Categories
Reviews TV

24: Day 7, Episode 10

Ridiculous! That is fucking ridiculous!
After Bauer goes through all that to get the list of traitors from Dubaku he then hands off the all-important computer disc to some random cop to deliver to the FBI.

I thought it was some stupid plot point to enable the show to extend along the lines of Jack having to track down the data again. But of course it wasn’t, just a ridiculous TV device that defies logic to move the data plot on in one direction and enable Jack’s story to go off at a tangent.

Bauer really has become an unfeeling killing machine now. It’s almost as if 24 is converging with another FOX show Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Categories
Reviews TV

Lost 5.06 – 316

Jack in the jungle mirrors him coming around in the pilot episode. Focus on the eyes. What just happened? Why have they been randomly deposited on the island?

Hawking’s church is a Dharma station? The lamppost. How they found the island. Ben lies. Ben always lies.

The island is not done with Desmond. Some kind of game and we are just the pieces.

Dharma built the lamppost specifically to find the island. They’d gathered proof that it existed, the Black Rock Captain’s log perhaps. If Hawking was an Other how and why is she now in a Dharma station?

Ajira Airways! Same as the water bottle Sawyer and co. found on the beach by the boats. Were the Oceanic 6 the ones in the other boat that shot at them? Or was it some other passengers on the Ajira 316 flight?

Jack is clearly the Thomas the Apostle of the story of Lost. Does this make Jacob Christ? Then who would Locke be? Perhaps Judas.

Ben has to keep a promise to an old friend. The promise he made to Widmore to kill Penny I think. If Desmond is in town then Penny almost certainly is too and Ben thinks he can seize this opportunity to carry out that threat. I really hope he fails.

The Shepherd boys all have a wanderlust. What is the significance of the scene with Ray. It seems odd to introduce a totally new character just so that Jack can pick up his father’s shoes.

Did Kate give Aaron to Claire’s mum? Finally an explanation about Christian’s white tennis shoes. Ben is injured and at the harbour, does that mean he tried and failed to murder Penny.

Hurley is awesome and is totally not believable as an asshole millionaire who would buy 78 seats on a flight for himself. Sayid is a prisoner under escort, why is he being transported to Guam? I guess that Illana is acting under orders from Jacob and is aware that the plane is going to crash and that Sayid needs to return to the island in that crash.

Frank Lapidus is flying the plane! Wait a second… we’re not going to Guam are we?

Extreme turbulence. White flash. Jack wakes up in the jungle. He was not actually involved in a plane crash, he just materialised in the jungle. Is this what happened to him in the Oceanic 815 crash?

Jin is shocked and pleasantly surprised to see Jack, Hurley and Kate.

Not a great episode and it is interesting that they only took 6 episodes to get back to the island. I’d have thought a lot more of this season would have been off island. The start seemed like a dream sequence as it seemed so unreal that Jack would wake up in exactly the same way as he did in the pilot episode. And that he, Hurley and Kate would be back on the island but be spatially separated and not knowing how it happened.

Ben lies. It is pathological. The line about how he can read “my mother taught me” is a throwaway line, a joke, but it is also a lie.

I’m sure Desmond is correct that they are all just like pawns in a massive game of chess.

Categories
Reviews TV

Jamie saves our bacon

Jamie Oliver and Channel 4 have once again teamed up to try to change the eating habits of the British public and Save our Bacon.

Through buying British we can both assure better welfare of the pigs and help our British farmers. Because British farmers have to abide by higher welfare standards than our European neighbours British pork is slightly more expensive than the imports from the EU.

In addition Jamie wishes us to purchase the less favoured cuts of pork such as the belly and the shoulder instead of loin or leg. These cuts are just as tasty but because they sell less well than loin they are significantly cheaper. By creating a carcass balance where each cut sells equally well Britain will have to import less loin and British producers will not be forced to export the shoulder at an unfavourable price. It is a true win-win situation for both the British public and the British farmer.

Sign up to Jamie’s pledge.

Categories
Reviews TV

Lost 5.03 – Jughead

Desmond and Penny have a son named Charlie! Presumably named after Charlie Pace and not after his maternal Grandfather.

Again confirmation that Richard is old and unaging. One of the ‘soldiers’, Jones, is indeed Charles Widmore. Mrs Hawking is almost certainly Daniel’s mother and is on the island in 1954 named Ellie.

Locke talks to Richard and this conversation is the reason why he was visited by Richard at his birth and then later as a small child. This calls into question the whole deal with him being the rightful leader of the Others as the reasoning seems very circular now. He became leader in the present because Richard put the idea in his head that he could replace Ben but it seems that this was only the case because Locke had told Richard back in 1954 that he was their leader.

Also Locke totally pwns Widmore by tracking him back to the camp of the Others.

Their leader is some sodding old man!
What, you think he can track me?
You think he knows this island better than I do?

Daniel loves Charlotte!

The Others speak Latin! How long have the Others in one form or another been on the island? Or, is it just a sign that their leaders have had a classical education.

