TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

The Best Three Things On TV

Dexter: The new season is excruciatingly tense. It’s partly the suspense over how he can continue to get away with it when everyone seems to be closing in on him, but for me it’s also the maddening worry that they’re going soft, trying to humanise and redeem Dexter. In the end it’s a better show for continually threatening to do that without ever making good. I’ve never been so relieved to see a knife sunk into a helpless human torso.

Pushing Daisies: A light-hearted supernatural murder mystery about a pie-maker who can resurrect the dead – for one minute. The premise is gloriously fiddly: his touch brings the dead to life, but he has to kill the resurrectee with a second touch within a minute, or a random bystander will die in their place. The obvious application is asking people who murdered them, but they’re not always much help. The dialogue is sparklingly lyrical, the pace is refreshingly swift and the stars winningly chipper and likeable. And it has narration that doesn’t suck.

Damages: Has somehow stayed miraculously on the rails after a seemingly unfollowable pilot. A legal drama with a symmetrical cast of characters on either side, but where the divide between good and evil is ignored by all – especially the writers. Ted Danson makes such a compellingly sympathetic villain, and Glenn Close such a frighteningly ornery hero, that you end up riveted by the duel but unable to root for either side. The web of bizarre, volatile relationships between characters has the plot spasming wildly, untenably with episode. It seems to become more impossible to resolve with every step the two timelines take towards each other, but never cops out or undoes its awful machinations.

Heroes Season Two

The trailer is on YouTube, and it doesn’t look very good, but! I’d like anyone else who’s watched the first two seasons of Alias to say it with me, when the moment arrives:

Sark!

Alias became terrible after – perhaps during – season two, but it was so much fun until then. Heroes has already borrowed one of its best actors, and shown that he was responsible for most of his character’s likeability. Now it’s got the other. I only hope he’s smarmily yet competently evil, and crops up unexpectedly in almost every storyline – it’d be just like old times.

Sark!

The rest is just depressing. Sylar’s still in it. I don’t even trust them with the guts to keep the Petrelli’s out. Last season’s finale was riddled with so many tedious tropes that I have no faith left in their ability to excite me. Entertain, probably.

British Airwaves

You’re supposed to feed a cold and starve a fever, I think, but I’m not sure what you do if you have a cold and a throat so sore that you can’t swallow food without hitting something and saying “Motherfucker!” afterwards. So far I’m dosing Halls, Lockets, Oraldene, 300% of my RDA in Vitamin C and Zinc and 200% of my RDA in sleep – to no avail.

I’m blaming British Airways, this time, for sitting me next to a door. a) Why would you put an Expensive Class seat somewhere too cold for human survival even under a blanket with the heating on maximum, and b) shouldn’t the doors on a plane be, like, airtight? Might my freezing be a symptom of a rather more serious problem at umpteen thousand feet? The two things BA can’t seem to get right are sending your baggage to the same hemisphere as you and an in-flight entertainment system that actually works. If they’re also failing to maintain hull integrity, I’m not sure they even qualify as an airline anymore. ‘Airborne torture wagon’ might be closer.

Are flights in one direction faster than in the other direction because you’re so high up that the air you’re flying through isn’t quite rotating on the Earth’s axis as fast as the ground? Because that’s kind of awesome if it’s true.

Anyway, since actual remedies aren’t working and pretty much everything causes an equal amount of pain now, I’m coiling up with chorizo cheese on toast, a flagon of coffee and a Damages triple-bill. I’m slightly gay for Tate Donovan.

The Finale Post

I’ve been delaying this because I couldn’t get the Javascript needed to make spoilers togglable work. I’ve now got to the stage where the code is exactly right except insofar as it doesn’t do anything, so I’ve given up. So I’m afraid you’re just going to have to do it the old fashioned way, and not read them if you don’t want to read them. It goes Lost, Heroes, 24, in case you need to skip.

Lost: quite good
I seem to be alone in this, but I rather liked the end to this series. The complaints I’ve heard are all things I’ve long since come to expect from every episode of Lost – we all know it’s no longer Good, right? Given that, and pretty low expectations from everyone telling me how much it sucked, I thought this was one of the only really fun episodes in season three.

