Your call is important to us

Posted on August 29, 2011 by Bev Vincent

This weekend I started and completed a 950-word essay for a new project that should be announced later on this week.

On Saturday, while Irene was bearing down on the East Coast, we tied for the highest temperature ever recorded in Houston: 109°, which was previously seen once in 2000. It will continue to be desperately hot for the next several days and then, unless they are teasing us, we will see a 20° drop in temperature and maybe the first truly significant rainfall in ages. By Friday, the high temp may be under 90°, and thought that sounds hot it’s a relief. And perhaps 3-5″ of rain over the weekend, which we badly need. We’ll see if it comes to pass.

Our daughter was supposed to fly back to Canada today to start university classes, but the flight, via Newark, was canceled. I received the announcement on Saturday morning and immediately tried to call Continental. You know that automated warning that the wait time before your call can be handled might be long? Continental didn’t even try. They simply said that their call volume was so high that they weren’t even going to put me in the queue. Goodbye! However, I was able to get someone from there to call me when I went through the website. I mapped out an alternate flight via Chicago that was available and wouldn’t cost anything. I’d get all the way to the absolute last confirmation step only to be told that they couldn’t process my request. The real live human being who called me back wasn’t the brightest candle on the birthday cake, but she was able to help me reschedule the flight…for Friday.

We went to see Cowboys and Aliens on Saturday afternoon. The theater was surprisingly full for a movie that’s been out for a few weeks. Why did nobody tell me Walton Goggins (from Justified) was in it? Lots of other familiar TV faces among the cast, including Clancy Brown (Lost), Adam Beach (Law & Order: SVU) and Keith Carradine (Dexter, Deadwood), not to mention Olivia Wilde (House), who was mesmerizing. It was fun to see Harrison Ford play sort of a bastard, and I think I’m now in the camp of people who could see Daniel Craig play Roland in the Dark Tower movies. It’s always good to see Sam Rockwell, too. On the whole, I thought the movie was a good summer flick. The aliens were a little too “stock” — we’ve seen their ilk a lot recently, including in Super 8. Their aircraft were cool, and I liked the way their mothership blended into the desert. I had to think that the arm weapon Craig wielded must have gotten tiring after a while. A solid B.

We finished our Dexter marathon and now we have to wait until October for the new season to begin. My wife picked Breaking Bad as our next sampler series. Not sure yet if she wants to stick with it beyond the first season (we’re four episodes in) because she finds it a little on the bleak side and questions a lot of Walter’s actions.

Doctor Who is back. I was a little surprised by the overwhelming love I saw for this episode online after it aired. For some reason, I felt somewhat disengaged from it. It felt like an obligatory “we have to explain a bunch of stuff” episode, necessary for future episodes but not terribly exciting in and of itself. The whole Hitler bit was totally arbitrary and they dropped the ball on resolving their MacGuffin. Not terribly fond of River Song at this point in her existence, either, which may have been part of it, and making the big, morphing vehicle look like Amy felt off. The Doctor also seems to be off his game this season. Making bad decisions and getting bested more than usual.

A rousing episode of Burn Notice last week. Had some nice credible bits, especially the moment when one of the hostages outed Michael. Setting up a straw man to pit the bad guys against was a nifty idea. The missing employee who never was. The Fiona/Sam subplot was a tad thin, though.

Not entirely sold on this whole Twitter tie-in with Haven yet. It worked better when it was more subtle (writing on the chalk board) then when Audrey picks up fliers from her desk that have the Twitter accounts to follow on them. For once, the weirdos living in the compound who won’t allow the cops around weren’t religious nutjobs. They had a legitimate reason for being as cloistered as they were. Duke’s “wife” is hard to pin down. Not sure what side she’s working for. I half expected that barn to vanish like it did after Audrey II came out of the building in the woods.

Posted in Breaking Bad, Burn Notice, Dexter, Haven, movies | Comments Off on Your call is important to us

I don’t like unpredictable

Posted on August 23, 2011 by Bev Vincent

We’re still on target to have every day in August go over 100° and still mired in drought. We had rain last Sunday but nothing since then. Yesterday we broke the record for the number of triple digit days in one year, and we’re adding to the consecutive-day streak daily.

I didn’t realize that Ike (2008) was the last hurricane to strike the US mainland. This year’s i-storm, Irene, is threatening to be the next.

I’ve been spending a lot of my normal writing time reading for the past week. I did get a short story tidied up and submitted to a new (to me) market, and finally finished my review of Robert McCammon’s The Five, as well as working with my editor at Screem magazine over some technical issues with my essay for the next issue. Other than that I’ve been spending most of my time with 11/22/63, which I finished this morning. I don’t want to say too much about the book at this point, since it won’t be out for a couple of months, but holy cow. An impressive story that has some fantastic set pieces and an ending that packs a wallop. It’s as much a love story as it is a time travel story.

Eureka irked me this week with their bad science. Usually the show has sort of a grasp of the basics, but having something “coated with methane” made no sense at all, nor did the yellowish orange ethane cloud. Also, the combination of ammonia and methane in oxygen, assuming something sparked the reaction, would produce cyanide, not just something that smelled bad and was noxious. The recreation of Titan on main street Eureka was cool, though.

This week’s episode of Haven was one of the best yet, a riff on Groundhog Day. It was supposed to be Audrey’s day off from work, but she ended up in this loop that got her as far as noon, at which point someone would be killed and she’d be sent back to the time when she woke up and have to solve the problem, which would change things and end up with someone different getting killed. Way to knock off the cast one at a time!

I saw the first episode of the new BBC series The Hour and am intrigued. It’s something of a cross between their State of Play (not to be confused with the US movie remake) and Mad Men. Lots of smoking. The lead isn’t as charismatic as John Simm but their “Peggy” is a knockout. It also features Burn Gorman (Owen from Torchwood) as a mysterious killer. There’s a politically charged mystery at the base of it, running in parallel with the creation of a new hour-long news program, sort of like 60 Minutes. The stabbing death of a scientist is being under-reported, and the one person who thinks there’s something more going on, a socialite who has a past with one of the reporters, is convinced she’ll be killed if she stirs things up. Seems she was right.

