Small World at 59E59: Cosmic Ideas

Tina and just got back from seeing Small World on stage on East 59th Street, a profound and memorable series of conversations between Walt Disney and Igor Stravinsky pitting popular culture vs. high culture, the king of animation vs. the 20th-century successor to Mozart, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky.   I don't know if Herbert Gans, author of Popular Culture and High Culture, has ever seen it, but if he did, I'd bet he'd love it.   Tina and I did.

Disney and Stravinsky did meet at least once in 1939, but no one knows what they talked about. Presumably about Disney's slowly-recognized masterpiece Fantasia, which put Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" music to animation.  Small World imagines these two describing competing visions of art, debating commercialism and artistic sincerity, with wit and passion and, against all odds, not only anger at times but mutual integrity.

Mark Shanahan plays Disney with his customary style and depth.  Shanahan, whom I've seen at least a dozen times in various roles, has a talent for inhabiting those roles, and in the case of historical characters, bringing them to life in front of your eyes.  I never met Disney, but I left the theater thinking I'd had the rare privilege of meeting this extraordinary film pioneer, and hearing what he had to say.  The same for Stephen D’Ambrose's Stravinsky - this is the first time I've seen D'Ambrose on stage, but I'd welcome the chance to see him again.

Small World (written by  Frederick Stroppel, directed by Joe Brancato) doesn't pull its punches.  Disney's take on the Nazis - he condemns them, but thinks there would be some good in getting Hitler to laugh - is unflinchingly portrayed.  (Most of us would prefer him just erased from existence.) Stravinsky comes across as all too quick to be converted to commercialism as the years in ensue.  These are flawed men, far more than just the best of their opinions, as we all are.

They also lived in a time very different from ours, in which avenues to fame and success were far fewer.  But if the pursuit of stardom has gotten has more routes in the 21st century, it hasn't gotten any easier, which makes Small World as relevant today as it was all those decades, almost a century, ago.

Here's a disclaimer.  Shanahan is an old friend.  He was my Masters student years ago at Fordham University, where he now teaches some great courses.  He did audiobooks for two of my novels, The Consciousness Plague and The Plot to Save Socrates, and wrote an Edgar-nominated radio play for my novelette, The Chronology Protection Case.

Should you therefore take what I say about Small World with a grain of salt?  Hey, maybe someone should write a play about this issue, too, and I could play the part of I. A Richards, who says all acts of creation, including reviews, should be judged only on their words, and not on the bios of their authors.

So see the play - Small World, that is - you'll love it.

Paul McCartney at the Nassau Coliseum

Paul McCartney ended his three-hour concert at the Nassau Coliseum tonight with "the love you take is equal to the love you make".  I can't think of any single songwriter, singer, or musician who has brought more love to the world with his or her music in the past half century.

And McCartney continued do to that tonight.  Here were some of the highlights, for me -

• "Let Me Roll It" - this of course is a Wings not a Beatles song, and it's a measure of how good Wings were, though usually no Beatles, that this song still sounds so good.  In fact it's one of McCartney's very best songs, Beatles included.  This song came early in the concert, and signaled how alive McCartney and his music still is.  The four members of his band were fabulous, too.  So was "Band on the Run," later in the concert, another great Wings song, performed with power and verve, just as it should be.
• "A Day in the Life," segueing into ... "Give Peace a Chance"!  Not only that, but McCartney said as an intro to the song that it was especially appropriate to "New York".  A quiet shot against Trump?  I hope so, but I loved the composite anyway.
• McCartney did the Lennon part of "A Day in the Life" with sensitivity and excellence.  One of the high points of the concert - which brought tears to my eyes, in fact - was McCartney's "Here Now," written, he said, after John's death, and embodying the feelings McCartney wishes he had conveyed to John when he was alive.
• McCartney's rendition of "Something" was likewise wonderful, starting off with just Paul on the ukulele and expanded to a whole Beatles-like performance with the band.
• "Back in the U. S. S. R.," "Live and Let Die," "I've Just Seen a Face," "You Won't See Me," "Let It Be," were also especially outstanding - but, then again, so was just about everything in this concert.

I'll end by mentioning again how great the backing band was - two guitarists, a drummer, and a keyboard guy, who sang as good as they played their instruments, which was tour-de-force indeed.

