Joss Whedon needs to do at least one more episode of Firefly, one that stars Terry O'Quinn.

Because with the exception of Firefly, every television show that we own on DVD has at least one episode featuring Terry O'Quinn.

That'd be, LOST, The West Wing, Millennium, X-Files and Earth 2.

Hell, Millennium is like "Spot the LOST Cast Member."

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More questions, no answers...

( LOST musings )

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LOST is sodomizing my brain.

But there's a lot of Desmond and some Sayid on the side with not a lot of Jack (and The Plague from Hackers), so I'll take it.

Edit: Penelope's number shares the last four digits with one of my old phone numbers. Creepy!

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By way of whedonesque, word from Ron D. Moore concerning Battlestar:

http://www.rondmoore.com/Site/Blog/Entries/2007/11/17_Galactica_wraps.html

I refuse to believe that we won’t finish, that we won’t be back to film our final stories, but I know and accept there is that possibility.

...

Galactica’s coming back, I frakking promise you that. But I am ready to put the rest of the story on the table and take the risk that I’ll never be able to tell it, in support of this strike.


Like Adama says, you make your choices and then you live with them.

Urgh.

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This news story which I first saw yesterday afternoon, bears a lot of similarities to last night's CSI.

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Forgot to post this last week, but Heroes, yeah.

I totally called the end of last week's eposide at the end of the season premier. Yeah, I rock.

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I came to a conclusion last weekend while watching SciFi's show Eureka. Willful Suspension of Disbelief actually has two thresholds, and how close they are to each other goes a long way to determining how good a story is, particularly science fiction.

The first threshold is the level of disbelief the story is asking me to suspend. The second threshold is the level of disbelief the story is requiring me to suspend.

Take for instance this miserable episode of Eureka, a show I'm currently watching like a train wreck. Eureka is a town where the greatest minds in America live and work and have all manner of scientific mishaps. That's the premise. What the show is asking me to suspend is my disbelief that there is this remote community where scientific advancements, perhaps a hundred years off, are commonplace. Alright, I'll buy that.

In this episode, we learn that the town has some sort of electro-magnetic bubble around it. In an effort to meet a deadline, a scientist steals the power source for her 15-year-old daughter's science fair project and integrates it into a security system. This interfaces with the E-M bubble, supercharging it.

Ok, I'll come along. That's what the show has asked me to suspend. Of course, in that request is the idea that this is real science, just used in ways we haven't yet imagined, but fully plausible. Protective E-M field around an entire town? Ok. Could happen. Might be possible now with a big enough power source.

So, now that they've asked me to suspend my disbelief at one level, the story suddenly demands, with no explanation, that I suspend it farther. The E-M field has gone into overdrive, and it begins pulling objects out of orbit.

Mind you, this super-powerful field isn't yanking cars off the road 20 miles away. It's only pulling stuff from orbit. And what happens to this stuff? it falls right on the field like meteorites, interestingly at a number of angles, indicating at least a 180° field of effect. So, you've asked me to believe that scientists are doing all this fun stuff, but then, inexplicably, you've demanded that I ignore the rules of science and just accept your version. Two thresholds. Nowhere near each other. Bad story.

I won't even go into the rest of the episode, because the resolution is even worse. Not to mention the fact that apparently, the writer of the episode hadn't seen a single previous episode and wrote the characters in any way he saw fit. Main character an average everyman surrounded by geniuses? Let's have him act like a retard! What? He's never acted like a retard before? He's probably the smartest character on the show despite not being a genius like everyone else? Bah, we need to make an IQ joke!

And it's not just Eureka. A lot of stories do this, and don't even think about it. Take the movie Twister. You had me pretty much until the end, and then you rode out the center of an F5 tornado by strapping your belt to a pipe, and survived with nary a scratch. Yeah, ok. You asked me to suspend my disbelief at "Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt aren't actually Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt, they're part of a team of tornado chasers." That was it. There was no mystery or unreasonable science. But then, whoa, you demand I believe that they're some sort of super-humans capable of defying nature by driving a truck into a mile-wide tornado and then outrunning it. Sorry, you lose. Go back and rethink that ending. It worked great until then.

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Dear Lost Writers:

The only time in the history of the show that Jack has ever been cool was when he was completely shitfaced, driving through LA blasting "Scentless Apprentice" by Nirvana. Don't be afraid to do stuff like that while writing the rest of the show. I look forward to seeing what you come up with when you deliver the rest of it to me on July 31st.

Kthxbye.

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Note to Lost: This waiting until February crap is not going to work for me. Please have the next 48 episodes ready for me to watch by the end of July.