Walt is starting to lose it on Breaking Bad. He’s turning into something of a megalomaniac. “It’s all about me,” he tells Jesse, and he blows up at Skyler when she asks if what happened to Gale could happen to him. “I’m the one who knocks,” he tells her. He feels that everyone is underestimating him in some way. Last week it was Hank, singing the praises of Gale’s chemistry. This week it was Skyler and the guy who sold them the car wash, who wondered if Walt was up to the challenge of running the business. Walt got so snarky that he wouldn’t even let the guy take his framed “first dollar” with him, and petulantly took it down after the guy left and used it to buy a soda in the vending machine. He also gets a bunch of women who work upstairs in the laundry in trouble by hiring them to clean up the lab. When they’re led away to be sent back to Honduras, Walt tells the new guy (Gus’s go-between) that it’s his fault. Blame me, not them, he says. “He does,” the new guy says.

Meanwhile, another hijacking of a pollo truck. Seems they learned from the last time. Instead of opening the back doors they hooked up the exhaust line to the intake and barred the back so the armed guys inside couldn’t get out. This week the machine gun strafing of the truck came from the inside. All for one tub of drugs. Seems like they knew what they were looking for—and it was all part of a message to Gus. They gave the tub o’drugs to some meth heads to attract Gus’s attention. Mike brought along Jesse as backup. “What you may not know about meth heads,” Mike said, then paused. “Maybe you do know—is that they’re kinda unpredictable. I don’t like unpredictable.” Jesse was in his comfort zone, though. After a failed Plan B, he grabbed a shovel from the trunk (there was one of those quirky POV shots from a camera attached to the tip of the shovel as Jesse carried it from the car to the yard) and started digging in the meth head’s yard, knowing it would attract his drug-fueled curiosity. Soon, he’s handing the shovel off to the meth head, who continues to dig for the rest of the scene, without having a clue what he’s looking for. Meanwhile, Jesse goes inside to confront the far more paranoid of the two and finds himself staring down the barrel of a rifle. He gets the upper hand and conks the guy with what looks like a crystal bong. When Mike arrives (plenty impressed, I think), he reads the message on the drug tub: “Ready to talk?” Gus doesn’t want the war to escalate so he tells Mike to set it up. When Jesse asks Gus why he’s picked him to ride shotgun with Mike, Gus says, “I like to think I see tings in people.”

Meanwhile redux, Skyler is listening to Walt’s phone message with new ears and isn’t finding it quite as romantic as she did last week. She goes walkabout with the kid, ending up at the four corners, where she tosses a coin as if where it lands will decide her destination. Twice it lands in Colorado, but she drags it back to New Mexico and returns home, where she finds that Walt has purchased a garish red car for their son. “Someone has to protect this family from the man who protects this family,” she tells Walt, who probably isn’t moving back into the family casa any time soon.

Episode 7 of Torchwood was a little like an episode of Lost. A large chunk of it was a flashback to 1927, and the scenario played out there turns out to have major implications for the contemporary story. Jack meets an identity thief named Angelo at Ellis Island and they end up friends, roommates and lovers. Jack is killed (as he so often is) during an escapade (saves the world, again) and Angelo is sent to prison. Imagine Angelo’s surprise when Jack is there waiting for him when he gets out a couple of years later. “I saw you get shot!” he says. “I got better,” Jack responds. “I saw your body!” and Jack smirks, “Wanna see it again?” But Angelo won’t take that for an answer and he kills Jack again once they get back to the apartment. When Jack returns from the dead, Angelo rounds up his fellow Italian Catholics, who string him up and proclaim him a devil, killing him over and over and over again. Ultimately, though, three men (the trickster’s brigade?) make a deal for Jack with the Italians. Once the negotiations are over, they link up arms to form a triangle, which happens to be the symbol we’ve been seeing to represent whoever’s behind the pharmaceutical company. Jack escapes (by dying one last time—the story of his life, he says).

Meanwhile, in the modern day, Gwen tazers Jack and ties him up to deliver to whoever it is that has her mother, husband and child captive. She blames herself a bit for being seduced by the importance being part of Torchwood conveyed upon her. “The more people we lost, the more I was a survivor.” However, she tells Jack that she won’t hesitate to see Jack killed like a dog (because, remember, now he really can die) to get her daughter back. For his own part, Jack warns Gwen that he will rip her skin from her skull before he lets her take his life away from him. So, they have an understanding. When they reach their destination, Gwen asks Jack what is the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen in all of his journeys. Then the mystery lady arrives, played by Nana Visitor from Star Trek: Deep Space 9. But Rex and Esther haven’t been sitting on their hands: they mobilized Welsh SWAT teams to free Gwen’s family and are set up with sniper rifles to take charge of the situation. “You’re going to live,” Gwen says when the dust settles. “It’s a talent of mine,” Jack says. But the mystery lady doesn’t think she’s lost the upper hand yet. She has one more card to play. Jack is going to want to meet the person who knows how the miracle began: It’s Angelo, and he’s been waiting a long time. Over 80 years, in fact. WTF?

Posted in Breaking Bad, Dexter, Eureka, Haven, The Closer, Torchwood | Comments Off on I don’t like unpredictable

Colin Maloney’s bad day

Posted on August 15, 2011 by Bev Vincent

I finished most of what I set out to do this weekend. The one thing I didn’t do was go see Cowboys & Aliens. I was going to do a doubleheader with Rise of the Planet of the Apes but I decided that one movie was enough for Saturday afternoon.

We’re under mandatory water conservation restrictions at the moment, thanks to our ongoing drought. For us that means mainly that we can only water the lawn twice a week, on Thursdays and Sundays. So I dutifully watered the lawn yesterday morning. Yesterday afternoon we had our first rainstorm of August, a good soaking gusher that lasted at least half an hour. Figures.

The Mothman Files, edited by Michael Knost for Woodland Press, is now available for pre-order. The anthology contains my story “Blue Plume,” along with stories by Brian J. Hatcher, Lisa Morton, Joseph Nassise and many others.

I finished my essay for Screem #23, wrote my Storytellers Unplugged essay, which goes up on Wednesday, caught up on Torchwood (see below) and read about 100 pages of 11/22/63. Did an editing pass through a 5500-word story and will go through it one more time before I send it out to a new market. All in all a productive weekend.

Got a kick out of the bank notice this morning that my wife withdrew money from the ATM in Roswell, New Mexico. She and our daughter are on an expedition to the Grand Canyon with various detours along the way.

