Travelers Season 3: The Reinvention

The third season of Travelers would have been excellent anyway.  MacLaren struggling against his own erased memory, the team dealing with a traveler who got into the body of a serial killer, the deadly chess match with the Faction, the unreliability of the Director, members of the team grappling with all kinds of personal lethal crises, all of that with the customary repartee about our culture as seen from the distant future, and true-to-life dialog like "You only ever wear a third of your wardrobe, anyway" (MacLaren's wife Kathryn to MacLaren; for me it's more like a tenth) made for a series of episodes as good as those in the first two seasons. But the ending of Season 3 made for something very different, and lifted the series to a whole new level.

I can't remember the last time I saw a whole series upended, rebooted, as early as the end of the third season.  Usually that happens years after an original series has concluded, and it's brought back for a new shot.  Actually, I do recall one time:  right after the Superbowl in 2003, when Alias reinvented itself by pulling the rug out from under the central premise of the series, in an episode that was in the middle of the second season (I won't say more, in case you haven't seen the series - see my essay in Alias Assumed if you're interested).  But although that happened in Alias a lot earlier than the end of the third season, and was brilliant and shocking indeed, it was not as literally and stunningly a reboot as we saw at the very end of Travelers 3.10.

At that point, one of our team, Marcy, is dead (David is, too).   Trevor's only partially cured of his aphasia, Philip has visions of multiple realities, and MacLaren's wife is now 100% sure that he's not the person she married.   I suppose the series could have continued within that framework - major characters have died with regularity on other series - but at that point, the team and its aspirations were in such tatters, Marcy and David's deaths so heartbreaking, not to mention our world in a nuclear war, that it was almost a relief to see "Fail" as the assessment for this three-year mission.  And what came after, the indication of a whole new mission "Begin"ning - a different way to save the future - couldn't have been more thrilling and effective.   The Director hadn't forsaken our team - it had just pushed them over a cliff, in the hope/expectation that enough of them would land on their feet, and pick up the battle in a new terrain.

It's not clear at this point - and that's part of the fun - who on the team will remember what in the next season (which I'm assuming there will be, for this now especially masterful time-travel series).  MacLaren back in 2001 clearly is the same traveler we saw in the first three seasons.  But Marcy and David are different.   David, of course, was not a traveler, so what we saw was just him in 2001.  Presumably Marcy was the way she was in 2001, before the traveler arrived in her head in the first season.   And the others?  It's not impossible that there will be a whole new team of travelers - I've seen that suggested in various reviews - but I think it would be much more satisfying to see how the team we know fares in this new reality.  We have a lot invested in them.

From its outset, Travelers has had a brashness, a directness in working with the paradoxes, that you don't usually find in time-travel series.  Now it has done this on the meta-level, smashing and reconfiguring the very ground of the series itself.  I'm very much looking forward to seeing how it all turns out.

See also: Travelers (review of Season 1): 12 Monkeys Meets Quantum Leap with a Story All of its Own ... Travelers 2: Chess Match of the Centuries

watch The Chronology Protection Case FREE on Amazon Prime

  

12 Monkeys 3.8-10: "Up at the Ritz"

The concluding three episodes of the penultimate season 3 of 12 Monkeys on the SyFy channel tonight - soon to be rebranded in all caps - was as good as the first seven, which is to say, superb indeed, and you can put that in all caps any time.

Jennifer's best line, among many: "fate's a real bitch, rarely puts you up at the Ritz". I've never been to the Ritz, so I can't exactly confirm that, but as for 12 Monkeys, it left us mesmerized, at loose ends, at loggerheads of impossible logic - or, exactly where we want to be for the next and final season in 2018.

This was mostly the story of Ethan Cole, aka the Witness, except, in a nice twist at the end, it turns out he's not the Witness after all.  He witnessed a lot, as he says, but the evil Witness with a capital W is Olivia. Locked up like Irina Derevko in Alias for a lot of this season, Olivia turns out to be even more powerful and sinister than Irina - or Ethan.  And Jennifer called it, or almost, or slightly, did.

Ethan's story was well played and told, and another version of Anakin becoming Darth, because he lost his beloved Padme.  Except, since this is time travel, Ethan tries hundreds of times to save her, in a heart-rending rendition of you can't change fate (which is one kind of fine, classic time travel story).

And the kicker is, although he says he's going to destroy the world as a result of his loss, his parents and/or his innate goodness means he won't, and he instead sacrifices himself to be killed by Olivia.

Except - this is time travel, so who is really dead?  Well, apparently the woman Ethan loved, but does this apply to Ethan to?  (Hey, I'm not even sure it applies to Ranmse.)  Ethan has a lot on his side for the final season, including now Jones back on the same side as Cassie and James, and of course the peerless, timeless Jennifer.

12 Monkeys started out in its first two season as often excellent, but sometimes meandering and too complex for its own good.  In its third season, it has really found itself, and is well on its way to being a masterpiece of a television series.

