It’s easy to tell that spring has arrived. Yesterday afternoon my car was absolutely covered in greenish-yellow pollen. When I pulled out of my parking spot, it flowed across the windshield like snow pellets.
Working on essays and book reviews this week. I turned in a piece to FEARnet the other day and now I have a review that has to go into CD by the weekend, although I plan to finish it tomorrow if possible. I have a short story that I need to revise and a stack that I’m going to hunt down new potential markets for, and then it’s off to novel land again. The more I think about this book (and I’ve been doing a lot of thinking but not much writing on it), the more layers I come up with.
Keith Carradine on NCIS reminded me of Dr. Johnny Fever from WKRP.
I saw three shows in the past day or so where the last five minutes (or less) were amazing. On The Americans it was really the final minute when the attempted kidnapping of the physicist goes so very, very wrong. How many times can you slam the trunk on a guy’s hand? For a while, it was the women who were kicking butt, and it was the woman assailant who got the last laugh by driving off and leaving our “heroes” standing gaping in the street. I find it interesting how they’re fighting the battle for the motherland on the grand scale and then the battle for their children’s souls (well, not exactly souls, that’s sort of the issue, but that’s the essence of it) on the home front.
Then there was CSI, where the creepy daughter turned everything on its head in the last couple of minutes. How much of what they thought they knew already was true? In any case, that was one messed up family. And then on Survivor, the newly merged team pulled off a brilliant blindside. It’s not unusual to see the evicted person gape with surprise, but jaws dropped on either side of him, too. It was hilarious to see, and it looks like the implications of that vote may create an interesting and novel situation next week.
You had to be a blind person not to guess that Rizzoli might be pregnant on this weeks Rizzoli & Isles, the first episode to not feature Lee Thomas Young. They haven’t written him out of the show yet, but they did cut the spring season to only a handful of episodes while they figure out what to do about the loss.
It’s rarely funny when a character dies, but Danny Crowe’s swan song on Justified was drop dead hilarious. All season long he’s been going on and on about his 21 foot rule and just when he was about to put it to the test, he goes and falls into his dog’s freshly dug grave and impales himself with the famous knife. Apparently the scene was inspired by something from an Elmore Leonard novel, where a bad guy falls down and accidentally shoots himself. According to the showrunner, Timothy Olyphant could barely stop laughing the whole time they were filming the scene. I also liked the scene where “Officer Buzz Kill” wormed the information out of the two prostitutes.
So, Dickey Bennett was back for a bit. Looks like he’s getting his hair styled at the Boyd Crowder Salon. I loved the way Raylan plunked down on the bench, put his head on his hands and just watched as Dickey spun out another long-winded yarn. There are as many inept crooks in Leonard’s works as ept ones. Take Dewey (“I got your heroin. Well, I got half of it, but it’s the whole half.”) Crowe, releasing his Gremlin on a hill and having to chase after it, running over the same big stone that rips the muffler from the car. “A lot of confidence for a guy who wears shorts with combat boots.”
The Crowe gang is diminishing and now they’re in-fighting. And Ava tried her best not to stab Judith in the prison but ended up having to do it anyway, while at the same time Boyd failed in his quest to get Albert to recant. That’s one twisted little dude. It will be interesting to see how Mary Steenburgen’s character whips things into shape.
