Turn out the lights, the party’s over. spoilers I was never a huge fan of Falling Skies. The special effects were often terrible, the stories were often hokey and silly, the acting was often a bit over the top. Falling Skies could never quite decide if it wanted to be a campy 1950s horror moive or a campy 1980s morality play. In the end, it didn’t really matter. After five years of losing a handful of people every week, but never anyone we knew or cared about, the 2nd Massachusetts Militia drags itself into Washington DC to do battle with…
Category: tv review
Salvage City
One of the fun things about living in hotel rooms is that you get to see all kinds of random crap on TV. King of the oddball show is The Discovery Channel. There are all kinds of goofy shows here from sort of reality shows to sort of educational shows. Amish Mafia and Naked and Afraid are two recent titles that kind of boggle the mind. Salvage City was a very short lived show. It has all of three episodes and you can watch them on YouTube. The idea here is what if American Pickers found a pile of junk, and…
Minority Report
It’s been awhile since I read [easyazon_link identifier=”140723093X” locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Philip K Dick[/easyazon_link]’s story or watched [easyazon_link identifier=”B00A2FSXHK” locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Tom Cruise[/easyazon_link]’s movie, but I do recall liking them both. It seems to me that the book was set in a slightly richer world. While PreCrime was kind of an experiment in the film, it appeared to be a well established fact of law enforcement in the story. I always had the feeling that every large city had its own PreCrime bureau. And if the Precog range is a hundred miles, then there should be a set of PreCogs every hundred miles. In Fox’s…
Vicious
Ash, do you know our friend Violet? [easyazon_link identifier=”B00JJRLG7G” locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Vicious[/easyazon_link] is a BritCom about an older gay couple and the small circle of friends that always seem to be dropping by unannounced. Freddie and Stuart are old school snobs who talk down to everyone they met. At the same time, they never have enough money. They get by on the meager wages Freddie earns from his rare acting jobs. Like all great Bristih comedies, there are a few running gags. One such gag in Season 1 saw Stuart introducing Ash to Violet every episode. Ash is the ‘normal’ person…
Masters of Sex Season 3
spoilers. It makes a certain amount of sense that the poster for [easyazon_link identifier=”B00U3UKXSG” locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Masters of Sex[/easyazon_link]season three hints at a happy polyamorous threesome. And as this season opens up, it does seem that Old Doc Master’s long suffering wife has come to accept his mistress as a member of the family. But as we zip throuh this first episode with shock after shock falling in rapid succession, we find that the happy trio doesn’t share a bed and that Bill continues to do his best to make everyone around him miserable. The show is spilt between an…
Atari:Game Over
I bought my first computer in 1982 for $1500. It was an Atari 400. Like countless others at the time, I would have bought just about anything with an Atari logo on it. So it was a bit of a shock when we all looked up one day and found Atari gone. [easyazon_link identifier=”B00UV3HPX6″ locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Atari:Game Over[/easyazon_link] tells the story of the death of Atari and the burial of what many have called the worst video game of all time, ET. This documentary looks like someone’s college project shot with a cell phone. But then, it is an Xbox production,…
True Detective Season 2
I Need A Hero I really liked the first season of True Detective. It was a wild and magical story with a lot of mumbo jumbo and talk about Time being a Flat Circle. It was also pretty clear who the two main stars of the show were. Lots of people came and went, but our two detectives were the stars. I have no idea who the hell’s supposed to be the main character in HBO’s True Detective Season 2. With a dozen or so people sharing screen time, and four people who seem to be sort-of main characters, the…
Humans-Androids Are Slaves
Another Science Fiction Show where machines with souls are bad. Humans is a British Channel 4 science fiction show picked up by AMC. The big American star in the cast is William Hurt. He plays a grumpy old man who has a strong attachment to his malfunctioning robot. In this alternate reality, health care is not only free, it’s mandatory. The Government tells William he must replace his old model with a new one. The new model appears to be based on Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. The main storyline has to do with a handful…
Defiance Season 3
The Syfy Channel’s post alien invasion/post apocalyptic tale of a city that used to be known as St. Louis. The first season was basically a Western, with the town getting a new Marshall and fighting off the Indians, only the Indians were a rag tag group of aliens. They are long gone now. Season 2 saw the Marshall’s daughter turn into a killing machine bent on the destruction of Earth. We abandoned any idea that Defiance might be the last free city in the world and spent a lot of time with massive CGI destruction. A few characters from the…
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
The novel had one of the worst covers I’ve ever seen on a professionally published book. It’s solid black with the title in white text. I suppose they could have gone that extra step and had the title in black text, but the effect was pretty much the same, it could have been a book about anything or nothing. Add to that a page count that made it feel like a dictionary when you picked it up which inspired you to promptly set it back down. But once I got around to reading it, several years after it came out,…