It was even semi-clever: episodes always begin and end with the present-day bits, and dip into the flashbacks in between. This one does too: it’s just that the series has essentially moved several years into the future, and is tying up the existing plotlines in flashbacks to the island. I think this may actually be the format from now on, which would mean a long-overdue end to the flashback stories that tell you nothing and make you like the characters even less.

Resolution: pretty good
Finding out for sure that they get rescued is a pretty big deal, even if the moment itself hasn’t featured. Recent hints at some of the more supernatural theories like hell, ghosts, and near-death hallucinations are all out: they’re just on an island, it exists, they get off it. Future Jack’s sifting of maps suggests that they escape the island themselves rather than being found by helicopters or boats, since it implies that the island’s location is still a mystery. More importantly, Charlie died. Ha!

Plot holes: moderate
Plenty of minor “Why?”s, but the only really irritating one was future Jack’s reference to his father as alive. It was obvious from the start of the first episode that it was a flash-forward and not a flashback, and this was a pretty pathetic ploy to try to throw idiots off the trail by flat-out lying to them. It’s an indictment of how predictable and cheap the writing has become that I thought it more likely they were lying to me than that I was mistaken about the twist the flashback was leading up to.

Excitement: none
It didn’t bother me, but yeah, no tension or intensity at all. War with the others? Don’t care. Mikhail gone? Don’t care. Dynamite detonators killed? Don’t care. iPhone girl evil? Don’t care. The excitement of Lost was always the bizarre mysteries, the polar bears and four-toed statues. The politics of The Others and the capture of major characters is mundane and tired. If there had been any exciting scenes, they would have been diffused by the endless cutbacks to the tedious Jack plotline, the only payoff for which was wasted by being too obvious too far ahead of time.

Irritations: moderate
Interminable Jack screentime accounting for almost all of that. Didn’t mind about Mikhail coming back to life, because I didn’t really care whether he lived or died, and we already knew Charlie would, so it only achieved the inevitable. Ben facing the survivors alone was dumb, and Jack not killing him was dumb, but again, don’t care enough to care.

Highlights: about six?
Survivors commit mass murder! Brilliant! Hurley runs some dudes over! Brilliant! Charlie drowns! Brilliant! Hurley brags about saving everyone! Brilliant! Evil new high-tech faction maybe! Brilliant! Jack is pathetic and doesn’t end up with Kate! Brilliant!

Cliffhanger: er
I watched it last night, and honestly couldn’t tell you how it ended. We didn’t find out who was in that coffin in the future (I thought Juliet, but Graham says it’s referred to as a ‘he’), but ‘someone dies in future’ is not exactly a revelation we’ll all be holding our breath for. What happens about the iPhone is about the only thing I’m waiting to find out, but I could die happy not knowing.

Heroes: fun but frustrating
The climax couldn’t help but be enjoyable, but the series really lost its nerve, heart and brain at the critical moment. I feel about this almost exactly the way people seem to feel about the Lost finale – I enjoyed it at the time, but the more I think about it the more angry it makes me. It was an utterly gutless and nonsensical finalé, and they’d spent so long building to a smart and spectacular one. At least Lost only ever promised a gutless and nonsensical one.

Resolution: fucking none!
What the hell have I been doing for these twenty hours of my life? At the end of it, both people who can cause the explosion are still alive. Nothing happened.

Plot holes: numerous, enormous
DL gets shot! Why didn’t he use his power? Sylar gets run through by a slow, screaming Japanese businessman. Why didn’t he use his powers? Peter needs to be airlifted into the sky by his non-invincible brother, even though Claire had a better solution. Why didn’t he use his powers? Sylar lies down after one stab, everyone walks away. Did they forget he had powers? Guys, if you’re going to make a show about superpowers, you should occasionally remember that your characters have them.

Excitement: high
But that’s a testament to the build up rather than the finalé itself. We knew, or thought we knew, exactly what would get resolved here, and we’d been waiting for it for a long time. Then it didn’t get resolved.

