apocalypse weather

Let's talk about MyNetworkTV. The idea is so overdue that it almost seems quaint; thirteen-week stripped serials that tell arced dramatic stories, and then are over, poof, and another one starts up.

Because of the "gap" left by the merger of UPN and the WB into the CW, lots of local affiliates all of a sudden had hours without programming, and a whole network was left with empty prime time. So now, from 8 to 10 (Pacific, I don't know how many feeds there are) we're getting Desire and The Fashion House, based on classic telenovelas that have enthralled millions of our neighbors down south. These are full American remakes, of course, drawing talent like Bo Derek, Morgan Fairchild, and Tippi Hedrin (Tippi Hedrin, people!) in Fashion House, which, according to its website, "delves deep into the glamorous, yet unscrupulous, world of the fashion industry and how greed, lust and blind ambition make or break careers, and hearts, in the business." Desire, a serial about mobstery restaraunteur brothers, stars Sofia Milos, near and dear to us from CSI: Miami's many adventures.

Every weekday for thirteen weeks we'll get another episode of the unfolding mystery, and as a bonus, the ADD-ridden among us will get special "catch-up" episodes on the weekends, where the week's events are condensed into an easy-to-swallow hour. And then! When the story's over, the shows go away. And whole new shows start, with whole new stories. Revolutionary!

The shift from the rigid network format (half-hour or hour, twenty-two week episodic structure that builds its story in time for sweeps and hiatuses) to a story-based one is the natural evolution of the medium. With DVD boxed sets and bittorrent downloads, we're eating TV series by the season, not the month. Me, I've only watched "24" on DVD. I just wait till the season's over and go to Amoeba so I can consume Jack Bauer's entire day in one go, and I have been known to do just that -- though, unlike Jack, I pause to eat and pee and get from place to place, so it usually takes me longer than twenty-four hours to get through a season.

And let's all look at Doctor Who, the classic version, for a change: here's a show that's been producing story-based arcs for something like twenty-six seasons. And the BBC still remains a rich proving ground for short-form serials; six-episode, thirteen-episode, three-episode stories come and go, year in and out.

Now, we've had our share of excellent miniseries, don't get me wrong, and from Roots to Band of Brothers to that one where William H. Macy had really big ears, I love me a good miniseries. I sat through Taken! I mean, mostly for Matt Frewer and Dakota Fanning, but still. Ten hours! I love a story that takes ten hours!

MyNetworkTV has all the hallmarks of failure, from a cheap-ass logo to programming that looks like it was shot on a sound stage behind the Border Patrol station in Tijuana, but it's got nothing to lose, and it can afford to be shameless, and that just might propel it to that weird sort of hypnotic success. Soap operas run for twenty seasons, not because they retain viewership from start to finish but because everyone dips in, once in a while, enjoys a season or two of Luke and Laura and then goes back to college or whatever and leaves the series for the next generation to enjoy. This leads me to believe that we will eat this kind of storytelling up.

Thanks to the nice folks at Laurel's TV Picks, namely Laurel, I've got our fall TiVo/download schedule mapped out to the hour:

Mondays

8:30-9 How I Met Your Mother CBS (9/18)
9-10 Heroes NBC (9/25)
10-11 Studio 60 NBC (9/18)

Tuesdays

8-9 House FOX (fall, 9/5)
8-9 NCIS CBS (winter, 9/19)
9-10 House FOX (winter)

Wednesdays

8-9 Bones FOX (8/30)
8-8:30 Twenty Good Years NBC (10/4)
8:30-9 30 Rock NBC (10/11)

Thursdays

8-9 Survivor CBS (9/14)

Fridays

8-9 Bones FOX (winter)

Battlestar Galactica
Stargate: Atlantis

Sat

-nothing-

Sundays

8-9 The Amazing Race CBS (9/17)
9-9:30 Family Guy FOX (9/10)

+ nonspecific FX/TNT shows, like probably "Rescue Me"
+ HBO shows ("Big Love")
+ BBC/ITV shows (Aftersun, Torchwood, GW X-mas special, DW, Little Britain, 2 Pints, Catherine Tate, etc)
+ misc procedurals that conflict with the above (or midseason) and will therefore be downloaded and saved for dry spells and special occasions (Jericho, Kidnapped, Vanished, Traveler)

Dear Google,

You've been telling us you're peeved by people using the term "googling" as a generic term for searching on the internet. You've asked us to stop.

We would like to assure you that we are not using "googling" generically -- we are actually Googling that much.

We can't stop googlin' as long as we're Googling on a regular basis, and I personally plan to Google The Hell On.

Your devoted Googlers,
The Internet

Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Beeb

I finally had to take "anglophilia" off my disinterests list. Not that, up until now, I wasn't interested in England, the way I'm interested in Norway and Fiji and the Falklands, but I never felt the need to fangirl the UK, the way some misplaced Americans do, reaching out for some beautiful, centuries-old, Stonehenge-crumbling historic past with kings and dragons and Shakespeare. I always identified more as a straight-up pomo American, too thick with irony to appreciate any of that very genuine, very poncy history that draped itself all over the Queen's England. England was a modernist icon, I thought, trapped in endearing -- but all the while very earnest -- echoes of the past.

Let's not forget I'm talking about television. And though it's 2006 it took me this long to get past my own stereotyping -- up till now England had been that place with four TV channels and nothing on but Masterpiece Theatre and Fawlty Towers, and all of that was adorably quaint but had very little to do with me, over here, slamming Rocky Mountain's finest ale and mainlining Family Guy, here on the brink of the second revolution in three hundred years, here in this country that's hasn't even reached her two hundred and fiftieth birthday yet. I was busily being the young punk runaway, and I'd very decidedly cast off the shackles of the Mother Country, 'cause fat lotta good they'd do me over here.

Tony Kushner, in the early 90s, back before 9/11, before air attacks on our home soil, let Louis say this, in Angels in America: Millennium Approaches.

LOUIS: [...]In spite of all this the thing about America, I think, is that ultimately we're different from every nation on Earth, in that, with people here of every race we can't...Ultimately what defines us isn't race, but politics. Not like any European country where there's an insurmountable fact of a kind of racial, or ethnic, monopoly, or monolith, like all Dutchmen, I mean, Dutch people, are, well, Dutch, and the Jews of Europe were never Europenans, just a small problem. Facing the monolith. But here there are so many small problems, it's really just a collection of small problems, the monolith is missing. Oh, I mean, of course I suppose there's the monolith of White America. White Straight Male America.

BELIZE: Which is not unimpressive, even among monoliths.

LOUIS: Well, no, but when the race thing gets taken care of, and I don't mean to minimalize how major it is, I mean I know it is, this is a really, really incredibly racist country but it's like, well, the British. I mean, all those blue-eyed pink people. And it's just weird, you know, I mean, I'm not all that Jewish-looking, or...well, maybe I am, but, you know, in New York, everyone is...well, not everyone, but so many are but so but in England, in London I walk into bars and I feel like Sid the Yid, you know I mean like Woody Allen in Annie Hall, with the payess and the gabardine coat, like, never, never anywhere so much -- [...] in London, there's just...and at one point I met this black gay guy from Jamaica who talked with a lilt but said his family'd been living in London since before the Civil War -- the American one -- and how the English never let him forget for a minute that he wasn't blue-eyed and pink and I said yeah, me too, these people are anti-Semites and he said yeah but the British Jews have the clothing business all sewed up and blacks there can't get a foothold. And it was an incredibly awkward moment of just...I mean, here we were in this bar that was gay but it was a pub, you know, the beams and the plaster and those horrible little, like, two-day-old fish and egg sandwiches -- and just so British, and so old, and I felt, well, there's no way out of this because both of us are, right now, too much immersed in this history, hope is dissolved in the sheer age of this place, where race is what counts and there's no real hope of change -- it's the racial destiny of the Brits that matters to them, not their political destiny, whereas in America... [...] Racists just try to use race here as a tool in a political struggle. It's not really about race. Like the spiritualists try to use that stuff, are you enlightened, are you centered, channeled, whatever, this reaching out for a spiritual past in a country where no indigenous spirits exist -- only the Indians, I mean Native American spirits and we killed them off so now, there are no gods here, no ghosts and spirits in America, there are no angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past, there's only the political.

