More New TV!

So, this is gonna be super-brief because my life is chaos now. And because there's only been one episode.

Graceland: USA, Thursdays 10/9C
Anyways, the premise is that this brand-new FBI agent gets stuck in a beach house for undercover FBI, DEA, and CBP (or ICE? They weren't clear, they just said "customs") agents, code-named "Graceland." This beach house is in an undisclosed location in southern California Venice Beach and all kinds of hilarious run-ins with the locals ensue, and the show definitely has some local LA humor - my roommate and I were dying at the "movie" bit - but looks like it could go in some pretty intense and dark directions.

This is one I'm definitely going to start DVRing.

Primeval: New World: Syfy, Saturdays 10/9C
I'm DVRing this, too! You might already know, but I love the original Primeval series - I just want to catch up on it before starting the new one.

Orphan Black: BBC America, on hiatus
Yeah, I wrote a post about it recently. But I finished the season and I'm actually more amazed. Tatiana Maslany needs not just all the Best Actress awards, but like 3 of each Best Supporting Actress award. I've never seen a show go from starting off slow to having a holy-sh!t-what-the-F*CK finale like that one, and it's taken a turn into a much more sci-fi kind of territory. (Although if you've read Next by Micheal Crichton you might guess where it's going) and I completely can not wait for next season!

And one remarkable thing about the Emmy buzz is that this isn't a BBC show that's re-airing on BBC America or PBS, thus making it eligible; This is a BBC America original series, meaning it was their production house (which makes what, maybe one or two shows of its own) and their tiny budget and not the BBC and their slightly less tiny budget that made it - and on top of it being a cable channel, this is a cable channel based around the idea of broadcasting existing programming in a new market, not so much around having original programming or (much) syndication like USA or TNT might have. So it'd be really interesting to see how this might affect TV production by cable channels if it wins any awards.

ETA: Any more awards - as I was writing this, it turns out that Maslany won a Critics' Choice Award

Orphan Black

So back when Doctor Who season 7.2/7.5/whatever you want to call it where JLC shows up for good premiered, this TV show - about clones, who discover they're clones - premiered right afterwards. I watched it, and it seemed interesting, but it didn't hold my interest enough to watch the next week's episode.

Sometime after all the season finales, though, I ran out of new things to watch and gave this show a second try. And wow, was it worth it.

The basic plot is that our main character (and almost always our POV character) Sarah is a small-time criminal and deadbeat single mom, and one night she sees a woman who looks just like her commit suicide in the subway. At that point, she decides that the logical thing to do is to pick up that woman's bag and heels and take over her identity or at least her bank accounts. Then, she ends up discovering that this woman's life isn't magically perfect - in fact, both Sarah and the dead woman, Beth, are members of a group of clones that's being killed off.

Admittedly, the first three or four episodes are a bit slow. But sometime around episode six people outside of their little circle start discovering their secrets, sh#t really hits the fan, and this series becomes incredibly addictive. And the supporting characters are great, too: Beth's partner, Art, and the forensic tech, and her boyfriend, Paul; Allison's husband; Cosima's French friend Delphine; Sarah's foster mom, her biological daughter, Kira, and my absolute favorite of all, her flamboyantly gay foster brother and co-conspirator, Felix.

And that Emmy buzz surrounding Tatiana Maslany? She completely deserves it. At times, I completely forget it's the same actress playing all those characters - apparently, there's supposed to be nine clones that Cosima has tracked down "so far", but so far I've only counted six that I've seen on-screen (Sarah, Beth, The German/Jane Doe, Allison, Cosima, and Helena). The amazing part isn't just how she plays Sarah or Allison or Cosima - it's how she also perfectly manages the complexities of one clone trying to be another. A less skilled actress, if she played Sarah and Allison, for example, and suddenly was faced with the role of Sarah pretending to be Allison, might simply play that role the same way she plays Allison, whereas with Maslany's performance we still know that it's Sarah we're watching.

Although nothing will fill the gap that Fringe has left in my heart and schedule, this is definitely satiating my desire for brainy weird scifi! (Also, this makes keeping track of a different versions of each character in each of 2 universes in each of 2 timelines, plus one universe in a future timeline, look simple!)

Good News, Everyone!

Our favorite bad "drama" TV show, Zero Hour, is going to be airing its remaining episodes this summer!

Prepare for more posts!