Tina and I had a wonderful time. We were on our feet almost the whole concert, singing, clapping, swinging with the packed house.  We met just a few months after Sgt. Pepper was released.  How sweet and magical it was to enjoy this tonight, some fifty years later.

In the aftermath of this concert, I'll especially miss the Beatles.  On the other hand, there's always the Beatles Channel on Sirius XM Radio, where the Beatles and their offspring are playing every minute.

Ray Donovan 5.7: Reckonings

An especially strong Ray Donovan 5.7 last night, in this especially strong - and heartbreaking - season, with at least four signal developments:

1.  Looks like Avi is off the show - at least, for a while.  It was close to being permanently, but Ray managed to refrain from killing his loyal and usually highly effective assistant and protector.  Fortunately, Ray is if anything nothing but clever, and he went the root of video recording his shooting Avi, rather than actually shooting him, and it managed to convince the LA head of the FBI.

2. Actually, I was surprised that he was convinced so quickly, but it turns out not to really matter, because that FBI head was soon shot as well - this time for real - by Daryll, in defense of his father, who's almost always in need of some quick defending.  But as Mickey knows, killing the LA FBI Chief brings huge dangers on to the family.

3. Terry telling the audience (and Ray) that he gave Abby mercy-killing drugs was one of the most heart-rending revelations in the whole Abby story, which is so sad as to almost make Ray Donovan another kind of show.  I know it's brought all kinds of possibilities to the show and the characters, but I still wish they hadn't done that.

4. But there was a least a little good news last night - or about as good as it goes on this show - with Bunchy getting out of jail.  He'll no doubt do something before too long which will land him in hot water again, but at least he's out and free now.

Hey, I guess Ray sleeping with Natalie is good news, too - it definitely is - and this is a story I'd like to see more of in the weeks ahead.   Ray Donovan continues as a truly unique piece of television, and though I can't say I always enjoy it, I can never not watch it.

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See Ray Donovan 5.1: Big Change  ... Ray Donovan 5.4: How To Sell A Script

See also Ray Donovan 4.1: Good to Be Back ... Ray Donovan 4.2: Settling In ... Ray Donovan 4.4: Bob Seger ... Ray Donovan 4.7: Easybeats ... Ray Donovan 4.9: The Ultimate Fix ... Ray Donovan Season 4 Finale: Roses

And see also Ray Donovan 3.1: New, Cloudy Ray ... Ray Donovan 3.2: Beat-downs ... Ray Donovan 3.7: Excommunication!

And see also Ray Donovan 2.1: Back in Business ... Ray Donovan 2.4: The Bad Guy ... Ray Donovan 2.5: Wool Over Eyes ... Ray Donovan 2.7: The Party from Hell ... Ray Donovan 2.10: Scorching ... Ray Donovan 2.11: Out of Control ... Ray Donovan Season 2 Finale: Most Happy Ending

And see also Ray Donovan Debuts with Originality and Flair ... Ray Donovan 1.2: His Assistants and his Family ... Ray Donovan 1.3: Mickey ... Ray Donovan 1.7 and Whitey Bulger ... Ray Donovan 1.8: Poetry and Death ... Ray Donovan Season 1 Finale: The Beginning of Redemption

Star Trek: Discovery 1.1: Klingons and Hitchcock

Star Trek: Discovery debuted on CBS tonight.  Alas, it won't be there long - in fact, after this first episode, viewers will need to pay for CBS All-Access to continue watching this latest Star Trek series.

Which is a shame, because the first episode has a lot of promise.  It takes place a few years before the original Star Trek - aka Star Trek: TOS - and so far has at least one familiar character, Sarek (well-played by James Frain) whom we got to see, a little older, in TOS, and even older in some subsequent movies, etc.

Discovery also has a feisty #1 - Michael Burnham (a woman, well played with style and spunk by Sonequa Martin-Green), a human woman, to be more precise, who was raised by Vulcans.  She thus combines of the best of both species, for reasons different from Spock, but also governed by logic on top of emotions, but much more in play than Spock's.  In a decisive moment, she gives the Captain a Vulcan nerve pinch to knock her out, when she (the Captain) is not willing to listen to reason regarding an imminent Klingon threat.  That's what I meant by feisty.