And I was eager to fight for our political future, because America felt like the future, even though "future" might simply be what fills the vacuum in a world without a past. And because of that, I was threatened by all that past, all those beams and fish-and-egg sandwiches, all that deep racial history and tradition that paralyzed England and enabled us to open a can of whup-ass on y'all at Yorktown.

Then the Millennium was Approaching, and since then, the millennium came, and brought with it our first attacks on civilian soil; the first serious foreign attack on America since Pearl Harbor, and we all recoiled a little bit and realized how our parents must have felt, wondering what we'd been up to with all our tongue-in-cheek irony and sweeping entitled sense of security, like we really were the Brave New World and nothing could touch us.

Point is, we're not as cutting-edge as I'd thought we were, and England's not so backwards modernist as all that. Where we're actually quite paranoid, stuffy and neurotic and afraid of jinxing ourselves, England's let loose over the last decade, and all of a sudden those four channels are pushing at the parameters of what we've come to expect in television, and over here, the WB and UPN collapse in on one another, folding under the weight of trying to support all that teenaged, contrived sarcasm.

Our new hit shows, "My Name is Earl," "Supernatural," "Battlestar Galactica," "Grey's Anatomy," are so much more earnest than anyone would have dared pitch in '99, in 2000, back when it was all edges and irony. Now we find ourselves craving some security in the familiar, the old tropes of love and loss, heroes and monsters. 2006's television's just 50's television grown up, where the men are men and the doctors are doctors and the heroes kill the monsters and the girls are witty, and clever, and behind every good man.

I watched Coupling and some Eddie Izzard specials in '03 and '04, watched The Office and Little Britain in '05, Green Wing and Doctor Who in '06. (I also watched AbFab in the late 90s and early 00s, but French and Saunders didn't do much better than Fry and Laurie to subvert my BBC stereotypes, still the same sort of classic combination of slapstick and vulgarity, no?)

In the optimistic economic eighties, we had yuppie TV like "thirtysomething," like "The Wonder Years" (yuppie nostalgia) and "Murphy Brown," like "Family Ties" and "The Cosby Show."

In the counterculture 90s we had "Ally McBeal" and her dancing babies. We had "The Simpsons" and "Seinfeld" and we reinvented the evening soap with "Melrose Place" and "90210."

We got confused in the 00s, the decade we came under attack and went to war for reasons no one could really identify. For the first couple years we played it safe, we returned to Family Values, we carefully filed down anything that might mean fear. Aaron Sorkin left "The West Wing" just like Clinton left the White House, and both the fictionalized and real versions of the West Wing became treacleized and stopped having anything to say.

And we crawled out of the post-9/11 safety cushion with our wallets out in front of us; we bought what came next with our checkbooks. We got "Family Guy" back on TV because we bought the DVDs, because producers of media were too scared to take a gamble on what we might want, and instead gave us what they already knew we did. "Lost" came and reminded mainstream America of the escapist power of science fiction and the paranormal, and in a move that hasn't been seen since the Formica-plated 1960s, we brought back sci-fi with a vengeance. Sixteen paranormal themed shows premiered, and were as quickly cancelled.

Which isn't to say some people didn't get it right. After all, the 00s gave us "Arrested Development" and "Scrubs," and saw the practical death of the four-camera sitcom. And in our nostalgia we did some things right, like the reimagined, sexy "Battlestar Galactica" and the completely user-friendly and female-viewer friendly "Supernatural" and "Stargate: Atlantis."

But the UK beat us to it, lapped us, paced us, set the standard for television in the millennium. While we were busy nursing our wounds and looking for anything unthreatening, the UK went wild with some of the most threatening, raunchiest television ever. Queer as Folk in 1999 came like a big fuck-you to the United States, for all our new-world mentality, we weren't the first to launch a big gay drama, and then, like we were afraid anything new we dreamed up would look pale in comparison, we just went ahead and took QAF and adapted it for the US. Like there are no other gay stories to tell; like the Beeb had Jossed us good. We took "The Office" for the same reason; we tried to take "Coupling" as if we didn't really understand that, minus the no-holds-barred penis jokes, minus the really human awkward unflushable insights, NBC-clean, "Coupling" wasn't really any better than any four-camera sitcom we could have created ourselves, stock, stock and barrel.

So the UK reinvents "Doctor Who" and, across the pond, we reinvent "Battlestar Galactica." DW adds a canonically gay character in Captain Jack; we heteronormalize a queer relationship (Apollo/Starbuck) but also manage to get a lesbian icon out of the deal. BSG's poised like an epic space adventure, but what it privileges is the domestic -- maternal and paternal leaders, with Conservative military and religious ideals, lead their flock home to the bosom of the promised land, and we hear what we've heard in the United States since that September day in 2001, namely, "wouldn't it be nice to feel safe again?"

Russell Davies' "Doctor Who," while reimagined in much the same way, inventing comedy and irony in place of bad special effects and totally unscary robot villains, has the opposite moral, and that's where the UK's lapped us. "Doctor Who" doesn't say, "there's no place like home" -- in fact, it posits that we're living in a world of infinite possibility, where almost anywhere is an adventure and everyplace beats home. BBC used the same old tin trashcan Daleks and spent its focus on reinventing the characters, and letting them tell (in "The Christmas Invasion," and others) contemporary political stories, and a timeless love story, with humor and ambition and hope. Maybe the money David Eick and SCI FI used to make the Cylons look so good would have been better spent trying to inject some wit, and some sense of adventure, into Galactica's sprawling and humorless morality play.

And that's where the Beeb has dared to revolutionize television for the new millennium. Comedies like "Green Wing" play with taboos I wouldn't have known the world was ready for, stuck in backwards America in 2006. UK television's got nothing left that's sacred, and that in and of itself's an example of how far they've left us behind. In "Little Britain," Dafydd's "the only gay in the village," and for the first time we've got not only a canonically gay regular on a TV series, but we've got several, which allows us to mock Dafydd's one gay stereotype by holding it up against lots and lots of others. Because America still hasn't learned that there's more than one gay story to tell, more than one gay in the village after all.

Watching British TV now is like seeing ourselves in our parents. I can totally see where we got our wit, our sense of irony, our stubbornness and underdogsmanship. And I can see where we went wrong, where we got too big for our britches and where we didn't live up to their expectations. In "Green Wing," Guy challenges Mac to name five famous lesbians. Mac immediately goes to the Brontes, which Guy blows off as too easy, off limits. When was the last time anyone on American TV offered up the name of a nineteenth century author as part of casual banter? Next time Turk asks JD to name five famous lesbians, furrow your brow and look for it.

