4 posts from 2005

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.