Insomnia TV Too

Meanwhile, back at Hulu...

The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

The story sort of continues. Riley, a rather nice young blond, is making further attempts to get into the teenage John Connor's underwear and keep him from spending time with Cameron. We now know that Riley has been sent back from the future to do exactly this, because the adult John Connor is far closer to terminators than he is people. This is a nice little development from the T2 film, in which we learn that John has formed an emotional attachment to the Arnie model. Meantime, Cameron has made friends with a night-shift librarian and is taking an abiding interest in local history.

As the episode progresses, John engages in a beat-down and finally snogs - and possibly sleeps with - Riley. Cameron discovers that a terminator (which are starting to suffer from Hero Gun complex) has been sent back too far and has decided to take the "long road" to the present day in order to carry out its mission.

Hero Gun complex: the heroes can hit things quite happily, but super-accurate terminators that can lay waste an FBI Hostage Rescue team can't take out a single one of them. It's annoying, because we know that the heroes are only going out in a season finale or a self sacrificing blaze of glory. In a show like The Sarah Connor Chronicles, this is probably necessary because the ensemle cast is small. It does take away from the tension, though, because a show that appears to be nihilistic in outlook (but isn't) has the capacity to be a lot more dangerous than this.

What's refreshing is that while Cameron has been made to appear sympathetic, she's not. She is still very much a machine, cares as much for one person as another, as we see when she treats the disappearance of her "friend" in the library with a moment's disconnection and then indifference. Summer Glau does an excellent job with this - she's hauntingly pretty and by the standards of American TV this must mean she's really good on the inside. Not so, as far as we can tell. She does a better job of this than Arnie.

Hereos

The Eclipse Part Two.

In which everyone gets their powers back.
This is predictable enough, I knew this was coming, and in the end it's just a reset switch of the worst kind.
For example - Noah slits Sylar's throat. And yet Sylar - who absorbed Claire's healing powers - returns at the end of the eclipse, covered in his own blood and angry.

This is still a very troubled show. The parts of the story with any satisfactory weight to them are the ones involving Hiro and Ando, the team for which the writers have very obvious affection, and Matt Parkman and his girlfriend. This is turning into a nice little redemption story.

Sylar, meanwhile, turns mean again. Look, guys, settle will you? Even Pro Wrestling maintains a face or heel turn longer and more consistently than this. Sylar is the human lightswitch of characters, from darkness to light a couple of times an episode. Now it's not about Sylar playing a complex game to outwit everyone and be his own person, it's a massively annoying inability of the writers to pick a trait and tell a story. Sylar as a badass villain works. Sylar struggling against his own power works. Sylar playing both halves of the Petrelli conspiracy against the middle works. But seeing him be all three in the same episode is just annoying.

I have actually now stopped caring about Nathan and Peter Petrelli. Nathan has suddenly and mysteriously, and with wonderful automagically applied illogic, decided to side with Dad because, as near as I can work out, making people superheroes would solve all world problems instead of creating hundreds of new ones. He rattles off a list of problem areas - Darfur being one of them - and seems to think that the presence of a person with abilities would make things better. It's clear that Senator Nathan Petrelli is a moron, driven by the plot's need to split the family down the middle he needs to stay one on a regular basis. I would say this is lazy writing, but I know better than that; it's not lazy, but it might be a sign of writers trying to arrange a situation that they can retcon later. That's something I don't like.

Fringe

The basic story, that there is a conspiracy afoot to do strange things with science, proceeds. This week's goodness includes:

Breaking into bank vaults by walking through walls.
Jailbreaks through time and space.
Cow grooming.
Walter makes inappropriate comments.
Shared memories.

We've also got an arc in progress, featuring a prisoner in Germany from a previous episode, but in order to explain it all, I would need to recap the story to date. Not gonna.

Fringe is worth watching, and then comparing to Torchwood, and then deliberately forgetting about Torchwood. It's turning up on British TV soon and I advise it be watched.