Game of Thrones - Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things

Yeah ... this episode really had highs and lows. It was Exposition City, for starters, and a lot of the exposition was kind of awkward or even inexplicable.

First, the Bad:

An entire scene of Viserys talking about dragon skulls? To what purpose? And throwing in dragon names from other fictional sources is pretty lame, even if Vermithrax did make me chuckle.

I've pretty much given up on the Dothraki "horde" looking like much more than a couple dozen guys on horseback. The actors are all doing a fine job over in that subplot, but it feels absurdly low-budget compared to the rest of the show.

Littlefinger giving the Hound's backstory to Sansa? Seriously? Probably the worst thing the series has done. Totally screws the Hound's character, and contradicts the point of the story -- nobody is supposed to know it except the people who were there, and Sansa, after the Hound tells her. It's kind of pivotal to the Hound's character. I suspect this means the Hound isn't going to be much of a character in this series, and that is a terrible mistake given his importance later on down the line.

Now the Good:

Catelyn's arrest of Tyrion. Calling out each of the men by their lord's names. Very dramatic and well shot. I continue to love Dinklage in this part. His manner as Tyrion is arrogant but not off-putting.

Julian Glover, as Grand Maester Pycelle, is hiding a lot behind the tired old man facade. He's a great actor, and I'm just disappointed he's too old to have been cast as Tywin Lannister, because he would have been incredible.

The "you don't know cold" scene in the dining hall at Castle Black when Thorne gives Jon and Sam a very sobering dressing-down was probably the best scene in this episode. Owen Teale (Thorne) is kicking the ass of a fairly minor part.

Game of Thrones - The Cast

So, three episodes in and things are starting to take shape, but what shape are they starting to take?

From pretty much every angle, this series is presenting a faithful, quality adaptation of the first book of George R. R. Martin's grim but great fantasy series, "A Song of Ice and Fire."

Predictably, the best performance by quite a gap is being given by Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister. As soon as he was cast, I was ready to pay for HBO. He is so goddamn good that I get irritated with how short some of his scenes seem to be. To be fair, though, Tyrion really doesn't get cooking until ... well, probably Sunday night at this rate.

I was a bit puzzled by the casting of Mark Addy as King Robert. Puzzled, that is, until his first scene in the first episode. He's doing a great job. His Robert is multi-layered in the best sense. He is sick of his wife and doesn't like his children. He still hurts over the loss of his true love. And, he's a mean drunk.

Sean Bean is tackling Eddard Stark with a grim stoicism that fits the character, but he's coming off a bit dull. I've always thought Eddard was a little thick -- he's clearly terminally stubborn -- but here he's often boring. I'm not sure what you could do with Eddard to make him more interesting, though. He's a stiff, hidebound guy surrounded by more colorful characters.

Likewise mired a bit is Kit Harrington as Jon Snow. Like Eddard, Jon is honorable to a fault (at least he starts out that way -- after that it depends who you ask), and like Bean's Eddard, Harrington's Snow is kind of overshadowed by the other characters who populate the series.

The other kids have all been aged up a touch, to no real detriment. Danerys (Emilia Clarke) is the most drastically changed, going from the book's scandalous 13 to ... oh, maybe 17-18 (Clarke was 22-23 at the time of filming, but she looks younger). It changes things, to be sure, but she's selling it, and it doesn't seem to hurt the story much. And, honestly, you really couldn't do anything else on TV. Even on HBO.

I will say that the kid they got to play Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson) hasn't done much for me so far. Yes, he's supposed to be a horrible person, but he's supposed to look like an angel, not a sneering Draco Malfoy clone. His best scene thus far has been one entirely fabricated for the series (though it doesn't jar), in which he tells his mother that he's ashamed of his beating and mauling at the hands of Arya Stark and her direwolf.

Lena Headey plays Joffrey's mother, Queen Cersei, and she is probably the character most altered by the transition to the screen. In the books, Cersei is pretty horrible even in chapters where she is the POV character. She's petty and cruel. The HBO series has softened her character a bit, and it isn't an unwelcome change. The Cersei of the books would probably wear out her welcome pretty quickly. This Cersei is still scheming, still cruel, but she is more obviously intelligent without seeming like a simple "evil queen."

Casting-wise, they have really done quite well. Tomorrow I'll go into other aspects of the show, and, yes, get a little critical. EDIT: Or not, really. I don't think I can make much hay of gripes with this show, to be honest, because I think it's really going to start rolling this Sunday.

Wait a minute... this is pretty good!

Shocked as I'm sure every single one of you might be to hear it, I actually saw a show I liked tonight on the tee and vee: Reaper.