Irritations: vast
All others pale in comparison to how pathetically gutless, tiresome and moronic it is to have the main villain not really be dead after all the heroes assume he is. I literally couldn’t believe they were doing it. If I didn’t have a little faith that they’ll try to move onto a new plotline for the second series, I would have stopped watching for good then and there.

It’s not just that it makes the characters stupid, it balances a huge plot twist on the absurdly precarious notion that the characters within this world have no concept of how it works. You don’t just get frustrated with them for being so stupid, you cease to understand them as characters. Their actions are inconceivable. There’s no longer any way to comprehend this universe.

Highlights: three tiny ones
It sad to say, but the biggest revelation and best moment in the finalé of an extraordinary 23-episode series was finding out Mr Bennet’s first name.

Cliffhanger: kind of
The chapter two teaser was a pleasantly clean break, but I’m not sure what it was trying to tell us. Do they have to stop an eclipse in this one?

24: good
This season a nuclear bomb went off in California in the fourth episode, so it’s been a bit of a low-key second-half by comparison. They’re trying to avoid a diplomatic faux-pas with Russia by preventing their defense secrets being handed over to the Chinese. Even that’s resolved very near the start of this finale, and the rest of the episode is about trying to rescue a single, rather unpleasant person from becoming collateral damage in the military resolution of the larger issue. But it was more about the people you like doing unexpected and pleasing things, and for that it was probably the most enjoyable of these three.

Resolution: near-total, as ever
It even ties up a plotline started three seasons ago, in which one of Jack’s many screw-the-rules operations actually has enormously grave consequences.

Plot holes: just the one
So the Russians, whose insistence on absolute proof of the destruction of The Component has been the driving force for this entire plotline, are delighted with the Vice President’s proposed plan of just bombing the oil rig it might be on and assuming it’s destroyed? Even if you can believe that, it’s impossible to believe that the VP would even have suggested it, so far is it from the result they’ve been pressuring him for all along. I don’t mind them doing the whole “You can’t call in an airstrike, X is still in there!” plotline again, but contorting the logic of the premise so horrifically to support it is sad.

Excitement: dangerously low
I think most of us are hoping Josh, Jack’s 16 year-old nephew with the awful fringe, will die. But even then we don’t really care either way. Those are the only stakes here, and 24 is supposed to be all about stakes. After a nuke on American soil the writers didn’t seem to know how to keep upping the ante, and ended up doing the opposite. It’s become steadily more downbeat and less intense as the series has gone on. It’s not a fatal flaw, but it’s a shame; the reason I fell in love with the series in the first place was the relentlessly escalating horror of what they were prepared to inflict on the country and their potagonist.

Irritations: none
24 established its flaws very early on in its life, so everyone still watching them has long come to terms with every silly thing it can do. I actually enjoy waiting for Jack to go rogue again (as he does three separate times in this episode alone). The only irritating recurring theme was his family being repeatedly kidnapped, and they’ve mostly learned to avoid that one these days. Technically Josh is family, but he wasn’t kidnapped to get at Jack – the villain’s entire plan revolved around him, the grand kidnapping failed, and in the end the government simply handed him over.

Highlights: several, but one in particular
This was the second episode of the season to feature some really brilliant writing. The first being an exchange early on between ex-president Logan and his much-maligned ex-wife, long since mad.

“Martha, the last thing I wanted to do was hurt you.”
“You always managed to get to that last thing, though, didn’t you?”

Here it was the fantastic clash between Jack and Defence Secretary Heller, whose life he’s saved around four hundred times at this point. (And who we saw die, I seem to recall, but whatever.) Heller’s forbidding Jack to see his mentally ill daughter, his long-term girlfriend, on the quite reasonable basis that everyone Jack knows dies. Jack, also quite reasonably but incredibly uncharacteristically, flips out.

“How dare you? How dare you? All I did, all I have ever done, is what you and people like you told me to.”