I’ve been looking forward to Rise of the Planet of the Apes ever since I first learned about it, and the more I saw the better it looked. I went to a mid-afternoon showing on Saturday and the theater was packed. I think my expectations were so high that nothing could quite have met them, but this came close. My complaints are quibbles. I would have like Caesar to be more conversant, like his analog was in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. The sign language was a good substitute, but it was fun watching Roddy McDowall talk. What exactly did Will Rodman do for the pharmaceutical company during the years when he raised Caesar to justify them keeping him on? Seems to me any company like that would have fired his ass long ago. Also, it would have been easy to hand-wave away the chimp that went berserk. They didn’t need to say that she had been given the drug. Apes are dangerous, and if one got lose it could easily run amok like that. Finally, Will’s girlfriend seemed smart enough, so why did it come as a surprise to her that Caesar wasn’t just a super (super, super) smart chimp? After all, she must have known what Will did for a living by that point. Little quibbles, but they were things that needed to be addressed, I thought.

I liked the opening section, which was an inverted version of the opening scene in Planet of the Apes, with humans hunting down and capturing chimps instead of vice versa. Loved all the shout-outs to the old series, including the “get your paws off me” bit, Charlton Heston showing up in an old movie on a TV, a chimp named Cornelia and an orangutan named Maurice (Maurice Evans played Dr. Zaius in the first two films), as well as other character names that were direct or indirect references to the series. The plot is an imaginative recreation of the concept behind Conquest. Serkis does a great job as Caesar and I got a kick out of the former circus orangutan and the developing dynamics between the apes in the ape shelter. Lithgow was excellent, too. All in all, not bad, but not ready to enter the pantheon of the other films quite yet.

I read today that Breaking Bad has been renewed for a fifth and final season. Given the wacky things that have been going on at AMC lately, I’m not surprised by this development. Also, given the fundamental premise of a guy with cancer trying to make money to look after his family after he’s gone, you have to figure that at some point he’s going to, well, go. Otherwise he’s just a bad guy making money illegally, year in and year out.

Last season, we had those lethal, silent killers from Mexico. This season, it is the equally taciturn Gus and Mike. When Mike takes Jesse for a ride, everyone is expecting bad things to happen (“If the plan is to bore me to death, mission accomplished,” Jesse says after a few hours), but Gus actually had a different plan in mind. Poor Mike has to put up with Jesse and his endless jabbering all day while he runs around the state picking up sacks of cash from dead drops. At first I thought he was retrieving his personal stash from various hidey-holes as a prelude to bugging out, but it was just routine business. Jesse thinks he’s along as a body guard. “I’m your guy,” he tells Mike. “You’re not the guy. You’re not capable of being the guy. I had a guy but I don’t have one any more. You are not the guy,” Mike says. But, in fact, the whole daylong schtick was a way of turning Jesse back into a guy, making him a hero and plucking him from the doldrums he’s been in lately. All Gus’s plan, and it worked like a charm. “Any questions?” Gus asks when Mike reports on the scheme’s success. “More than a few, but I know better than to ask,” Mike answers. Another lesson learned: you don’t mess with Mike’s radio.

On the home front, Walt and Skyler are back together again. The message Walt left on her answering machine proclaiming his love (he thought it might be the last message he ever left since he was going to confront Gus, once again) had the unintended effect of seducing Skyler. They close on the car wash and have a dinner party to celebrate. Hank has just told his colleague at work that he’s done with the Gale file. He’s dead (the love child of Scarface and Mr. Rogers), so there’s not much point in continuing. However, Walt gets really drunk at dinner and is offended when Hank calls Gale a genius. Not a meth cook, a meth chef. Walt says that the guy’s file indicate a rote copycat and “this genius of yours” might still be out there. He should’a kept his mouth shut because, at the end, Hank is once more back on the Heisenberg trail.

More interesting developments in Torchwood: Miracle Day over the past couple of weeks. The government has decided to reclassify the living into groups. Class 3: living. Class 2: living with a persistent injury. Class 1: Should be dead. The Class 1 people are first on the list to go to the overflow camps and, in particular, to sections of these camps called modules which turn out to be incinerators. The people behind Phi Corp have found a way to recreate murder by incinerating these living bodies. However, they haven’t put that plan into effect…yet. Then a middle manager by the name of Colin Maloney has a really bad day. He’s good at badminton and ideas, very bad at implementation, by his own admission. Torchwood infiltrates his camp, in the person of new Torchwood member Dr. Vera Juarez. She is so incensed by what she finds at the camp that she threatens to send him to jail. He responds by grabbing a gun and shooting her a couple of times. To cover up his crime, he puts her in the module and lights it up. Rex sees the end result and captures it all on film.

Colin’s bad day doesn’t end there. Rex is in the camp, too, pretending to be a Class 1 patient so he can get inside the module and Esther has inserted herself into his staff, too. The pressure mounts and Colin starts acting increasingly erratically. He captures Rex and tortures him in the most gruesome way imaginable: by sticking his pen in Rex’s persistent chest wound. Geez that was hard to watch. And then Esther shows up on the scene and he attacks her, too, except it turns out that Esther has some surprises up her sleeves. She gets the better of Colin and throttles him in a scene that demonstrates just how hard it is to strangle someone. “It’s been a very long day,” he complains. “I just want to go home.”

Jack has been trying to sway Oswald over to his side by promising to find a way for him to die by ending the miracle. Miss Kitzinger, though, is doing a very good job (as a shady guy tells her) and when push comes to shove, Oswald goes off both scripts, proclaiming everyone on earth to now be angels, and then ends his speech with the code word Kitzinger supplied: Revelation. Jack is trying to find out who’s behind Phi Corp, but he’s not getting very far. Under duress, their chief operating officer indicates that something has been going on as far back as the 1980s, but all he has is a word: blessing.

Jack is still unique among people on earth: Category Jack, according to Esther. The only one who can die—really die. That doesn’t stop people from trying. There’s a new group, the 45 Club, that consists of people so desperate to kill themselves that they jump from the 45th floor of buildings (or higher) to lose consciousness.

Meanwhile Gwen and Rhys are trying to save her father from one of the camps and all they manage to do is send him from a marginal category 1/2 patient straight into #1 territory by giving him a heart attack during their escape. Gwen uses her magic contact lenses to record an exposé of what’s going on in these camps before blowing the one in Wales to smithereens. However, when she gets back to the US, someone hijacks her lenses to send her a message: we have your mother, husband and child. Bring us Jack.

Posted in Breaking Bad, Haven, movies, Torchwood | Comments Off on Colin Maloney’s bad day

CSI: Boston

Posted on August 12, 2011 by Bev Vincent

We’ve been on a run of >100° days. I think we’ll only hit 97° today. What a relief.