The CW showed an "encore presentation" of the pilot tonight, and I'm glad I didn't miss it. It was funny and fun, with a very likable cast, good dialogue, and ... well, you get the idea. I have to admit I was a bit taken aback to see that Kevin Smith directed the pilot, but it is my understanding that he and a fair percentage of the production crew in general were only on board for the pilot.

Now, I don't hate Kevin Smith. Hell, I don't hate anyone (or at least not anyone germane to this particular discussion). But I have to say I'm not the world's biggest Keven Smith fan. I thought Clerks was okay, and I kind of liked Chasing Amy, but Dogma was such a dragtastrophe that I kind of avoided anything with his name on it after that point. It wasn't particularly hard, since everything he did seemed to have Jay and Silent Bob* attached to the name, and I was done laughing at them about halfway through Clerks.

That was a rather long-winded way of indicating that Smith's absence will not necessarily be an obstacle to my enjoyment of the show.

Briefly, the show stars Bret Harrison as Sam, a college dropout who works at a Home Depot clone with his uber-slacker friend "Sock" and a host of supporting characters, including love interest Andi -- or, as Mrs. Morgue and I referred to her, "some girl with REALLY white teeth." I'm not kidding, she must brush her teeth with strontium-90.

After a series of odd events on the day of his 21st birthday, including the appearance of a man who calls himself the Devil (the very awesome Ray Wise), Sam sits down with his dad and is more than a little upset to learn that his parents had sold their firstborn son's soul to the devil. The fact that they're really, really sorry doesn't immediately cheer him up, nor does a second meeting with the Devil, in which the business-suited Satan tells Sam that he's either got to perform some repo work on hell's escapees or face the consequences.

His first attempt to repo the soul of an arsonist who has been reincarnated as a fireman is an unmitigated disaster and Sam disgustedly tells the Devil that he may as well take his soul because he sucks. Not so fast, the Devil tells him. It turns out that if Sam won't do the job, the devil will collect not his soul, but his mother's, which by some kind of transcendental escrow arrangement is actually the collateral on the whole deal.

Being a good son (and, more importantly, not holding a grudge for a certain preconception transaction), Sam agrees, and, with the help of Sock and a handheld vacuum cleaner, succeeds in bringing in his first fugitive soul.

It's nothing too fancy, grounbreaking, or original, but it is done well, with all the elements in place to make good on its premise. We'll see how that works out. While shows like Chuck and The Bionic Woman will really need to shine to make me forget how cruddy their pilots were, Reaper is going to have to work just as hard to live up to its debut.

* Trivia for people with no pop culture skillz: Kevin Smith is Silent Bob! -ed

La Femme Bionique

The Bionic Woman is so--

"Wait. Before you trash it like you did Heroes' season premiere (you hypercritical, miserable jackass), could you give us a boring comparison between The Bionic Woman and Battlestar Galactica?"

Okay, I'll give it a shot...

With the new NBC Show, Bionic Woman, producer David Eick once again dons his mining helmet and heads down into the rich soil of the 1970s. One can hardly blame him, considering his career has more or less been defined by the "re-imagined" Battlestar Galactica, which turned a beloved but cheesy (and short-lived) 70s science fiction series into the biggest hit ever to come out of the Sci Fi Channel.

The problem with going back to the well (mix metaphors and serve chilled), as far as science fiction television shows are concerned, is that the well ain't that deep, and most of the water tastes like crap.

Battlestar was a show that was canceled mainly because it was very expensive to produce. A fairly substantial fan base (including yours truly) was pretty upset that it got canned. One kid even committed suicide (ban all television!)

The Bionic Woman was a spin-off of The Six Million Dollar Man. It ran on ABC for two seasons (1976-1977), got canceled for low ratings, then NBC picked it up for one more season before canceling it as well. I watched it a bit, back then, having been a fan of its parent show, but found it pretty boring.

So, independent of the actual merit of the remake, can the success of Battlestar be used as a predictor of success for Bionic? I would say no.

Battlestar may have had a shorter run than the original Bionic Woman, but it ended on a much higher note, fan interest-wise. This is pretty well demonstrated in the huge reaction to the announcement of BSG's re-envisioning. The internet was abuzz with people who felt strongly about whether it should be made or not, who should make it, how it should be done, etc. On the other hand, BW was announced way back in 2002 and no one, as far as I can tell, really cared all that much.

Now not everyone loves the original BSG. Far from it, in fact. But publicity-wise, hatred is a lot better than indifference.

"Well, now that you've raised our expectations, how is the actual show?"