And I'll see you back here with more reviews of 12 Monkeys, next year.

See also 12 Monkey's 3.1-4: "The Smart Ones Do" ... 12 Monkeys 3.5-7: "A Thing for Asimov"

And see also 12 Monkeys 2.1: Whatever Will Be, Will Be ... 12 Monkeys 2.2: The Serum ... 12 Monkeys 2.3: Primaries and Paradoxes ... 12 Monkeys 2.4: Saving Time ... 12 Monkeys 2.5: Jennifer's Story ... 12 Monkeys 2.6: "'Tis Death Is Dead" ... 12 Monkeys 2.7: Ultimate Universes ... 12 Monkeys 2.8: Time Itself Wants Time Travel ... 12 Monkeys 2.9: Hands On ... 12 Monkeys 2.10: The Drugging ... 12 Monkeys 2.11: Teleportation ... 12 Monkeys 2.12: The Best and the Worst of Time(s) ... 12 Monkeys 2.13: Psychedelic -> Whole City Time Travel

And see also this Italian review, w/reference to Hawking and my story, "The Chronology Protection Case"

And see also 12 Monkeys series on SyFy: Paradox Prominent and Excellent ...12 Monkeys 1.2: Your Future, His Past ... 12 Monkeys 1.3:  Paradoxes, Lies, and Near Intersections ... 12 Monkeys 1.4: "Uneasy Math" ... 12 Monkeys 1.5: The Heart of the Matter ... 12 Monkeys 1.6: Can I Get a Witness? ... 12 Monkeys 1.7: Snowden, the Virus, and the Irresistible ... 12 Monkeys 1.8: Intelligent Vaccine vs. Time Travel ... 12 Monkeys 1.9: Shelley, Keats, and Time Travel ... 12 Monkey 1.10: The Last Jump ... 12 Monkeys 1.11: What-Ifs ... 12 Monkeys 1.2: The Plunge ... 12 Monkeys Season 1 Finale: "Time Travel to Create Time Travel"

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Available on Prime

Dimensions: Watercolor Time Travel

With another winter storm howling on the doors of New York, I took refuge in Dimensions tonight, a lushly beautiful 2011 British time travel movie, recently made available on iTunes and Amazon Instant Video.

The director, Sloane U'Ren, has previous credits as a set designer in television shows ranging from Alias to Six Feet Under, and it shows in Dimensions.  The movie, which tells a close-up story of a young scientist in 1920s England obsessed with time travel, moves like an Impressionistic painting from scene to scene, with images and textures and lenses that brush the soul.

There is a palpable innocence in the movie, which almost makes it akin to Primer, though Dimensions is barely about paradox and time loops.   It is rather about love, sought and lost, accidental and deliberate.   The movie also resonates with Daniel Faraday and Lost, which also has the charm of the young man as scientist -- though, again, Dimensions is manifestly not about the world-changing implications of the time travel we find in Lost.

The first part of the movie is indeed so uncontrived - a rarity for any time travel story - it almost seems like a YA or younger tale.  As the movie progresses, we get a romantic triangle of characters in their twenties.  The acting in this section is very good -  the most memorable coming from Olivia Llewellyn and Camilla Rutherford's quietly powerful performances, and good work from Henry Lloyd-Hughes as the scientist, too - and this more than the storyline makes this part of the movie blossom.   Antony Neely, whose main previous movie credits are in music, wrote the screenplay for Dimensions, and the story indeed progresses like a song, with versus and repeated chorus and bridge - an apt form for a time travel tale - or maybe an etude from Debussy.

Watercolors and tears, a story that moves like Donovan's "Wear Your Love Like Heaven," make Dimensions an unusual and even remarkable time travel story, which not only takes place in the 1920s but almost feels as if it was written and filmed back then, had such evocative color cinematography been available.  See it if you'd like a compelling introduction to what time travel could be, or the sense of wonder you had when you encountered your first time travel story at 12 years of age.

Other reviews of off-the-beaten-track recent time travel movies: 95ers: Time Runners: Original and Entertaining and I'll Follow You Down: Excellent Time Travel Movie

                ~~~ +++ ~~~

Enjoy time travel stories? check out



"one of those extremely rare sequels that end up better than its predecessor ... worthy of the title, blockbuster, if this were a movie ... by far the best time travel story I've ever read" - Scott Sandridge, SpecMusicMuse 




"resonates with the current political climate . . . . heroine Sierra Waters is sexy as hell . . . . there's a bite to Levinson's wit" - Brian Charles Clark, Curled Up With A Good Book

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And The Chronology Protection Case movie


podcast review of Dimensions and two other time travel movies

The Blacklist 1.9: Field Transfusion

The Blacklist 1.9 is the first half of a two-part Fall finale, and put up the most powerful show of the series thus far.  It showed us something you don't usually see on television - Red giving the badly wounded Ressler a field transfusion of blood from Red's own arm - and much more from Red.

