Revolution 2.4: Nanites and ... Maybe Aliens?

On a night in which our real US government finally got down to business in Washington, the faux US government - the self-styled "patriots" - took a beating from our heroes in Atlanta and the Plains Nation in Revolution 2.4.

The Atlanta scene featured Major Tom eliminating his patriot superior and taking over that position himself.  It was a good move towards Tom's goal of destroying them from the inside.  Tom is sure that the patriots are not really a vestige or descendant of the US government before the blackout, and a sheet of paper in Rachel's hand out West seems to support that.

The best action in a variety of ways was out West tonight.  Charlie and Monroe come to the edge of an uneasy truce, as Monroe saves her from men who drugged her.   Miles dispatches that sicko who lost his wife.  But the best part of the story entails Rachel turning the deadly tables on her friend Ken and killing him - he turns out to be a patriot and was about to kill her - and what happens when two patriot soldiers get the drop on Miles.

Actually, I regretted Ken's dying for two reasons - I like the acting of Richard T. Jones - and he died only because he followed the dumb Hollywood practice of not killing Rachel immediately.  Ken was old enough to have seen how many times James Bond was able to turn the table on his would-be killers when they toyed with Bond rather than killing him outright.  But Rachel comes away from that encounter with the piece of paper I mentioned above - which she shows to Miles - and it has some kind of writing that neither recognizes.  So I'm wondering - aliens?

Meanwhile, Miles was able to make that meeting with Rachel because Aaron came to the rescue - by seeing the danger Miles was in, even though Aaron's eyes were closed and he was miles away - and directing the nanites to incinerate the patriot soldiers.

Good stuff - definite nanites under Aaron's control, and possible aliens.  Bring it on.

PS - In response to a comment on IMDB: The writing on the sheet resembled Arabic. But - I saw that, and thought, wouldn't someone as educated as Rachel have known that was Arabic?

See also Revolution 2.1: "The Last Surviving Friend" ... Revolution 2.2: Reanimation

And see also Revolution: Preview Review  ... Revolution 1.2: Fast Changes ... Revolution 1.14: Nanites and Jack Bauer ... Revolution 1.15: Major Tom and More 24 ... Revolution 1.16: Feeling a Little Like the Hatch in Lost ... Revolution 1.17: Even Better Nanites ... Revolution 1.18: Whodunnit? ... Revolution 1.19: Cheney's Bunker ... Revolution Season 1 Finale: Good Pivot




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Bones 5.12: A Famous Skeleton and Angela's Baby

JFK's bones and Angela's pregnancy were the stories in the unusual, appealing episode of Bones 5.12 tonight.   In both cases, the question is whether they are real.

Let's start with Angela.   She thinks she's pregnant.  This leads Jack to tell her that he wants to take care of her and the baby, even though the baby is Wendell's.   But it turns out Angela's pregnancy test gave a false positive.   Angela is left with a renewed deep appreciation of Jack.   What have I been telling ya - they're moving closer and closer to getting back together, which is where they belong.

Meanwhile,  Bones and team are obliged to perform an examination of an unidentified set of bones.  Unfortunately, the lame coming attractions repeatedly told us the bones were JFK's, thereby depriving us of the pleasure of figuring this out or discovering it ourselves (Fox: wake up!).   But the story was still very enjoyable, mostly because -

Booth stands up to the Secret Service team, led by Agent Ellison (Richard T. Jones) from The Sarah Connor Chronicles (not really Ellison, but it was good to Jones in action again).   And -

There's some question of whether the bones are really JFK's.  Booth doesn't want them to be - he wants to believe the U. S. government would never cover up that there was more than one assassin.   (We also hear that he's a descendant of John Wilkes Booth - I can't recall if we knew that before.)   But Bones and the rest of the team conclude there was indeed more than one killer.

Booth's not happy.  But then Bones apparently discovers that the bones are really not JFK's, which makes Booth happy.  But it turns out she thinks the bones may really be JFK's after all, but she played it that they're not, for the sake of Booth.   That's a nice touch, indeed, and it gets Cam to tell Bones she's a good person.

Bones has always been more about relationships, ultimately, than about bones...  (And, hey, a fine Michael Jackson bit by Booth at the beginning.)


5-min podcast review of Bones


See also Bones: Hilarity and Crime and Bones is Back For Season 5: What Is Love? and 5.2: Anonymous Donors and Pipes and 5.3: Bones in Amish Country and 5.4: Bones Meets Peyton Place and Desperate Housewives and Ancient Bones 5.5 and Bones 5.6: A Chicken in Every Viewer's Pot and Psychological Bones 5.7 and Bones 5.8: Booth's "Pops" and Bones 5.9 Meets Avatar and Videogamers ... Bad Santa, Heart-Warming Bones 5.10 ... Bones 5.11: Of UFOs, Bloggers, and Triangles

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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 

Vantage Point: Flawed but Fine

Hey, I just saw Vantage Point on DVD. The critics didn't much like it, but, once again, I didn't much agree with them.

