but I'll wait until after the third episode before I give my impressions.

Chuck Rocks

So I'm watching Chuck's Christmas episode tonight (it's not available on Hulu yet, but I'll update with the link tomorrow ETA: Here it is) and it sets up this hostage crisis in the Buy More. And suddenly, we hear just a hint of "Ode to Joy" on the soundtrack, and I'm thinking, "Is this supposed to be some sort of shout-out to 'Die Hard,' what with the hostage crisis at Christmas and everything?"

And then the LAPD pull up outside, and who should be with them?

That's right: Sgt. Al Powell.

But since Chuck is nothing if not unafraid to go over the top, instead of then slamming us over the head with a dozen more "Die Hard" references, they throw in a reference to a completely different cool-ass movie. You see, the guy taking everybody hostage is named something like Nate Rhyerson, but everybody calls him "Ned." Bing! (Full disclosure: Ned 'Rhyerson' is not in fact played by Stephen Tobolowsky, but Sgt. Al Powell is played by Reginald Veljohnson)

Heroes wasn't bad as a finale to the "Villains" arc, and I hope like hell Sylar's really dead, cause I'm sick of the sight of him, but of course, we never saw the body, so he'll be back, dammit. He'll be back.

And I'm afraid we may have seen the last of My Own Worst Enemy, which is too bad, because I was having fun with it. It's problem is that as a spy drama, it's as unbelievable as Chuck, but not as funny, so it's harder to buy into. Sort of a TV version of "True Lies," but without Jamie Lee Curits and Eliza Dushku, more's the pity.

A Heroes Huh?

I just noticed that last post was my 400th. Woo-hoo. However, seeing as how my first post was a dummy placeholder to stash the graphics I was using on the blog, this is more properly my 400th post. So yay.

Back when I was buying comics regularly, the way I decided to drop a title from my list was if I noticed that I was regularly pushing that title to the bottom of my reading stack. If I got to the bottom of the stack and said, "Oh crap, I've still got to read Flash," I knew I was pretty much done with that title (then again, simple inertia kept me reading Flash for probably two years past when I really should have stopped).

I''m noticing the same thing with Hulu, now. When I log onto Hulu to watch my slate of Monday shows, I'm like, "Heroes? Nah, later. Terminator? Yeah, but Chuck first, then Terminator, then Heroes and My Own Worst Enemy if I still have time."

I felt bad for Jeph Loeb when I learned he'd been fired from Heroes, but frankly, even though this season is better than last, it's still disappointing. That's the risk you run with series that have a central mystery. If the mystery disappoints as it is revealed, the entire series deflates, especially if you haven't managed to craft characters the viewer wants to stick with for the long haul.

I can count the characters I really like watching on one hand (Hiro, Claire and HRG), with some others I'm fairly interested in (Daphne and Elle). Some characters I used to like have turned ridiculous and annoying (Nathan and Suresh), and I was tired of Sylar by the end of Season 1.

But the thing that's got me writing about Heroes now is the lastest Hiro subplot. Hiro's brain has been regressed to age 10, and his only way of finding out what's been going on in the last few months has been to read issues of 9th Wonders, the prophetic comic book drawn by the late Mystery Sock.

We first learned that the comic was prophetic in episode 2 of season 1. Hiro uses that issue to guide him for several episodes, then in episode 19, we see Isaac shipping the "last" issue to the printers via bike messenger, which it appears never gets published, because whenever characters reference the story in the future, they're looking at unpublished proofs, not the actual issue in question. And that issue tells how Hiro travels to the future, then comes back and stabs Sylar in the final episode of Season one.

But now, ten and eleven episodes into Season Freaking Three, 9th Wonders is still being published, still depicting events contemporaneous with the show's timeline. Who has taken up the mantle of prophetic cartoonist? Oh, these are issues that Isaac drew before he died, only now the inventory has finally run out. But there is a rumor that there is one final story out there, in a sketchbook Isaac gave away just before he died.

Remember when I was complaining about "Bolt" and moviemakers purposely getting their own job wrong for story convenience? That goes double for this show, with an exec producer who is a working comics professional resorting to this kind of ridiculous retcon to write characters out of a fix. Seriously, as much as I love Hiro, I wouldn't cry if they killed him off, along with Peter and Angela and Poppa Petrelli and Sylar and any-fucking-body else who can time-travel/predict the future. It was cool for a season, but now it's seriously hurting the show. We're all getting sick of that shit. Either dump the prophecies, or at least stop making the show completely revolve around them.