And the Klingons are indeed a threat, emerging as the full-bodied danger we saw so well in TOS. But the Federation is not yet aware of this, so we're set in a tense Hitchcockian suspense rather than surprise mode.  (Hitchcock thought it was better movie-making to show people on a bus when we the viewers know a bomb is ticking away - suspense - than the surprise of a bomb shocking us with an out-of-the-blue explosion.)  We viewers in 2017 know what threats to humans the Klingons will soon pose, so Discovery is well positioned just on that verge.

Will I subscribe to All-Access so I can continue to watch this series?  My wife and I were tempted with The Good Fight, but decided that Netflix and Amazon Prime were enough great streaming to pay for. I'm a little more interested in this new Star Trek, but hey, we're still inveterate cheapskates, and we just paid plenty for great Paul McCartney tickets at the Nassau Coliseum.

So I can't tell you I'll see you next week here with another review - but, maybe, someday, if this new series shows up streaming somewhere else.  Or if someone in Hollywood picks up my novel below.


a different kind of space travel

Outlander 3.3: Free and Sad

A powerful and powerfully sad episode 3.3 of Outlander tonight, with both Claire and Jamie gaining freedom from each of their own prisons, separated by some 200 years in time.

So why was it so sad?

Well, Claire finally is free of Frank, and not because he finally wants to get divorced because he knows that Claire can never love him again, with Jamie forever in the way.  No, it's because Frank dies in a car crash.  And that's sad.  He was by no means perfect, even though he was having an affair all these years.  But he took Claire back, and raised Brianna as his own, and can you blame him for loving another woman, after what happened with Claire.  True, that wasn't exactly Claire's fault - she didn't choose to go back in time, and once back there, she had no way of knowing she'd ever see Frank again in her future.  But, still, she might have done more to banish Jamie from her heart, once she was back with Frank, though that's easier for a viewer to say than her character to do.

And Jamie is free, too - or, at least, no longer in prison.  Again, he now has a better chance of going back up to those stones and trying to find Claire in the future, now that he's left that prison and its rats behind.  But, will he?

The coming attractions suggest that it will be Brianna who goes back in time, not Claire, though that's not clear.  But what's to stop Claire from going to the stones again, especially if she's back in England with Brianna?  I guess it's also not clear if she'll go back to England now, either - but is her hard-earned profession as doctor truly more important to her than finding Jamie?

I'm looking forward to seeing what happens.

See also Outlander Season 3 Debut: A Tale of Two Times and Places ... Outlander 3.2: Whole Lot of Loving, But ...

And see also Outlander 2.1: Split Hour ... Outlander 2.2: The King and the Forest ... Outlander 2.3: Mother and Dr. Dog ... Outlander 2.5: The Unappreciated Paradox ... Outlander 2.6: The Duel and the Offspring ...Outlander 2.7: Further into the Future ... Outlander 2.8: The Conversation ... Outlander 2.9: Flashbacks of the Future ... Outlander 2.10: One True Prediction and Counting ... Outlander 2.11: London Not Falling ... Outlander 2.12: Stubborn Fate and Scotland On and Off Screen ... Outlander Season 2 Finale: Decades

And see also Outlander 1.1-3: The Hope of Time Travel ... Outlander 1.6:  Outstanding ... Outlander 1.7: Tender Intertemporal Polygamy ...Outlander 1.8: The Other Side ... Outlander 1.9: Spanking Good ... Outlander 1.10: A Glimmer of Paradox ... Outlander 1.11: Vaccination and Time Travel ... Outlander 1.12: Black Jack's Progeny ...Outlander 1.13: Mother's Day ... Outlander 1.14: All That Jazz ... Outlander Season 1 Finale: Let's Change History

Salvation: Plans A and B and more

Salvation was shown on CBS this summer - finale was just this past week - but binge-junkie that I am, I binge-watched the whole 13-episode run over the past few days on Amazon Prime. And this series is binge-watchable and excellent indeed.