I moved offices at the day job yesterday for the first time in 10 years. My new one is upstairs and at the back of the building from where I used to be. Means I’ll be using a different entrance most of the time and I’ll be getting the extra benefit of climbing a set of stairs a couple of times every day. There is an elevator, but it’s only one flight, so it will be the stairs for me. Right now it’s pretty quiet in my new quarters, but I’ll be getting more neighbors in the coming weeks. It’s almost like moving to a new building. Different kitchen. Different restroom. Different fellow employees. Sorta nice. I had the assistance of a former Montreal Alouette when it came time to move my massive desk. He wrestled that thing like he was trying to bring down the quarterback.

My wife and daughter are gone for a week-long roadtrip to the Grand Canyon. So, while the cat’s away, this mouse will…work like a sonuvagun. Here are the things I hope to accomplish this weekend: finish my essay for Screem #23. Redraft a short story so it will be in a condition to send to a new market I want to try. Write my Storytellers Unplugged essay. Catch up on Torchwood, Burn Notice and Haven. See Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Cowboys & Aliens. Read a chunk of 11/22/63. Eat and sleep as necessary.

A good mid-season finale to Covert Affairs. A lot of shows have done the spy-poisoned-by-radiation plot, but this one was handled well. There was a terrific two-minute continuous tracking shot near the beginning of the episode that followed Annie and the Chinese defector from the conference room at the hotel, down a corridor, through the kitchen, down a flight of stairs to the emergency exit. Very well choreographed. There was a lot of background action, people moving across the camera path, dropping things, interacting. The camera sometimes had to dodge around food carts and walls, but it kept up with them for the entire span. Hitchcock would have been proud. Annie finally got up the gumption to tell Annie her secret. Annie over-reacted, predictably and then recovered, predictably but, surprisingly, stuck to her guns about making Annie move out. Well played.

When I watch Rizzoli & Isles, I often have a hard time matching Sasha Alexander’s character with the one she played on NCIS. On NCIS she was the straight man to Tony’s clown, whereas here she’s pretty much the clown. She used to roll her eyes at Tony, and now Rizzoli is the one rolling eyes. Got a kick out of the scene where the two friends switched clothes. “Your suit is a real booty call magnet,” Isles tells Rizzoli. “I got hit on twice. By women.” Angie Harmon can do an excellent job of hiding her femininity, even when wearing a little red dress. It’s all in the way she holds her body, like she’s getting ready to tackle someone. Reality check—when Isles is asked for a quick turnaround on some lab results she quips, “This is not CSI: Boston.”

Posted in Covert Affairs, Rizzoli and Isles | Comments Off on CSI: Boston

Tiny little woman in a Hyundai

Posted on August 9, 2011 by Bev Vincent

My essay for Screem #23 came in at 6300 words in first draft. I’m 2/3 of the way through my first editing pass and it’s now down to 6050 words. I expect it will get tightened up a little more before I send it to the editor.

I received my galley copy of 11/22/63 last night. What a brick. 850 pages. Looking forward to tearing into it.

I will have a short story in The Mothman Files edited by Michael Knost. When I was flipping through channels this weekend, I stumbled upon a SyFy film called Mothman starring Jewel Staite of Firefly fame. It was pretty cheesy, but I watched the last hour of it anyway. Mothman takes his vengeance on people who did bad things. My favorite line from the film (but there were a lot of quotable nuggets) takes place after they’ve been battling this creature (who emerges through “shiny” surfaces) for a while. “There’s a banning ritual? Why are we just hearing about this now?”

The World Fantasy Convention web site for 2004 has the following statement: “A Convention DVD of WFC2004 will be mailed to all registered members of our convention once the production is complete. This DVD will include video and still photography from our event in October 2004 including interviews with the guests of honor and other professionals.” My copy showed up last night! I double-checked the postmark to see if it had been lost in the post for the past seven years but, no, it was just mailed a few days ago. Haven’t had a chance to look at it yet, but I look forward to doing so. That was my first WFC. I went because The Road to the Dark Tower was newly out.

We’re nearing the end of season three of Dexter. I had forgotten until this marathon that Margo Martindale (Ma Bennett from Justified) played the records clerk who was Harry Morgan’s friend and close with Dexter, too.

Provenza is always good for some funny lines on The Closer. “Not counting my divorces, I’ve been served 17 times,” he says after the lawyer/process server (hey, it’s Viola from Moonlighting) wallpapers the office. “It’s Flynn,” he says a moment later. “He’s paranoid for a living.” When Brenda realizes that Gabriel asked to be subpoenaed to avoid the appearance that he was cooperating with the plaintiff and then finds out that her husband is also being sued, she cracks up. Much chocolate and wine consumed. She spills wine on the table, pretty much on the words “with intent to kill,” and ends up with what looks like blood on her hands. Nice imagery. Lots of Cinderella joke, too, when they end up with a ruby shoe as evidence. When the pastor’s wife tried to take the blame for the killing, she said, “It’s all about me,” which must have resonated with Brenda, because she’s been telling everyone the lawsuit is all about her.

Another by-the-numbers episode of Burn Notice last week. I got a kick out of the way Sam described Fiona to the Michael Westin lookalike: a tiny little woman in a Hyundai who’s going to protect you. Fi gets her jab in later when she tells Michael he’d “stick out like Sam’s chin.”

The Wil Wheaton/Wesley Crusher effect on this week’s Eureka: Zoe comes back to town and saves the day. Funny line of the episode comes from Zack who tells Carter, “Someone hacked your girlfriend.” That’s one wicked keyfob Barlowe wielded. Glad she’s out of Allyson’s head, though we don’t know how much data she got away with.

That Mike dude on Breaking Bad is getting more awesome by the week. He withstood the machine gun onslaught of two very determined guys who strafed the Los Pollos Hermanos freezer truck (cool interior pov of the bullets coming through the door) and coolly (very coolly, given the temperature) gets up and pumps a bullet into each of them, sending them flying out the back of the truck. He then tweaks the flap of his bullet-mangled ear back into place. Walt later calls him a grunting dead-eyed cretin. He shows up later to bring back the guy who robbed Jesse of $78,000, along with the cash. Jesse stares him down. “You ain’t gonna smoke that dude. You know how I know? You went to the trouble of putting a blindfold on him. Let yourselves out.” But Mike knows Jesse is becoming a liability. After consulting with Gus, he takes him for a ride. “Gonna ask me where we’re going?” he asks his captive. “Nope,” Jesse replies.

