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Wednesday, August 04, 2004
Sci-fi Sandwich
Ha ha! That's right, Locutus, resistance is futile! There's no way you can resist that delicious almond butter and banana sandwich, is there?
It's a cool and cloudy day and that reminds us of one thing: fall will be here sooner than you think and that means a new tv season! And it's slim pickins for any geeks who enjoy an half-decent sci-fi series (at least there's Smallville).
And the Smallville Season 4 rumourville sounds promising. Lois Lane is supposed to appear in 13 episodes and Michael Ironside is cast as her father. Even though I hated that early 90s Lois & Clark series, Teri Hatcher remains the Lois Lane standard that I'll be judging the Smallville Lois against. Funny, Dean Cain is my least favourite Clark Kent of all time, worse than George Lazenby. Here's my worst Supermans ever list:
1. Dean Cain
2. Pete Best
3. George Lazenby
4. Ahmed Best
5. Kirk Alyn
BBC is resurrecting Doctor Who and this time they've cast a Doctor who looks contemporary but still suitable for the role after the disaster that was Paul McGann and the three guys before him. Ok, here's my worst Doctor Who ever actor list:
1. Peter Davidson
2. William B. Davis
3. Paul Davis
4. Paul McGann
5. Roger Daltry
After plodding along for a dwindling number of viewers for three seasons, Enterprise, in an act of utter desperation, pulled out all the stops with its cliffhanger episode by introducing the ultimate evil: alternate universe space Nazis. If that can't breathe some life into the series, nothing can.
And it's kind of sad because the raw materials are there. The cast is good (except for poor Ensign "Wesley" Mayweather) and the production design is great ... the problems with the show can be summed up in a list of five items:
1. Sucky, sucky music
2. Sucky, sucky stories
3. Sucky, sucky Star Trek cliches
4. Sucky, sucky token black guy character
5. It's just dull
Do you realize that the null-music on Enterprise is the same droning crap that we've been listening to on each Star Trek series for over fifteen years? And it was bad when they "perfected" it in the final seasons of TNG!
2 & 3 sort of fit together. The stories are mostly the same old stories we sat through during the later seasons of TNG when it stopped being really good, and crappy DS9 and unwatchable Voyager. And the cliches Enterprise is guilty of were already cliches by the end of TNG: two people in positions of authority have a conflict, someone with low self-esteem takes on a challenge and their self-esteem is boosted ... etc, etc, who cares ... ?
The other thing that's become cliched is the acting. Every freaking sentence has to be infused with this dramatic tone and it's leaden and tedious. Are they writing each bloody episode in iamabic pentameter? TOS wasn't like that. Sure, Shatner used to act but at the end of many episodes, there were these light moments when Kirk would make a racist "Spock, it's just .. hu ... man ..." or sexist "Yeoman, it's just .. wo ... man ..." comment and everyone would chuckle and the episode would end leaving you with the sense that although these people face some pretty intense situations, they actually enjoy life. Picard, too. You always got the sense that he thought that being Captain of a starship was pretty damn cool.
Archer doesn't seem to enjoy anything. He's always worrying about his dad's "legacy" or his dog's poop cycle or any number of real or imaginary slights. Half the time he seems like he's just about ready to break down and start crying. Captain Sensitve-Loser-Guy would have been a better name for him.
Then there's ensign Mayweather ... I guess you can't really call him the token black guy because they really did make an effort to create a multi-cultural cast. But, he was cast and then completely ignored for three seasons. The character could be salvaged and here's how: make him gay. I mean, the character is already kind of gay, so why not pull him out of the closet?
Finally, the dull-factor. These idiots are out in space for the first time, it should be a dramatic adventure, right? But there's not much drama pumped into the presentation and much of the 'adventure' seems routine. Verisimilatude isn't just created by set detail, how the characters react to things makes an impression as well and these characters always act as though they're on the Enterprise-E.
Space Nazis. It better work.
All-time worst Star Trek Villans:
1. The Breen
2. The Kazons
3. The Dominion (and related villans, The IGA)
4. Tam Elbrun (not really a villan, just annoying)
5. Dean Cain
And then there's Battlestar Galactica in January. I liked the mini-series, so my fingers are crossed that this will be a worthy sci-fi infusion.
Other tv:
Are you as excited as I am about the second season of This is Wonderland? Here's what the CBC Season Preview has to say about it:
More original mind-bending stories. More angst-ridden comedy. More emotionally complex mayhem. More uniquely obsessive characters. More unusual locations. More unexpected conflict. More of everything you loved the first time – and a few surprises too.
Wait a minute, they're trying to trick me! I didn't love it the first time! I only watched it because it was on after Monday Report and before the Newsroom! The show is sort of like Enterprise in that it has good parts (good cast, setting, some interesting stories) but in its first season it wasn't really able to pull everything together into what one would call "a show".
The main problem was, and I've said this before, that too much time was spent on court cases of little interest and hardly any time was spent with the regular ensemble of characters, who seem like they would be really interesting if we could get them to sit down and hang out for more than thrity seconds. A couple of the characters you seen in the opening credits only appear briefly in a few episodes and had less time on screen than many of the less interesting guest stars.
So who knows, maybe they can turn that sucker around and make a show out of it.
And that's your tv/sandwich update-a-thon!
3:11 PM
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