On TV

[evilhippo]

I'm declaring this my official day off this week. The rest of the week and on into next is going to be my last hurrah (and by hurrah I mean torture by UofC). I already spent most of the morning trying to sort out my living situation and finding a few more places to send my resume... and covering my new laptop in stickers. It's still a little unbalanced, but at least it's decorated now.

So now I'm going to sit here and muse about my TV fandoms, because I've had a few random comments itching at the back of my mind for a while now, and I should probably write them down.

I don't think there's any question that they really needed two hours to finish this season. Everything that needed to happen happened in the last ten minutes, and that left me feeling rather unsatisfied. Especially since two of those last ten minutes were Hiro stuck in the past. And as delightfully wtf as that was, it could've been sacrificed for better pacing. One of the wonderful thing about Heroes, for me at least, has been its pacing. It's taken a group of almost entirely unrelated characters and taken an entire season to get them all in one place, often fairly cleverly (though I wish "get Peter out of New York City" would've occurred to more people, because that way his mom's involvement in the conspiracy to blow up the city could've been fleshed out a little bit more because um, dude, wtf? Please to be explaining exactly her character there. And someone please explain why she was caught stealing early in Nathan's campaign? Methinks her involvement was just kind of tossed in there.)

Also, Peter's unstoppable explosion. That needed to be explained a bit better, too. I realize that the point is that he just can't control his powers well when he's around Sylar, because he gets a hefty dose of everyone else's (though it beats me how exactly that works). But to figure that out, you have to think back to some of the earliest episodes, where the problem was more pronounced. It hasn't come up at all for a good four or five episodes, which pretty much eliminates the "oh, that's why this is happening" response, which is what makes for really good TV. Heroes is possibly one of the weirdest shows in this way, since it's had moments where you go "Oh! That's how that works" only to realize that there hasn't been any build-up to it at all. How they pull that off is just completely beyond me.

Oh, and Sylar keeps randomly disappearing and reappearing, and if he's got Claude's power... I'm going to be kind of annoyed. If Claude is dead, he at least deserved a proper death. I'm assuming he's not, though, because otherwise Sylar would've taunted Peter properly.

And, as a final note, though I hate to admit it because it's an awful idea in the grand scheme of things, I want to see Sylar redeemed at some point. It shouldn't happen, but I want to see it. (Not as much as I wanted to see an ACTUAL EPIC BATTLE BETWEEN HIM AND PETER OMG WHY DIDN'T THAT HAPPEN. Freaking Heroes.) I think maybe it's my fascination with Zachary Quinto's acting.
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It seems like a lot of my problems lately are with pacing. Probably because that's what's on my mind right now, since I'm trying to figure it out for myself. And this is a sentence between these two so no one accidentally goes from one paragraph to the other and accidentally spoils themselves for something. Not that this week's Doctor Who really has much to spoil.

And you, season three of Doctor Who... what is going on? Something is very strange when Gridlock might be my favorite episode of the season. It's weird. This season has had it's good moments, but it has yet to have a really good episode. I'll admit now that I definitely never appreciated Rose enough. Because I'm chalking this up to the companion change. The writers don't know how to handle her yet, and while Rose and Nine grew together in the first season, and David Tennant is just generally good, this switch has just left everything in a kind of disarray, and it's totally not Freyma's fault. She has no context. We haven't touched on Martha's family, except in passing... which is a shame, because I kind of like her mother, and the ensemble family is an interesting idea. (It's also an excuse to keep them out, though, because with a family that in-touch, you can't just zip Martha away.) I think the writers (probably just RTD) set out to come up with a companion that would be a lot of things Rose wasn't--older, more independent, less of a good-hearted loner. And in doing so, they've kind of written themselves into a corner, because that's all they seem to have to go on. She has no real dimension. She's trying to become a Doctor, she's got a little bit of a crush on the Doctor (who wouldn't?), and she's independent. That's pretty much all we've seen. Other than that, she's kind of a blank slate.

So, the point kind of being, the only parts of 42 I liked were the Doctor and Martha, because they both had actual character development. It was nothing major. The Doctor was scared and admitted it, which was cool. And Martha actually went off on her own to do things, and didn't wuss out when things didn't go exactly as planned. Which is good. But why the heck did that revelation take seven freaking episodes? This season has had some kind of obsession with a kind of real time thing, in that we've got to deal with watching every step in the Doctor and Martha's relationship... unfortunately, that's crap for Martha because she's got to spend so many episodes earning his outward trust (if he didn't trust her in the first place, he wouldn't have let her on the TARDIS). So this season's been slow and awkward and weird.

I think the moral of the story here is that that kind of real-time doesn't work well. You can't keep an audience interested that way, as interesting as it may be in theory to watch that relationship develop. (I'll admit it'd be equally awkward to just skip to a more comfortable time between the Doctor and Martha, but missing the mark in either direction is just as bad.)

And, on 42 in general: Way to fail at real-time. I've only seen 24 a few times, but isn't the point that things kind of... all go on at once? I don't think 24 has some kind of trademark on split-screens or something. I mean, for an episode that could've been super-supenseful, it fell completely flat, which is just insane. (I swear 53% of that failure was the phrase "Burn with me"... omg. Why didn't someone stop that from being an actual line?! There's always been something delightfully tongue-in-cheek about Doctor Who, but the rest of this episode seemed like it was taking itself seriously and failing rather than actually taking something and turning it around to laugh at it.) As I told chocolatemoose in order to appropriately lower her expectations for the episode: maybe if you ignored all the side characters and watched it with the sound off, it'd be okay.

P.S. Doctor Who, you've had too many episodes this season that take themselves too seriously. Stop it. Get back to having fun.