As far as a comparison of the actual merits of the respective re-imaginings, I think BSG had a lot more going for it than BW as well. BSG was able to drastically darken the tone in comparison to the original show without losing much. With a substantially larger cast of characters, it was also able to change individual characters more without totally removing them from their original incarnations, thus preserving fan investment in the re-envisioning.

"You're still talking about Battlestar Galactica, you know..."

Yes, but bear with me. I need some kind of framework to make myself sound smart, otherwise I'm just bitching.

BW doesn't even keep the same names for characters who essentially play the same roles (apart from the lead), so virtually nothing but the "bionic" part of the original survives. And while BSG spins events from the original series' beginnings into well-realized and sober plot points, BW discards completely the initial origin story of its lead character, the fan reaction to which (as an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man) was so strong that the character of Jamie Sommers, who died in the SMDM episode in question, was resurrected for her own spin-off. Instead, Jamie's origin and transformation comes before the first commercial break, the culmination not of a well-developed love story but rather of a seven-minute extract of a relationship.

All of which might eventually get sorted out to much acclaim, but for one small problem: The Bionic Woman kinda sucks.

The acting, with the exception of Miguel Ferrer as Oscar Goldman Jonas Bledsoe, is pretty weak. BSG star Katie Sackhoff puts in an appearance as "the first bionic woman" -- a psychotic Frankenstein's monster. Her performance is pretty criminal, but it's hard to tell how much is bad acting and how much bad writing. Jamie's sister, played by Lucy Hale, is yet another teenage computer genius, who will no doubt be called upon to "hack" into computers whenever it's convenient to the lazy writing staff.

Sommers herself, played by Michelle Ryan, is about as interesting as a documentary on the history of paper shredders. The character is a bartender now, rather than a champion tennis player, and everything about the scenes where she is tending bar screams "this is not a bartender -- this is an actress!" She doesn't pour drinks like a bartender, she doesn't talk like one, and she certainly doesn't dress like one.

I don't know about you, but I'm not keen to watch an actress try to be a conflicted, half-cybernetic killing machine if she can't even play a goddamn bartender, and that same sentiment could pretty much be applied to every aspect of this show. The things that aren't totally boring are ... well, there actually isn't much in it that isn't boring, apart from a big, Matrix-y fight scene in the pilot's final minutes which, now that I think about it, was pretty boring, too.

Not going on my list of shows to watch (which is currently empty).

Heroes, Season Two Premiere

You know, I'm really glad they canceled Heroes after just one season. I mean, yeah, they might have been able to keep going after the pretty awesome season one finale, but it probably would have been a total letdown.

Yeah. Hehe. *sigh*

...

SPOILER SPACE - Do not read further if you don't want to know about the Heroes Season Two Premiere.
...












Sweet Mother of Abraham Lincoln, that sucked. In virtually every way it could have sucked, it did so with a vengeance.

Let's see:

• Opening the show with a heaping helping of Mohinder? CHECK!
• Showing us in the opening of the show that Nathan, Peter, and Sylar are all going to show up alive.
  
• Not just letting Parkman survive, but having him completely recovered from four gunshot wounds to the chest and still have plenty of time to transfer from the LAPD (where he had been suspended) to the NYPD and complete his detective training and pass his detective exams before the first commercial break? CHECK!
  
• Having Nathan survive with no explanation? CHECK!
• Giving Nathan a Grizzly Adams beard for no reason? CHECK!
• Making Nathan a sorry drunk despite the fact that he did the right thing and knows it? CHECK!
• Moving Claire to a new school, which is ALSO populated entirely by bitchy cheerleaders? CHECK!
• Making these cheerleaders EXTRA BITCHY? CHECK!
  
• Introducing new and absolutely uninteresting characters? CHECK!
• Introducing the new characters' powers in a totally predictable fashion? CHECK!
• Giving George Takei the super-equivalent of the Black Spot before killing him off in a trite manner? CHECK!
• Hiding the identity of George Takei's killer with a hoodie???? CHECK!
  
• Spinning plot threads out of whole cloth as if they'd always been part of the show? (i.e. "That means there are only ... nine of us left!") CHECK!
• Introducing "Irish" characters with quite possibly the worst Irish accents ever committed to audio recording? CHECK!
• Turning Mr. Bennet's only scenes into asinine comic relief? CHECK!
• Actually having a character ask another character his name and having that character answer with a panicky, "I ... I don't know!" BIG FAT REX MORGAN, M.D. CHECK!
• Showing us in the "Next Time on Heroes" bit, AGAIN, that Sylar is alive. CHECK!
  

I could go on, but it's too painful.

Even the feeble highlights, almost totally lost in the Chicken McNugget backwash that was this premiere, were ... uh ... feeble.