The premise or starting point is actually the least original part of the story, one we've seen several times before: an MIT student discovers a deadly asteroid is heading towards the Earth, due to arrive and likely render us into extinction in less than a year.   But the series really takes off from there - figuratively and literally - and delivers all kinds of surprises and lessons, just what a good science fiction story should do, including -

• an Ethan Musk kind of billionaire, working on not one but two ways of countering the impending catastrophe - an "arc" (named Salvation) that can get 160 or some number like that of people off this planet, with a view towards setting up shop on Mars or anywhere the human species can continue; and a device, separately launched, which can pull the asteroid enough off-course that it avoids the Earth (crashing into the asteroid won't work because the resultant pieces will still take out a lot of the Earth's population)
• a Hillary Clinton type of President in office, who's beset by people high up in the government who want to kill her
• a Russia a lot like the one we have today, though more on the verge of attacking the U. S if provoked
• a top-notch mainframe computer - reminiscent of the one in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - though not sentient
• all manner of loving and not-so-loving relationships, with characters who manage not to be cartoonish 

On the last point, Jennifer Finnigan does an excellent job as Grace, one of the central female characters (and it's good to see she got over Barry from Tyrant).  Ian Anthony Dale puts in a similarly strong performance as Harris - he's Grace's boss in the Department of Defense - and it's always good to see Tovah Feldshuh (this time as President) and long since time that we saw John Noble (Fringe) back on television again.  Charlie Rowe (the MIT student) and Jacqueline Byers make an appealing couple struggling with a relationship as they each struggle in different ways to prevent or do something about the end of the world.  But my favorite is Santiago Cabrera as Tanz, the billionaire computer-genius high-tech quick-witted space-engineering mastermind - so good I'm sorry he's not with us here on this Earth right now, even without an asteroid rapidly approaching.

Top notch science fiction on television, highly recommended, and I'd watch a second season right now if it existed.

a different kind of space travel

Review of Rob Sheffield's Dreaming the Beatles 15 of X: Voting for McCartney, Again

It's been a while - too long - since I posted a review of a chapter or more of Rob Sheffield's Dreaming the Beatles.  Lots of reasons, including end of summer, but the most significant is I want this wonderful book to last as long as possible - or reading the book, to be more precise.  With the Beatles channel on Sirius XM, that I listen to daily, every time I'm alone in the car, I'm almost believing that the Beatles are still with is - as indeed they are, or at least their timeless music.

Also, my wife and I are seeing Paul in his final performance in New York this week - at the Nassau Coliseum.  We've wanted to do this for years, but being inveterate cheapskates held us back.  We didn't way to pay enough for decent seats.  But we finally did (and I'll be back here with a full review later this week).  And I credit Rob Sheffield's book and the Beatles Channel - not just the music there, but Peter Asher's show "From Me To You," Dennis Elsas's "Fab Fourum," and Laura Cantrell's "Dark Horse Radio" (even though it's mostly about George) as mostly to blame.  Thanks :)

So I decided to read the next chapter in Sheffield's book, and, lo and behold, it's about Paul.  Not only that, it's a George vs. Paul chapter - "Something" vs. "My Love" - and the part about Paul is a full-court put-down of "My Love" ("the worst song any of the Beatles had anything to with").  Sheffield acknowledges that there are worse songs lurking on some of the solo albums, but scores "My Love" because it got so much trumpeted attention.

So here I am defending Paul again (like he needs my or anyone's defense), like I did all those years ago in my first published article, A Vote McCartney, that appeared in the Village Voice in 1971 after I'd sent in a letter responding to a particularly nasty attack on McCartney's solo album by dyspeptic critic Robert Christgau.  (The editors took my letter, published it as an article, and paid me for it - teaching me something that guides me to this very day - writing is the easiest most enjoyable way for me to earn money.)  To be clear, I don't think "My Love" is in the first, second, or even third tier of great McCartney compositions and performances.  I think "Hope for Deliverance," for example, is vastly better.

But nor is "My Love" anywhere near as atrocious as Sheffield indicates.  "Till There Was You" from the Beatles is garbage in comparison to "My Love," a complete waste of a track on a Beatles album. Even "Hi, Hi, Hi" from McCartney's Wings era is worse than "My Love".   And "Silly Love Songs" is probably a little worse, too.   "My Love," despite its excesses, has a passion.  You can hear Paul singing about Linda in that song, and that makes it real.

But what is it that engenders such anger at Paul McCartney?  Sheffield has already said that he admires Christgau, but, in my view, Sheffield's a far better and more sensitive critic than Christgau. But what is it that evokes such dislike of a below-average, but certainly not so horrendous, Paul song?