No More Wheel

So I've talked before about the "Wheel of Heroes" (if you don't feel like following the link, suffice it to say that in the first season, the Wheel of Heroes, like the Wheel of Time, turned exceedingly slowly). but I don't think I can use that descriptor anymore.

Because this season, they've gone to the opposite extreme, introducing potential story arcs, then resolving them almost before you know what's happened. First, Sylar's on the loose, while Now-Peter's hunting Future-Peter. Then Now-Peter's gone, trapped in level 5, and Sylar is captured. Then the Level 5 villains break loose, and we're led to think that the season will consist of hunting them down. But then Sylar wipes the floor with them next episode, and Now-Peter is freed. Then Now-Peter absorbs Sylar's power just as the real Sylar is learning to control his, and it looks like Peter is now going to become this season's Big Bad. But then Peter loses his powers, etc. etc. I'm getting whiplash from all the reversals.

I really need to work on stories again, but every time I sit down to do it, I just get a huge buzz of white noise in my brain. I know where I want the plot to go, but there are too many things I need to set up to get it going, and I can't sort out the scenes.

Life etc.

I'm very cash-poor through the end of the month, so I've been spending a lot of time at home, watching shows on Hulu and listening to old radio on Internet Archive.

On Hulu, I've been watching Life, a fascinating cop drama. The set-up: cop falsely imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit is exonerated by DNA evidence after 12 years. He gets a 50 million dollar settlement from the LAPD and a job with the force as a detective. But he is not the same man he was. His years in prison left him damaged, and he coped by studying Zen philosophy. Now he solves crimes as a police detective while also investigating the mystery of who framed him.

It's a fascinating show, and Damian Lewis is excellent as Charlie Crews, the main character. Crews is constantly walking a fine line between brilliance and dementia, and he is very aware of his surroundings at all times, seeing things that others miss. He is fully in the moment, as it were.

A new show that just debuted is My Own Worst Enemy, starring Christian Slater as a normal suburban husband and father who discovers that he has a secret life as a government spy. The agency wipes out his memories after every mission, so while he is at home, he has no knowledge of his other life, no secrets to spill. Everything is perfect until the conditioning breaks down at the wrong time, and he suddenly becomes his civilian self in the middle of an assassination attempt.

The pilot was really entertaining, but the central gimmick could get really tired very quickly. So I'm intrigued to see where the show takes the premise.

The pre-season hype for Heroes basically said, "Heroes become villains and vilains become heroes." After five episodes, it's obvious that they're taking that literally. Sylar is on the road to rehabilitation, while Peter has become this season's central villain. The world is on the path to destruction thanks to Hiro's screw-ups, while the cute speedster thief he calls "Nemesis" has been shown in prophetic dream to become a hero working to save the world. Claire is trying to become a hard-ass hero while noble HRG is going even further over the deep end in "trying to protect this family" (and I will be very happy if I never have to hear him deliver that particular line again). Nathan has once again become a tool of the bad guys, and Suresh has turned into a bug-fuck crazy monster.

I don't think I like it.

But Chuck is cool.

On the old radio front, I've been listening to X Minus One, adaptaions of classic science-fiction stories from Galaxy Magazine in the 50's. And it just reminds me how trite some of those old stories could be. But it's fun listening anyway.

Heroes Season 3

I was busy on Monday night, but I finally got around to watching the Heroes season 3 opener. And as is usual with Wheel of Heroes, I find myself torn between, "That's effin' awesome" and "why the hell did they do that?"

Things I liked:

- The revelation that Peter shot Nathan I thought was cool, but also disliked (see below)

- Claire asking Sylar if he was going to eat her brain, and his reply of "That's disgusting."