The bit where Skyler and Walt solidify their fictional story about where they got the money to buy a car wash was interesting. Good characterization. Hank looked pretty good, too, when they came to visit. More animated than he’s been in a while. The case file must have gotten his blood flowing. Funniest moment of the episode was the karaoke DVD he showed Walt and Walt Jr. that featured the late, lamented Gale doing David Bowie. Walt almost had a heart attack. He manages to get Hank to read him into the case. Hank believes Gale was “his guy,” i.e., Heisenberg. The lab notebook is incredibly detailed, and has the mother of methamphetamine recipes mixed in with instructions on how to make vegan smores. It’s dedicated to W.W. (Woodrow Wilson? Willy Wonka? Walter White?), and Walt pulls out a Hail Mary when he finds a Walt Whitman reference in the book.

And there’s always a good scene with the sleazy lawyer, Saul. “You do have a little shit creek action happening. You know, FYI, you can buy a paddle.” By which he means hire the services of a “disappearer” and drop off the grid forever. I wonder if that will be the series endgame.

Posted in Breaking Bad, Burn Notice, Dexter, Eureka, The Closer | Comments Off on Tiny little woman in a Hyundai

Dead is Dead

Posted on August 4, 2011 by Bev Vincent

Hot, hot, hotter than hot. And dry. But humid. Saps the energy out of you when you go outside. Long live A/C.

Both The Closer and Rizzoli and Isles started with the disappearance of a young child. In both episodes, the parents of the missing child were divorced, and their relationships weren’t amicable. Also, in both cases, the missing child or the parents were known to a member of the police department. However, from that very similar starting point, the shows went in completely different directions.

In the case of The Closer, the missing boy disappeared from a day camp that was attended by Tao’s son Kevin. Tao was picking his son up when the disappearance was first noticed, so he got involved and the case became a homicide soon thereafter. As Provenza noted later in the episode, “I know my way around divorce. There’s bad, there’s ugly, and then there’s this.” The ex-wife has a new boyfriend and she took the ex-husband for almost everything he owned, so there is a lot of bitterness and finger-pointing when the boy is found dead in a nearby swimming pool.

It was interesting to see things from Tao’s perspective, and from his son’s. Everyone in the department is an “uncle” to Kevin. He sits around in the observation room and sees how Brenda handles the “notification,” which starts with an interrogation. Tao keeps sending him off to do homework. When Mrs. Tao arrives later, she is livid that her husband involved him in the investigation. “This is really better than letting him get his driver’s license?” she says. Kevin is 16 and Tao thinks the boy should be concentrating on SATs and homework instead of learning to drive. At the end, Kevin goes on a rant. “You think I’ll drive off and never come back. You can’t hold onto me forever. You just can’t.” Tao hugs his son and says, “Yes, I can. I’ll be holding on to you for the res of your life.”

The resolution to the case, predicated on the fact that the boy’s bicycle was neatly parked on its kickstand, was a real shocker.

In the Rizzoli and Isles case, the story went off in the direction of Elizabeth Smart and Jaycee Dugard. The clue about the lighthouse seemed a little strained to me. The missing child was the daughter of Rozzoli’s former partner, so it was close to home. A more upbeat resolution, though the episode wasn’t without tragedy.

This week’s Haven was one of the funniest ever. A phial of antimatter ended up stored in a safety deposit box next to a Higgs field disruptor, which means that heavy metals end up lighter than air and the bank just floats away. It’s first reported as a bank robbery, which Sheriff Carter thinks is just super—a real crime that doesn’t require an I.Q. of a gazillion to solve. However, he ends up inside the floating bank (after plummeting 50 feet from his car into a lake), attempting to separate the two incompatible devices so they won’t need to call NASA every time they want to make a deposit. “The bank might be unstable,” he’s advised as it lurches this way and that. “Noted. Unstable bank. But what bank isn’t?” he mutters. Lots of good pratfalls and sight gags, including the bank plummeting to earth once he succeeds. Almost everything returns to normal, except his Jeep ends up orbiting next to the Hubble space telescope.

One of the recurring themes on Covert Affairs this week is the difficulty associated with keeping secrets from family. This week, Annie is followed by her sister, who seems suddenly curious about how Annie is spending her days. Then Annie finds out that her form languages prof was a spy and had, in fact, recommended her to the CIA. Annie gets the unwelcome job of telling the spy’s wife that he had been lying to her for the past 20 years. The prof/spy also had a microdot containing valuable information that had to be found. Imagine looking for something the size of a period hidden among the belongings of an avid book collector. By the end of the adventure, Annie has decided to tell her sister the truth, even though Auggie warned her that after he told his brother they didn’t speak for six months. Season finale next week.

Torchwood took a very interesting twist this week. I was afraid that the villains of the series were going to be something as banal as big pharma, but it turns out that there’s something behind them. Something old. Something that has a mantra it likes to repeat in the best Doctor Who tradition. We are everywhere. We are always. We are no one. Apparently someone from Jack’s past, but when you’ve lived for thousands of years (Rex and Esther still don’t quite believe that), it’s hard to narrow it down. But they’ve been planning this for a long time—whatever this really is.

The tea party is represented by Ellis Hartley Monroe, played by Mare Winningham. She’s at the head of a campaign whose slogan is “Dead is Dead.” They believe that everyone who should have died since the miracle should be treated as if they really were dead. By persisting, she argues, as if they had a choice in the matter, they are draining resources from living, healthy citizens. They shouldn’t have equal rights. They should be removed, isolated and contained to prevent the spread of disease. Abandoned hospitals are turned into “plague ships” to hide the sick and the elderly. For a while her faction shows signs of growing. She’s stealing Oswald Dane’s platform, until he comes up with a counter-move. He plunges into one of the plague ships like Jesus among the lepers. He picks up a child and hoists it into the air (conveniently visible to the cameras outside). He’s one of them, you see. He should be dead. He will be their spokesperson to make sure they get what they need. Food and security, primarily. Just like that, he has the spotlight again, much to Jilly Kitzinger’s delight. She can’t stand Oswald (she can’t bear to look at “the clever bastard’s” hands, knowing what they did to his victim) but she has a job to do and Oswald’s bravado performance has it back on track again. The video goes viral. He’s the voice of the people again.

Poor Ellis Hartley Monroe, though. Whoever these mysterious overlords are, they decided to get her off the airwaves. They apologize as her car is loaded into a crusher at a junkyard, but her strategy was revealing their hand a little too soon. Her car ends up like the Fury at the end of Christine, but she’s inside and she can’t die. Camera zooms in on her eye. What a way to spend the rest of eternity.