I still stand by the idea of America, and I love that this country's all future and no past, all potential and no shackles, because somehow even our most embarassing moments, our lapses in judgement, our slavery days, all feel very recent and natural, the growing pains of a country too big and faced with more freedom than it knew how to handle. But we got attacked, in this decade, and it changed us, despite feeling like we were all grown up in big-boy pants and way past changing, past being sensitive or scared.

"Doctor Who" 2005, "The Empty Child." The Anschluss has come to London and the kids are hiding from the air raids and Rose tells the girl not to worry, she's from London, fifty years from now. They win this one.

I was in Brooklyn on September 11th of '01, and Rose in the air raids reminded me that that's my experience, the closest we've come to being in a country that's been attacked on our own soil. Seeing a city like London under siege in my dad's lifetime gave me chills. Like it was impossible to believe this city of Panzers and exploding artillery's the same as the city where I went to the theatre in Picadilly Circus. And Nancy can't believe it either, even when Rose tells her they win.

Fifty years of recovering from that does something to a country, I imagine. Fifty years of rebuilding with the same stubborn manifest destiny that's going into rethinking the new World Trade Towers, nationwide, over generations. And so it is like seeing ourselves in our parents, and more, watching them watch us. And we were on the cutting edge for a while there but in this millennium we're behind the curve, backwards and stodgy and without any real sense of how to play well with others. From across the pond they mock us and watch us stumble, and in their television and movies and rhyming slang we get a peek into how we could have been, how our parents grew, in a different world, in a different time.

Talk back to me about British TV of the last decade, or American TV of the last decade, or strange books about war. I'm about to start the first series of "Black Books;" I'll keep you apprised.

Dear Mr. Tennant,

I'm writing from Hollywood, California, because your star's rising so brightly I can see it from here, and it's gorgeous, and it's blinding, and I thought you should know what it looks like from 6000 miles. This is also a love letter.

From today I give you a year, maybe eighteen months till you're a household name, top-billed, in the States as well as abroad. Here's what's gonna happen.

They'll make you work out, you beautiful lanky stringbean, and you'll get biceps and a chest and then they'll make you do (more) shirtless scenes. Then you're gonna cultivate an American accent. They'll tell you to do it because more roles'll open up for you. We'll tell you to do it because we want to hear you sound like us, and you'll do it because you got a bit of the cowboy in ya and a damned good ear. Take it for a test drive on Doctor Who this year, because in the age of BBC America you've got a bigger captive audience than Tom Baker ever had, and in a week you'll end up on YouTube.

Next you get a breakthrough hit. Something with critical appeal on a low budget, this year's Trainspotting. I bet the scripts are coming in already, and you're with ICM, so you'll pick the right one. Then it's a question of do you want to do the mainstream summer American romantic comedy they send ya, or do you wait for the villain role in the smaller American thriller? And the girls join the gays, as they tend to, and next thing you're beating out Brad Pitt in every poll there is. Glossy magazines that smell like perfume will call you things like "The Scottish Sensation" and the Desperate Housewives will start fantasizing about you. Quite possibly call you to offer you a six-episode arc.

I just met you this past year because I'm a geek and a fangirl and I watched Eccleston in Who, and, like everyone, thought I'd never get over him once he left. (If you're playing the home game, you had me in three episodes. I marked the moment, it's at the end of "School Reunion" when we get our very first giant Tennant grin, breaking around "my Sarah Jane!")

Since then I've made a point of getting hold of screeners for Casanova, Blackpool, Secret Smile. I watched 2005's Quatermass for you, and the internet provided old episodes of Taking over the Asylum where they noticed you first, all limbs and energy and that weird wisdom in your eyes. You like props and stage business. You like smiles that break from one corner of your mouth to the other, like a wave. You like to touch people. You like to pace, to sit down and get right back up again. You like to cross a room and then look back over your shoulder. You bite your upper lip and shoot a knowing look. Most white guys bite their lower lips, but you've redefined mouth business for a whole new generation, with that pop of your lower jaw and the way the tip of your tongue folds up against the roof of your mouth. I suspect some of that's you, just as I suspect that even when you're not performing your face tells a hell of a story.

So I did twelve years of Tennant in about two months, real time. I watched you grow up and blow up and explode on the screen as Casanova, as Carlisle, as the Doctor. This time you took the slower path, and I tripped through the pages of your book and fell for you as I watched you blow the roof off the place.

The reviews I've read describe your Doctor as quirky, electric, I've even heard "waspish," but if you ask me (and boy how you didn't) I think the key element you bring to the character's what we saw in the very first five minutes we had him on screen -- he's a fellow who's hop, hop, hopping for his life, in perpetual motion because if he ever stops, even for a second, he'll be forced to come to terms with the weight of his 900 years and all his angst and guilt. And so you spin him across the screen with a sort of desperate mania, like the guy who hides his emotions behind humor or the guy who talks too fast because he doesn't want to hear what you're gonna say if he lets you interrupt. Actually, it's kind of chilling. One gets the feeling that just beneath the surface, Tennant's Doctor, for all his infinite adaptibility, is about one good guilt trip away from smiting the universe with his wrath for all of its injustices. Kind and passionate, yeah, but don't ever mistake that for nice.

All this in sharp contrast to your Casanova, though on the surface they do share a sort of Peter Pannish irrepressibility, because you somehow managed to make Casanova -- while entirely a rogue -- the domestic sort. Here's a man who, despite appearances, really does just want that perfect love affair, to run off with his heart's desire and settle down for a life of domestic wedded bliss. And how you managed to do that while keeping him a self-centered cad is just another little indication of why I spent the last two months seeking out every credit of yours I could get my hands on. Casanova who wants nothing more than for his son to be proud of him, or nothing more than to play house with Henriette, and still manages to botch the whole thing up because he's crippled by his own need for instant gratification and because he's got that magpie-like attraction to the shiny and new and untried.

And then Carlisle's a third sort entirely, probably the laziest character I've seen you play. And of course it's not really laziness he's got, but what you present as sort of a combination of complete worldly entitlement and a sort of boredom with everything around him. Your Carlisle slouches through his life completely convinced he'll get whatever he's got his eye on without much effort on his part. When other folks talk, he lets his mind wander. He lopes around with that air of bored confidence, but then, in a really phenomenal performance, you litter all that confidence with nervous behavior, the eye poking, the oral fixation. Like even Carlisle doesn't know how insecure he really is. And it works for him, both the insecurity and the overconfidence; he gets his man, he gets the girl, he's a corrupt antihero and we all root for him anyway.

In other words, you've impressed the socks off me. And that doesn't mean anything, I mean, my opinion, as I'm not famous, or noteworthy, or an asshole, but I'm brighter than most and I've got discerning taste and I'm not even an Anglophile; I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Jewish New Yorker cum-Angeleno, and I think you are the greatest thing to come along since belly lox on a bagel. And not just because you're a beautiful man, which you are, from the loud arch of your eyebrow to your toothy grin that can stop a girl's heart, ka-thud, just like that. And not just because you're a legitimate talent, a genuine actor's actor, an alive, electric performer with a freakish ability to shift from beaming to broken or from charming to creepy with a curl of your lip. Because one bit of stage business isn't enough for you, and they may call you spastic and jumpy but every single one of those movements is controlled, elegant. You slide into your roles like you were born in them, which, I suppose, in the Doctor's case, you were. You make good decisions. You see the whole picture. And I've grown absolutely addicted to watching you do it, and falling just a little bit in love with you besides.