All the best moments in 24 are when Jack’s had enough. He takes more than anyone reasonably could, but the writers just keep throwing the trauma and tragedy at him until he snaps. He goes the entire series expressing nothing but grim determination, so when he finally does flare up it’s spectacular and genuinely emotional.

In season three this also came in the finale: after hacking his own partner’s hand off with a fire axe, on top of everything else, he excuses himself to his car for a moment and just sobs. In season four it came earlier on, when he was forced to threaten a doctor at gunpoint to abandon critical surgery on his girlfriend’s ex-husband, shortly after said ex-husband had saved his life, and does so with a look of utter panic.

Here it’s that line, when he can no longer take the callousness with which he’s discarded by his superiors when his task is complete. For the most part they can be civil about it, and cite official guidelines about plausible deniability that explain why they have to fire him, credit his success to someone else, arrest him, sacrifice him to terrorists or hand him over to the Chinese.

But this time it’s literally personal: he’s lost so much to them and the job that he can’t be allowed near the only personal life he has left, as broken as it is. And he ends up saying more or less what I said about him the last time I wrote about 24: that he’s barely a person, just a grimly logical tool who methodically achieves the objectives set for him. Ironically, it’s his most human moment yet.

Cliffhanger: none

A Couple Of Things!

• I’m in one of those swamp months, where everything seems to take five times longer than it ever possibly could, and usually go dramatically wrong at three different points. This is why I was in the office until nine tonight, despite working on a section for the issue after the one whose deadline the others were crunching to. Also there was free junk food and liquor, by way of Ross’s efficient repurposing of the bribes we receive to incentivise and energise overtimers.
   
• The one thing that did go swiftly and without hitches was a short story I wrote to submit to the Machine Of Death collection, a set of short stories based around the concept put forth in this comic:
  

  I’m going to put it up here in a day or two, once I’ve tinkered with it a bit. It’s a little over six-thousand words, divided into five short chapters, and covering a lot more time and events than my 50,000 word novel was ever going to. I’m not trying anything of book-length again until I’ve done a few more of these – it’s gratifying and intoxicating to fly through something like this without sweating it. I’m not keen to go back to a vast mess of ideas without enough narrative string to tie them together, no matter how I re-squish them.

• Lastly, Heroes was excellent. I hope they don’t do too many of these single-story episodes or it could become Lost (there is not a scale by which I could measure how little I cared about anyone or anything in the last episode of that), but Glasses Guy is one of the few characters who can carry one with ease. The actor has always been superb, taking a very tough role to make interesting and managing to give him an uneasy mix of creepiness, likeability and mystique. All while wearing horn-rimmed glasses. He’s even better without them, though, and he’s convincing enough as both a loving father and a demon that even towards the end, you’re not 100% sure which side he’s going to come down on. And ultimately it’s the one you believed in slightly more, which is itself a feat. Not just to act each well, but to know exactly how well you’re doing it and stop short of perfection on the one your character’s heart wouldn’t quite be in. 24, Lost and Studio 60 are all losing it at the moment, I’m so pleased to see the most flawed show of the lot outshining them all.

He’s Gone Too Far

That’s it, Intro Guy. You are now so bad that you entirely counter-act the greatness of the programme that follows your intolerable gloat. I actually regret watching this episode, the intro was that bad.

It’s not just that an intro is unnecessary, it’s this intro in particular. It’s an intro made by people who don’t just look down on their audience, they actually hate them. It’s the kind of intro I’d produce for I’m A Celebrity And The Suffocating Numbness Of My Life Has Driven Me To New Lows Get Me Out Of Here. It’s openly an advert for the very thing it is a part of. It doesn’t stop at explicitly summarising the themes and symbolism of the preceding season, it actually explains in bullet-point form what’s going to happen in the following episode, and shows clips of it. At first you think it’s going to insult your intelligence, but it quickly becomes clear that the disdain, the spite its authors hold for you far exceeds their restraint, and the insult is merely an appetiser for the flurry of gashing, wrenching, deep and bloody wounds they plan to inflict. And the salt in your mutiliations is a voice-over whose patronising sickly smarm is so drippingly viscious you could choke on it.