Who knows?  I'm looking forward to more fresh evidence to hurl against McCartney's critics at his concert this week.

Note added a few days later: And here indeed is my review of McCartney's splendid three-hour concert.

See also Review of Rob Sheffield's Dreaming the Beatles 1 of X: The Love Affair ... 2 of X: The Heroine with a Thousand Faces ... 3 of X: Dear Beatles ... 4 of X: Paradox George ... 5 of X: The Power of Yeah ... 6 of X: The Case for Ringo ... 7 of X: Anatomy of a Ride ... 8 of X: Rubber Soul on July 4 ... 9 of X: Covers ... 10 of X: I. A. Richards ... 11 of X: Underrated Revolver ... 12 of X: Sgt. Pepper ... 13 of X: Beatles vs. Stones ... 14 of X: Unending 60s ... 16 of X: "I'm A Loser" ... 17 of X: The Split ... 18 of X: "Absolute Elsewhere" ... 19 of X: (Unnecessary but Brilliant) Defense of McCartney ... 20 of X: "All Things Must Pass" ... 21 of X: Resistance ... 22: The 70s Till the End ... 23: Near the Science Fiction Shop ... 24 of 24: The Last Two

And here's "It's Real Life" -- free alternate history short story about The Beatles, made into a radio play and audiobook and winner of The Mary Shelley Award 2023

 
lots of Beatles in this time travel

Somewhere Between Finale: Photograph

Well, Somewhere Between concluded tonight with a photograph.  I'm tempted to hum Ringo's song "Photograph" - I've heard it a few times in the past few weeks on the Beatles Channel, and it sounded good - but no, it wasn't that kind of photograph at the end of Somewhere Between.  It was a snapshot of a happy family at a wedding, and I won't say anything more, because no point in trafficking in spoilers.

I will say that there was some good action in the finale, but lots of missed opportunities.  Among them was the old dilemma of two people you love are drowning just off the dock, there's only time to save one, so whom do you jump in and save?  I thought Laura was going to have that choice with Nico (she really loves him now) and Serena (she's loved her all along) both in the water, but it didn't go that way, and, let's face it, if it had, there's no way Laura wouldn't have saved her daughter.

But the biggest missed opportunity in the short series was time travel itself.  The water scene in the finale did harken back to the water which generated all of this, but, after a promising beginning, there was a decreasing amount of time travel in this series, or, exploration of the paradoxes and conundra that time travel inevitably and provocatively leads to.

So Somewhere Between will likely go down as a good start that looped on to itself to the point that you could barely tell at the end that time travel had anything to do with this.  Which I guess is interesting in itself, in some meta way, since time travel when it is working on all cylinders is all about loops - just not the kind that are so self-obliterating you forget about time travel and think you're watching a pretty obvious police show.

But thanks for the ride, anyway.  I'm always up for time travel, and will usually stay with it, as this complete set of reviews demonstrates.  Cueing Ringo.

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See also: Somewhere Between: Frequency meets Awake ... Somewhere Between 1.2: Fate ... Somewhere Between 1.3: The Scarf ... Somewhere Between 1.4: The Husband ... Somewhere Between 1.5: The Affair ... Somewhere Between 1.6: Nico ... Somewhere Between 1.7: No Deja Vu ... Somewhere Between 1.8: Capital Punishment and Time Travel ... Somewhere Between 1.9: Clearing the Deck

Outlander 3.2: Whole Lot of Loving, But ...

Outlander 3.2 put on a good show tonight, with Claire and Frank making love in the late 1940s, and Jaime doing the same (mostly off camera) back in those 1750s...

Problem is, Claire's thinking of Jaime (of course), and Frank knows it (also of course).  And Jaime doesn't really want to, but, hey, he's gone too long without it, and he closes his eyes.

I have an idea (and, again, I should say that I haven't read the novels, so I know nothing beyond this very episode).  But, if Jaime misses Claire so deeply, and he wants to stop endangering his sister and her family (his family, too), why doesn't he just make his way to up to those standing stones and try to find Claire in the future?

But that said, it was still a good episode, especially seeing what Jaime's family went through to protect him, and what Claire's going through to assert her professional aspirations at Harvard in the 1940s, where apparently women were not usually thought of as doctors.