Thank you.

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Melissa Fitzgerald is considering a run for Congress

That's the woman who played C.J. Cregg's assistant Carol Fitzpatrick on The West Wing. It'll be great to have someone from a real administration in office. And, as an added bonus, she'd be running in my district! She's apparently well connected in PA, too. I saw her talk at the Obama-Rendell-Murphy-Pelosi rally in Norristown.

There's a campaign I'll be happy to volunteer for!

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WTF?! You mean to tell me that Claire Bennett wears ASBESTOS UNDERWEAR!? I don't care if she's only 15, I WANTED SKIN.

In other news, Sulu is a total badass.

And:

"That bastard! He's thinking in Japanese!"

"WHY ARE YOU THINKING IN JAPANESE!?"

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So, I have two theories.

Primatech Paper isn't the actual location that they're holding Sylar, hence the FBI's inability to find them. Someone that we haven't met yet working with Bennet (Hell, even Bennet himself - he travels quick) is a teleporter - not a space/time bender like Hiro, just a matter teleporter - and the real facility is in Ontario, where Eden's body was found. From what I remember, the time between Eden's suicide and her body being found are remarkably close. Although, if they are in Texas and were going to dump the body 3,000 miles away, why not just save the effort and dump it in Mexico? Why Canada, where things like this are far more likely to be thoroughly investigated?

Conversely, if they do have a teleporter and they are in Ontario, why did they dump the body there? Why not just weight the body down and dump it into the Marianas Trench, or some other location that it would never be found?

Theory #2 - Bennet is working for Linderman. That one pretty much writes itself.

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Prediction: Jimmy Smits will take David Caruso's place on CSI:Miami.


So, Jimmy Smits turned down an offer to be on NYPD blue, and they re-wrote the character and gave it to David Caruso. When Caruso left the show, Smits came in and took his place.

Jimmy Smits turned down an offer to be in CSI:Miami, and they re-wrote the character and gave it to David Caruso.

Do I smell a pattern here? I hope not. MATT SANTOS FOR PRESIDENT.

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So, I watched 10.5 on NBC for a mind-numbing 4 hours between Sunday and Monday nights. Let me break this movie down succinctly (something that the movie itself failed to do):

1) There is no sense of time. The viewer is given vague dates. As far as I could tell, the entire movie takes place in less than three days.
Actually, considering there are no scenes at night, a viable argument could be made for an 8-hour period. The only real time we're given is at the beginning, where it's like 7:00 am.

2) The science was absolute bullshit. They're dealing with a faultline that's 700km below the surface, so they go down 400 FEET with nuclear warheads. 400 feet vs 700 kilometers. My guess is that there would be a crater and a boom, and not any considerable impact on the faultline below.
It'd be like holding a firecracker against your kitchen table with your hand, lighting it, and seeing if it fused the gaps in your linoleum tile.
Not freakin' likely.
There were other glaring Hollywood-isms, too. THe earth starts shaking, and the rear-ends of cars jump straight up in the air, car lands on roof, and explodes. Simply atrocious. If they were shooting for even a shred of scientific credibility, they missed and hit their own feet.

3) Drama. Stupid stupid stupid drama. Not Law & Order drama. We're talking 10th grade cheerleader-likes-the-football-captain-he's-so-cute drama. There's a CATACLYSMIC EARTH-SHAPING GEOGRAPHY ALTERING EVENT HAPPENING, and every single character in the movie is worried about WORKING OUT ALL THEIR LIFE PROBLEMS. Had they taken out some of the horribly acted drama elements (just SOME!), it wouldn't have been a mini-series. They could have wrapped it up in two hours. Seriously. almost 20 minutes dedicated to Ivan Sergei's character's issue with his dad, the DIRECTOR OF FEMA. HE'S THE DIRECTOR OF FEMA!! HE'S GOT BETTER THINGS TO DO THAN LISTEN TO YOU BITCH.

4) No concern for the way things happen in the real world. We're treated to multiple instances of people calling high level officials at work that they happen to be related to. Look, it doesn't happen like that. When there's a state of emergency, numbnuts, you don't call your wife who happens to be the Governor's aide. And if you do, YOU DON'T GET THROUGH TO HER. Simple as that.

5) Bluescreen technology evolved years ago. No one told NBC. There are scenes with helicopters fluttering overhead that look like they could have been generated in 1980. Seriously. If you don't have the budget for a 4-hour miniseries, CUT IT TO TWO HOURS. Take out some of that all-important drama. Do something. Don't show the strings.

Ok, I'm tired of writing, but trust me, the list goes on. Those are four hours of my life that I will never get back.

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