television

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“I don’t want to go!”

Good (Time) Lord… it’s been ages since I’ve done a write-up about Doctor Who! The last time one appeared on this blog was when “The Next Doctor” Christmas special aired twelve months ago.

But no way was I gonna miss posting thoughts about the final adventure of David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor…

Thankfully, BBC America aired “The End of Time” Part 1 last Saturday night: a day after its Christmas Day premiere for our Brittish brethren across the pond… meaning that for the first time ever I didn’t have to download it off the Intertubes via BitTorrent. But I didn’t want to share my thoughts on it until Part 2 aired stateside this evening. It just finished so here we go!

I’ve mixed feelings about “The End of Time” but in general, I found it to be a rollickin’ and satisfying finale not ...

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This blog hasn’t had much to report on local cult leader/pathological liar/convicted felon/public menace Johnny Robertson lately. Been almost a month since I posted anything new.

This next item though is sufficiently wacky enough that it screams to be talked about.

Some people have been writing to let me know that Johnny Robertson and all of his followers (those being James Oldfield, Micah Robertson “The Lesser” and Mark McMinnis) have been conspicuously absent from the airwaves of local television station WGSR in recent weeks. Instead What Does the Bible Say? and A Word from the Lord (AKA “The Martinsville Taliban Show” and “A Word from James Oldfield”) have been in reruns, one of which was Oldfield’s two-hour spiel about why it’s a sin to place money in the Salvation Army kettles. That particular screed prompted one person known to this writer to make a fifty dollar contribution to the Salvation ...

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My DVR just received a massive enema. Gone is stuff that I’ve recorded like P2 and Krull and Clash of the Titans and Stroker Ace (though how that got scheduled is beyond me, and I’m still trying to figure out how I wound up with Yentl). So now I’ve got plenty of disk space to record WWII in HD from the History Channel.

HOW did I miss hearing about this until now? Well, no matter ‘cuz History Channel is broadcasting them again and if you’ve got a high-definition television you really owe it to yourself to catch this, because you’ve never seen World War II as clear and brilliant as this before. See that still image? Those are British soldiers coming ashore at Normandy, and it looks so crisp and sharp you’d swear that this was footage gathered just yesterday.

If History Channel puts this out on Blu-ray… well, ...

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ABC’s Lost, perhaps the most defining and innovative show of the decade, will begin its sixth and final season on February 2nd, 2010. That’s a Tuesday night by the way, which is where Lost will be from here on out (apart from a break for the Winter Olympics). Eighteen hours spread out over sixteen episodes will begin with the two-hour season premiere, “LA X”.

Can showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse wrap up everything in those 18 hours?! In no particular order we’ve got: the smoke monster, Jacob, Richard’s eternal youthfulness, Walt being “special”, Christian Shepherd and why he’s still walking around, the statue, the Temple (which we have yet to get a serious look at), the food drops, why Marvin Candle uses those names for different DHARMA films, the hollowed-out Bible, the Black Rock, whoever thought to build the pendulum inside the Lamppost station (I’ve thought since ...

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AMC’s much-promoted revamp of The Prisoner concluded last night. After watching both hours twice-over now I am going to say that that, acknowledging that while mine is going to be in the minority of opinions, that I very much enjoyed it and thought it was time well spent. And I will likely be getting the DVD of the series when it becomes available. But I will say that AMC way over-hyped The Prisoner. And so much so that I have to wonder how much confidence they had in their own product. Doing “coming up” bumpers before each commercial break did nothing to instill one’s faith in this show as a viewer. Without those, I think The Prisoner could have been much more enjoyable. Another reason why I’m looking forward to a DVD set of this.

Meanwhile, ABC aired the third episode of the relaunched V. I watched it ...

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We had the first run-through (or “stumble-through” as it was officially called 🙂 of both acts of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever last night, so I was late getting home. But I had the DVR whirring away recording the second two hours of AMC’s remake of The Prisoner and I just finished watching ’em.

I know that I’m in a solid minority here, but I am absolutely digging the heck out of The Prisoner! To me, it’s the same theme going on as the Sixties original series. Just… different. Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner was about individuality, and this one starring Jim Caviezel and Ian McKellan is about personal identity. Now, those may seem like the same thing, but they aren’t. They’re just aspects of the same thing. I don’t have any better word for it other than “soul”.

Is The Prisoner meant to be entertainment? Hmmmm… not really. It’s ...

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I’m still enjoying this re-imagined V (slam here for my review of the pilot episode). ABC is doing a fine job of updating the concepts of the original. However, I’m more than a little compelled to say that this show needs to ratchet up the intensity. Tonight’s episode “There is No Normal Anymore” picked up right after the end of last week’s premiere, and then hit a plodding stride.

Maybe this is still just “setup” for a bigger payoff later. I hope so, because V has tons of potential. But unless there’s some master arc plan in the works that we aren’t aware of the show is taking its own sweet time more than Babylon 5 did, or Ronald Moore’s Battlestar Galactica. It worked very well on those series and it can work just as well now, but V‘s showrunners need to pick up the pace ...

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Giant alien spacecraft arrive over dozens of major cities around the world and their leader – a sexy brunette in a revealing skirt and high heels – broadcasts a greeting in perfect English and all these other languages in 100,800,000 progressive high-def television, says her name is “Anna” and that humanity is the first sentient life they have ever encountered… and nobody on Earth is bothering to ask HOW the hell any of this is possible?!

Well, other than that…

(I’ll interject that all of those previous plotholes were quickly forgotten just before the final commercial break, when Elizabeth Mitchell’s character peeled back the skin and I screamed out “OH HELL YES!!”)

I watched the premiere episode of V tonight on ABC and thought it was wildly and surprisingly good. I loved the original V miniseries from 1983, thought the following year’s V: The Final Battle stank on ...

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