I say apparently, because I grew up in the 1950s, and two of my pediatricians - both excellent - were women.   Where did they get their degrees?  If we're to believe Outlander, presumably not at Harvard - which, if true, says Harvard was a lot more misogynistic (and racist, too) than other colleges and universities.

But I digress.   We clearly have a good, tense, dramatic situation now in Outlander, with Claire and Jaime both missing and wanting each other, and not only an ocean but an ocean of time between them.  It will be fun to see if and how they manage to cross it.

See also Outlander Season 3 Debut: A Tale of Two Times and Places

And see also Outlander 2.1: Split Hour ... Outlander 2.2: The King and the Forest ... Outlander 2.3: Mother and Dr. Dog ... Outlander 2.5: The Unappreciated Paradox ... Outlander 2.6: The Duel and the Offspring ...Outlander 2.7: Further into the Future ... Outlander 2.8: The Conversation ... Outlander 2.9: Flashbacks of the Future ... Outlander 2.10: One True Prediction and Counting ... Outlander 2.11: London Not Falling ... Outlander 2.12: Stubborn Fate and Scotland On and Off Screen ... Outlander Season 2 Finale: Decades

And see also Outlander 1.1-3: The Hope of Time Travel ... Outlander 1.6:  Outstanding ... Outlander 1.7: Tender Intertemporal Polygamy ...Outlander 1.8: The Other Side ... Outlander 1.9: Spanking Good ... Outlander 1.10: A Glimmer of Paradox ... Outlander 1.11: Vaccination and Time Travel ... Outlander 1.12: Black Jack's Progeny ...Outlander 1.13: Mother's Day ... Outlander 1.14: All That Jazz ... Outlander Season 1 Finale: Let's Change History

Gypsy: Beyond Treatment

Binge-watch Gypsy on Netflix in you're in the mood for a highly original, riveting, erotic, New York-based, not quite a thriller in the conventional sense but it has a a lot of that too, and a tour-de-force performance by Naomi Watts.

It was especially good to see Watts after her necessarily gonzo, unidimensional performance in the alter-dimensional Twin Peaks: The Return, which was excellent in a very different way.  In Gypsy, she plays psychologist Jean Holloway, who has at least two identities and numerous looks and attitudes.  Watts plays them all to perfection.

The set-up is she's a shrink who crosses the line and gets involved - literally, in at least one case - with the close relations of her patients.   Though her motives could be magnanimous, i.e., born of a desire to better help her patients, we soon learn, at least in one case, that Holloway is doing this much more for her own gratification.  Further, she doesn't even struggle with this - it's as natural to her as stopping by the coffee shop where her main infatuation (or maybe it's true love), the ex-girlfriend of one of her patients, works as a barista. In other words, this is no In Treatment. Now, New York's a pretty big town, and we have to suspend our disbelief that she is constantly in danger of her patients running into her when she is seeing or doing more with one of their loved ones.  That's where the thriller part comes in, and Holloway loves the adrenalin rush.  I liked it, too.

There are good performances everywhere, especially by Melanie Liburd, who plays Alexis, secretary to Holloway's husband Michael, a lawyer, played by Billy Crudup, who does what's needed in portraying a well-meaning character who's usually behind the eight ball about his wife's activities, but gradually gets the picture.  In the end, this first season of a series that so evocatively calls for more is an ode to feminine sexual power, as typified by a scene in which Jean and Alexis each have sexual encounters, against most odds, and Michael, of his own choosing, has none.

Highly recommended for a few late summer evenings, or, I'd bet, a few evenings any time of year.

Somewhere Between 1.9: Clearing the Deck

And in this next-to-last episode of the season (series? who knows) of Somewhere Between - 1.9, to be precise - we get lots of important developments, including [spoilers abound  below]

• 
  
• 
  
• 
  
• Tom is dead.  Shot dead, that is, by the team of bad guys, whom we learn are working for ...
• The Governor, or maybe the Governor's wife, it's not entirely clear.  What is clear is that this is one dysfunctional family, with a son who kidnaps Serena (though he seems to have a good heart), and another who likely is the killer.