Categories
Reviews TV

Lost 5.02 – The Lie

They should have listened to Hurley, they should not have lied. Hurley so goes back on his promise not to help Sayid after Sayid fails to support Hurley on the boat. But of course.

Ana Lucia! Ghost or creation of the island? “Do not get arrested!” “Libby says hi.”

I ♥ MY SHIH TZU t-shirt is his only option.

Never coming back from the island.

“Sayid ain’t explaining nothing”

Store Locke’s body in the butcher’s meat locker. Who is Jill? What is Ben’s plan other than to return the Oceanic Six to the island?

Frogurt is literally a redshirt.

Can Miles talk to dead animals too?

Why only baby pictures of Ji Yeon? She must be nearly three years old by now, should be a wider range of photos. I’m not convinced that Jin is dead. He’s a survivor and was some distance from the explosion. I’m sure he’ll just have been blown into the ocean.

“A good man doesn’t kill three men!” Is Sayid a good man, are any of them?

Hurley’s emotional explanation of basically the entire plot of seasons 1-4 was crazy/brlliant and his mom’s reaction was perfect and a beautiful moment.

“Never clear on the button” Ha ha

Hurley might be the one truly good person of all the main characters of the series. Sayid is a ninja. Barely conscious and he still manages to viciously attack Jack.

Hot pocket throw by Hurley, hilarious.

Is the young soldier Widmore? Locke to the rescue. Mrs Hawking does calculations of what? 70 hours to return or “God help us all.”

Categories
Reviews TV

Lost 5.01 – Because You Left

We are back.

8:15 am and Pierre Chang awakens to feed his baby (Miles?) and then off to record one of the cryptic Dharma Initiative films using the alias of Marvin Candle. Will we ever discover the reason for these aliases that Chang uses?

Trouble with the Orchid station when drilling into the chamber where the Frozen Donkey Wheel is located.

Daniel Faraday is in the past! There are rules of time travel that cannot be broken. Sawyer, Juliet et al are in danger unless the Oceanic Six return. Dan Norton will not divulge the identity of his client. Surely that’s not possibly legal! Or it is a ruse that plays on the fears of Kate who would probably be ignorant of the legalities of this situation.

Sayid kills some dudes, maybe he needs more comfort food. Hurley is remarkably accepting of the crazy shit other people bring into his life. How and why does the new memory enter into Desmond’s mind at that point in time if his and Daniel’s timelines have changed.

Categories
Reviews TV

Kill it, Cook it, Eat it

In the last few days BBC Three have been screening the third series of the television show Kill it, Cook it, Eat it, which will be available on BBC iPlayer for the next few days. I’ve only just discovered this programme and so hadn’t seen the previous two series which apparently were different in that they had built a kind of restaurant/studio around a real working abattoir. Series three was based at the Balavil Estate in Scotland and each episode saw a different group of nine participants engage in the killing of game, prepare the carcass and butcher the meat before a professional chef cooked it for them for dinner.

I thought this was a fascinating and even-handed exploration of the issues of meat production and hunting. The participants were drawn from many walks of life and not everyone was a meat-eater keen on the slaughter of animals for food as the participants included vegetarians, vegans and animal rights campaigners to offer the other side’s viewpoint. In fact virtually all the participants had never held a gun before let alone used one to kill and so it was likely that it might turn some of the meat eaters off the idea of eating meat when faced with the reality of how it gets to the table for consumption.

Kill it, Cook it, Eat it is a good companion piece to the Channel 4 shows hosted by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Gordon Ramsay which seek to inform the public about the realities of the meat industry and convince the public to choose free-range over the factory farmed meat in which animals are kept in awful conditions. I firmly believe that people should be making an informed choice when it comes to their consumption of meat, but don’t think that people should be made to feel guilty if they do make the choice to go for the cheaper factory farm produced meat.

However this series of Kill it, Cook it, Eat it was focusing on game meat with four different groups of participants hunting deer, duck, rabbit and finally grouse so there is the additional ethical questions about hunting. I’m completely in favour of the hunting of animals for food or population control as I see these as necessary activities but am opposed to hunting purely for sport.

I think that the rabbit episode had the most interesting mix of characters there was Tabitha a Ugandan lady that couldn’t understand British people’s attitudes to killing animals, Victoria the animal rights campaigner, Cathy who ran an Animal Rescue centre, Emma who was squeamish about meat but I don’t think was a vegetarian, vegetarian Francesca who looked like a WAG and thought she had a healthy diet even though she needed to take supplements due to anaemia and a nutritionist Helena who tried to argue with Francesca that it wasn’t natural to be taking multivitamins but it was to eat meat.

I think that Victoria the animal rights campaigner who as it turned out was a natural with the shotgun made a great point following her success with the clay targets that why is it necessary to take it to the next level and kill animals when you can get all the same fun and exhilaration from shooting the clay targets. I’d agree with her if rabbit shooting was purely for sport but it isn’t and most of the killed rabbits are ending up as food. However her position is somewhat supported by the events in the programme whereby following the lack of success with the gun the head gamekeeper decides that they will resort to using nets over the burrow entrances to catch the rabbits as they emerge to then have their necks broken. I think this is a more humane way of killing as unlike shooting there is no possibility of an injured rabbit escaping to die in pain and is actually something I have done myself.