- Cute speedster chick

- Elle's awesome reaction to Sylar's attack--perfectly in keeping with what we learned about her character last season, it both solves a present problem while opening up an entirely new one

- The out-of-nowhere revelation about Sylar's origin = kick-ass

Things I didn't like;

- The blatant movie ripoffs--Claire hiding in the closet with louvered doors, clutching a knife (straight out of "Halloween"), and Suresh suddenly turning into Jeff Goldblum in Cronenberg's "The Fly"

- Once again, the story turns on time-travelers trying to prevent a future they've witnessed--Future Peter's dystopia, Hiro's glimpse of disaster, Mama Petrelli's dreams

- The introduction of a new Ali Larter character to replace StripperHulk--this could be cool, but smacks of desperately trying to have it both ways, i.e. retain a popular actor in the cast while dumping a character who has run out of story options

- characters who have not been written out undergoing wild changes in personality for plot convenience--Suresh's sudden mania to have powers, Nathan's freaking bizarre religious conversion

I'm looking forward to future developments, but damn, this show can be frustrating even when it's good.

The Season So Far

I have not been posting TV updates at the furious pace I did last season at this time, because nothing is exciting me the way it did last season. I haven't even tried to watch Smallville, which has stretched way beyond its initial concept. I think they were in a position to do a grand wrap-up about three season ago and end the series the way it really should have ended. But the ratings were too good so they've had to do all these ridiculous contortions with Brainiac and Bizarro and the Justice League, and now I can't even watch it.

Prison Break is the same way. The pilot was stunning, I thought. But the premise didn't seem like a good premise for a series (which it wasn't--Prison Break was apparently originally intended to be a feature), and the ridiculous contortions they've had to go through to keep from ending the series finally wore me out.

Heroes, I still like, but the newness has worn off, and they need to get things moving again. This week, they finally brought back Sylar and Niki (StripperHulk) and showed us what happened to them. But the multiple plots are just not progressing at all, except for Peter's maybe, and three episodes is a little long to let this go on. Stuff needs to start happening soon.

So far, I've been right about Reaper. Three episodes in, and it's pretty much a MOTW (Monster of the Week) show. It's a funny MOTW show, which helps, and Smallville showed you can grow out of the MOTW syndrome without losing the heart of the show. But I'm not sure how long I'll stay interested.

Chuck is strange. It's also funny, and in a sense, it's also MOTW, only in this case, it's Mission of the Week. But the characters actually seem to be growing and developing in ways that the characters in Reaper aren't, so I like Chuck more. The big problem with Chuck is the ABSOLUTE STUPIDITY of the central premise, which just bugs me. I think it would bug me a lot less if the government agencies he was working with were like U.N.C.L.E. or S.H.I.E.L.D. or something; having him work for real-world agencies makes it harder for me to accept the fantasy premise.

Journeyman and Bionic Woman intrigued me, but not enough that I wanted to keep watching either one. So far, the only new series that I'm really going out of my way to watch are Chuck and Kitchen Nightmares.

Monday Night TV Returns

Prison Break actually came back last week, but I found I didn't care anymore. I mean, at all. I decided I would rather watch a football game between two teams I don't care about than watch another exhausting season of ridiculous plot twists, no matter how much I liked Wentworth Miller's character.

Last night, though, was the good stuff on NBC. Debuts of Chuck and Journeyman, and the season premiere of Heroes.

Chuck is a McG show, so it's stylish and funny, but you can't expect everything to make sense. It's about a guy named Dave... kidding, it's about a guy named Chuck who works as a computer repairman at a store that is an obvious take-off on Best Buy. An old college buddy sends Chuck a mysterious email full of scary images that flicker across his screen at incredibly high speed. Turns out, the email attachment contains the entire contents of a top-secret database meant for sharing information between CIA and NSA (that's one hell of an attachment, let me tell you).

After that, things start getting weird for Chuck. He strikes up a flirtatious relationship with a gorgeous blond customer, getting his first date in years. A mysterious black-suited figure breaks into his apartment and tries to steal his computer, destroying it in the process. Then he recognizes a terrorist in Large-Mart (guess what it's supposed to be) without knowing how he knows. Then guys in black suits show up during his date, apparently trying to kill him. But that's okay, because his date turns out to be a CIA agent trying to retrieve the information on the email he received (she was the black-suited ninja, you see).

By the end of the episode, Chuck has managed to survive both the spies and a terrorist bomb plot, and it is revealed that the information sent to him is now permanently stored inside his head. So the only way the NSA and CIA can use all that information is if they work together to keep Chuck safe. He refuses to join either agency, so he continues to work at Buy More, while his beautiful CIA love interest and a bulldog NSA assassin (played by Adam Baldwin of Firefly) keep watch over him.

