Insomnia TV

In the last week or so, I haven't been sleeping much and while not sleeping I have been watching TV and catching up on shows I have missed on Hulu.

So. Some reviews.

Heroes is all a bit complicated.

So...the Petrelli family continues with it's twisty ways, totally unable to be in the same place without hating one another. Angela's paralysis is cured in a dreamscape sequence engineered by Matt Parkman; we get the usual stuff about psychosomatic injuries becoming real, and Matt's new girl attempts to save him, and then Arthur "Call me Q" Petrelli shows up. Angela reminds him that deep down inside he still loves her, so Arthur cures her.

Wow. OK, Angela, now remind him that his insane quest to destroy the world is also because you two have had a tiff and...Angela? Angela!! Crap. The show goes on.

So anyway, Ando has been saddled with a Hiro that believes himself to be ten years old (Thanks to Arthur "Magneto's a lass" Petrelli).

And then at the end of the episode, everyone picks sides. The teams are:

Team Arthur
Sylar
Flint Gordon, the big dumb lunk that hurls fire.
Mohinder
Ellie Bishop
Knox
Tracy Strauss

Team Angela
- just about everyone else.

Except Hiro and Ando. So far. They used to work for Arthur, but quit.

And then in the next episode, things get stranger. An Eclipse happens and suddenly everyone loses their powers. Oh noes! This provides one really decent scene, in which Matt Parkman refuses to believe he can win his girl back without his powers and Hiro pelts him with corncobs until he smartens up.

The other thing that happens here is Sylar changes sides roughly eighty-seven times. Is he playing a complex game of his own? Is he really this easy to manipulate? Is he just a mass of conflicted broodingness? I think he's up to something, and it's amusing to see him turn into a badass (with the line "I hate heroes") just before the eclipse happens - during which Noah, the man with the Horn Rimmed Glasses and real tough guy, dislocates Sylar's shoulder and makes the badass cry like a little girl.

Claire gets shot, Arthur "Omnipotent" Petrelli makes an elementary deductive mistake based on more prescient art, and the Petrelli boys end up on Haiti arguing with each other about who the bigger jerk is. Right now, lads, I would have someone Zombie you and be done with the pair of you.

Onward to

Fringe

The premise for this show is not simple.

FBI Agent Olivia Dunham is recruited to investigate odd events that seem to form part of something called The Pattern - which suggest that someone is performing experiments on the world using rather extreme fringe science.

Olivia is pretty good stuff, actually. She's sensible, rational, passionate and clever. She's played by Anna Torv.

Olivia's team consists of a Mad Scientist, Walter Bishop. Walter (played by John Noble) has been in a lunatic asylum for the last 17 years.

If you watch this show for now other reason, do watch it for John Noble's performance. He's fab. I love Walter Bishop, who can segue from bewildered non-sequiters to towering rage in moments, and who's dialog you have to pay close attention to. The rest of the cast are more or less forgetable (apart from Astrid Fenyman, the assistant, who is a background character that needs more lines and more of a part in the show).

The ideas presented are firmly in the X-Files territory, but instead of having a spooky explanation, everything here is rooted in Science. Although there are nods to things being Odd, like the rather well done Classic MiB who shows up in the epsiode The Arrival. This is no Will Smith MiB, this is one from the annals of the Mothman reports, and the early days of UFology, and it made me rejoice to see it.

I love the show. There, I said it, and recommend it to you.

Next?

The Sarah Connor Chronicles

I wouldn't have watched this at all, but Summer Glau is in it.
Anyway.
It turns out to be pretty good.

Summer Glau, "River" from Firefly, is a Terminator programmed by John Connor to protect his younger self. The show talks about Emergent Behaviour - which is when a machine that is programmed to learn does something outside the normal range of what it should do - and then uses Cameron to demonstrate this.

There is a moment where Sarah Connor sees a tortoise on it's back. She turns it over. Later, Cameron asks John why she did this and John tells her that good humans like to help when they can, and that it would have been cruel to leave the tortoise to die. Shortly thereafter, Cameron beats the pogies out of a former FBI agent while John interrogates him. Once the beating is done, Cameron looks at the agent, who is on his back in the remains of a table, and turns him onto his front before walking away.

The show is full of little moments like this, and Summer Glau is very good at them. The rest of the cast are...more or less what you'd expect.

Lena Headey has the unenviable task of playing Sarah Connor; the character is basically nuts anyway, tortured by what she believes the future holds, and has forced herself to become a steely killer. This conflicts with what the character really wants to be, which is a mother to John. It's not an easy role, especially since Sarah Connor is what you get when a woman tries to be a man - or in this case, as we saw in Terminator 2, a Terminator.

Thomas Dekker plays John Connor, and it's another one of those difficult roles to carry off; the initials JC are not a coincidence. He's going to be mankind's last hope, but when we meet him he's fifteen and already has the attitude of a combat veteran. John's character is very much darker and more troubled than the John Connor we have seen in movies, but again this seems to work well.

