A week with no posts, wow. I think we've all either been working or too busy playing Call of Duty to bother writing about TV shows. And besides, there was no Lost this week.
Apparently Fox has been doing a week of musical themed programming called "Fox Rocks", but I had no idea when I sat down to watch--so you can imagine my surprise when the Kesha song "Tik Tok" replaced the usual Simpsons intro. The song was done with a unique music video that was pretty much the same as the regular one, except they add more scenes and the characters are singing the song. I gotta admit, at first I was a little peeved, thinking that this was an actual change, but it didn't take long for that to wear off. I love when the creators of the show care enough to go out and do something fun like that.
Anyway, the episode was my favourite of this season, and lately it feels like I say that after every new episode. I like new stuff, and since The Simpsons has lasted so long I'm always intrigued as to how they are going to make the episode fresh and not just have some re-hashed idea. I bet that sometimes they mask it so well, we wouldn't even know anyway. This one deals with that "big brother" aspect of modern surveillance after Homer leaves an unattended bag (with plutonium inside) at a train station, the town freaks out (in classic Simpsons style) and installs a similar surveillance system to Great Britain's, where virtually every spot in town is being watched over by concerned citizens, namely Ned. I use the word "virtually" for a reason, as Bart soon discovers a blind spot to the cameras and he and Homer open up a party zone to get away from the constant nagging of the goodie neighbour.
It made me laugh, and that was the most important part. It was the part that made me okay with having to stay up until 4:30am to watch the episode. I went to bed almost giggling in my sleep at some of Lisa's one-liners from the second act, and Homer's logic in the first. Looking forward to next week's, but not as much as Lost and Parks and Recreation.
While Lisa has had a few good B-stories ("Boy Meets Curl" and "Thursdays with Abie" come to mind here), the 21st season of The Simpsons hasn't really focused an episode primarily on the bright 2nd grader until Sunday's "The Squirt and the Whale". One of the more emotional tales, this one can be hailed as this year's environmental awareness episode. I don't even say that in a negative way, one of my favourite episodes of Futurama is "The Birdbot of Ice-Catraz", which actually deals with a very sticky plot in which baby penguins need to be hunted in order to save the species. The benefit of having Lisa deal with one of these types of situations is her youth. While she's smart enough to ask the right questions and come to logical conclusions, she's still a little girl who can get in over her head.
In a likely attempt to focus on the emotional ties that occur in the latter half of the episode, the first act was chalk full of jokes and gags that once again find a way to be hilarious while still being relevant to the scene. Even the first scene, which begins with a random trailer for probably the stupidest movie in the world "Tic-Tac-Toe: X v. O", still ties in the plot by having Homer rip the plugs out of the wall before giving a rant about the inflated Hydro bill. So, off to the environmental fair to find a new way to power their home. I love when the Simpsons go to fairs, expos or carinivals, like in "The Twisted World of Marge Simpson" where she attended the Franchise Expo, some of the booths were so odd, like the picture straightener. This has a lot of the same while being completely different, my particular favourite being the confrontation between the Switchgrass Power and the Corn Ethanol tables--gotta love science fights. The Simpsons settle on wind power, and erect a enormous fan in their backyard. It even makes their power meter run backward.
The whale story crops up in the second act when Bart and Lisa go around town to see what kind of damage the wind storm did to the town (you can imagine what happened to the backyard fan). They trek down to the beach to find the beached whale. I like what happens here, where Lisa is overthrown with emotion and Bart is dancing around the blow hole, because it separates the two's different characters. I know it's a small detail, but its things like this that ground the characters in their proper emotional categories. Anyway, the episode is unique in that the B-story and A-story are not interwoven, but that's because they don't happen at the same time. The fan story and the whale story are the only two things happening, it's a narrative device that's hardly used, especially in 20-minute episodic comedies.
I was curious to see how they were going to deal with the disposal of the beached whale, because that can be something of a problem when the PETA gets involved--but I thought they did a good job. They don't make a joke out of it, but they still overlay the tragic inevitability with a nice veil of humour. Chief Wiggum again chimes in with a couple great one-liners.
I didn't much like the climb into the dramatic ending, where sharks and whales sort of duke it out. However, they did raise a good point when Homer tries to save the whales by killing the sharks by explaining the trade off between the two innocent creatures. If Homer did harpoon a shark, it would have sent the whole episode into that dreaded "counter-productive" territory.
On the whole, this episode stands out from the rest of the season not only for its environmental message, but also the writers ability to keep the same "Simpsons" spin on each and every issue addressed.
8.5/10
I started playing Trine at 2:30am in the haze of a half awake delerium, but it held my interest for a good hour or so before my body cracked the whip on me and I sauntered off to bed. I'll admit though, the intro was a great way to ease a new player like me into the game. The graphics are crisp, the controls are responsive and simple, and the overall feel is quite smooth. Basically, the story starts off with a thief entering this shrine to steal this crystal, but when she touches it, it freezes her in place. This same thing happens to a knight and a wizard (though they come to the crystal for different reasons), and once all three of them are there, they disappear. The intro lets you play as each of these characters as they get to the crystal, giving you a crash course in the character's specific abilities. The Knight can fight with the sword and block with the shield, the Thief can use a cool hookshot thing and fire a bow, and the Wizard can levitate objects, and create a block if you draw a square with your mouse (lol?). So it's like a tank, dps, and... mage, I guess, since you collect health from dead skellies.