James Spader gives an even more inspired than usual performance, highlighted by an instantly classic Red soliloquy about why he wants to live - drink the wine (two bottles), sleep like a baby, make hot love on cool sheets, and more - that Shakespeare would have enjoyed.   And the loss of life is a very real possibility, as Red witnesses one and likely two FBI agents shot dead by the bad guy, right before his eyes.

What all of this is building up to is a gun to the head of Lizzie, which we know not only Red won't abide, but not Ressler either.  The coming attractions pretty much show that he comes to in time to give the bad guy the code so the door can be opened, and Red apprehended.

Now we know that neither Red nor Lizzie can die in this story, but everything else is up for grabs or at least change.   If Ressler survives, he'll have to be grateful that Red saved his life.  And Red's giving himself up to save Lizzie can't be overlooked by her.   So what we'll have to look forward to when the series returns for its second half is a rearrangement of the loyalties and passions we've  seen thus far in the Fall.

I like series that re-set themselves - it was one of Alias's strong suits, which The Blacklist in many ways resembles, and Person of Interest just did that to searing effect last week.   But we'll know more about how this plays for The Blacklist next week, and I'm looking forward.

See also The Blacklist Debuts: Alias Meets Jay Z ... The Blacklist 1.2: Mysteries ... The Blacklist 1.3: Construction Site Heights ... The Blacklist 1.6: Truth and Enigma ... The Blacklist 1.7: Natural Immunity ... The Blacklist 1.8: The Father and the Husband

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Da Vinci's Demons: History, Science, and Science Fiction

I caught up on the first three episodes of Da Vinci's Demons on Starz last night - the latest offering from David Goyer (of Flashforward television fame) - and I found the series superb, a full-bodied, top-of-the-line player in the surge of outstanding historical dramas that are lighting up television these days.

In time and place, Da Vinci's Demons is closest to The Borgias - in fact, in the exact same places in Italy, and only two decades or so years earlier.  You'll find familiar family names - such as the De Medici's and the Sforza's - as young Da Vinci (25 years old) contends from Florence with the Pope and his nephew. The lovemaking and nudity is also in good supply - even a bit more with Da Vinci, as befits his Renaissance-man talents as a painter and anatomist - and the ambience is as lush and captivating.

But Da Vinci's Demons has far more than political and erotic intrigue.   Da Vinci was a scientist and inventor far ahead of his time - sketching helicopters and tanks that could well have been built right then and there had the needed collateral technology been at hand.  Like Heron of Alexandria 1400 years before him and Charles Babbage 400 years later, Da Vinci belonged to the very small group of visionaries who literally saw the future in their fundamental understanding of the world around them.  Indeed, Da Vinci is easily at the top of this class, and his scientific pursuits, which included not only anatomy but botany and geology, are amply portrayed in the series.   Da Vinci's Demons in its scientific story lines is akin to Vikings on the History Channel, and its excellent depiction of Norse advances in ship building - though the Viking science of ship building is one-dimensional in comparison to what Leonardo wrought.

Such extraordinary range and depth of real scientific knowledge logically spills over into science fiction and fantasy, or speculation about what deep wells of knowledge are feeding this world, and reside beyond.  The possibility that the ancients knew far more than we give them credit for has long been a theme in my own science fiction, and figures in such popular culture triumphs as The Da Vinci Code and Rimbaldi in Alias.   Da Vinci's Demons features an ancient (fictional) Book of Leaves, which contains knowledge of the universe that goes well beyond science.   As the young Leonardo begins to learn of this book and its secrets, he comes into conflict with the Vatican and its desire to contain it and keep it from the world.   As is the case with all good science fiction, there is a proximity to reality which gives it punch:  Leonardo comes across a map of a continent which no one recognizes but he somehow knows is true.  It's a map of South America, a few decades before Columbus, a time when other historically unrecorded voyagers could well have made the trip across the Atlantic, as the Vikings in fact had done some 500 years earlier.

Da Vinci's Demons thus has everything a devotee of historical fiction and science fiction could ask for.   In its fantasy elements, the series also has a kinship with Game of Thrones, but the situation of Da Vinci's Demons in our real world makes it more compelling in my book.

                                        

The Americans: True and Deep

The Americans, with Keri Russell as one half of the Soviet sleeper spy couple so deeply undercover in Washington they're more American than most of us, debuted on fx last night.  It was superb.

First, about Keri Russell, there are two interrelated things about her past as an actress that make her appearance in The Americans especially interesting.  She is best known for her breakthrough Felicity roll a while ago,  one of J. J. Abrams' early series about a college student.  And Abrams' next series was Alias, which featured Jennifer Garner not Russell as graduate student turned spy, but which had a major continuing storyline about a Soviet agent under cover in the United States - Sydney Bristow's (Jennifer Garner's) mother, Irina/Laura.   I like these sort of complex prior histories to television series.