Meanwhile, all roads seem to be leading to Los Angeles. The Torchwood gang is already there, though Gwen lies to Rhys back in Wales, saying that it’s cold and dark and dismal when she is, in fact, walking on the beach on a bright sunny day. Though they have a mission, real life doesn’t come to a halt. Esther’s sister Sarah (there’s probably some Biblical symbolism there, but it eludes me) is melting down and the only way she knows to help is to call CPS. Don’t know what she was thinking they’d do other than take the kids into protective custody. But she’s distracted and it draws the attention of the people who are looking for Torchwood. Gwen, too, is always handling calls from Rhys, mostly about her father, who is ill in hospital and, by the end, is bound for an “overflow camp,” which sounds ominous.

Along the way there’s a good adventure involving the theft of a Phi-Corps computer that requires them to replace it with a clone and start a fire to hide the theft. They also have to figure out how to get by the biometric locks. Their solution is benign. The bad guy isn’t above removing hands and eyeballs. Of course, the bad guys show up at the worst possible moment and Rex has to climb 33 flights of stairs, ripping open his chest again. He arrives to rescue Gwen and Jack just as the bad guy is about to say who the really bad guys are, and he fills the guy full of lead. He can’t kill him, of course, but he shoots him in the throat, effectively silencing him.

Hard to say where the series will go next, but I’m enjoying it.

Posted in Covert Affairs, Eureka, Rizzoli and Isles, The Closer, Torchwood | Comments Off on Dead is Dead

Oh, great. Walt’s in his underwear again

Posted on August 2, 2011 by Bev Vincent

I think I’ve got all the research done that I need to start writing my essay. I want to finish it up by the weekend so I can get to work on that book thing I’m supposed to do.

Hot as blazes. Again.

Got caught up on TV shows over the weekend. Haven was interesting. They keep finding ways to toss in little things that King fans might notice. The garbage disposal this week made me think of Firestarter and the weird, moving house conjured up Black House in my mind. Or the Lodge from Twin Peaks. And the overall story of inanimate objects coming to life and conspiring against people was an obvious nod to “Trucks” and Maximum Overdrive. The propeller shot was about as graphic as anything they’ve done on the show. Shades of Dawn of the Dead. The shot of Nate with the nails in his back was pretty cool, too.

They found an interesting way to handle Audrey #2’s duplicate memories by essentially wiping her clean. At one point, Audrey #1 says, “My memories are your life.” No more. However, it seemed to imply that Audrey #1 isn’t sure she actually lived things. That she’s an artificial construct of some sort. She never learned to play the piano, and yet she can now. I got a kick out of the Red Lobster commercial during the episode that played off Haven, too. Clever.

Charlotte from Lost was the guest star on Covert Affairs last week. She played a flight attendant who falls for Auggie and gets swept up in his off-the-books mission to track down the man responsible for his blindness. While it was an action-filled adventure of an episode, he seemed too quick to trust the woman and reveal who he was, sort of. Funny line: when he wants to plant a microphone on her, he fumbles with her blouse. “Probably not best for the blind man to be in charge of hiding the bug,” he says eventually.

Getting a guy to deliberately set fire to his own house is a sign of a good sting, which is exactly what they did on Burn Notice. Then they set him up for attempted murder. Good developments with the new Agent Pearce (a definite upgrade from her predecessor) and the plan to burn Michael for murder. My favorite exchange came after they identified the guy who doubled for Michael buying the burner phone. Sam says, “Good looking fellow. Doesn’t quite have your chin, though.” Michael responds, “That means a lot, coming from you.”

When the going gets tough, Marie goes klepto on Breaking Bad. I was wondering why she was shopping for a new house under an assumed name, spinning wild stories about kids or no kids or kids with serious illnesses. Seems the stress has driven her back to her old ways. She had the gumption to stand up to the realtor who caught her in a lie, but the ensuing tug of war spilled her spoils and got her arrested. Fortunately, Hank still has some juice with the department and got her released. Meant he owed the guy a favor, though, and the favor was to look at Gale’s lab notebook. Hank isn’t terribly motivated these days. “What am I? Ironsides?” (Wonder how many people caught that reference.) He watches porn when Marie’s out stealing stuff and bowling when she isn’t. However, he eventually became so bored (“I’m lying here like third base”) he picked up the file. I wonder what he’s going to pick up.

Meanwhile, Walt is ranting about the new security measures at work and Skyler is proving that she can be a strong negotiator. The scenes with Saul, the shady lawyer, are always good for a chuckle. She can’t be budged from her plan to use the car wash as a money laundering business and not just any car wash, but the one where the guy insulted Walt. However, she has many limits to how far she’s willing to go to accomplish this and finally comes up with a plan to send a fake pollution tester to shut the guy down for contaminating the surrounding area with his filtration system. She’s feeding the guy statutes, chapter and verse. Then she plays hardball when the guy calls up to renegotiate the offer. I loved the momentary look of uncertainty on her face between the two phone calls, seen only by us, not even by Walt.

Hard to figure out exactly what’s going on with Jesse. The party is getting wilder and rougher, but he doesn’t seem to be paying attention. His place has basically turned into a crack house, with people fighting. He creates a feeding frenzy by throwing a handful of cash into the middle of the room. He seems to be functional when he gets to work, but he’s got a boatload of nervous energy to burn off, and I don’t think the Go-Kart track is going to do the trick.

Posted in Breaking Bad, Burn Notice, Covert Affairs, Haven | Comments Off on Oh, great. Walt’s in his underwear again

Cruisin’ for…

Posted on July 29, 2011 by Bev Vincent

Don stood us up. It veered south overnight so we haven’t seen any effects from the storm at all. Apparently Houston proper received significant rainfall, but not a drop where I live. Yet, anyway. Maybe we’ll see some overnight. Can only hope.

I had a Big Bruiser (pictured) as a kid. Actually, I had it as an adult, too, as it stayed in my room at my parents’ house until we cleaned it out a number of years ago. The light worked, I’m pretty sure it had a siren, too, and the tow truck made a growling noise, like that of a heavy engine. The associated pickup truck could be equipped with a rumpled fender and a flat tire to complete the simulation. The back of the tow truck had two different ways to hook up the pickup, including a hook dangling from a heavy piece of twine. The lift was also battery operated. Hey, look, here’s the original commercial. Cool. Blast from the past.

That’s apropos of nothing except I found a very large bruise on the back of my shin last night. About the size of a hockey puck (I’ve been comparing a lot of things to hockey pucks lately). It looks like it’s been there for three or four days. I have absolutely no idea how I got it. That’s troubling. I kept going over everything I did since I got back from NECon but I have no recollection of hitting my leg or being hit. Hmmm.