Not even just because you're a Socialist, or you did 7:84 or can probably match me at West Wing trivia, or because you still believe in agitprop, though those are points in your favor. And I didn't fall for you just because you're six feet and can't weigh more than a buck fifty but you move like a dancer and your head's always square on your shoulders and you can't teach that kind of confidence, that kind of posture, that's just born, and either you got it or you don't, and you've got it in spades.

But mostly I'm impressed from 6000 miles away, and I felt the need to write to you, because you're taking this in stride, all of it, hop hop hopping for your life and making good choices and living in the present and building a career not by cutthroat ambition but by sheer talent, each role coming out of the next because we want you, and not the other way around. And you say now that you don't have a five year plan, and I believe you, because I've read articles from '04 where you mentioned trying to get your agent to put you up for a walk-on role on Who. But a year from now you're going to belong to the world, The Next Big Scot, because the scripts are only going to come in faster after Christmas, after Recovery, after whatever's next, and I'm gonna miss you.

Scotland's known you forever, but we just got hold of you over here across the pond, and we're proprietary! I love that this year you're property of the geeks, the fanboys and fangirls and the Pink Paper gays, all of us who always jump on board just a little bit quicker than the rest of the world, all of us who know how to see magic in the mundane and who saw it in your amazing face. We're a clever bunch, geeks and artists, and we usually find the cool stuff first.

We're on the brink, you know? Doesn't it feel like apocalypse weather? This big world and my country's diabolical administration and the conflict that arises when a planet gets too small for its population? Good time for agitprop and a great time for geeks -- we made the microphones and the internet and the podiums and now we've got 'em in our hot little hands. So what do we SAY? What do we DO? How do we use what we got to change the world for the better? Is it any wonder I fantasize about this year's love in the form of a Socialist Scot with a talent that even The Man can't keep down?

But that's also why this is a love letter, because I'm aching for our lost year, because next time you're in LA you'll be bigger than Brad Pitt and rich as Croesus, and I'm never gonna get the chance to work with you, to use your energy and vast, sprawling talent to tell my stories. And we'll never get that drink.

And it woulda been a good drink, David, it woulda been awesome.

Maybe I'm wrong, and you'll stay staunchly where you are, the pride of Scotland and the Pink Paper heartthrob for five more series of Who, and then maybe after that you'll team up with Russell Davies and write your own pilot, and star in that, and spend some more decades with the RSC and follow the path of other actorly British sorts, and you'll crossover to the states when you're seventy and playing Dumbledore in Harry Potter 21.

But either way, I hope you feel the potential, the excitement, the fire of your shooting star. Because from over here, it is absolutely incredible to watch, and I can't look away.

The best of luck to you in everything you do. Come to LA and I'll show you a good time.

Part One of "Judas Iscariot Is Kicking Up Seashells" : The Gospel According to Andrew Lloyd Webber

And I know there's the thing where we joke that you think we killed your Lord ("we" being us Jews and "you" being you Christians, for the purposes of this sentence), and that's fine when it's for fun, but the thing is, everything I know about the New Testament and the gospels I learned from Jesus Christ Superstar (and some Godspell -- my Christian friends have informed me in the past that Godspell is a more accurate/more revelatory musical theatre interpretation of the Jesus story, and that JCS leaves a lot more open to artistic interpretation. Would you say that's true? Maybe I just have to listen to Godspell more -- anyone have .mp3s for me?) -- everything I know about the New Testament I learned from anecdotal evidence, popular culture, and Jesus Christ Superstar, and I've been thinking about this a lot in the past few days, driving back and forth from Pasadena in dead traffic with JCS on the stereo, and I have concluded that I don't see Judas having any other choice! Had I been in Judas' position, in the Gospel according to Andrew Lloyd Webber, I would have done exactly the same thing.

There are so many places along the way where I could have become misinformed that I'm making it a point to learn more about the Gospels, which is where I turn to the internets for help. I'm looking for any secular type gospels -- I think we in the secular world call it "historical fiction" -- that describe the Jesus/Judas/Gethsemane/blood money/Caiphas/Annas betrayal. I have Norman Mailer's The Gospel According to the Son which was, if nothing else, more straightforward than Gore Vidal's gospel, but I would like more, particularly about Judas Iscariot. All the biographies/gospels I've found on Judas tend to be lifted from the Christian Inspiration area of the bookstore, rather than the fiction area or history area, which makes me nervous, and I sat for a long time in Barnes & Noble carefully dismissing any gospel that had red letters or Los or Thees or Thous or O Lord!s in them -- and was left with Mailer, Vidal, and Anne Rice. Good thing Anne Rice is crazy (and good thing her big Jesus tetrology hasn't reached the Gethsemane chapter yet) or I'd have come home with more books than three.

I'm trying to get a handle on the political environment of the day, on the conflict between the Romans and the Jews of the Middle East, Caesar feeling threatened by the rise of other powers, the desert populus of Jews just trying to survive day to day in the hot unforgiving sand, local lords and governors paying tribute to Caesar and charged with keeping their flocks in line. I mean -- Caesar was a force to be reckoned with, no? I wouldn't go up against the Roman Empire without good backup either, and even then I'd be careful where I stepped. It's like trying to mount a revolution under an oppressive dictator. You gotta be cunning!

So -- let me see if I've got this right? And you tell me where I'm wrong, or lead me to texts where I can expand my knowledge? This is me retelling JCS, trying to squeeze fact from interpretive dance.

Jesus and Judas start a nonprofit, basically, in Galilee, stirring up grassroots support to help the poor and suffering. Judas is eager to help his fellow suffering Jews, and hopes they can continue their work under the radar for as long as possible before Caesar comes stomping in demanding tribute.

The poor and meek and so forth really take to Jesus, and for a couple of years their nonprofit does great work around Galilee, healing the sick and feeding the poor in the desert! Then Jesus's popularity grows to such a degree that the local leaders, folks with a real fear of Caesar and their ears to the ground, folks who have been at war before, people like Caiaphas and Annas, start getting nervous that Mr. Nazareth's cult of personality will bring the attention and the wrath of Rome upon their little struggling neck of the desert.

Judas, meanwhile, wonders how his well-meaning and humble nonprofit somehow launched into a one-man Jesus Revue, and also worries that with all the singing and dancing Jesus is doing, and with all the crowds that have flocked to Jesus, the wrath of Rome will come to Galilee and see Jesus as a threat and take out the whole lot of 'em. Judas wonders why Jesus is spending their group's hard-raised money on fine ointments and massage oils for him to use with his prostitute girlfriend, when insteaad they could use that money to feed and clothe the poor. Jesus replies that he will only be on this earth for a short time, and that they should all make the most out of having him here, and that he'd be more useful to the organization if he were relaxed, which Mary understands, hence all the deep-tissue massaging. Jews continue to flock from miles around, and everyone starts calling Jesus the King of the Jews for some reason.

Judas now seriously bugs out, because all he wanted to do was help his fellow Jews in Galilee, not throne a King. Caiaphas comes to Judas and says, we know this isn't what you signed up for, we need to take care of Jesus ourselves before Rome smites us. Judas says no WAY, he's my BEST FRIEND, I'm not turning him over to you. Meanwhile, Judas watches as Jesus gets the whole country to sing and dance his praises. Judas, for the good of the Jews, agrees that Jesus is a threat that must be stopped.