In Alias, the Soviet spy (played by Lena Olin) was married to an American spy (played by Victor Garbor) - all powerfully acted, by the way.  In The Americans, both Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell) and her husband Phillip (Matthew Rhys) are Soviet spies, and their acting is top-notch.  In fact, just about everything in this series seems to be, so far.  Plot twists, unexpected bursts of action, frank sexually vivid (not quite explicit) language combine with the acting to made the premiere never a dull moment.

Russell, especially, has a way of getting just the right pitch in her voice.  When her husband, wanting to show her a little affection and getting rebuffed, protests that he's her husband, Elizabeth responds "is that right?" with just the right slight cutting sarcastic edge.  This is because their marriage is their job as spies, not a true aspect of their lives.  But, as William James the American psychologist noted more than a century ago, when you go through the actions of something, often enough, you begin to grow real feelings for those actions, too.

Elizabeth and Matthew have been at this for more than a decade.   They have two children, a daughter age 13 and a son a little younger.  So of course they have some real feelings.  It's just that, at the beginning of the show, Matthew is more in touch with them than is Elizabeth.  But that changes at the end, in a sequence of events which show that, as much as Matthew has become a truly happy suburban American father, he's still tough as nails underneath.

The one part of the premiere episode that jangled a bit is the FBI guy who moves next store.  This can't be coincidence - which Elizabeth and Matthew seem to realize - but so far the show is playing it as coincidence one-hundred percent.  I expect we'll find out before too long what's really going on with the neighbor.

There's also great 1981 scenery, with talk about Reagan as a lunatic from the Soviet perspective, Walter Cronkite on television, and all sorts evocative 1981 music.  At this point, The Americans is looking to easily be one of the best new shows on television, with only The Following as any real competition.

                                                           

Revolution: Preview Review

I caught the complete first episode of Revolution last night - set to premiere later this month on NBC - courtesy of NBC putting this up On-Demand. Herewith a review, with soft (non-specific) spoilers.

Revolution is J. J. Abrams' latest. Now, I know what you're thinking - or, what I was thinking, anyway. With the exception of Fringe and (to a lesser extent) Person of Interest, Abrams has not come anywhere close to his extraordinary triumphs of Lost or even Alias. Half of his efforts have been like last year's Alcatraz, promising at first but pretty soon an irredeemable turkey.

So I approached Revolution with caution, and - I found the debut episode superb! It's chock full of punch-in-the-gut surprises, with characters we think are major dying on and off camera, and big, unexpected revelations right up until the end. The set-up, though it might seem at first glance to have too much in common with the ill-fated FlashForward and the high-flying Walking Dead, turns out to be refreshing and original.

The world has been beset by a power failure from hell - all electricity is gone, including battery power (which, in our real world, the Amish use instead of electricity from power plants). This means that everything digital is gone - useless - too.

We follow a family - no Family Robinson - in the Chicago area. (You notice how often Chicago is popping up in television drama these days? Boss, Revolution, Chicago Fire, last year's Playboy Club - probably another good consequence of Obama, seriously). Charlie, the daughter - a little under 20 - is strong, attractive, and believable. The others are good, too, and I found myself disappointed when the first episode was over - disappointed that I couldn't see more.

There's an endearing hipness about Revolution - the Hurley-like character (we had one, Hurley himself, in Alcatraz last year) - was a big exec at Google, before the permanent blackout. So far, I like this guy better than the Alcatraz guy.

"You say you want a Revolution, well, you know ..." I'm looking forward to this one on NBC.




"As a genre-bending blend of police procedural and science fiction, The Silk Code delivers on its promises." -- Gerald Jonas, The New York Times Book Review

"Daddy, this the best book I've ever read!" -- Molly Vozick-Levinson, age 12 at the time

"cerebral but gripping" -- Booklist

Trying to Like Alcatraz

Well, I've been watching Alcatraz - seven episodes so far - the latest J. J. Abrams production.  That in itself was a good reason to watch it.  Although I disliked the ending of Lost, the series at its best was one of the best ever on television.  Alias was also superb, as has been Fringe these past two seasons.  And I'm enjoying Person of Interest.

And there other things to commend a television show about Alcatraz.  The Birdman of Alcatraz is a fine movie, and this television show is about time travel - in my book, you can go wrong about that.

But the problem with Alcatraz is that it doesn't have enough of that.   Although time travel figures in every episode, there's little about the paradoxes and narrative joy of really confronting what it's like to run into much older versions of people you  knew when you travel 50 years into the future.  There are hints of that, intersections with characters who lived through those 50 years, including, especially, Emerson Hauser played by Sam Neill.