I kind of knew it was going to happen, but the one episode that I've been dreading in theory looks like it's going to be the most promising so far. In fact, the idea itself sounds horrible from the standpoint I had at the end of the last season, but given what's come between then and now, I can't help but look forward to Human Nature/Family of Blood. It sounds cool. Different for once. And it's come to my attention that Paul Cornell is the guy who wrote Father's Day, and loathe as I am to admit that that episode got to me, it did (I almost cried), and that's a sign of a very good writer, because I mostly hate emotional stuff. (And I'll continue to hold out high hopes for Blink, because Steven Moffat is also a good writer.) So here's to crossing my fingers and hoping that this season is loaded with good episodes at the end. (And if the rumors/"spoilers" about the end of the season are true, I will be in a perpetual state of wtf for a good long while (which will probably include more questioning of RTD's sanity).)

And because I am like a deranged doting parent when it comes to new electronics:

Like I said, a bit aesthetically unbalanced still, but it'll settle in. There are also stickers hanging out around the keyboard, but I haven't bothered to get a good picture. The only important thing is that the key I've remapped to be a proper delete key has got a radioactive symbol on it now.

Comments

[shichahn.livejournal.com]

Your thoughts on both Heroes and 42 are very very similar to mine. :o But yeah, I rather like Gridlock, and I'm all "wtf, why is my favorite ep so far a RTD?" I think you're right about what I am now going to call the Martha Effect. I like her, but I don't have much to go on with her, I don't really care about her yet. I do, however, appreciate her effect on the Doctor, in the sense that she actually makes him talk about stuff. Although maybe I just like hearing about Gallifrey and such old-Who stuff in the new series. XD;

I'm really looking forward to Human Nature. I wouldn't go so far as to say the series needs rescuing, but it needs some sort of substance, which I think Cornell can provide. I loved Father's Day, and it did make me cry. Heh. It just seems to me that Cornell is, you know, actually a good writer. As opposed to people like Chibnall.

I also feel very very similarly about everything you've written here with Heroes. The end did feel a bit rushed. It didn't help I didn't realize that this week was the finale until the day before. I seriously couldn't see how they were going to finish it all in one hour. And I think, given they only had an hour, they did a remarkable job, but even an extra 15 minutes could have been well-used. That said, I rather did like the couple minutes of "Generations" there. Hiro is excellent. XD

But I do want to know how Sylar was hiding in the open, as they said, and how he always just appears behind people... Something's up with that. Though I wish they'd explained it in this last ep and then not let him crawl down into the sewer. Him getting away = anticlimactic and kind of lame, in my view. :p


OKAY. Anyway. Yaaay computer! XD I am jealous of all the stickers. But then I don't like to sticker things, I think. My laptop has only one Ed sticker (as made by sketchyheart!) and I have other stickers but I never use them.... I think my problem is that once I put a sticker on something, it has to stay there, and so if I get a new computer I will lose that sticker, so... I just cling to them like a packrat.

[evilhippo.livejournal.com]

It seems like a lot of Old-Who is seeping into this season. Which I don't mind at all, since I've done enough reading-up to have a fair idea of what it means. The theories about Mr. Saxon, though, just kind of make me shake my head, because that gets into like, the TV movie and... what the heck is my general reaction to that. (-;

Nah, I wouldn't say the season needs rescuing. But a strong bunch of episodes to end on would be nice. Someone needs to sit Chibnall down and explain the proper use of cliche and... dialog. There's something very strange going on in his mind about those things.

I am really looking forward to seeing what they do with Hiro in 17th century Japan. (It still absolutely stuns me that a good quarter of the show is in Japanese, and I would love it just for that fact, because, dude, American shows aren't supposed to touch subtitles with a ten-foot pole, let alone languages like Japanese.) I just wish that it had come after a more solid ending. Even a few minutes more would've been nice. And I have to say, I don't exactly understand Sylar's departure into the sewers. I mean, true, it never was exactly clear that he was going to die, but geez... I was expecting a battle, at least. (Though Niki picking up the parking meter and bashing him with it was cool. She actually managed to score quite a few cool points with me in the past few episodes, which is cool considering I found other things to do during her sections in all the earlier episodes because I just really, really didn't care about her.) I'm going to be bitter about the lack of epic battle forever.

And, on the sewer thing, as I told Dar, I think he should meet Splinter down there, who'll train him to be a ninja so there can be not-so-Teenage Mutant Ninja Sylar he can battle Hiro's samurai he can be redeemed I can be amused. Heck, he's already radioactive. It works.

As a totally random question (because I have a very intense debate going on with my RA, upon which some intangible sum is wagered)... do you think Sylar actually eats the brains? (Our points of consideration are whether the writers have a vested interest in being clever and whether there's any actual evidence for or against.)

Also, Hiro has got to be one of my favorite characters on TV ever. And Masi Oka rather awesome, too. It amuses me to death that he's a comp-sci/math major from Brown who works/worked at ILM on special effects (for Pirates!). Acting and a solid computer-geekery background is pretty good basis for being an awesome person. ^_^ (Fine, I have a crush on him and Hiro. Freaking Japanese guys.)

I used to horde stickers... but then I decided that there were always more stickers, and I should probably stick them to things before I lost them (which I seem to do a lot. I've been hording a sheet of FMA stickers now for more than three years--I've only used three, and now I can't find the rest. Which is bad, because I was going to stick Envy or Lust on this laptop, since Gluttony lives on the other one.) And now I really, really want TARDIS and/or Dalek stickers, but I'm thinking the chances of me finding them anywhere in the US are very, very slim.

I love how sketchyheart's stickers get around.

(Holy crap this is a long comment.)

[flutingfrenzy.livejournal.com]

Aww, it's so cute and it has your eyes! ♥

[evilhippo.livejournal.com]

^___^