Watching John and Sarah in conflict about how life is to be lived is interesting, and forms part of the show's emotional conflict. There are other characters, some from the future and some not, and an interesting sideline: Shirely Manson is apparently playing a T-1001, that happens to be running a company which looks like it might want to create Skynet.

It's worth picking an episode or two to watch, simply to work out whether the show's mix of sly commentary about the future and explosions is for you. Again, I like it enough to have caught up on Season 2, but I'm not quite sure if I like the show as a whole. I shall watch more.

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Heroes, Season 3, again

At last, Heroes seems to be attempting to tie things together into one coherent plot and with a bit of luck that will make for some interaction between the various characters and stories.

They are still doing the "and now, twenty seconds with Suresh! Followed by eight seconds of Sylar!" thing, which is still getting on my nerves. I would love to spend more time in the company of Hiro, or any of the characters really, because as it stands the nature of the show means I really don't know most of the characters. Developing powers have replaced developing characters.

For example, Nathan Petrelli (the flying politico) started out the season convinced, utterly, that his power was a gift from God. That idea has been rather brusquely discarded, in favour of a more scientific explanation and Nathan's character has likewise reverted. What if, even faced with the truth about the source of his power, he continues to believe? As it stands, Nathan Petrelli seems to have shaken off his brush with God in short order; to me this says that he was never that convinced about it in the first place, so can I trust anything about this person? Who is he, really?

The story, such as it is, now appears to revolve around the Petrelli family and an internal feud between mother and father, tugging the kids (Nathan, Peter and Sylar) in different directions. The good news is there are indications that Sylar, now recruited by his Dad, isn't playing the same game as everyone else; the analogy is that while Mr and Mrs Petrelli are playing chess with the assorted characters, Sylar is now playing Poker and has been smart enough to mark the cards without telling anyone.

Peter Petrelli has been a bit of a headless chicken since the start of the season and is still hyperventillating his way through scenes. I feel that if he would just stop for a moment and catch his breath, and perhaps do some actual thinking, he might be a bit more interesting and a lot more useful. As it is, he lurches from one crisis to the next without ever really having a plan. This is all good stuff if you want your hero to be a reactionary mess, complete with knee-jerk responses that seem to come out of nowhere, but less good if you're hoping he might be a character you identify with and want to see succeed. He's outplayed and outclassed by everyone else, never seems to catch a break and instead of being the audience identification character is more a sort of mobile punchbag.

Is it good, though?

Well...yes, sort of. I do hope they wrap this story up, though, because I'm not sure it's good enough for a Season 4.

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Heroes, Season 3

I have to admit, I want to like Heroes simply because it's a show about superheroes and, for at least a season, seemed to be doing it properly.

I think it probably says a great deal that my favourite comic books were V for Vendetta, Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns et al - fundamentally, stories about someone very unusual in a fairly ordinary world.

Heroes had that going for it, but as the population of people with powers multiplies you run into the issue of spending too little time with the characters that matter.

For example, Season three now has storylines running about Suresh, Hiro and Ando, Matt Parkman and a new female character that Hiro believes is his nemesis, about three escapeess from Level 5, HRG, the Petrelli brothers, Sylar, Mama Petrelli, Claire's adoptive mother, Claire's biological mother, another prescient painter (and Matt, and Hiro), the character played by Malcolm MacDowell, whom I have probably spelled all wrong, and a bunch of other stuff that I'm having difficulty wrapping my head around let alone caring about.

The individual stories are interesting - Sylar appears to be on a redemption arc, which could be an exceptional story, and Peter has learned Sylar's ability so now he also shares Sylar's twisted hunger. This, in itself, is cool. At last, we get to see something of what it must be like to be Sylar, but from inside the head of someone we already know. How will Sylar's demonic need to feed affect Peter? Well...

...it gets him put in a medical coma while we trot off to find out what the other eleventy plot threads are doing. This is infuriating.

Likewise, the early promise of Hiro and Ando's tale - which stems from one of those "the character has to be a moron for the next five minutes in order for this to work" situations - is on rough ground because so little time is spent with them. If you missed it, basically a time travelling Hiro sees his own apparent death at the hands of Ando. This is a wonderful idea, because the two had been inseperable and worked well together. Instead of drawing this out, teasing the breakdown in their friendship or leading us down the path that leads to either Hiro going bad and Ando taking him out, or Ando going bad, it seems to have been taken care of in about three episodes.

Damn!

There was even room for a twist there, which might have already been foreshadowed.

So, having gone from something approaching Marvel's "New Universe" experiment, we're almost in X-Men territory where everyone appears to have some superpower and no one therefore appears all that special or interesting.

It could be better. It should be better. I watch the online reruns instead of kicking the kids off the sofa and making it Monday night viewing, which should in itself be telling.

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