Well briefly this year’s Christmas episode of Doctor Who was in my opinion a load of crap and Catherine Tate was even more bloody annoying than I’d expected her to be. Yet another proof that RTD shouldn’t fucking write these episodes as if we needed more proof.
And yet I was still excited by the trailer for the forthcoming Third season of the show. I’m a fucking lost cause really.
I’ve rewatching season five of the tv show 24 in preparation for the imminent start of season six and I’m starting to feel some pity for the character of Rick Burke.
Who is Rick Burke you wonder?
He is the CTU interrogator/torturer played by Martin Papazian. Why should I feel pity for a torturer though? Well as if his occupation wasn’t bad enough it seems that half the people he is asked to ‘interrogate’ by his superiors in CTU are entirely innocent and have no information at all for him to extract from them.
Not only that but when he does actually have a genuine suspect to interrogate, Christopher Henderson, Burke is knocked out by Tony Almeida before he can finish the job.
I had initially thought that Burke was in season four also but he is in fact the second iteration of a character whose sole purpose is to take over the role of torturer from Jack Bauer so that Bauer’s heroics are not so diminished by carrying out such acts as they have been in previous seasons.
The season four CTU chief interrogator was an Agent Richards as portrayed by Butch Klein who has the thankless task of torturing Richard Heller and Sarah Gavin, who of course were innocent of conspiring with the terrorists.
Myths over Miami is a fascinating article from almost ten years ago in the Miami New Times. [via]
On Christmas night a year ago, God fled Heaven to escape an audacious demon attack — a celestial Tet Offensive. The demons smashed to dust his palace of beautiful blue-moon marble. TV news kept it secret, but homeless children in shelters across the country report being awakened from troubled sleep and alerted by dead relatives. No one knows why God has never reappeared, leaving his stunned angels to defend his earthly estate against assaults from Hell. “Demons found doors to our world,” adds eight-year-old Miguel, who sits before Andre with the other children at the Salvation Army shelter. The demons’ gateways from Hell include abandoned refrigerators, mirrors, Ghost Town (the nickname shelter children have for a cemetery somewhere in Dade County), and Jeep Cherokees with “black windows.” The demons are nourished by dark human emotions: jealousy, hate, fear.
One demon is feared even by Satan. In Miami shelters, children know her by two names: Bloody Mary and La Llorona (the Crying Woman). She weeps blood or black tears from ghoulish empty sockets and feeds on children’s terror. When a child is killed accidentally in gang crossfire or is murdered, she croons with joy. “If you wake at night and see her,” a ten-year-old says softly, “her clothes be blowing back, even in a room where there is no wind. And you know she’s marked you for killing.”
I wonder where Dexter might fit into the mythologies of the street children of Miami.
The highlight of tonight’s National Television Awards was seeing Sir David Attenborough 
receive the Special Recognition Award for his lifetime achievement in bringing the wonders of the natural world to British TV screens over the past five decades.
He is a wonder of the natural world himself as he really does not look anywhere near the 80 years he has lived. I have always loved the many series of nature documentaries I have seen in my life presented by Sir David Attenborough and he really is in my opinion the Greatest Living Englishman.
Then from the sublime to the ridiculous he was followed to the stage by Peter Andre and Jordan who were there to present the award for Most Popular Serial Drama.
It looks cheap and flat in comparison to American sci-fi shows but then Doctor Who does also and I think that Torchwood has a far smaller budget than Who does.
Jack gets shot in the head shocker and the we discovery that he’s fucking immortal double shocker. Wow.
The incongruity of Cardiff and sci-fi makes it for me.
So we reach the end of season two of Lost and again we have had some revelations and questions answered but new questions are raised by it leaving us eagerly awaiting the new season.
The Skinner Box is not a Skinner Box!
I seem to have been a step ahead of John Locke on this throughout the season. I figured it wasn’t real and was just a psychological experiment in the first episode of this season when Locke thought it was real. Then upon the discovery of The Pearl Locke lost his faith but I started to wonder if The Swan was not as I had first surmised a Skinner Box but was in some fashion real.
The Others are not as we were led to believe a bunch of barbaric survivors who had been stranded on the island in some incident many years ago. What are they hiding by pretending to have been reduced to a Lord of the Flies like savagery?
Danielle has been on the island for 16 years now and the Others pre-date her arrival, have they only recently adopted this false front following the Oceanic 815 crash or have they been doing it for many years? Kelvin tells Desmond about the Hostiles that live on the island, was this a reference to the Others?
Also the Faux Henry Gale tells Michael that they are the good guys when he asks who the hell they are.
They seem quite sophisticated and the fact that they are hiding their true nature would lead me to believe that they are quite possibly scientists working for the Dharma Initiative studying the behaviour of various groups of castaways and who must pose as yet another of these groups in order as to not jeopardise the results.
The way that the Faux Henry Gale was able to manipulate the Oceanic 815 survivors particularly Locke would suggest that he had extensive psychological training. Is he perhaps one of the scientists employed by the Dharma Initiative to study the participants in the Swan/Pearl observation experiment.
What the hell is the four-toed foot of a destroyed statue all about?
Consensus is starting to build that The Wire is the best show on television. I don’t disagree with that, as great as shows like The Sopranos, Deadwood and Six Feet Under are I think The Wire has them beat.
Novelist Stephen King thinks so too.
The Wire keeps getting better, and to my mind it has made the final jump from great TV to classic TV — put it right up there with The Prisoner and the first three seasons of The Sopranos. It’s the sort of dramatic cycle people will still be writing and thinking about 25 years from now, and given the current state of the world and the nation, that’s a good thing. “There,” our grandchildren will say. “It wasn’t all Simon Cowell.”
Season four of the show received a score of 98/100 on Metacritic, the highest score for a TV show on the site. [via]
The creator of The Wire David Simon answers the questions of AOL users on the series.
Just watched last night’s episode of The Shield, Of Mice and Lem. Holy Jebus that was a fucking brilliant episode, every minute of it was fantastic.
This season of The Shield seems to have gone by so quickly, it has been bloody excellent though. This the fifth season of the series has been one of the best in my opinion. Can’t wait to see how it all plays out in next week’s finale.
Kenny Johnson who plays Detective Curtis “Lemonhead” Lemansky was particularly outstanding in this faced with the awful dilemma of how to balance his loyalty to the Strike Team and his own self-preservation. With the Strike Team’s deal with Antwon Mitchell having now fallen through Lem’s fate is now horribly uncertain.
I foresaw the twist that was Wyms being promoted to Captain after being potentially faced with losing her job having failed to disclose her illness.
I read in the Times newspaper today that NORAD were to move out of their nuclear bunker facility underneath Cheyenne mountain to a more regular air force base.
Unlike most readers of the story though my first thought on hearing the news was “Well what are they going to do with the Stargate then?” 