Looking Out To Sea

This evening we made our first use of the BBC’s iPlayer “watch again” system to see the first episode of Ashes to Ashes, the sequel to last year’s retro-modern cop show Life on Mars.

We watched it on the laptop over wireless, and received full-screen playback for almost the entire episode. The only “loading…” pause was during the opening credits, for which I’ll happily forgive them. The quality was excellent and I was pleasantly surprised that it even works on Linux-based machines, provided you’ve got the latest Flash player.

I’m not sure what I think about the show yet. It was very jarringly edited — open a door into a different room, the person walks into a different building. I have already developed a healthy dislike for the protagonist’s daughter. I hope she will remain merely a spectre for the rest of the show.

Nothing much happened, though they’ve got a good character for the main part. Like Sam Tyler in the previous, Alexandra Drake should be a good person to base a series around.

At the moment I am reading another crazy Peter Høeg book, The Woman and The Ape. I’ll probably be finished it in another day but it’s looking pretty good so far. After that, I’m looking forward to The Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin by Francis Spufford. It looks like a great deal of geeky fun. I really hope it lives up to its promise.

Musically I have been tied up with Michael Hedges after receiving Beyond Boundaries, a compilation of some fantastic and moving tunes. Hunt it down like your guitar virtuoso life depended on it.

I am looking forward immensely to watching Battlestar Galactica when Helen gets back.

Last week I got a copy of season three of Battlestar Galactica from a friend. We settled down on Friday night for some serious couch-potatoism. The first three episodes didn’t work. It turns out they had been written to the disk as approximately 1 Gb of zeroes. At least they would have compressed well!

So I ran over to MovieBank and rented the first disc of season two of 24. We’d been warned that it was a bit crap, but really I had no how silly it was going to get. We’ve also been told that it picks up from season three onwards. Can we get confirmation of this?

spoilers coming!

I mean, Kim gets threatened by a mountain lion! And kidnapped/held hostage on several occasions! How does she manage it? Can one person really be so incapable? I must admit to feeling very emotional when Jack had to tell his daughter he was about to die. And George Mason saying goodbye to his son too. It was a series for emotional goodbyes.

It was pretty disappointing that we were able to accurately predict nearly every twist (who didn’t see George Mason hiding out in the plane?). It did allow for some good banter between the two of us, betting at which point they would stop telegraphing the twist and actually execute it. It was also really silly the way that antagonists would be wheeled out one after another — as soon as George disappears, Tony becomes a grumpy boss, then Carrie appears to Tony can be a good guy again. Then division boss Chappelle appears so Carrie fades into the background. Sigh.

So, 24 drinking game would involve imbibing something whenever:

• You hear the CTU ringtone. (Or every time you hear me say “we’ve got those phones at work!”.)
• One character says to another “you have to trust me”.
• One character says to another “give me everything you’ve got on” some person.
• Someone says “what are you talking about?” when given news of a strange situation (“you’re daughter’s been arrested”, “I’m dying of radiation poisoning”).
• The CTU intelligence crew look at each other with suspicion… no, that would be too cruel, that’s all they ever do.

Distractions don’t come more idle than looking up the TV Tropes wiki. It’s such fun.

The page on the stereotype of Hollywood atheist is quite interesting. It gets to the core of the “bitter atheist” — you know, the one that used to believe in God but doesn’t any more because his wife died in a car accident? It has this to say of Battlestar Galactica (the new series):

…features two prominent atheist characters, both of them wildly different: Admiral Adama, who views humanity as flawed but inherently good, and ultimately accountable to nobody but themselves for their mistakes in life, and Gaius Baltar, an egocentric technocrat who ultimately comes to consider himself a god.

Interesting summary. I haven’t seen enough BSG to be sure, but I’d always pegged Adama as being on the wishy-washy liberal theism fence. You know, Church of Scotland rather than Church of White Jesus From Texas. They forgot one character though — President’s aide Billy, who died in the very next episode after explicitly saying he was an atheist. But that’s what happens when you enter politics looking about 14 years old…

It is sad that the one atheist character who’s super-intelligent, a media personality, a hit with the ladies and a good-humoured guy also happens to be out of his tiny little mind. But you can’t have everything, right? ;-)

More interesting to ask, why are there so few positive role models of scientists in film and TV? The balanced scientists are as few and far between, and there is a lot of cross-over: the cold, calculated, “logical” scientist who can’t understand/engage with human emotion.

1. Get home.
2. Settle on sofa.
3. Open boxed set.
4. Find the first five DVDs are missing.
5. Blog about it.

It seems we will be watching 24 season 2 on another occasion.