Then there's dinner and some more singing, and then there's the betrayal with a kiss. Judas, appropriately, can't live with himself, can't take the blood money, after all that, kills himself and dies a villian. Elsewhere, Pilate doesn't want to have to make a ruling regarding Jesus's case, because whoever chooses to punish Jesus is going to be, among many things, supremely unpopular with the groundswell of Jesus fans, and Pilate had a dream where they all hated him. So he sends Jesus to Herod, figuring it's up to one Jew to deal with another. Herod ALSO doesn't want to punish Jesus, and gives Jesus every opportunity to admit he's not the King of the Jews and get out of there unscathed, but Jesus refuses to admit it. Sure, he says, "you named me that," but he also proposes that there might be a kingdom for him somewhere. All this talk of being the son of god makes Herod think Jesus is in fact just crazy, but Herod can no more punish a crazy man than he can punish an innocent man. There's 40 lashes, because the crowd INSISTS that Jesus be punished some way and the crowd's getting restless. Then they send Jesus back to Pilate, because the crowd keeps insisting that JEsus be killed or else they'll be stuck facing the wrath of Rome, and Jews don't have capital punishment. Pilate goes ahead and nails Jesus up, hating himself for it all the while.

I feel -- if Jesus was indeed a real guy who walked around Israel 2000 years ago -- which is quite likely -- I feel he really put his friends in a tough position, put his people in a tough position, sold out the needs of the many in exchange for his own cult of personality, got high on fame and was a threat to Judaism everywhere. And then of course, he was a threat to Judaism, because after all that, we get Christianity. Judas, on the other hand, strikes me as the type who never wanted fame, but wanted to find a way to help his people -- more of a Socialist than a King.

And I lose control here. I don't know why a new religion sprung up because of this one guy. I don't know what we did that was so wrong. I don't know what Jesus did that was so great.

I don't get out much, so I read. I will tell you more after I've finished Mailer. Any clarifications or pointing out where I'm completely all wet eagerly appreciated.

I never watched SG1, even when all my Farscape fannish friends hopped over into SG and even when the artist formerly known as Maayan started writing fic. And EVEN when the artist formerly known as Maayan and I drove out to the desert just to lie down beneath this bowl of stars, and, over the course of eight or ten big-sky hours, M. told me the entire tale of Daniel Jackson, from Sha'uri and that, wossname, wise Ancient caretaker, to Daniel ascending and then getting the boot and coming back with big biceps to play with Ben Browder. And I've seen the movie and I'm comfortable with the rule that any new Stargate starts with a hot alien babe showing some scruffy antihero her, erm, cave paintings, but my fannishness about SG1 extends to how hot Jaye Davison was as Ra the sun god in the movie, and, pressed, I couldn't pick a Goa'uld out of a lineup, despite the fact that I think Peter Stebbings played one once.

This is our first Star Trek free television year since 1987. And I'm not complaining, I can't very well complain considering the preponderance of genre TV this year, but when a gal who grew up watching Picard seek out new lives and new civilizations needs a sci-fi fix, she needs a FIX, yo. And thus we have Stargate: Atlantis.

SGA is not a profound show, by any means, nor groundbreaking in any way, let's just get that straight right off the bat. BSG is undoubtedly smarter and more elegant, more dangerous and unique. And BSG is a damned good show; we'll get that out of the way straight off too, despite the fact that it's really not very funny at all. But it's not our space show, not any more than Threshold or Invasion or the new Dr. Who; it didn't pick up the Star Trek spill. That, there, is for SGA.

Because, okay.

So what SGA does for us is give us everything that was ever delicious about Star Trek (and Star-Trek-related space shows, see also Babylon 5) without any of the hamhanded morality or unwieldy world-building. Every season on every Star Trek has a handful of yummy plots (the bodyswap plot, the trapped-in-an-elevator plot, the killer bugs plot, the power-outage plot) that lend themselves to thoroughly, relentlessly enjoyable television, and then a handful of useless boring plots (the requisite Klingon episode, the requisite alien one-off love affair episode) that never really hold up upon the fortieth or fiftieth rewatch. And so SGA, cleverly, has saved us that trouble by ONLY recycling tried and true FUN space plots. Yes, every arc and every decision and every character or alien race on SGA has its ancestry among the Star Treks, but oh! how wonderful to see them strung together like this, like a greatest hits album recorded by ONLY the good characters, the clever, snarky, slashy characters, with the tongue-in-cheek humor that gets to come from being set in the present, as opposed to in a nebulous future where we don't have money or racism anymore.

Every character on SGA also has his or her ancestry among the Star Treks, which is kind of a handy shorthand for us because it doesn't matter if the characters themselves actually live up to their obligations because we BELIEVE they do, since we've grown up simmering in these paradigms. To wit -- play the drinking game "What Does Weir Do?" sometime and see how sober you end up. Weir, darling Weir, has never once done ANYTHING, not a THING to demonstrate that she's the ass-kicking chick leader we want her to be. BUT, I'm willing to BELIEVE she is, even if she doesn't show me, because Janeway was, and that's where her ancestry springs from. Here, observe a chart, where Star Trek: Voyager is (almost) arbitrarily selected from any of a set of space show paradigms:

Which brings me to why it doesn't matter if McKay's science is pseudoscience, because he's been TAILORED as a genius, we BELIEVE he's a genius, and so we can use that for our fannish pursuit of tasty slash. And it doesn't matter if Sheppard's got nothing but his pointy ears and his belt to set him apart from John Crichton or Tom Paris or anyone else who likes to take a little space ship for a joyride and come home cracking jokes about pop culture, because we BELIEVE he's a kickass soldier and pilot and commander.

So those of us who wanted so badly to slash our space boys now get a better slash pairing than Paris/Kim (or Crichton/D'Argo!) ever offered us. Those of us who want hot girlslash can take Weir and Teyla to places Janeway and B'Elanna have absolutely gone before. Those of us who want smalltime bottle eps can hang out in Atlantis (which I always accidentally refer to as "the station" when I want "the city," see also, DS9, B5) while those of us who want mytharc with gravitas have the Wraith a more serious and satisfying threat to Earth than the Borg or the Scarrans ever were. It's like space shows for DUMMIES over here, with all the lines drawn for us, but FUCK ME the lines are good.

Which is to say: there is nothing unsatisfying about SGA. It is comfort food, it is a legacy, it is in the dictionary next to SPACE SHOW. Mm!

All of this leads me to suspect -- and this is where my complete ignorance of SG1 could get me in trouble, so feel free to take this with a grain of <s>stupidity</s> salt -- that the creators of SGA were Trek fans themselves, and that they SEE the opportunity SGA has to be the neo-Trek for this generation. Which leads me to "Aurora."

The Ancients, at least in Aurora, resemble Star Trek so much that I can't imagine it's unintentional. Which is partially upsetting, because I want the Ancients to be omnipotent, or at least paranormal, and Star Trek-ifying them makes them almost too underdeveloped for my taste, but let's table that for now.

John shows up in the virtual environment only to get faced with a phaser and thrown in the brig behind a forcefield. He travels down brightly lit corridors that could be on Voyager, the Defiant, or the Enterprise, and faces off with the Captain in an all-white version of Picard's bridge.

And perhaps we're spoiled, those of us who marinated in space shows most of our lives, because we don't see Star Trek's universe as tremendously radical; we've seen it all before. But with SGA we get an opportunity to see the technology and civilization created by Star Trek in a new light, through the prism of folks who stepped right out of 2005 just like we do. And, like John Crichton faced with little yellow bolts of light, it IS pretty damned amazing what the Ancients came up with, what with transporters and force fields and phased-energy weapons and traveling faster than light. And considering they were defeated by the Wraith, or at least overwhelmed, it makes sense they shouldn't totally outstrip the Borg, right? I mean, if the Wraith race of bee people was too tremendously advanced from the Borg race of bee people, we'd expect the Ancients to be similarly advanced, and unstoppable opponents don't make good TV.