Speaking of, I was really taken in by the graphics. The scenery is in 3D, sometimes obscuring my view but never at key times. There's a lot of nice detail to it, like little bugs flying from flower to flower, pollen reacting to being disturbed, even the sound gets more intense as a tree passes in the forefront.
Though I haven't played through the whole thing, I've played enough to know that I'll eventually want to get there. The narration overlays the gameplay, which at times makes it feel like I'm playing a extremely cool picture book. The story is admittedly simple, but I wasn't really expecting much. Besides, the amount I got out of this game for the price I paid is enough to trump any criticism. Okay, well the Knight's voice is pretty annoying. But seriously, I paid 6 bucks for some McDonalds last night and all I got from that was a depressing and greasy feeling in my stomach.
On a final note, the game has a multiplayer portion that I have yet to sample, so get on Steam and spend 5 bucks!
While you can't run a show for twenty years without repeating yourself, you can still find ways to tell the same stories with different characters and outcomes. Just as well, I really have enjoyed the writers efforts to keep the stories interesting to people by means other than storytelling--stuff like commentary on recent events, social fopas and the like. Tonight's episode, "Chief of Hearts" offers a stellar performance from unexpected characters while putting a new wardrobe on a well aged story.
The A-story is the strongest, and centers around a friendship between Chief Wiggum and Homer after our hero offers the Chief a free sandwich. I'll admit, I've made friends with people for lesser things, so I guess I can sympathize. I was hyping this episode in my mind these past few days because I've been finding a lot of the recent Chief Wiggum lines to be hilariously dumb, and I feverishly dig that backward and sideways logic that is bounding about the comedy world these days.
Bart fills the rest of the episode with a less than impressive (I've used that phrase like three times today) B-story where he gets addicted to a combination of Pokemon and Digimon. Marge gets the wrong impression from Bart's secrecy and thinks he's selling drugs. So, yeah, another "drugs aren't for selling" campaign. It wasn't really that heavy, though, and served more as a Mother/Son bonding opportunity than it did social commentary. Still, the Homer/Chief story took up most of the episode and it was strong enough to keep the episode together.
6/10
These last two weeks have been good and bad. I got a new job, which I still haven't decided whether I should put it in the good pile or the bad one. The job is the same as last time, but it has new management so things might be better than they were before. I spent the last two weeks doing basically zip, and I loved each day of it. All my TV-watching habits were expelled out of my system in a wonderful week of nothing. This is the last day of this wonderfulness, so I thought I would start to get back on track.
I started watching Dexter a few years ago, mostly because I enjoyed Michael C. Hall's narration and the overall delicate style of such a ruggedly brutal show, but the solidity of the show comes directly from the evolution of Dexter's mind. From the first season to now, it's clear that things have changed for him. He has a family, is married, and has a thousand more responsibilities than he can usually handle. It's hard to make a sociopath grow as a character, in fact it's probably one of the most difficult character traits to try to develop. The main device of being a sociopath is not being able to register emotions. Imagine having to act as a character who has literally zero emotions (okay, that's changed a little too), but also has to fake emotions to make himself seem real. That's gotta be tough.
While I stopped watching mainly because there were no new episodes at the time I finished the second season, I think a lot of it had to do with finding a way to make a better season than that one. Season two was incredible in a million different ways. Doakes and Lila were perfect foils for Dexter, and their parts in the second season will always be some of the best conflicts in the Dexter saga.
Sadly, the third season was a major disappointment for me. Jimmy Smits plays the main antagonist, and I gotta say that I just didn't like looking at this guy's face. I didn't believe him when he was angry, and had no sympathy for him when he was sad, and whatever was in between wasn't so great either. I hate watching shows where a character that you start of not liking (not because he's an antagonist, but just because the character doesn't work) becomes one of the main people in the show. I really wished they dealt with him better than they did.
It wasn't just that, though, it was the general story. For the first time, Dexter let's someone into his personal world. This surprised me in its delivery more than its content. It felt like it happened way too fast, like I didn't know Miguel Prado well enough to have him actually take part in Dexter's killings. Then by the end, it doesn't really feel like a logical resolution to everything. Anti-climactic, if anything.
Truth is, I didn't even want to watch the fourth season. I had about six days left in my amazing week of nothing before I had to start working again, and I wasn't really up for wasting another couple days on a eventual waste of time. I did it anyway because of the raving reviews I've read on the fourth season. Thankfully, they were right. The fourth season had an amazing first few episodes, setting in motion the main plotlines for the entire series in brutal and shocking ways.
John Lithgow gives an amazing performance as the Trinity killer. Like a lot of other people, I laughed when I heard he was going to play a crazy murderer, but that's because I've really only seen him on 3rd Rock from the Sun and playing his guitar for kids on the Treehouse Network. As crazy as the guy gets, the scene I remember the most is one of the first ones we see him in where he murders a woman in a bathtub. Creepy shit, and I get shocks of pain thinking about that cut he makes on the ephemeral artery. Ick.
Though I've given away a few spoilers so far in this post, I refuse to give away the ending. The last 50 seconds of 'The Getaway" are a complete twist, throwing the series into a whole new direction. They even made several different endings as to not let a leak be anywhere near reliable.
The series doesn't pick up again until next September, so we have a while yet until we get to see how Dexter deals with his new predicament. In the coming weeks, expect to see more posts. Sunday's include a talk about the new Simpsons episode, Monday's will have a review of the latest House M.D., as well as a blurb on the new Parks and Recreation episodes that start airing again on the 29th of this month.