There’s no mistaking the venemous cynicism behind this – I spend most of my days feeling it – but attached to something as great as Heroes it becomes an even darker spectre. This is disdain for one of the few remaining wonderful things on television, and only the blackest of burnt, drowned, dead, dead souls could feel it with this level of vacant dispassion. I don’t know who writes these, but I can tell you that they have no irises – their obsidian pupils fill the entirety of their lidless and unblinking eyes.

24

I didn’t like 24 at first – it was exciting for a few episodes, but after three hours of excitement you start to lose interest a bit. There’s also something rather comic about the this guy having ordeals that last precisely 24 hours every few years, so I watched a bit of series five last time I was in the States to laugh at it. The show has a formula that’s easy to mock, because there are only a certain number of things that can happen within its parameters, and over one-hundred hours of programming they tend to happen quite a few times each. There’s a mole inside CTU! The boss of CTU is being a dick! Jack’s gone rogue! There’s a mole in the government! That terrorist plot was just a cover for a much larger one, involving nukes! The least interesting character’s been kidnapped! Oh no, a bomb!

But there’s a fairly smooth gradient from mocking something to enjoying its silliness without laughing, and from there to just enjoying it. And by that time, something truly extraordinary has usually happened. Every series of 24 has a handful of moments that make you take your tongue out of your cheek and just gape. They come from the fact that terrorist thrillers generally revolve around forcing the good guys to make impossible decisions, and in Jack Bauer they’ve lumped themselves with a good guy so unflinchingly logical and ruthlessly dedicated that such decisions are trivial. So to create the pivotal moments, the writers have to put him in absurdly difficult situations, in which he has to do everything short of shooting his own daughter for just the slimmest hope of stopping a terrorist plot that could kill thousands more.

Jack’s now so used to sacrificing himself or innocent lives for the greater good that he usually saves people the bother of asking him to do it by jumping in there and volunteering. At one point a terrorist leader calls an Amnesty lawyer to protect an accomplice CTU have in custody from the torturous methods they need to use to get the information they need from him in time to stop a warhead headed towards- I forget, probably Los Angeles. Jack’s solution is to release the prisoner, immediately resign, then break his fingers in the parking lot as a private citizen in order to protect CTU from liability. This has been read as advocacy of torture as an interrogation method in general, of course, but that’s over-simplifying. The reason not to legalise these methods is that you can never be certain that their use will save lives in any given circumstance. Jack is always certain, to an extent that doesn’t exist in the real world.

The truly horrible calls don’t come up too often, but that’s part of what makes them so much fun to watch. You’ve been watching Jack be almost effortlessly ruthless about so many tough decisions that seeing something make him hesitate – even if only for a few seconds – is incredibly powerful. There’s a moment at the very end of season three, which involves some of the nastiest thing’s Jack’s had to do (including one with a fire-axe and a close friend) when he’s sitting alone in his car, with no urgent mission for the first time in twenty-four hours, and just sobs.

This new series is off to a good start: he’s already had to do something that made him both throw up and cry, and- well, the thing that happens while he’s doing that, for those who’ve seen it. The aforementioned silliness of one man getting caught up in this many twenty-four-hour ordeals probably puts people off, but I’m hoping they’ll keep going for another five seasons. As it progresses it gets both darker and more absurd, making it more entertaining in diametrically opposing ways. Jack gets more interesting as he loses more of his humanity and his family feature less, and I have a feeling Kim’s going to cop it this series. The plots get more intricate as they try to avoid repetition and simultaneously up the stakes – though neither very hard; this is American primetime after all.

Season six also has one of my favourite actors: Siddig El Tahir El Fadil El Siddig Abderahman Mohammed Ahmed Abdel Karim El Mahdi – whom they somehow thought would be able to play a middle-Eastern character convincingly – normally speaks English with a perfect Received Pronounciation accent, so it’s always rather weird watching him pretend to wrestle with the language in his Arab roles. But he’s the main reason I like Star Trek – his Dr Bashir was the first truly likeable character I’d seen in any sci-fi, and the reason I gave it a chance. Here his role isn’t a terribly likeable one – he just has to look angry all the time – but I still find him endlessly watchable. If he turns out to be the series arch-villain I’ll be especially happy.