In fact, I thought Vantage Point was pretty good. Kept me guessing with good twists and lots of action. A refreshingly different kind of assassination movie - especially in tune with the complexities of our age, in which the bad guys are far from dummies.

Two points I did have a little trouble with -

1. William Hurt played both the President and his double. Now, I can understand the people in Spain, in the crowd, not knowing the difference. But the event was televised on GNN - a CNN equivalent - with close-ups to boot. How would the double, however much he looked and sounded like the President, have fooled the American people and everyone in the news business? (This flaw could have been dealt with by setting up the news coverage as unable, for whatever tech or security reason, to deliver close-ups of the President with decent sound.)

2. I guessed Matthew Fox (Agent Taylor) was the bad guy as soon as he told Dennis Quaid (Agent Barnes) that he, Fox, would check something out. Now, I think making Fox the bad guy was an ingenious move, given that we know him best as Jack Shephard on Lost, who is good, through and through. But something in that scene between Fox and Quaid gave it away, at least to me.

Nonetheless, if was a fine movie. With an especially good part played by Forest Whitaker, who never disappoints. (Also good to see Richard T. Jones - Agent Ellison from The Sarah Connor Chronicles - playing Agent Holden in Vantage Point.)

PS: My wife had trouble with an additional point in the movie: Why did the terrorists want to take the President alive? Didn't bother me, though. I thought that, with these more intelligent than usual terrorists, we're supposed to assume that they understand that holding a US President hostage gives you a better hand to play than killing the President.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles 7

Episode 7 of The Sarah Connor Chronicles on Fox tonight was mostly about the education of FBI agent James Ellison - well played by Richard T. Jones. He started the evening in possession of a Terminator hand and some doubts and suspicions. He ended being rescued by Sarah from a blaze - a blaze set by Sarah's psychiatrist from the mental institution in which she had been held in the 1990s. The psychiatrist - also well played by the perennial Bruce Davison - didn't believe her then. But he believes it now. So much that he doesn't trust Ellison with the hand, and wants to kill him and take the hand himself.

But, he doesn't lend himself a hand at all - sorry - because Sarah frees Ellison, who puts the psych in a mental institution in a nice nasty bit of poetic justice. And Sarah takes the Terminator hand and destroys it.

So where does that leave us? Ellison could think the shrink was just crazy all along, including when he was raving about the attack from the future. But a part of him was suspicious already....

It may hinge on how much of his ordeal will he remember. In a scene near the end, he seems to be conscious when Sarah rescues him. Will this make him Sarah's ally? Will he buy her explanation about what happened to the hand? Will Sarah tell him?

I'm sorry that the two-hour finale is coming up next week, though it looks to be good and I'll certainly be watching it. But there's a lot more that could be developed in these intriguing chronicles ... including John's relationship with his uncle, which is just getting started, and, of course, the ultimate loyalties of Cameron...

See also: The Sarah Connor Chronicles 1 and 2 ... 3 ... 4. A Robot Primer ... 5 ... 6 ... 8-9: Terminate with Puzzles, Surprises, and Soul

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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

more about The Plot to Save Socrates...





Read the first chapter of The Plot to Save Socrates .... FREE!

The Sarah Connor Chronicles 5

The fifth episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles on Fox has pretty much everything...

An exquisite moral dilemma about the continuing problem of what Sarah should do about Andy the programmer, whose chess code for the "Turk" could be the basis of Skynet. She previously burned down his house to knock him off track, but he's back at it. Will Sarah follow Cameron's advice to play it safe stop Andy for good?

Of course not - Sarah's not a machine, she's a human, with feelings and morality.

So Andy will live-

But not long, because someone kills him. Exquisite ethical quandaries are often futile ... Derrick Reese - Kyle's brother - also on assignment from the future, is seen running from the body...

Putting Derrick in the story is a good move. It enriches Sarah's connections to Kyle in our movie memories. Turns out, though, that he didn't kill Andy. Someone who wanted not to destroy but take the Turk program killed the programmer...

Meanwhile, evil Terminator Cromartie is on Derrick's case and trail. And this sets up one of the best action sequences in the series so far, with Sarah, John, Derrick, Cameron, Cromartie, and screeching trucks and lethal-to-robot screwdrivers in the mix.

Cameron prevails, but Derrick's badly wounded.

Cameron looks at him on the table and gives him up for dead. But John fetches Charley - who's in EMS, and looks like Kyle - and in a great last scene we have Charley, John, Derrick, Sarah (and Cameron) all in the same room...

Family, action, ethical quandary - the makings of good TV in this new golden age.

And, just for good measure, FBI guy James Ellison - well played by Richard T. Jones - finds Cromartie's hand, severed during the truck and screwdriver battle ...

The beat goes on...

See also: The Sarah Connor Chronicles 1 and 2 ... 3 ... 4. A Robot Primer ... 6 ... 7 ... 8-9: Terminate with Puzzles, Surprises, and Soul

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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

more about The Plot to Save Socrates...





Read the first chapter of The Plot to Save Socrates .... FREE!