But, we can kill a Wraith with only moderately more difficulty than we can kill a Borg, and we are similiary outnumbered, out-hiveminded and out-expendable; the Borg don't care if they lose a million drones if they take Earth in the process and neither do the Wraith. Which makes sense, and makes the Wraith, like the Borg, a compelling foe. If we could kill them too easily they'd be boring, but if it were impossible to kill them at all, they'd be unwieldy. And thus, we give them bug-minds and greater numbers and we let them rape and pillage the galaxy destroying worlds, while somehow being the only four people in the universe who can conceivably stand up to 'em.

Point being, SGA's taking a whole team, a whole planet worth of people and doing to them what Farscape did to Crichton; plopping them in the middle of space technology WE (the audience) are not unaccustomed to, and watching the cast members flounder around learning as they go, dwarfed by this impossible futuristic tech and this battle of giants in the playground (watch as I mix my space show metaphors!). And thus, we get everything fun that Farscape did, along with everything fun that Star Trek did, along with everything fun that B5 ever did, stuck between order and chaos, between the Shadows and the Vorlons, between the Ancients and the Wraith, between the Federation and the Borg.

*

Caught another gasp of apparent downtime at work; this only happens on weekends, usually Sundays, slow news days, when the bosses are away and the campaigns are par for the course till Monday's news cycle begins.

Let's talk about TV!

I am all over this <i>Lost</i>-itis surge of genre-lite shows hitting mainstream network television. It's positively a FEAST for those of us who hunger for genre television in the post-Star Trek world. I'm watching them all (except, oddly, <i>Lost</i>, which I lost control of somewhere mid last season when the flashbacks started to bore me. If they're done with the backstory flashbacks I might tune in again; how's this season?) except the one on the WB about the teen ghostbusters, but that's more of a WB/teen-show bias than anything else, and I'd probably watch it if someone pointed me the way. Anyway, here's the 2005 shows I'm watching this year. Add to it the old standards of Atlantis and Galactica (go SciFi!), Scrubs and House (go docs!), Survivor and The Amazing Race (go reality!) and this is my Fall '05 lineup. Don't forget that the _underscore's the new bullet point; use it three times and it's yours:

_bones: Apparently I'm the only one who's liking this show. I think that'll change. It turns out it's PURE GENIUS, and that Emily Wossname is ADORABLE and she and David Boreanz promise to be the Mulder and Scully of the Oughts, except far more frank and shooting from the hip and FUNNY. I love the ensemble, love the marvelously clueless nerd (see also: every other show this year; viva los nerds!), and love the wry humor socially inept geniuses brought together for no other reason than they love a mystery. Sheer quality; this is the best new show this season. The writing crackles, the ensemble has genuine chemistry, the characters are new and different and the mysteries, so far, have been, you know, TV-solid.

Thumbnail: Bones is a brilliant yet completely socially inept forensic anthropologist who really really likes solving crimes; David Boreanz is a federal agent who could use the help of a good forensic doc, badda-bing, now they're partners, and they have a crack team of nerds and hackers at their disposal.

_surface: Holy production values, Batman! If nothign else, this show watches like a Hollywood blockbuster, and with cliffhanger endings at the end of every episode, it's a lot like watching a massive-length feature in the line of "Lake Placid" or "Deep Blue Sea" cut arbitrarily into forty-four minute chunks. So, you know, it's exactly as enjoyable as "Deep Blue Sea" or "Anaconda" or anything else with scientists and seamonsters, and that Lake Bell is adorable (and about as believable a PhD as Denise Richards).

Thumbnail: There's something big under the sea, some sort of super mammal that lays eggs, and one got beached, and the government found it, and meanwhile Lake Bell is a surfer-chick marine biologist single mom trying to solve the mystery of the undersea beast. Elsewhere, a kid in suburbia hatched one of the eggs and grew a teeny little amphibian that he named "Nimrod." Elsewhere, a guy in an annoying marriage is obsessed with finding the sea monster that dragged his best friend away.

_threshold: I don't care what you say, there is nothign that will make me stop watching a show where Brent Spiner and a midget protect us from invading aliens. This is probably a dumb show, but I don't care much, because, like Surface, it has its roots in adventure/pseudo-genre films like "Sphere" and apocalypse films like "The Day After Tomorrow" and "Independence Day," thus makign it a classic textbook what-to-do-when-the-aliens-come series. Carla Guigino is a good tough lead, but the high points of this show are unquestionably Brent Spiner as the neo-60's hippie doc, and the midget lingust mathematician. MIDGET LINGUIST! The possibilities are limitless!

Thumbnail: A la "Sphere," Carla Guigino is a federal agent who dedicated her life to making plans for Worst Case Scenarios, and building teams to call to duty in said scenarios. When an alien signal designed to reprogram human DNA appears over a Navy ship at sea, Guigino is called to Washington to implement plan Threshold; the plan she wrote for the event of an alien invasion. She comes with her very own clueless nerd (this one's a curly haired hacker conspiracy theorist, to offset "Bones"'s curly haired hacker PhD student or "Numb3rs" Krumholtz's curly haired math teacher), a tough-jawed marine, and the aforementioned Brent Spiner and a midget that make the show oh so worth watching. Seriously, the midget (Peter Dinklage) linguist is the best bitter brilliant not-a-team-player scientist to hit media since those guys who worked with Bruce Willis in "Armageddon."

_invasion: SNK likes this show because it's really secretly a show about the vicissitudes of blended families, masquerading as a pseudo-genre show about aliens. Really, the crazy Everglades stepfamiles that make up the ensemble are absolutely the reason to watch, from the scruffy conspiracy theorist brother-in-law ("It's an EBE! It's an EBE!") to Kari-Matchett-of-Cube-2 as the wild-eyed blonde doctor who just might be under her husband's weird alien spell. The kids act like kids, the stepparents act like stepparents, and the politics of Homestead, FL, are secondary to the politics of a family with stepdads and stepmoms and stepkids all struggling to feel safe after the scary (and all-too-real-looking) hurricane.

Thumbnail: There's a hurricane in Florida, after which mysterious bolts of light fall from the sky, land in the Everglades and swim away. Two families, joined by divorce and including (usefully) a doctor, a newscaster, a park ranger and a sheriff, survived the hurricane and had their share of strange encounters with the alien lights, which they will likely spend most of this season coming to understand. Like <i>Lost</i>, and unlike most of the other new-genre shows, Invasion is careful not to tell too much; the story of the alien (?) is vague at best, and used only to add color to the more important story of the family and social dynamics in this sleepy Everglades town.

*

As for comedies, I'm watching "How I Met Your Mother" and "Kitchen Confidential" and so far they're both very worthy heirs to excellent sitcoms lost and gone. "Kitchen" could be the next Sports Night, if it smarts up a little, and "How I Met" is already the best heir to "Friends," but even better because it's got Neil Patrick Harris and Alyson Hannigan in. Neil Patrick Harris is the best thing to hit sitcoms since Zach Braff, I tell you whut.

I gotta go back to work now.

At thirty-five thousand feet, there's turbulence over the Ohio river basin. I took an Ativan. Beside me is a German woman in her eighties; when I boarded the plane she was sitting in my seat, 23F.

"Um, I think that's my seat." I waved my boarding pass over my armload of luggage and my blinged-out cane. "23F."

"But I like to sit on this side!" she hissed.

"Yeah, but it's my seat."