The show is a lot of fun with appealing characters. It doesn't make a damn bit of sense, though. I'm not a guy who furiously thinks through all the implications of every plot point, trying to find holes. Normally, I let myself go with the flow and only drop out of the trance if something egregiously stupid happens. Like somebody sending an email attachment from a handheld PDA that contains the entire contents of a room-size supercomputer. Or the contents of a hard drive being irretrievably wiped out when a computer falls off a shelf. Or nobody at the NSA thinking to retrieve the contents of the email attachment from the ISP, rather than from Chuck himself. But of course, once again, NSA is presented as the secret government agency in charge of assassination, not computer security-Hollywood is full of idiots.

So I'll watch the show as long as it's on, just for the fun and the relationship between Chuck and the gorgeous CIA babe. But I don't expect it to last even a full season unless they can fix the stupidity.

Journeyman was pretty good, too, almost a modern remake of Quantum Leap. This newspaper reporter begins inexplicably making brief trips back in time, in order to fix problems in the timestream or something. He's making the world a better place, but destroying his marriage in the process. I liked the show, but wasn't mesmerized by it, the way I was by Daybreak.

And I'm so happy that Heroes is back. Once again, though, the Wheel of Heroes turns exceedingly slowly. Once again, the premiere episode does not manage to fit in every character. We see nothing of StripperHulk's dysfunctional family, nor of the resurrected Sylar. And some actors apparently got signed to other shows--Matt "TelepathiCop" Parkman has quietly divorced, as has Nathan "The Flying Pol" Petrelli. Maybe the Heroes folks decided to fear the Rena Sofer Curse.

One thing that jumped out at me on this ep, other than the complete lack of plot progress, was the wonky time-shifting. We intercut between Hiro in the past and characters in the present. That's fine. But we also intercut between, say, Indestructible Cheerleader Claire in gym class, then Molly Walker having a bad dream in the middle of the night, then back to Claire, still in gym class. The characters are supposedly on opposite ends of the continent (I think), but even a three-hour time difference can't account for that. The commentaries in the Season One set mentioned that they sometimes break up scenes in editing to get a better flow, but this one just didn't work.

Still, I'm excited by the possibilities. Let's get this Wheel rolling.

More Heroes DVD Stuff, Six Degrees of Frazier's Brain, and a Tiny Touch of Reviewing Nostalgia

When I was reviewing movies for the Daily Oklahoman, waaaaay back in 1986-87, two of the movies I reviewed were "Teen Wolf" and "Burglar," both written by the team of Matthew Weisman and Joseph Loeb III. While watching "Teen Wolf," I figured that the writers must be comic book fans, both because they treated Michael J. Fox's lycanthropy more like a superpower than a curse and because they used the term "wolf out" to refer to his transformation (which was a shout-out to the old Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno Incredible Hulk TV series; the series's crew used the term "Hulk-out" when talking about Bixby's transformation scenes).

Imagine my surprise when I learned recently that Joseph Loeb III had changed his professional moniker to Jeph Loeb, comic-book writer extraordinaire who has also achieved great success in TV, as a producer/writer on Smallville, Lost, and Heroes.

Speaking of guys who change their professional monikers, Loeb and Weisman also received story credit on the sequel to "Teen Wolf," "Teen Wolf Too," but they did not write the screenplay. The screenplay is credited to R. Timothy Kring, known these days as Tim Kring, creator of Heroes.

I've now listened to all the commentary tracks (except one which was so inane that I couldn't finish it). One of the things I've been newly reminded of: Actors often don't read entire scripts. Depending on the actor's philosophy of acting and/or devotion to craft, they may only read the scenes in which they appear. This reminds me of a Shatner anecdote I'm going to try to find and post about later.

And here's my own little version of "Six Degrees of Separation," connecting me to Heroes. I went to high school with a guy named Steve Spencer, whose dad went to school with a guy named Hunt Lowry. Hunt Lowry produced (among other things) a movie called "Get Crazy," starring Malcolm McDowell and directed by Allan Arkush. McDowell played Linderman on Heroes, and Arkush is an exec producer and has directed five episodes.

So Steve Spencer to his dad to Hunt Lowry to Arkush/McDowell. That's four steps. Can I do better?