I’m still getting caught up on DVR’d shows from NECon and in the days subsequent. I think I’m down to to series left: Burn Notice and Covert Affairs. Rizzoli and Isles is one of those shows that, with a little tweaking, could be very good. Most of the tweaking would involve getting rid of one character and completely changing the nature of another. Minor. I’d get rid of Rizzoli’s mother. She’s just another in a long line of annoying TV mothers who’s only there to provide something akin to comic relief, but not really. And I’d change Isles from an oblivious know it all into, you know, a real human being. Rizzoli is real and credible. Why not Isles, too. Instead, she just spouts statistics and facts that no one else cares about and acts inappropriately. I also think the resolution of this week’s episode was lifted from NCIS. The guy who’s told to stay in the car at a crime scene who uses his car to catch the fleeing bad guy while remaining within the strict confines of his orders. Jimmy Palmer did the same thing once.

Wil Wheaton and Stan Lee were guests on this week’s Eureka. Wheaton was playing to type as the mildly annoying scientist who has invented the perfect food for the Titan mission. A foil for Fargo. Lee was another competitor in the space program challenge. Dr. Lee, in this case, though he preferred the title “Generalissimo.” He’s been experimenting with the effects of gamma radiation, of course. “I’ve produced some surprising results.” When Fargo suggested that he might be a little old for space travel, Lee responded. “Don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.” The episode was inspired by Minority Report, I guess. A new gizmo allows law enforcement to perceive threats to the space program well in advance. “You’re accusing me of something I might do?” Parrish asks. In a neat twist, though, the gizmo predicted a catastrophe that was caused by a flaw in the gizmo itself.

Also an interesting concept on Haven, the little Maine town where people have strange afflictions. Enter a character who is able to take someone’s affliction for his own use, but only one at a time. As soon as he steals someone else’s affliction, the previous one is returned to its rightful owner. He needs Nate’s deficiency in his sense of touch so he could commit a robbery that had a painful method of getting in. Another character’s affliction causes people who see her to see the thing in their lives that scares them the most. Duke sees the person who’s going to kill him. Audrey Parker #2 sees a clown who looks very much like Pennywise, sharp teeth and all. Audrey Parker—our Audrey—is immune. What did Nate see? We don’t find out. For now anyway. Nate’s actions at the end were inspired. I didn’t see that coming. I kept waiting for the guy to reach out and touch him but instead, Nate rescued someone else. Nicely done.

Posted in Eureka, Haven, Rizzoli and Isles | Comments Off on Cruisin’ for…

Failing Murder 101

Posted on July 28, 2011 by Bev Vincent

Seems more and more likely that Tropical Storm Don, also known in yesterday’s post as the godfather, will hit the coast well south of us. The local weather prognosticators have doubts that we’ll see any rain from the system at all. A little tweak to the north would be much appreciated. However, we might get some rain today from another system (maybe from the remote outer bands?) so we won’t get away completely.

We’re up to the sixth episode of Season 1 of Dexter. The point where the guy everyone is sure is the Ice Truck Killer looks at Dexter for the first time and says, “Who the f*** are you?”  One of the things I’ve always appreciated about the series is the way the writers ratchet up the tension. Dexter doesn’t have just one thing closing in on him at a time—he has several, all converging at the same rate.

This week was one of the funny episodes of The Closer that featured Flynn and Provenza. The last one, in all likelihood. Provenza has an opportunity to make some extra money doing serving papers on someone while off duty. He hasn’t strictly cleared this with the chief, yet, so it’s unauthorized. Flynn joins in, after uttering the show’s thematic statement: Anything that begins with you whispering ends with other people shouting. They con Buzz into joining the caper because they need someone who can track a cell phone. They lie to him about how much money they’re going to make, cutting him in for $200 instead of a share of $4000. Their subject is in a hotel: Alan Arkin with bad teeth. When they get back downstairs, Buzz notices that his tail light is broken. He decides to videotape it for evidence. Gunshots are heard and a body falls from the hotel, landing right on Buzz’s car.

“This is totally containable,” Provenza says…to Fritz, who happens upon the scene because the victim was awaiting sentencing for embezzling a ton of money from a pension fund. “I know what you’re thinking. What is a murder victim doing on Buzz’s car.” However, the medical examiner discovers a little physical detail that casts doubt on the victim being Hirschbaum. Turns out that an imposter was killed instead. Brenda plans to keep that fact quiet, which troubles both Fritz (the FBI has a policy against lying to the public) and Chief Pope. “You think it’s a good idea to have someone from the LAPD lie publicly?” he asks. Then he sees Commander Taylor on TV at a press conference. “Oh. Yeah. I can live with that.”

The supposed victim’s family is a piece of work. His fourth (and final, she claims) wife wants her stepdaughter to call her “Mom.” “I’m not calling you Mom. You sat behind me in eighth grade English.” Mom makes herself look suspicious by saying the same thing three times in exactly the same words. The daughter makes herself look suspicious by asking for her father’s death certificate.

When a clue to the real Hirschbaum’s location turns up, Brenda suspends Flynn and Provenza (and Buzz) so they can track him down before the FBI catch up with him. They “kidnap” him and take him to a hotel while they try to figure out how to make any of the money they were promised by the lawyer. With all the damage to Buzz’s car (plus a ripped suit), they’re operating heavily in the red. I thought it was funny that Alan Arkin’s character was reading the yellow pages while they concocted a plan. The artist’s sketches of the kidnapping suspects were pretty hilarious, too.

Hirschbaum offers them $100K each to serve the papers again and let him get away. Buzz, of course, is indignant, but Flynn and Provenza had a plan. Brenda is curious about the broken tail late and, when they retrace their steps from the night before, they discover that it was broken at the lawyer’s office so he could follow them at night more easily. The funniest part of the whole episode was the interrogation of the lawyer, who went to the best law school in the Caribbean. “I suppose all this makes me the criminal,” he says indignantly. “Well you did kill someone,” Brenda responds. “An actor!” he says, as if that makes everything all right. “Everything I’ve done up to now has been completely legal, except for the murder,” he says. Brenda tells him she’s not only arresting him for killing Hirschbaum’s stand-in, she’s doing it so that his clients will get better representation.

My favorite line of the show, though, which I’ll have to use some day, came after the lawyer said he didn’t mean to kill the stand-in. “Intent travels with the bullet,” she said. Great line.