"Scheisse!" she spat at me. She left for the other aisle, 23 ABC, with her two travelling companions. Moments later the steward comes by, ensuring that all luggage is in the overhead bins and that some objects, bulky and awkward, may shift during takeoff. "I want to sit THERE!" Scheisse grabs the steward's arm with her crone-y bony fingers, points at me. I'm in the window seat, staring out the window, watching TSA operatives fumble with bulky and awkward luggage checked under the plane at the gate.

She's beside me now, 23E. Her travelling companions are caretakers of a kind, German both, and according to Scheisse, criminals, crooks. They take her money. They have been travelling together for some time now. Their initial place of departure is a mystery to me, as is their final destination -- this Boston to Los Angeles leg seems to be just one in a series of Golden Years adventures sponsored by depressed, depressing hospice care coordinators in an effort to get the dead and nearly to Budapest or Bucharest before returning to the hospice watch. This I've deduced in broken English and some German, but the sentiment in 23E is clear. She glares across the aisle at her caretakers. "They are CRIMINAL," she says. "I will not rest until I see that they are kicked out." Kicked out of what, I don't know; I can't imagine it matters, and anyway she moved over here, it seems, to be rid of her caretakers and closer to the window, to see the clouds, to see the sunlight. Something we have in common, Scheisse and me. Even on Ativan I need a fixed point in turbulence, some soft fluffy clouds a couple thousand feet below that aren't moving, that put our shudderation in context; the context of the big huge sky.

United now charges for meals; $5 for any of four Snackboxes (do they carry Skiving?), $5 also for a grilled chicken wrap. Scheisse fumbled in her purse for change, among tissues folded and refolded, snotted on and resnotted on but still useable. Sucking candies. Rubberbands. String. I wonder if she's a Holocaust survivor; the tissues make me think so, the fury, the window. She's got a handful of Kroners or Schillings or Zloty, a quarter and two pennies, which she scrapes clean with her fingernails (there's red sticky stuff on them, she carefully removes it from around George's hair and neck, from around Abe's beard and chin, from the feathers of the bald eagle) and stares at: not enough. With the snort resignation of a horse who isn't ready to be harnessed again, she leans over to 23 ABC, exchanges some words in German with the caretaker.

The caretaker is a woman in her fifties, maybe, sixties with a bad dye job, wearing a white knit poncho and more jewelry than she can afford. She speaks better English than Scheisse, but still mostly German, and her partner ("the boyfriend," Scheisse tells me conspiratorially. "He is also a criminal. He is deadbeat.") sits like a lump beside her, like a bratwurst with a mustache, and doesn't even try at English when the stewards come talk to him.

Scheisse returns from the caretaker, back to 23E with another exasperated "Scheisse!" and then, to me, and not quietly. "She is a liar. She says she have only ten dollars and will not give me money for food. I know she have more -- she have all my money she took from me."

I bought her a sandwich, grilled chicken wrap with roasted peppers and corn. I suggested she crumble up her Ruffles potato chips in the sandwich when she complained of its lack of salt. "No salt at all!" she told the steward. "Sorry," he said. She ordered a tonic water. Also salt free. She asked me if she should crumble her Ruffles into the tonic water. I advised her this wasn't the best way to go. The sandwich went back into the handbag, Ruffles, airline safety card, semi-useable tissues. A pair of airplane headphones and a couple airsick bags. My survivor suspicions grow. I've read Maus.

She said to me: "I need to find some way to tell that these people are criminal. But I have a hard time because I have hard time with my English."

Fascinated, I offered to help, and whipped out the laptop.

"When did you first meet-- " I pointed at 23ABC..
"Oh, long time ago. We used to be friends."
"What happened?"
"It's criminal. I have a room in Los Angeles, Leisure World, Laguna Beach.. And they are doing harm to people who are above 75. They try to harm them. Heard from others that the staff doesn't listen to complaints. Turn around and blame the people who are sick and can't tolerate the treatment they receive from their caretakers. Some of them got killed by their treatment. It's criminal."

My grandfather has a place at the Arbors, a retirement village in Amherst, MA, with friendly nurses, round-the-clock bingo, movies, crossword puzzles, bridge, the occasional rousing game of "I Never." He's 94 years old, and every night his nurse comes in to give him his diabetes finger-stick, make sure he takes his meds, and there's always a nurse on hand in case Poppa needs a shower. They take good care of him there; they feed him three good meals and he flirts with the nurses and the cotton-tops and at the end of the day we kiss him on the head and say bye, Poppa, we love you, and we leave him there knowing he's in good hands, five miles away from my parents and a world away from the horrors Scheisse was describing. Scheisse has tears in her eyes, and I'm still wondering what she was doing in Boston. I want to help.

"Old friends sick in LA. I didn't know until after, because I was away."
"Where were you?" I asked.
"I have a hard time putting these together, they say I am old, I am stupid."

"Okay," I said. "No problem. Let's keep going. When did you hear that your friends were being mistreated?"
She giggled, incongruously, a full-on old German lady giggle. "Oh, gossip, word of mouth, you hear around," she said. "When I came back from the place I had been to, I found out my old friend had been mistreated in the hospital."

"Where were you at the time?"
"I was away. Now I find out she has been mistreated, maybe if they had cared, given her the right treatment she would be all right. Maybe she is dead already."

"And your friend is at Leisure World?"
"Yes, they are treating her there."

We're on a plane flying Westward from Boston to Los Angeles. We left Boston at 6:30pm, local time, today, July 26th. 23ABC flags the steward again. Points to me. "That lady over there needs five dollars. I bought three sandwiches. I bought a sandwich for [Scheisse] and so did she." The steward gave me five ones. Scheisse grinned at me. Victory!

I started in. "Do you remember why you were in Boston?"
"Well, I talked to a couple people, but just passing by. The most important thing is that I would like to get the information together, so that I could get it to people who can help them and do something about it."

"So you came to Boston to talk to some people about these issues."
"Well, I'm not dropping the subject, I just need to get the information together."

"How did you get to Boston?" I asked.
"I did not go to Boston."

Criminy, Klinger. "I'm just trying to put this in chronological order. Because obviously we were in Boston just a couple hours ago."
""If you don't make notes about these things," Scheisse shook her head with a rueful smile. "You don't remember."

"Where were you yesterday?"
"I was at Leisure World with her."
"In Los Angeles?"
"Yes."
"And then you got on a plane and flew to Boston."
"No."

Different tack.

"What did you do today?"
"I dealt with a problem and then something happened and I had to give it up."
Took a long shot: "Is it possible that anyone gave you any medication?"
"I was looking for medication. But I couldn't find it so I gave up." Dead end.

"When were you last at Leisure World?"
"Oh, not long ago, two days."
"Where were you in between?"
"I have to find my notes, to try and make sense of it."

"How did you get to the airport today?"
She points a thumb at 23ABC. "Them."
"Where did they bring you to the airport FROM?"
"From my place in Laguna Hills."

The best I can manage at this juncture's that Scheisse and her friends hopped on a plane in LA yesterday, came to Boston, turned right back around and returned to LA.

I presented it, smoothly, certain I'd nailed it. "Tell me, does this sound likely? A couple days ago you flew out of LA and came to Boston --"
"We did not go to Boston."

"But we were just IN Boston --"
She shrugs, shakes her head. "I don't know."