It's great to see Neill, probably best known for Jurassic Park, on television (he was great in the Tudors, and years ago in Heartland).  And he does a fine job when he's on screen in Alcrataz.  So does Hurley - Jorge Garcia - who basically plays Hurley as a PhD comic book expert.   So does Sarah Jones (Big Love) as Rebecca Madsen.

But the problem is that emphasis on the individual stories of the people - mostly criminals - whisked into the future gets in the way of the really interesting stuff for me, which is why and how they were whisked.  Without that mechanism more in the limelight and explored, Alcatraz remains little more than a Criminal Minds without its intensity, and with intimations of immortality as yet unrealized.

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The Plot to Save Socrates
"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

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Enjoy listening to audio books? Get a free audio book copy of The Plot to Save Socrates - or any one of 85,000 other titles - with a 14-day trial membership at Audible.com ...

Person of Interest of Interest

I was interested enough to see the first episode of Person of Interest.  It's Minority Report (an operation identifies crimes before they're committed, and tries to stop them), Medium (sees the future), Mission Impossible (you know what that is), a bit of 1984, and a few other touches all its own.  I liked it a lot.

Michael Emerson (Ben from Lost) is one of the major characters (Finch) who is so much like Ben (Finch even gets roughed up like Ben) that it could have been Ben, but that's ok, because Ben was one of the more fascinating, provocative characters on Lost.   Here he plays a computer genius who built a device, in the aftermath of 9/11, that could track potential terrorist attacks, with a view towards our government's intercepting them.   An unintended consequence is that this special super-computer could also ID potential non-terrorist crimes like individual murders and kidnappings.  Ben - sorry, Finch - built a back-door to his program, and he's determined to stop as many of these one-on-one crimes as possible.  Not as easy, of course, as it sounds, and complicated by the fact that the computer program cannot be sure whether the person of interest it identifies is the victim or the perpetrator.

Finch needs eyes in the field.  Not only only eyes, but moves that can stop the crimes.  He's not government, but he has plenty of money, he's off the grid, and he's in the market for a James Bond kind of agent.  That's where Reese comes in, played by James Caviezel (who was excellent in another science fiction story, Frequency, one of the best communication-back-through-time movies ever made - in fact, the best).  My Mission Impossible reference gets to the complexity of Reese's assignments, and 1984 points to our government still watching all of us through Finch's massive computer and its omnipresent lenses.

The premiere was good,  the show has potential, and I'll keep watching it.  I'm always a sucker for stories about the government watching me.  And, hey,  J. J. Abrams - one of the executive producers - has done some pretty good previous work with Felicity, Alias,  Lost (except for the ending, which I don't think was his fault),  and Fringe.

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The Plot to Save Socrates



"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

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Fringe 3.21: Ben Franklin, Rimbaldi, and the Future

Well, Fringe 3.21 tonight had everything from Walter doing his best Ben Franklin to Olivia making like Sydney from Alias (with an ancient drawing of Olivia in play), and a promised surprise ending that wasn't about a person or place but a time.

The word about Fringe in its first year was that time travel would not be one of the themes explored.  That expectation was already broken with an excellent, personal time travel story last year - a  pretty much stand alone story- what I called Strangeness on a Train, episode 2.18, with Peter Weller.   But now time travel, to the future no less, has been woven into the central, war-between-the-realities narrative of Fringe, as Peter ends up 15 years into the future in our reality.  

We know this because he's near a September 11, 2001 memorial plaque in New York - this didn't happen on the other side, "over there" - and it's by a plaque dated September 11, 2021.  And there seems to be some horrendous new mass destruction going on in this future.  

How Peter got there is less interesting, I'd say, then the fact that he's now there.  But his journey entailed Walter flying a kite to attract electricity; Olivia making Sam work with her, at gun point; and Sam bowing out as Olivia, at Walter's coaxing, uses telekinesis (one of the original Fringe golden-age science fiction themes from the beginning) to open the doomsday device here on this side by shutting off the device on the other side on Liberty Island through the sheer power of her mind.

One of the great problems with time travel - in additional to the tantalizing, mind-numbing paradoxes - is how, if you've traveled to the future, can you communicate with people back in your own time.  At least when you travel to the past, you can leave a note - or an ad in a newspaper (as Isaac Asimov had his hero do in The End of Eternity, my favorite time travel novel).

And, to make Peter's situation even more interesting, he's not only in the future, he's in his future - that is, he seems to be 15 years older.

Will be fun to see what Peter - and the future versions of our other characters - do about this, and other crises that beset them, next week ...

And coming this August ... my essay  The Return of 1950s Science Fiction in Fringe in this new anthology ...