Hmmm. Another of my high school classmates was Suzy Amis, who starred in a movie called "Firestorm" with Howie Long. "Firestorm" was co-produced by Joseph Loeb III, aka Jeph Loeb, writer and co-executive producer on Heroes. That's two steps.

Can I do any more? Let's fish around on IMDB...

One of my classmates at USC was a guy named Ken Tsumura. His most recent credit was as an exec producer on "Curious George." The first time I saw Ken's name in credits was on The Simpsons as production manager. George Takei, who played Hiro's father on Heroes, has done voices on three episodes of The Simpsons. That's two again (I could cheat and say it's only one, because I met George Takei at my first sci-fi convention, but getting autographs doesn't count, I don't think).

You know, it's a fun game to play with Kevin Bacon, but it gets a little depressing when I start playing it with my own name.

Heroes on DVD

Happy Labor Day.

I bought the Heroes Season One DVD set on Friday. Watched them all weekend. I haven't watched all the commentaries yet, but TV episode commentaries aren't always that interesting. Usually, I'm looking for further insight into story decisions and lots of times, the commentaries are more along the lines of "We shot this in downtown L.A. at three A.M. I think it really looks like New York."

Anyway, a few observations:

• The deleted scenes are mostly useless, but in at least one instance, they illuminate something that didn't make sense from the final aired episode. In the early parts of season one, there was a scene where StripperHulk drives a long way (after burying a couple of bodies in the desert) to visit D.L.'s mother. In the scene, we learn what crime D.L. has been accused of (and begin to suspect that it was really StripperHulk who committed it). But the scene seems to be pointless. Niki walks in the door, has a three-minute conversation, then says, "I want you out of Micah's life." What was the point of visiting, then? The deleted scenes give the answer; a deleted subplot about the grandmother calling Child Protective Services, trying to have Niki declared unfit, which was what prompted the visit. The scene couldn't be cut entirely, because it had too much necessary exposition about D.L. and Niki, but they probably had too little time or money to write and shoot a new scene which did the same thing, so we ended up with this weird pointless little episode.
  
• I still don't like the "Hiro's father" sub-plot. It really seems tacked on and made up as they went. They refer to the "Takezo Kensei" stories as early as episode one (I think), but the idea that Hiro's dad is super-rich just sticks in my craw. It undercuts the everyman appeal that Hiro had at the beginning, and George Takei, beloved as he is by fans, just doesn't have the acting chops of the rest of the cast. I wonder about his powers, too. From the training montage with Hiro, it appears to be a super-teaching ability, or else some sort of time-dilation effect (like Hiro's space-time warping abilities) that allows him to compress a lot of action into a relatively short span of real time. Or else Hiro really did learn to be a sword master in a few hours. I don't know; the writing on that storyline seemed to veer wildly toward the end. For instance, the scene where Hiro reverses time to make a bullet fly back into a gun, only the momentum of the bullet flying backwards knocks the gun out of the girl's hand. What the hell?
  
• Peter has a lot of abilities that he doesn't know about. We know that his mother and father had powers, and Mister Deveaux (Simone's father) as well, but he hasn't exhibited them (although I wonder if Peter's prophetic dreams don't come from Deveaux, since two of the dreams are the only scenes where Deveaux plays a major role). He also met Eden early in the season, but has never used her "command voice" ability. And he's only exhibited Sylar's TK, not any of Sylar's other abilities, like freezing or melting stuff or (especially) super-hearing. That last one should really have manifested in the final episodes.
• I know some folks were upset that they did that hokey last shot in "Volume One" of Heroes, showing the bloody trail where a survived Sylar has crawled into the sewers after being killed. It seemed like a crass attempt to keep Sylar alive for the ratings next season; the earlier scene of his death made it seem definitive, after all, and they had already teased next season's Big Bad (the man Molly is scared of). But watching the season over again, and knowing that we only saw Sylar exhibit a fraction of the powers he had stolen, I wonder if resurrection is one of them. I say this because Sylar's death at the end of the season is not the only time we saw him die. He also died while in custody at Primatech Paper, then revived and killed the doctor preparing his body for shipping. So that ending shot was actually justified by events earlier in the season. Having said that, I'm disappointed; I've got Sylar-fatigue.
• Wow, did they pimp the hell out of that Nissan Versa or what? They mention it by name in several episodes, and every graphic novel chapter on the website still bears a blue Nissan Versa ad on the first page.
  