Dexter: Series One

It’s over. Did sir care for it? Would sir grace us with his comments? Then might I direct sir to the spoilerific discussion following the original post? Very well.

 

Dexter Again

Yes!

Hopefully a facial expression can’t be considered a spoiler, but if you’re not keeping up with Dexter this ought to tell you enough to realise that you should be. If you are, you’ll recognise it as one of the best reaction shots in the history of man.

Dexter

Plenty of awesome things starting on US TV at the moment, and plenty of awesome things returning, so I missed that an intriguing show I read about in the paper months back had started – until Graham supplied the pilot. Played by best-thing-about Six Feet Under Michael Hall, Dexter’s a sociopathic compulsive serial killer with a day job as a forensic analyst for the Miami police, specialising in blood-splatters. And killing murderers. It’s not about him taking out the guys the police can’t prove their case against, it’s about him desperately needing to sate his bloodlust and deciding to at least restrict himself to the more deserving victims. And it is, of course, superb.

Dexter fakes normal, happy life with aplomb, making the atmosphere absurdly sunny and upbeat. His boss fancies him, his sister depends on him, and he has a doting rape-victim girlfriend he dates because neither of them are interested in sex. Forensic science is a world in which everyone has to be ghoulishly indifferent to murder just to get through the day, joking about corpses over donuts, so Dexter’s bona fide ghoulishness blends in seamlessly. Only one cop thinks Dexter’s a sick freak barely attempting to hide it, and loathes him violently and openly. Dexter is relentlessly nice in response, and inwardly slightly saddened that only one person seems to have noticed.

The joke, of course, is that Dexter has a superb insight into the workings of a serial killer’s mind, and has to actively try not to catch them in his official capacity in order to keep himself in potential victims. In the pilot, he comes across an ongoing case in which all victims are found neatly dismembered and entirely drained of blood, a style Dexter admires so breathlessly that he has trouble maintaining a professional veneer when he first sees the body – “Why didn’t I think of that?”. His usual distaste for the killers he kills is completely eclipsed by his awe at this man’s style, and the two of them are starting to become fixated with one another – the killer stalking Dexter in the most chilling way, which Dexter takes as a friendly hello.

Really the remarkable thing about him is not that he’s a serial killer, it’s that he’s a well-written sociopath. Like Highsmith’s Ripley he fakes his civilised persona so well that even you are won over by it, and like Ellroy’s Terror his compulsion is so compellingly depicted that you empathise with it almost as much as Monk’s OCD. It proves that a protagonist can be sympathetic irrespective of his crimes if his personality is appealing enough, and you couldn’t ask for a more delicious twist on the traditional ace-detective archetype.

The comments hereafter may be spoilerific for anyone not up to date with the latest episode aired in the States.

24: Drink When…

• Someone annoying is kidnapped.
• A terrorist informs another terrorist that “Everything is proceeding as planned.”
• A terrorist assumes Jack is dead.
• The person in charge of CTU makes a bad call.
• Jack goes rogue.
• Jack is fired.
• Jack is arrested.
• Jack breaks out of CTU.
• Jack is reinstated to CTU.
• “Protocol.”
• Someone gives a hopelessly vague order (“Take precautions.” “Make something happen.”)
• Someone gives a redundant order (“Proceed as planned.” “Execute the next stage.”)
• The president screws up a common phrase (“Keep me closely posted.” “We’ll cross that bridge when the situation presents itself.”)
• Someone at CTU has to go behind their boss’s back to help Jack.
• “We don’t have time!”