Posted in Dexter, The Closer | Comments Off on Failing Murder 101

The godfather

Posted on July 27, 2011 by Bev Vincent

Remember all that rainfall we haven’t received over the past nine months? The drought? The sixteen inch deficit for 2011 to date? There’s a decent chance we might make up most of it later on this week.

It’s early days, and Don doesn’t even officially have that name yet, but the tropical disturbance will likely become at least a tropical storm, which will then scoot across the gulf, perhaps even becoming a hurricane along the way. Current (and very, very premature) estimates show landfall south of us, which means we could get a healthy soaking come Friday. We’ve actually been doing not too badly in July—we’re only down about half an inch for the month compared to the average—but still a long way to go to refill the depleted reservoirs.

We decided to start our new DVD series marathon with Dexter and, after just a few episodes, my wife said she liked it enough to go ahead and get the other seasons. Season 5 doesn’t come out for a couple of weeks, but I figure four seasons should last us at least until then. It’s interesting, rewatching the first season after all these years. The little things I didn’t know to notice at the time, such as the first time that we actually see the Ice Truck Killer without having a foggy clue that’s who it is. And seeing these characters in the early days, when they’re still finding their legs. Deb especially.

Episode 3 of Torchwood gives us a hint at who the actual culprit behind “the miracle” might be. Big pharma! One, in particular, called Phi-Corp, that manufactures the kinds of drugs that are now in high demand. The main clue to the culpability is the fact that they were stockpiling these drugs long before people stopped dying, which means they were either behind the phenomenon or knew it was coming.

Oswald Danes continues to develop into an interesting character. He makes an idle comment during an interview that he thinks drug companies should start giving away their products instead of capitalizing on the situation. Then he’s swept off to visit Phi-Corp and he’s suddenly changing his tune: he doesn’t want drugs to be free—he wants them to be freely accessible, which means no more prescriptions. He takes his lumps for his past, though. On an unauthorized expedition to a coffee shop, he’s chased by a thuggish couple who recognize him, throwing his final words about his young victim (“she should have run faster”) in his face as they chase him down the street. He is “saved” by a couple of patrol cops, who thrash him in a dark alley before delivering him back to his motel. “You should have run faster.” His confrontation with Jack reveals his conflict. He craves execution but he’s “in a world without death, and it’s killing you.”

This episode had a lot more British vs. American humo(ur), with Esther acting as translator for certain words and phrases. Also a lot more sex. Rex runs away from the Torchwood gang and ends up in the sack with Dr. Vera Juarez. Jack runs off to a gay bar and ends up in bed with some random dude. Poor Rex, he’s always bleeding from his wound. When Jack shows up with a hangover and cops some of Rex’s pain killers, Rex complains. “I need them, too,” Jack says. “You weren’t impaled,” Rex counters. “You should see the other guy,” Jack says with a sly grin.

There was less about the implications of the situation than in the previous episodes. A woman was choked by her boyfriend, her windpipe pulverized, but of course she’s still alive. “This is what murder looks like now,” someone observes. People can’t even be charged with attempted murder any longer. And when Jack visits the bar, he discovers that “people are throwing a lot of sober out the window.” A bowl on the bar contains discarded sobriety chips. A group of masked protesters, almost mourners, call themselves the soulless because they think that everlasting life has robbed them of their souls.

One thing I notice about Breaking Bad is that the camera rarely moves. Gives the show a dramatic look. There are cuts, and the occasional pan, but a lot of steady camera (as opposed to SteadiCam). The second episode was interesting. It consisted of two main plot lines. First, there was Walt acquiring a gun so he could get rid of the threat he perceives from Gus. Jim Beaver from Deadwood plays the gun dealer who advises him to get a .38 special. It’s less conspicuous than the automatic and has fewer bullets. “If you can’t get it done in five shots, you’re into spray and pray and I wouldn’t expect six more to close the deal.” He practices drawing and packs the gun the next day he goes to work at the drug lab. Mike seems to be running the show there now, asking for a second weigh and telling Walt that he’ll never see Gus again. Walt then decides to visit Gus at home but his cell phone rings as he crosses the street and it’s Gus, telling Walt to go home. His final gambit: trying to convince Mike that they are both vulnerable after what happened to Victor. “Get me in a room with him and I’ll do the rest.” Mike’s answer is pretty clear. He punches Walt and kicks him twice when he’s down, then thanks him for buying him a drink.

In parallel, Jesse is partying like it’s 1999. He spent a ton of money on a big DJ-ready sound system with all the accouterments. When Badger and Skinny Pete come to visit, he offers them drugs. At first they say they’re on the 12-step program, but he quickly wears them down. Badger and Pete get philosophical over the zombie versions of video games. One of the funniest conversations ever:

Badger: That’s the bomb, bro. Think on it. They’re not just zombies. They’re Nazi zombies.

Pete: Nazi zombies.

Badger: SS Waffen troopers, too, which are like the baddest ass Nazis of the whole Nazi family.

Pete: Zombies are dead, man. What difference does it make what their jobs was when they was living.

Badger: Dude, you are so historically retarded. Nazi zombies don’t want to eat you just cuz they’re craving the protein. They do it cuz they hate Americans, man. They’re the Taliban of the zombie world.

Pete: I played the game, man. They ain’t exactly fleet of foot. I mean, where’s the challenge? At least the zombies in Left For Dead clock a respectable 40.

Badger: Apples and oranges. Totally unfair to compare the two.

Suddenly his place is crammed full of people. It reminds me of the Larry Underwood scenes from early in The Stand. Wall-to-wall partiers dancing to really loud techno. There’s another funny (irrelevant but funny) discussion about a pizza place where the gimmick is that they don’t cut the pies. “They pass the savings on to you,” Badger says. “What savings? How much can it be to cut a damn pizza.” Badger is pretty stoned by now. “You make like 10 million pizzas a year. You figure it takes 10 seconds to cut each one. It adds up. In man hours that’s like…I don’t know!”

The next morning, the place looks like Woodstock. Wall to wall bodies. A camera mounted on a Roomba threads its way through them, giving a funny perspective on the fallout. Badger is draped over a stool, his head leaning back, when the Roomba goes by. He sits up. “Did that just happen?” But Jesse isn’t ready to quit yet. He has to go to work, but he wants the party to be going full out when he gets home. Finally, he wears everyone out. Badger (“I need a brain transplant right now”) and Pete need to go home to sleep it off—they’ve been up for three days straight. “Maybe we’ll see you next week,” they tell Jesse.

Posted in Breaking Bad, Dexter, Torchwood | Comments Off on The godfather