This puts everything in much sharper perspective.  The reason that the Governor is not willing to relent on the death penalty for Danny - or, again, maybe it's the Governor's wife who is not willing to relent on this, so she's encouraging the Governor to be "strong" - but, in either case, the goal is to close the case on the murder, by killing the convicted murderer, Danny, so the real murderer, the Governor's son (the really bad one) will get off scot free.

Serena's kidnapping is a bit more complicated.  She was certainly taken as a way putting pressure on her father, Tom, and that was working, for a while.  But Tom got wise, then got killed, so now that's no longer a reason to use Serena as a negotiating hostage.  Given that the good - or at least, better than the murdering - brother kidnapped her, it would seem that he might be inclined to release her now.

Except - his mother, the Governor's wife, certainly doesn't want that, since Serena has seen the face of her kidnapper, many times, which of course would endanger the Governor and his family.  At this point, then, Somewhere Between has become a pretty good, if convoluted, cop or murder mystery show.  And, hey, the killing of Tom totally frees Laura to be with Nico, in case there was even a sliver of doubt before.

As for the time travel - well, that's scarcely been in evidence, and I do hope it returns in whatever kind of finale we see next week.

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See also: Somewhere Between: Frequency meets Awake ... Somewhere Between 1.2: Fate ... Somewhere Between 1.3: The Scarf ... Somewhere Between 1.4: The Husband ... Somewhere Between 1.5: The Affair ... Somewhere Between 1.6: Nico ... Somewhere Between 1.7: No Deja Vu ... Somewhere Between 1.8: Capital Punishment and Time Travel

Outlander Season 3 Debut: A Tale of Two Times and Places

A strong, sensitive season 3 debut for Outlander tonight, with two parallel stories, excellent in different ways, as befits the splitting in time and space of Jamie and Claire that we saw at the end of the second season.

Claire's story had lots of nice touches of life for her and Frank at Harvard in the late 1940s, including snobbish support for Dewey in the 1948 Presidential election and insufferable male chauvinism from just about every man in town, with the partial exception of Frank, who's nothing but understanding, or as understanding as he can be, under the circumstances.  As in all time-travel conversations, our knowledge that indeed Truman would win, as Claire thought he might, makes her opinion all the more enjoyable to hear (and it testifies to her acumen, given that she has yet to travel into her own future, via the stones or any other means).

Jamie's story is far more harrowing, coming to the brink of death after the carnage of Culloden. Again, we know that Jamie cannot die that way - not because we know the future, Jamie is a fictional character, after all, unlike Dewey - but because he's too important a character to die, certainly at the beginning of a new season like this.  (Though after what happened to Abby in another series on tonight, I guess anything is possible).  But it was still engrossing to see how Jamie got out of the death sentence, despite himself, and after a lot of good people met their maker or whomever you might meet in a universe in which time travel's possible.

And one very bad person died, too - Black Jack, at Jamie's hand - but here I'll offer my customary point that unless you see someone's head cut off or blown off, you never know for this sure, and, again, especially so when time travel's afoot.  (I haven't read the novels.)  But I'd guess (and hope) he truly is dead.

Good to have this story back, and I expect I'll be back every week or so with a review.

See also Outlander 2.1: Split Hour ... Outlander 2.2: The King and the Forest ... Outlander 2.3: Mother and Dr. Dog ... Outlander 2.5: The Unappreciated Paradox ... Outlander 2.6: The Duel and the Offspring ...Outlander 2.7: Further into the Future ... Outlander 2.8: The Conversation ... Outlander 2.9: Flashbacks of the Future ... Outlander 2.10: One True Prediction and Counting ... Outlander 2.11: London Not Falling ... Outlander 2.12: Stubborn Fate and Scotland On and Off Screen ... Outlander Season 2 Finale: Decades

And see also Outlander 1.1-3: The Hope of Time Travel ... Outlander 1.6:  Outstanding ... Outlander 1.7: Tender Intertemporal Polygamy ...Outlander 1.8: The Other Side ... Outlander 1.9: Spanking Good ... Outlander 1.10: A Glimmer of Paradox ... Outlander 1.11: Vaccination and Time Travel ... Outlander 1.12: Black Jack's Progeny ...Outlander 1.13: Mother's Day ... Outlander 1.14: All That Jazz ... Outlander Season 1 Finale: Let's Change History