See also Fringe 3.1: The Other Olivia ... Fringe 3.2: Bad Olivia and Peter ... Fringe 3.3: Our/Their Olivia on the Other Side ... Fringe 3.5: Back from Hiatus, Back from the Amber ... Fringe 3.7: Two Universes Still Nearing Collision ... Fringe 3.8: Long Voyages Home ... Fringe 3.10: The Return of the Eternal Bald Observers ... Flowers for Fringenon in Fringe 3.11 ... Fringe 3.12: The Wrong Coffee  ... Fringe 3.13: Alternate Fringe ... Fringe 3.14: Amber Here ... Fringe 3.15: Young Peter and Olivia ... Fringe 3.16: Walter and Yoko ... Fringe 3.17: Bell, Olivia, Lee, and the Cow ... Fringe 3.18: Clever Walternate ... Fringe 3.19 meets Inception, The Walking Dead, Tron ... Fringe 3.20: Countdown to Season 3 Finale 1 of 3
 
See also reviews of Season 2: Top Notch Return of Fringe Second Season ... Fringe 2.2 and The Mole People ... Fringe 2.3 and the Human Body as Bomb ... Fringe 2.4 Unfolds and Takes Wing ... Fringe 2.5: Peter in Alternate Reality and Wi-Fi for the Mind ... A Different Stripe of Fringe in 2.6 ... The Kid Who Changed Minds in Fringe 2.7 ... Fringe 2.8: The Eternal Bald Observers ... Fringe 2.9: Walter's Journey ... Fringe 2.10: Walter's Brain, Harry Potter, and Flowers for Algernon ...  New Fringe on Monday Night: In Alternate Universe? ... Fringe 2.12: Classic Science Fiction Chiante ... Fringe 2.13: "I Can't Let Peter Die Again" ... Fringe 2.14: Walter's Health, Books, and Father ... Fringe 2.15: I'll Take 'Manhatan' ... Fringe 2.16: Peter's Story ... Fringe 2.17: Will Olivia Tell Peter? ... Fringe 2.18: Strangeness on a Train ... Fringe 2.19: Two Plus Infinity ... Fringe the Noir Musical ... Fringe 2.21: Bring on the Alternates ... Fringe 2.22:  Tin Soldiers and Nixon Coming ... Fringe Season 2 Finale: The Switch

See also reviews of Season One Fringe Begins ... Fringe 2 and 3: The Anthology Tightrope ... 4: The Eternal Bald Observer ... 7: A Bullet Can Scramble a Dead Brain's Transmission ... 8. Heroic Walter and Apple Through Steel ... 9. Razor-Tipped Butterflies of the Mind ... 10. Shattered Pieces Come Together Through Space and Times ... 11. A Traitor, a Crimimal, and a Lunatic ... 12, 13, 14: Fringe and Teleportation ... 15: Fringe is Back with Feral Child, Pheromones, and Bald Men ... 17. Fringe in New York, with Oliva as Her Suspect ... 18. Heroes and Villains across Fringe ... Stephen King, Arthur C. Clarke, and Star Trek in Penultimate Fringe ... Fringe Alternate Reality Finale: Science Fiction At Its Best

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The Plot to Save Socrates


"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

---

Enjoy listening to audio books? Get a free audio book copy of The Plot to Save Socrates - or any one of 85,000 other titles - with a 14-day trial membership at Audible.com ...

NCIS 8.19: The Deadly Book

Well, some of my critics think some of my books are deadly, but that's not the way the book at the centerpiece of NCIS 8.19 was deadly tonight.   It was responsible for the murder of two.   And just how it was responsible provides the story of one of the better standalone whodunits on NCIS this season.

First victim discovered is a Navy Commander.   He was doing some kind of intelligence work - which the Admiral in charge (Carl Lumbly from Alias) is not quite willing to tell all about to Gibbs.   Then the second victim turns up dead - a good looking woman working for the DIA.   There are remnants of a burned book in her fireplace.   Is this book somehow relevant to her death?   And if yes, the Commander's, too?

The book is an expose of illegal miltary operations, which both the Commander and the DIA agent were investigating.   So there's no doubt that the book in some way triggered the two murders.   But by whom?   Someone who's career would be ruined if the book gets published?

There follows a good investigation of the publisher, and the author, but the murderer is still not only at large but unknown.   And the key, it turns out, is the oldest motive in the world.  The book is dedicated to the DIA agent, who had a romantic involvement with the author.    The husband of the DIA agent sees the dedication, follows her to a meeting with the Commander - strictly business and relating to their case - and wrongly assumes that she's having an affair with him.   The husband then goes on to kill both.

Sometimes the solution has nothing to do with military secrets or rogue governmental agents, but is rather hiding in the plain sight of perennial, everyday marital discord.   A good twist for a show like NCIS, and, as Gibbs advises the murderer - try divorce instead.  He of course should know.

Gibbs also had the best line in the show, about a danish in a dispenser looking like it was there since he first started working at NCIS.  What is it about those danishes - they always look that way.   But tonight's show was like a nice fresh danish, tasty, not too heavy, and a good snack as we wait for the powerhouse shows up ahead.