Veronica Mars

I’ve been meaning to write properly about why Veronica Mars is so awesome at some point before it kicks off again on the third of October, but for now I’m just messing around with clips. This is my first embed, so wish me luck. It’s one of my favourite moments from the second series:

If Things Go Right

Well, now there’s nothing in my room. This monitor is balancing on this PC, and this keyboard is on my lap as I slouch against the wall on the floor, wearing a suit for some reason. The room is shaking with the bass of Cat Power (still great), Sufjan Stevens (still amazing) and Sondre Lerche (new! Awesome!), reproduced with extraordinary fidelity and volume by my £25 surround sound system, which is in a heap on my bed, underneath a lamp. I have, officially, moved out of this place.

I’m not feeling too bad about the thunderous noise because Rich is out and the guys in the flat below are playing bland reggae loudly anyway. Rich has dubbed them Jonnie Potsmoker and Smokey McPot, and having watched Dude Where’s My Car on a whim the other day, I now get the reference. We’re not going to miss these guys. Although now I’ve tried this cinema-volume music thing, I may miss that. The better half of Predatory Wasp Of The Palisades Is Out To Get Us sound amazing like this.

I’m hearing a pretty muted or negative reaction to Graham Linehan’s (Father Ted, Black Books) new sitcom The IT Crowd from, like, the three people whose opinions I’ve heard. This is wrong! It’s fantastic. The second episode more than the first, perhaps – some of the actors seemed to ham it up a bit in the first, Chris Morris included, but I was still won over by it.

It’s not really a satire of an IT department, any more than Black Books was about a book shop or Father Ted was about being a priest. Like them, it’s an elaborately orchestrated farce of secrecy, politeness and bureaucracy with a twist of the surreal. What distinguishes it from inferior comedies like The Green Wing is its reluctance to write any of its characters off: none of them are dehumanised charicatures, all of them are at least somewhat likeable, and for me sympathy is essential for humour. I can’t laugh at people I entirely hate.

What made me use the word ‘fantastic’ instead of great, apart from a reluctance to resort to the absurdly over-used sentence “It’s great,” is that I keep suddenly thinking of a particular scene and cracking up – the only real litmus test for a sitcom. It’s the fire scene, but not specifically the:

Moss: (writing an e-mail in front of a fire) ‘Fire exclaimation mark. Fire exclaimation mark’

That they picked out for the preview clip – it’s the line before.

Moss: ‘Dear sir or madam. I am writing to inform you of a fire.’ (backspacing) No, no, that’s too formal.

I’m skirting the real subject of this post, mostly because I’m pretty sure I’m not allowed to talk about it. But it’s happening soon, it’s both figuaratively and literally a dream come true, and I’ll tell you all about it as soon as I’m no longer under contractual obligation to shut the hell up.

Quote From What I’m Watching

“Ah, it’s so nice to be eating with a fork instead of sticking one into someone’s neck. Heheh, I’m kidding. I’m a government accountant! Why would I kill that guy in Budapest?”

Maths Cop!

Holy shit, they finally made a TV series about cops who solve crimes with maths! This is like all my dreams come true at once, except only one of them, and one I haven’t actually had yet, but totally would have if I’d thought to. It’s called Numbers (ignore unreliable sources such as the official site calling it ‘Numb3rs’ – that would mean it was stupid), and I’ve only seen five minutes of the first episode so far, but already there’s been an educational speech on the relevance of mathematics over the credit sequence, and straight off the bat some dude with odd eyebrows is correcting a woman on her use of the word ‘exponential’. Now he’s said “We can create a Bayesian filter!” and I am sold.

In other news, I have this week off, then next week I’m going to Moscow. Having masses of free time seemed like a good chance to try Black And White 2 (as did getting Black And White 2) and so far it is surprising me. I thought it would be pleasant but insubstantial, but in fact it’s got more substance than Colombia. But it’s extremely irritating. I thought it would again be an aimless playground from which no satisfying game could be sculpted, but in fact it’s alarmingly close to a truly brilliant RTS. It’s just definitely not one in its current state.

I have uncensorified my Serenity thoughts now that the film’s out. I may go and see it again in the middle of the day at some point this week – I used to love being able to do that at university; it’s just you and a few old ladies, and you emerge blinking to discover that the day is still in progress. But if you’ll excuse me, I must get back to CSI: Mathematics.