• I'm disappointed by the slim bundle of extras in the boxed set, although I guess I should be grateful they provided anything.

I'm really looking forward to the start of season two on September 24. And in the weeks before the season starts, I'll be watching the online "documentaries" about Takezo Kensei, the samurai that Hiro idolizes and whose sword he stole. That just happens to be the lone samurai Hiro runs into at the very end of season one, so Kensei will obviously play a major role in season two. The artwork of Kensei on the Yamagato Fellowship site shows him with a soul patch much like the one Future Hiro sported, so this may be where Hiro transforms totally into the badass we know he will be (although he'll obviously not be so much the dark badass, since Ando didn't die).

Lost and Test

We had the season finales of Lost and Heroes this week, and both pretty much kicked ass. I was a little, a smidgen, disappointed in the Heroes finale, simply because we're still not seeing these characters really cut loose. Well, that and the fact that master villain Sylar died, then came back long enough to set up the start of next season, then died again for real, and then... wasn't dead? I don't know. And of course, the fact that Peter didn't really need Nathan's sacrifice- he should have been able to do what Nathan did himself.

The Lost finale was exactly what a Lost finale should be. It answered a ton of questions, while setting up a ton of new questions, and ended with a twist which indicated that the show is once again going to be fundamentally different next season. I love the way that every season seems to be at once the same show and yet a different show from the season before. And the finale also made obvious that these guys haven't been blowing smoke when they say that they know where the show is going. They're not just making it up as they go along.

I put together a podtestcast, but I'm having trouble posting it. It was a lot harder than I'd though it would be, and the result is kinda dull, so I may redo it. Or not. We'll see.

TV Round-Up: May 2

Heroes: Now that's what I'm talkin' 'bout!. We get a Days of Future Past-style future dystopia, complete with the deaths of practically the entire cast if Hiro can't get his shit together and kill Sylar already. Most of the action is still taking place off-stage, with only tiny hints of the powers being used--the big final confrontation between Peter and Sylar takes place outside a door around which we only see tiny flashes of light, for instance. Either they're saving up effects budget for a kick-ass season finale, or else the show going to tease us forever and never really cut loose. Hints of what's to come: Sylar is apparently going to kill both Radioactive Ted and the shapeshifter chick before they bring him down.

Drive: Fun show from an executive producer of Firefly and Wonderfalls , starring Nathan Fillion from Firefly. I liked it so much, it's canceled after three episodes. Tim Minear's next show show is going to be canceled before it airs, and the one after that is going into negative episodes.

American Idol: The two contestants from the top 24 with vague Oklahoma connections are still in it (Phil and Melinda), and I think Melinda's in it to win it, which will do incredible things for our station, having another hometown winner.

I'll doing some anime comments tomorrow or the next day.

Cool And Yet Not

I'm having very mixed feelings about Heroes nowadays. I still like SuperHiro best of all, but I don't like the directions they've taken his storyline. First, they made him way too naive. Then they crippled his power just as he was really learning to rock with it. Then they pulled that dinosaur bait-and-switch. Then they introduced Hiro's dad, and as cool as it was to see a cameo by George Takei, I really hate that they basically changed Hiro from an average sarariman schlub with an awesome secret into a super-rich geek who's just been slumming.

And now, as kick-ass as last night's episode was, they've tied in SuperHiro's dad with the Invulnerable Cheerleader's adoptive father (her biological father being, of course, the Flying Pol) and it's all just getting too damned incestuous for words. Less with the twisty backstory connections, more with the super-powered ass-kicking please.

Speaking of super-powered ass-kicking, I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but the new commercials for the Fantastic Four sequel look awesome. I was underwhelmed with the first one. Too sitcom-y, lightweight cast, slim plot, really stupid reiterpretation of Doctor Doom. But I've got to say, the scenes of the Silver Surfer from the first trailer really got me going, and the glimpses of the FantastiCar in the new commercials (plus the hints that Galactus himself might be featured) have me totally sold. Only things that worries me: the movie doesn't come out till June, and they're already blitzing the commercials in February. How loud does the hype machine have to get for this movie to get out from under the shadow of Spiderman 3 (which also looks pretty damn good).