See also NCIS Back in Season 8 Action ... NCIS 8.2: Interns! ... NCIS 8.3: Tiff! ... NCIS 8.4: Gary Cooper not John Wayne ... NCIS 8.5: Dead DJ, DiNozzo Hoarse, and Baseball ... NCIS 8.6: The Written Woman ... NCIS 8.7: "James Bond Movie Directed by Fellini" ... NCIS 8.8: Ziva's Father 
... NCIS 8.9: Leon's Story ... NCIS 8.10: DiNozzo In and Out ... NCIS 8.11: "The Sister Went Viral" ... Bob Newhart on NCIS 8.12 ... NCIS 8.13: The Wife or the Girlfriend ... NCIS 8.14: Kate ... NCIS 8.15: McGee and DiNozzo's Badges ... NCIS 8.16: Computer Games ... NCIS 8.17: Budget Cuts ... NCIS 8.18: Gibbs vs. the Kid

And see also NCIS  ... NCIS 7.16: Gibbs' Mother-in-Law Dilemma ... NCIS 7.17: Ducky's Ties ... NCIS 7.18: Bogus Treasure and Real Locker ... NCIS 7.21: NCIS Meets Laura ... NCIS Season 7 Finale: Retribution

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The Plot to Save Socrates
"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

The Event 1.7: The Portal and its Implications

As The Event has progressed on NBC, some viewers have contended that the aliens - the ones who caused the plane on the verge of crashing into the President to disappear and materialize elsewhere, the ones who don't age - are really not aliens or extraterrestrial biological entities (EBEs) but human beings from our own future.   Although episode 1.7 tonight had the reporter repeat her assertion that they're EBEs (not different from aliens, just a better name for them), we also saw a conversation between Sophia and Thomas (revealed as her son - nice touch!) in which they talk about building a "portal" to get back "home".

So suddenly the humans-from-the-future hypothesis has a bit more traction.   At very least, the presumed EBEs are not trying to build a star ship to get them home.  They're working a portal.  Of course, a portal can be used for jumps across space, or jumps across time, or jumps across both at the same time.

Here's a brief primer:  Space ships and star ships travel mostly across space (though they can also go through time via worm holes or some other wild encounter out there).   Time machines are the old-fashioned vehicle of choice for the time traveler - as in H. G. Wells - but portals have been responsible for some pretty significant temporal journeys too (Harlan Ellison's "The City on the Edge of Forever" is a great example, and probably my favorite Star Trek episode from the original series).   But portals are also the vehicle for jumps across the universe in Star Gate.

So where does that leave us regarding the portal and its significance in The Event?  Although Sophia and Thomas's people could still be aliens or EBEs - and I still think they very likely are - the portal does open the possibility, at least a crack, that these folks are humans from our future (or, for that matter, a past in which a branch of our ancestors were technologically highly sophisticated).   We do seem to know for a fact that their DNA is different from ours - Simon (who survives the blast) escapes detection tonight when an EBE agent swaps out Simon's DNA for a human's.   Different DNA points towards alien or EBE, but could also be the case for humans from our distant future or past.

Meanwhile, we also had a pretty good Blake back story - his wife was a Russian spy - which although seen before in Alias, had a very different resolution in The Event.  And we meet Hal Holbrook, who plays a very old, very bad guy, who at very least is responsible for killing Leila's mother, kidnapping her sister, and who knows what else.   He's presumably human, because he's obviously aged, but for all we know he could be another kind of EBE, maybe a rival group - though, on a third hand, he doesn't seem to be commanding the kind of EBE power we've seen.

Will be fun to see how these portals progress in the weeks and months ahead ...

See also The Event Debuts on NBC ... The Event 1.2: Aliens! ... The Event 1.4: 24 Back in Action! ... The Event 1.6: Not Only Aliens, Immortals!

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The Plot to Save Socrates
"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book 

Covert Affairs on USA Network

Covert Affairs checked in with a strong pilot on the USA Network last night.   The series stars Piper Perabo - said to be the new Julia Roberts - as new CIA agent Annie Walker.  She does have a lot of Julia Roberts, her beauty and smile, and also something of Jennifer Garner as Sydney Bristow in Alias, one of my all-time favorite series due to its Chinese box-in-a-box complexity and style.   Bourne Identity producer Doug Liman is producing Covert Affairs, so it also has a lot of the style and pace of that fine movie, too.

The pilot had car chases and pursuits on foot you don't often see with such power and speed on television.   The plot had some good twists and supporting acting, including Anne Dudek (best seen on House) who plays Annie's older sister, Kari Matchett (best seen, at least in my view, on ABC's Invasion a few years ago) who plays Annie's boss, and even Clarke Peters (The Wire, Treme) as Annie's professor.   Christopher Gorham as Auggie Anderson, Annie's bright, young, blind colleague was also pretty good, and the character is refreshing.  No blind detective on television has been as compelling as Longstreet, from back in the 1970s, so it will be interesting to follow Auggie's role on the show.