I thought that Cathy the owner of an Animal Rescue centre was fantastic as she defied my expectations and had a far more informed and realistic attitude to animals than did the vegetarians. She was concerned about the welfare of the rabbits that they were intending to kill but was quite prepared to kill a rabbit with her bare hands and then skin and butcher it. Rabbits are not indigenous to Britain, they were introduced by the Normans, and are considered vermin when in the wild. I learned also that apparently landowners are actually legally obliged to kill the rabbits on their land in order to control numbers. This is a point that I think that Victoria conceded but she failed to come up with a viable alternative method of population control that didn’t involve killing the rabbits. The only other method we in Britain have tried is the awfully inhumane deliberate spread of the disease myxomatosis.

The fourth programme in the series was grouse shooting and this is the one that I think I have fallen on the side of opposing as there are I believe fundamental differences between this and the hunting of other game. In this group of participants there was a South African bloke that had hunted before and a Royal Marine. I think these two were placed in this group because the producers recognised the difficulty of Grouse shooting and believed them to be amongst the best marksmen of all the participants. Grouse shooting is considered the pinnacle of game shooting as it is very difficult to hit as it flies low to the ground and is very fast, because of this the estates can charge a premium for the privilege.

It seems to me that the primary basis of the grouse shoot for the estate is an economic one, of secondary importance is the tradition of the grouse season which starts with the Glorious Twelfth and of least importance is the notion of the grouse as a food item. But then again as most of the birds that are shot during the season are sold on to restaurants this is again an economic reason for the estate to have the shoot.

Proponents of grouse shooting make the argument that it is about conservation and maintenance of the landscape but they are maintaining an artificial ecosystem to encourage breeding pairs to live on the estate and reproduce to keep numbers up to sustain as much hunting as possible. This is not about population control as it is with the deer and the rabbits as the population would not necessarily be there or increase without that human intervention.

Also unlike the duck there was a mixed response to the taste of the grouse meat and though grouse apparently is in great demand by posh restaurants the chef at one interviewed in the show seemed to indicate that he thought it wasn’t worth the money he was charging for it. On the evidence of this TV show the justification of shooting for food doesn’t stand up to scrutiny as it is easier to shoot duck, which gives more meat and has a more popular taste.

Finally there is evidence that less ethical estates than Balavil, which is featured in Kill it, Cook it, Eat it are engaging in the illegal killing of raptors in order to protect their stock of grouse from these predators. Many other predators of the grouse such as foxes, crows and stoats are also killed to protect this game bird.

I believe therefore that the only argument in favour of the grouse shoot is the economic one and if the estate really cannot sustain itself without the great income that the grouse shoots bring in then I might be in favour of it but I’m yet to be convinced of that. Even then it is a difficult argument because it is apparently necessary to kill a number of animals that are predators in addition to the grouse. The killing of predator animals merely to support a practice of killing game animals it is not an activity I think I could support.

So in summation I thought Kill it, Cook it, Eat it was a fascinating thought-provoking television series that I learned things from and which reinforced my opinion that hunting for food is I believe a noble pursuit but hunting for sport is not. Stalking deer and hunting rabbits and ducks is something I’m okay with and could see myself doing, but grouse shooting is not something I could either engage in or support.

Categories
Reviews TV

Emily loved him…

Oliver Postgate the creator of Bagpuss and Ivor the Engine has died at the age of 83.

I grew up watching the work of Oliver Postgate and one of my very favourite TV programmes as a small child was Bagpuss.

And when Bagpuss was asleep,
All his friends were asleep.
The mice were ornaments on the mouse organ.
Gabriel and Madeleine were just dolls.
Professor Yaffle was just an old wooden bookend in the shape of a woodpecker.
Even Bagpuss himself, once he was asleep, was just an old, saggy cloth cat,
Baggy, and a bit loose at the seams,
But Emily loved him

He was like a very sweet gentle Grandfather who would sit me down and tell me magical tales. He will be remembered fondly by generations of children who have now grown up to have children of their own. [via]

Categories
TV

Star Trek as the A-Team

Categories
Reviews TV

Ross Kemp in Afghanistan – embedded with British soldiers

Having been immersed in the lives of the US Marine First Recon Battalion for the past seven weeks I felt at a loose end when the miniseries Generation Kill ended.

I loved Generation Kill, appreciated its realism and because it was based upon accounts of real events it was extremely close to being a documentary. Thanks to Amazon’s “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” feature I found a similar series but from a British point of view, the documentary series Ross Kemp in Afghanistan.

This five part series sees actor and investigative journalist Ross Kemp and a tiny film crew embedded with the Royal Anglian Regiment’s 1st Battalion (The Vikings) who were deployed to Helmand Province in 2007.

It’s viewable online at YouTube, but if you can buy the DVD do so because some of the profits of each sale go to the Army Benevolent Fund.

Bloody excellent documentary that makes you appreciate the sacrifice that British soldiers are making in defeating the Taliban.