Hiro's segments were kind of amusing, and had the only surprise in the entire episode.

Um ... yeah. Uh ... I'm really trying here ...

Nope, I got nothin. God help NBC, cause Chuck also sucked.

Frakking BSG!

Robot Chicken strikes again. I'm not sure how many of these voices are actual BSG cast members, but I'm pretty sure it's all of them.

Warning: Rude-sounding nonsense words alert.

Heroes, Season 1 (via iTunes)

Rating: 4.5/5 Capes

I started watching Heroes about five days ago on a site that provides ... uh ... "free previews" of shows. Yeah.

Well, I started to get into it, so I decided to buy the whole season from iTunes (about $43 bucks), and watched them all in about two days.

Very impressive show. The plotting, from the pilot to the season finale, was great. I can see where it might have been a little annoying to watch on a weekly basis, though, since there were at least a dozen plotlines:

• What's the Deal with Peter?
• Who is this Sylar guy?
• What the hell is going on with Nikki?
• Will Nathan get elected to congress?
• What's the deal with Claire's dad?
• Will Parkman's marriage survive telepathy (would anyone's)?
• Will Mohandir ever get good at delivering voiceovers?
• Will Manhattan be incinerated by an atomic blast (and, if so, by who exactly?)
• Will Isaac kick heroin and still be able to paint the future?
• Will Hiro master his powers in time (no pun intended)?
• Will Ando ever get laid?
• Will saving the cheerleader really save the world?

There are probably more there, really. It's a complex show, to say the least. I can hardly imagine watching it with a big-ass mid-season hiatus, which the folks who watched it on TV had to deal with (and it's ratings took a huge hit for it).

Still, for a "realistic" treatment of the emergence of superpowers in people all over the world, it kicks ass. Comic book fans may have been expecting "bigger" powers or a more four-color treatment, but I really liked the vulnerability of the heroes. As one character (who I shall not name) put it:

"What am I supposed to do? Yeah, I can fly, but I don't own a gun, and I don't know karate. Am I going to rescue cats out of trees?"

Echoing some of the themes of the X-Men comic (and movies), a lot of the characters consider themselves freaks. They fear their powers and what they mean. Some of them have powers that are, in and of themselves, extremely dangerous. Several of the characters walk the line between villain and hero and a few end up on different sides than they started on.

No one, even one particularly horrible villain, comes off as totally black hat or totally white. One character uses her powers for a vicious (though somewhat understandable) act of revenge. Another hides his powers for a convoluted mix of reasons, both selfish and tragic.

The acting is excellent as well; the ensemble easily outshines most of the superhero efforts that we've seen on the big screen thus far. Of the paragons of cinematic superherodom, only Batman Begins, X-Men: United, and Spider-Man can brag of anything like the depth that this show manages. Sure, there are some weak links, but even the weakest generally manage to grow into their roles over the course of the season.

Standouts in the cast include Adrian Pasdar as Nathan Petrelli, a very conflicted aspiring politician, Jack Coleman as the sinister and enigmatic Mr. Bennet, and Ali Larter as the very messed-up Nikki Sanders. Masi Oka and James Kyson Lee have great chemistry as a pair of Japanese office workers and best friends, one super and one not, who struggle with trying to find their destiny in an America that isn't exactly what they'd imagined. There are some rather unusual but good performances by guest stars as well. I'd name names, but the only one that wouldn't, in itself, be a spoiler is Eric Roberts, who is creepily awesome in several episodes.

The powers that have been displayed thus far range from mind reading to super healing, but the best are those that kind of defy comic book definitions. One character is only super from time to time. Another has the ability to figure out how anything works, and the implications are a lot creepier than you might imagine. And anyone who has heard anything about the show has probably heard that super healing can make for some rather disturbing images as well.

My favorite interpretation of a "classic" power in the series has got to be the show's take on flight, though, despite the fact that it really doesn't get a lot of screen time. The first time you get a good look at the power in action, it is truly an "Oh, hell yeah!"-worthy moment.

The very best thing about the show, though, is the fact that, despite a sort of X-Files-like backdrop of sinister conspiracy and hidden motives, it actually resolves things. Mysteries don't stay mysterious just for the sake of keeping your attention. We do find out who the villains are, the heroes do eventually meet one another, and the hard choices do get made, for better or for worse.

I just hope that it doesn't run into the same problem in season two that killed Twin Peaks, which I like to think of as the, "Awesome! Now what?" conundrum.

Flight of the Conchords

Never seen this show, but if this clip is any indication, I will definitely have to check it out:



Bunch more here for your viewing pleasure.