As Auggie tells Annie early on, the CIA lifted its hiring freeze after September 11, so most of the people at Langley are new hires and young.    They're also often involved with each other - Kari Matchett is problematically married to Peter Gallagher's character, head of Annie's division - because that way secrets can (usually) be kept a little safer, at least not likely to be divulged to a reporter or worse, an enemy agent, during pillow talk.    We'll no doubt see that proposition sorely tested during the series.

Annie's heart was broken right before she joined up - and that was indeed her motive for becoming an agent - but the guy is still watching over her, stalking her, who knows about his ultimate intentions.

More than enough story, color, and action to keep me watching.

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The Plot to Save Socrates


"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book 

24 Season 8 Hours 3 and 4: The Female Jack

Hours 3 and 4 of 24, Day (or Season) 8, were on tonight with a fine, heart pounding, surprising story.   The two hours actually told two very different, though interconnected, stories ...

In Hour 3:  Omar Hassan (played by Slumdog Millionaire's Anil Kapoor - he reminds me a little of Omar Sharif back in his Lawrence of Arabia days) does the right thing, and supports reporter Meredith Reed's (Jennifer Westfeldt) admission to Hastings that she and Hassan had been having an affair.  But Hastings still think she could be part of the assassination attempt, and is swayed by planted evidence on Meredith's computer.   Only Chloe thinks the evidence may have been planted, but Hastings won't listen to her, and the assassination plan proceeds...

Out in Queens, Jack's doing his best to track and stop the assassin, but he winds up with a gun in his hand and a dead cop and his wife - they were killed by the assassin, who is now taking the slain cop's place in the protection detail for Hassan at the UN.   A Vic Mackey wannabee (actually, Domenick Lombardozzi - Herc  - from The Wire, a fine actor) and his partner played by Johnny Wu take Jack into custody.   Domenick beats Jack, certain that he's a cop killer.  Fortunately, Wu doesn't like this and is just convinced enough by Jack's story to call it in ... This allows Jack to get in touch with Cole at the U.N., and arrive there himself, just in time to -

Save Hassan.   As I say in my review of just about every episode, with 24 you never know...  But it's clear now that Cole is a major, valuable CTU agent, able to think and act almost as fast as Jack, and drive a wild car to stop an assassination with the best of 'em.

On to Hour 4:  There's almost always a bad guy behind the bad guy we've been dealing with on 24, and we soon meet that guy and his son (played by David Anders - Alias's Sark! and he just appeared in a reprise of Hiro's arch enemy in Heroes tonight).   There's weapons grade uranium involved, but Jack's still determined to get back to L.A. ... but hey, this is 24, as in 24 hours, so that's not gonna happen just yet.

But the real reason is the not the uranium but a radioactive relationship that didn't quite happen last year - between Renee (Annie Wersching) and Jack.  Here's my take on last year (Season 7): the two are attracted to each other, even love each other, should sleep with each other already.   Other elements:  Renee didn't approve of some of Jack's violent methods last year, but by the end of the year, well, maybe she had been transformed.

We find out just how much tonight.  She's called back from private security to help get to the Russian gang (the father and son) who are behind the uranium dealings.  Jack doesn't think she's ready to get back into the cross fires.   Hastings and Renee ignore his advice.   Jack won't be going to LA just yet.  He's going to go in with Renee.    She's not thrilled about having a babysitter, but, like I said, she feels something real for Jack so I'd say she's mostly glad he'll be with her.

So the two go out on the mission together.  And in Renee's very first interaction with a bad guy, she gets a little frustrated, and cuts his hand off!

This is the first time in the series that I can recall Jack partnered with a woman who has less patience with bad guys than he does.    Should be a riveting day for Jack and Renee and all else concerned.  (By the way, Chloe's better than ever.)


6-min podcast review of 24

See also Season 8 reviews: Hours 1 and 2


And see also Season 7 reviews: Hours 1 and 2 ... Hours 3 and 4 ... Hour 5 ... Hour 6 ... Hour 7 ... Hour 8 ... Hour 9 ... Hour 10 ... Hours 11-12 ... Hour 13 ... Hour 14 ... Hour 15 ... Hour 16 ... Hour 17 ... Hour 18 ... Hour 19 ... Hour 20 ... Hour 21 ... Hour 22  ... Hours 23-24 

And see also Season 6 reviews: Hours 1 and 2 ... Hours 3 and 4 ... Hour 5 ... Hour 6 ... Hour 7 ... Hours 8 and 9 ... Hour 10 ... Hour 11 ... Hour 12 ... Hour 13 ... Hour 14 ... Hour 15 ... Hour 16 ... Hour 17 ... Hour 18... Hour 19 ... Hour 20 ... Hour 21 ... Hour 22 ... Hours 23-24

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