Today was a pretty good day.
I woke up early to bring my car in for its yearly inspection and an oil change. My father was kind enough to give me a ride over, and then back again later to pick the car up. There used to be a pretty convenient train in the morning that would take you from the mechanic (half a block from the station) back to our station (one block from the house), but the LIRR saw fit to muddle with their schedule and only run trains once every hour between those two stations. So it’s just easier to get a ride.
I didn’t do a whole lot else today. I went for a long walk, and I took a very successful nap, and I played with the dog. I also watched a little television.
I watched another episode from the first season of Fringe — I keep waiting, I think maybe in vain, for it to get better than its pilot, which I watched when it first aired last and didn’t love. It’s not an uninteresting show, kind of a glossed-up X-Files, but right now I’m not seeing a whole lot to make me revise my original opinion of the show.
The second episode of the new Doctor Who fared a little better, though I do think it coasted by a little too much on costumes and set design and ultimately couldn’t hide what was a little thinness in its story. It was clever and fun — and thank goodness they didn’t do that click-click-click what-did-the-Doctor-just-see thing again — but it felt strangely cut short. (There were a couple of minutes at the end that were nothing but establishing shots for next week’s episode.) It wasn’t at all disappointing, but that delightful sense of wonder I felt last week did feel a little under-served by the end this week.
And then I got caught up on the last two episodes of Chuck, while I pulled together issues of Kaleidotrope (which with luck will be mailed out before next weekend is out). I’m occasionally mystified by Chuck‘s difficulty in pulling in a bigger audience — it’s a fun action comedy with some great characters — but if the show has to end this season, “Chuck Versus the Other Guy” was a several steps in the right direction and just a cool episode to boot. (Nice to see Mark Sheppard continuing his plot to appear in every television show on the air. Also nice to see, however briefly, Ida from “The Middleman”.)
And finally, this evening, I watched The Informant, starring Matt Damon. It’s kind of an odd movie, but that’s probably because it was a pretty odd story. I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to say that Mark Whitacre is a fascinating character — if you haven’t already hear the This American Life show about his case and all its convolutions, you should. I thought Damon did an excellent job portraying a man who just keeps lying, it seems, because he just doesn’t know what else to do. It’s actually a pretty fun movie, despite all that, and is more a dark comedy than anything else.
And that, such as it was, was my Saturday.
Better than mine. Schlepping myself in to the office was definitely not fun.
Hmm, I’m pleased to report that my own delighted sense of wonder was still perfectly intact through the second Who episode.
And let me know if Fringe gets any better before you give up on it or not. I had pretty much the same reaction to the pilot that you did.
I didn’t at all not enjoy the second Who episode. It was a clever story, well executed. It just felt…short, very slightly slight. I think maybe if they’d developed the world a little more beyond the surface details — the Smilers looked cool, but why exactly did they exist? the human-Smiler hybrids? — or had the Doctor take at least a beat before figuring everything out. It was good, but I’d probably stop a little short of calling it great.
Fringe meanwhile…the things I liked about the pilot are still there, thanks largely to John Noble and Joshua Jackson, but so are the things I didn’t like. The convoluted mythology of the Pattern, which is what fans really seem to be responding to, makes it more interesting, but so far less, not more, satisfying as a story.
I’m going to see if I can hold on at least until Leonard Nimoy turns up, but it could be slow going, and I’m not yet convinced it’s worth it.
I’ve been watching Fringe from the start. The “science” is ridiculous (typical Kurtzman & Orci) and they kind of hyped up the whole Pattern thing and then sort of forgot about it. The last two episodes pretty much turned me off, the plot was rather inane. But I keep watching because I’m hooked on John Noble – he and Jackson have great chemistry together but his character just never ceases to be a source of amusement. I get a good chuckle out of him almost every episode, which makes the bad stuff worth sitting through for me.
I think in the pilot, when they referred to “fringe science” as if that’s an actual thing, a term used by actual scientists, I knew the reality of the science wasn’t going to be a big thing for the show. It’s not so much when the science is ridiculous when I’m bothered; it’s when the science is ridiculous because they clearly just don’t give a damn. It’s like in their Star Trek: “red matter” is dumb, but their inability to play even by their own established rules is what’s kind of insulting.
The ridiculousness of the science in the pilot was part of what turned me off. It did strike me as sort of insulting to the intelligence. That, and I remember thinking that the characters — or at least the lead female, whose name completely escapes me — struck me as doing dumb things because they were required by the plot. That’s a major turn-off for me.