I did the Sunday crossword puzzle today. I wasn’t impressed by it at all. You can read more about the puzzle, along with answers, here, if you’re so inclined. It’s come to this: I’m regularly — like, once a week, only very occasionally more — reading a crossword puzzle blog.
I watched yesterday’s season finale of Doctor Who. I thought it was entertaining, and did a reasonable enough job of bringing some big things to a satisfying enough conclusion, but…okay, minor spoilers here: I’m not so sure I like how they took what’s basically a running dumb meta joke about the television series — one that Moffat himself made before, actually, in “The Girl in the Fireplace” — and make it canon. See, it’s not like anyone calls him that; that’s just what the show is called. Minor quibble, so a minor spoiler. If you haven’t seen the episode, I’m actually still being really vague. Maybe too vague even if you have seen it. Have any of you seen it? Ultimately, I really enjoyed the episode, even if I feel like (more minor spoilers) Moffat went back to last season’s finale a bit much — “The Wedding of River Song” bears at least a passing resemblance to “The Big Bang” — and even if I’m not so sure splitting the season as they did really worked in their favor. “A Good Man Goes to War” is a good finale, and “Let’s Kill Hitler” is a good place to start again, but there’s a loss of overall momentum by splitting them apart. Still, whatever else, you certainly can’t fault Moffat for not telling ambitious enough stories.
I also watched another episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which I’ve slowly been re-watching (again). There’s not much to say about it — except that, even in the first season when it was still finding itself and defining its characters, the show feels true to itself and well defined. As opposed to, say, those other two Trek spin-offs, Voyager and Enterprise. I’ve slowly been watching Enterprise as well recently, for the first time, and there I do think I’ll have more to say at some point. It’s too problematic a show, despite my genuine appreciation for some of what it does, for me not to say something more. (I’m not sure I can bring myself to rewatch Voyager. I quit pretty early on the first time around.)
I played Portal a little more. I’m very late to the party with this, but it really is a great game. Maddening, challenging, often laugh-out-loud funny — I’d highly recommend it if you’re one of the few people who have yet to play it. (Or was I the last?) I’m very nearly finished, but I tell you: I could have picked a better time — like when I didn’t have an issue of Kaleidotrope to finish laying out — to download a really complicated computer game.
And lest you think I spent all day playing games and watching TV — oh, I also re-watched the pilot episode of Fraiser for some reason. But! I also replaced the air filter on my car, so there’s that — I wrote this:
The aliens built John Wilkes Booth to kill us all, but the man fell in love with the theater and became a celebrated actor of the American stage. It wasn’t until 1865 that the aliens were able to correct for the glitch in his genetic engineering, to overwrite the false memories they had implanted in the humanoid Booth, and redirect him toward their original course of action. By that point, though, the best Booth could do was assassinate a sitting president — which always seems like a big deal in theory, but in practice, in the greater scheme of things, doesn’t often amount to much at all.
And even there, Booth nearly gave the game away when he jumped to the stage and his new programming temporarily shorted out along with his broken leg. Eyewitnesses, and posterity, would later report that Booth had shouted “Sic semper tyrannis” — “thus always to tyrants” — but it was really the alien language of his creators that he shouted, not classical Latin, warning everyone assembled at Ford’s Theater of the giant mothership poised to descend upon the Earth and the alien armada lying in wait somewhere in orbit around Neptune.
It’s questionable what any of the other patrons of the theater that evening could have done with that knowledge even if they had understood Booth, or recognized the string of coordinates his fleeing outburst had inadvertently revealed. Even then, America’s space program was still in its infancy. The operational base on Mars was still manned only by automated drones — Seward’s Second Folly, detractors called it, none too originally — and the Civil War with the lunar colonies had driven Lincoln to distraction.
And yet the aliens called it off, their plans to destroy us all, to subjugate and terraform the planet to their liking, to infiltrate humanity with genetic spies sent to do their bidding. How close to that precipice we came in 1865, we may never know. We can only be glad that the aliens lacked the temerity for a full assault when Booth (and his robotic conspirators) failed to deliver on their earlier promise. What the aliens had cooking in their labs, America of that turbulent age would never know.
Only a century later, in 1963, when the aliens returned to unleash mechanical spiders to kill President Kennedy, would we meet the true face of this global threat.
Of course, they weren’t the same aliens. That accounts for some of it. Conspiracy theorists have tried for years to draw parallels between Lincoln and Kennedy’s assassinations, but the simple truth remains: the aliens that attacked them both were different.
Only the time-traveling werewolf Nazis were the same.
Yeah, I think there was maybe some Doctor Who on the brain there.
ETA: I finished Portal. It would appear the cake is a lie.