"You were going to go on a longer trip, right?"
"I wanted to go somewhere where I could do something about the situation. But I gave it up. I cannot find the right words. I cannot find the thoughts. It's frustrating. I can't help them because I can't express it. I need to think. I would like to help them. It is just killing me. You see that they are old, that they are sick, that they have money, and no family, and they let them die, they help them die and take their money. I see it could happen to me too."

Scheisse's name is Helene Kosalko. She is from Hungary. I have no idea why she's on this airplane, where she's coming from or what she's going back to. She came to the United States to learn about new technologies for insurance companies. She doesn't do it anymore. "It's killing me," she says. "That people can hurt each other. The worst is families -- they should help improve the conditions, they should stick together, but instead it's falling apart. It's killing me."

The sun is going down; Helene likes the glow through the window, so I'm keeping it open despite the glare on my laptop monitor. There's a wooly blanket of clouds a couple thousand feet down; up here it's blue skies and smooth sailing. They're showing Miss Congeniality 2; Sahara is over. It's 7:00 now, two more hours.

"Sometimes I am even scared to go home," Helene says. Later, she looks out the window with a beaming smile. "And the sun is still bright!"

*

Later, 8:42 and 29 minutes left on my computer's battery. Helene asked me what the big black thing outside the window was. I told her it was the wing. The sunset's a gorgeous strip of orange and red bleeding down from indigo, teal, green. "Gorgeous," Helene says. "Oh god." She covers her face with her hands. "I wish I could go to sleep and never wake up. I have no one. No family. Even if I go to Europe, it will not be better. I'm afraid to go home. I have no key. I have no home."

"Aren't they taking you back to Leisure World?" I asked, gesturing toward 23ABC.

Helene sighs. "I doubt it," she says. "I don't believe a word they say ever again."

I'm glad I'm taking a cab from the airport, suddenly, selfishly, glad K-Town's nowhere near Laguna Hills. Already I've promised this woman I'll investigate Leisure World and find her an ally there, a nurse, an orderly, a gentle giant who takes her by the hand and eases her passage and the movie ends over some maudlin treacle: "Time in a Bottle," maybe.

*

Medical Investigation

This week we had Ice Station wossname, you know, where they fly up because the researchers taking core samples Are Not Who They Are, and then the crazy comes, and the murders, and the storm comes, and they're trapped. MI's what you'd get if you took the early cast of ER and sent them on Mulder and Scully's adventures: renegade NIH docs flyin' from town to town identifying mysterious pathogens in the nick of time and saving the world without fanfare. The cast is sort of yer just-add-water ensemble with the exception of my girl Eva Rossi, more on her later. Neal "Buck Compton" McDonough is Dr. Stephen...something, who lopes around brooding and taking everything *really* seriously, and Kellie Williams is his emotionally stable sidekick, following him around, diagnosing things and telling Dr. Stephen that he should get more sleep. Chris "Jake 2.0" Gorham is DANGEROUSLY cute and plays the same role he played in Odyssey 5, where "young prodigal astronaut" is replaced with "young prodigal doctor." The token black guy is pretty interesting for a token black guy, if only because his job description remains sort of indiscriminate: he seems to be the resident CSI, which mostly means that while Buck and Kellie are talking to patients and diagnosing things, Token Black Guy prowls around the victims' homes with rubber gloves on, taking samples of things and putting them in jars. The internet tells me that critics don't like Eva Rossi, but I think she's awesome if for no other reason than it's been a long time since a TV show had a resident LIAR. Eva is the NIH crew's "press liaison," which, okay, I have no idea what that means, but in the very first episode, to keep a journalist off their scent, Eva seduced said journalist, led him into the hospital's basement, cold-cocked him and locked him down there for the duration. This is probably not ethical, but I find it deeply cool. Aside from that, she mostly has Deanna Troi's job, which is to say, she stands next to Buck a lot when he's interviewing patients, and then mutters "he's lying" under her breath and goes off to unravel the patient's lies. Plus she's really VERY hot.

MI is basically TV comfort food, likeable, interesting enough and easy enough to follow. They did the "poisoned pants" plotline WEEKS before House did it, equally satisfying if lacking any real existential commentary or depth. But I ain't missed an episode yet and I'm still finding it good solid square-meal TV which could end up being NBC's answer to CSI.

House

House is better. I am so over the whole lead-character-is-a-cipher school of ensemble casting, and House neatly sidesteps that by making the lead character a sociopath whose opinion of humanity starts with "all patients lie" and goes down from there. And fuck me gently with a chainsaw, Hugh Laurie is hot. The grumblyness! The scruffyness! The Vicodin addiction! "I don't have a pain management problem; I have a PAIN problem." House answers the same questions as MI, but doesn't really pretend to be an ensemble because all the non-Hugh Laurie members of the cast are only relevant in as far as their relationship with House. Essentially he's a genius diagnostician put to the task of solving medical mysteries, and he's got a fleet of groupie docs who work for him and revel in his brilliance while being perplexed by his dry, utterly unloveable personality. And plus since he's such a genius he gets to stay still at a pleasant ivy-covered hospital in Princeton, NJ where the mysteries come to him and all he has to do is prod his groupies into doing the legwork while he tromps around on his crutch popping pain pills and working one day a week in the free clinic so Bobbi Bernstein doesn't fire him. The groupies are pretty awesome themselves, if indistinguishable from one another, though over the course of the eight or nine episodes Omar Epps has begun to distinguish himself as the workaholic doomed to follow in House's footsteps, and Jennifer wossname, the girl doc, has begun to distinguish HERself as the one who sometimes cries. Also there's Robert Sean Leonard, whose role in the cast is completely indeterminate except for showing up occasionally to flirt with House and give House the opportunity to do guy things like play piano and stare at boobies.

House is as dry and clever as House himself, smart smart smart and therefore doomed to cancellation. They're better than the poisoned pants plotline they RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES!, but the medical mysteries themselves aren't as important to the show as the "differential diagnoses" over the course of the episode, where the groupies try to impress House while saving patients' lives, and House further alienates his docs and shoots down all their suggestions.

Medium

This Arquette is sort of off-putting and I can't figure out why. There's something deeply annoying about her, but yet, every time I think she's an untalented hack she turns around and does something subtle and powerful and all of a sudden I like her again.

Medium is, well. So this Arquette discovers she's psychic, or, rather, has prophetic dreams, mostly about violent crimes, and so she scurries over to the DA's office and volunteers her service helping to track down killers et al. It's got the episodic casefiles you'd expect, but it's really a family drama masquerading as a paranormal mystery show, because the best parts of it are the scenes at home between the Arquette (Allison...something) and her husband (who ROCKS) and her kids. First off, she's a psychic and her husband BELIEVES her, which is already revolutionary and cuts right past all the things that are usually annoying about the set of shows built on this concept (see also: Invisible Man, First Wave, Pretender, anything where the lead's got some paranormal skillz and nobody believes him). Also, she doesn't try to hide it, cutting right past the OTHER usual annoyance of these types of shows. For example, when she goes to quit her job as a paralegal and her boss asks why, Allison shrugs and says "apparently I'm psychic, isn't that weird?" But the BEST best un-annoyance of Medium is that sometimes Allison's visions are WRONG. I have so much respect for a show that doesn't mind having its lead characters visions be WRONG that I'd keep watching this show for that reason alone.

The casefiles are dumb. The show's got a vague Touched by an Angel vibe to it, but because of the details above I think I don't care. Mostly, Allison's husband is sexy and funny and supportive and interested in her visions and good to the kids, and the kids sound like real kids and the Arquette acts like a real mom and wife and woman who recently discovered she's psychic, and all that is absolutely worth watching.