Syfy original movie: Stonehenge Apocalypse!

So I couldn't resist when I saw the title on the screen. And then it turned out that this also involves Misha Collins

It starts with Syfy forgetting completely that a) you can't walk inside Stonehenge, or take guided tours in there and b) that some of the rocks there have fallen over. The stones begin rotating, and quite predictably, everyone nearby gets killed.

Although, five minutes in, Misha Collins is not wearing a very tiny toga, unlike some other actors from Supernatural in their Syfy movie debuts... but he is sneaking around some bushes taking photos of Stonehenge, and saying something about an "underground current."

Tori Higginson, of Stargate Atlantis, also shows up, and then Stonehenge kills a whole lot more people, and then for some inexplicable reason, a volcano erupts out of a Mayan pyramid!

(And I swear, I'm sober. This is only the first commercial break!)

At some point, someone says "50-ton stones don't move themselves" which is very obvious. However, he goes on to say "I don't think it's Merlin waving his magic wand" but he's in a Syfy movie so that actually could be the explanation for all of this.

Then. Misha Collins has some kind of device that's showing something that looks like the X-Men movies. And utters the line "Top of the morning." And then there's something about radio waves cycling and electromagnetism changing the structure of organic molecules in the soil or something. Hey, this is less inaccurate than Ancient Aliens! And somehow they determine it's a countdown with 37 seconds left!

But they find out that Misha Collins' papers have a "planetary energy grid" which they promptly, and correctly, denounce as psuedoscience. But, alas! It's shortlived. And it turns out that they can't say "NASA" onscreen so they keep saying "The US Space Agency."  This is priceless!

Also, this is all happening in a high school. Although obviously it's because Syfy didn't have the budget to film anywhere fancier than an empty high school, I'm trying to imagine what in-universe reason was given for this: Were they broke, and attempting to save the UK government money, like how the notorious and now defunct Detroit crime lab ended up in an elementary school? Or is this their attempt at being covert? Or was it simply the nearest structure with internet access and a coffee maker?

(Electromagnetic currents don't criss-cross!) and he claims that ancient civilizations knew about energy grids and built pyramids, and stonehenge, on top of the places where they crossed. And also that there's an undiscovered "ancient site" in Maine.

And apparently the soil around the stones is turning purple because of bacteria. The scientists try to lower something from a helicopter to read an energy field in the middle of stonehenge. But, rather than having a helicopter with a piece of equipment on a winch or something, the equipment is just stuck on the bottom of it and the entire helicopter goes lower. Predictably, it explodes.

(and there's a commercial with William Shatner doing some kind of Syfy original series that involves him being "weird." I'm almost afraid to look)

Strangely enough, this event is being handled by the US military. I don't even know if they bothered to try to explain it. And the soldier says line like, "In my world, when something counts down, it goes boom." Therefore, the US military decides it wants to demolish Stonehenge. With explosives.

Unsurprisingly, this only causes the stones to make lots of electromagnetism again. Meanwhile.... I can't even keep track of what's going on, but we see the thing that looks like the X-Men logo again, and they're talking about a "key" and "advanced technology" and apparently Misha Collins' token non-white friends are doing something somewhere else that's related.

(disclaimer: I may or may not be multitasking and cooking mac and cheese and assembling my new Iron Man 3 legos right now)

This time, a volcanic eruption has "flattened" Indonesia, and they said that there's a "planetary military" that "requires a global military response." Oh, so is the US government finally going to let the British government's military get involved in what's going on in their own country? Anyways, this is at the point that they decide to listen to Misha Collins. But the military people think that the "joint council" (IDK, the UN?) is going to order them to nuke stonehenge. And then they want to use a radio telescope to try to jam the EM signals stonehenge is making in order to prevent it from being nuked.

At some point, Misha Collins asks what the bacteria were, and decides that Earth is being terraformed. Or reverse terraformed. Or whatever. And then someone says "the stone's wavelength is approaching visible light" and then uses the phrase "going gamma" and then says "gamma waves are atomic." This, apparently, is an excuse to CGI pretty things around stonehenge, and make the stones glow.

So, somehow, Misha Collins & co are in a museum in NY. Maybe all of this has been headquartered and happening in the US to begin with? But they see a "relic" that's got the X-Men logo on it, too. And it starts to glow, too. And they end up deciding to steal it, just at the same time that someone else does and starts shooting up the place. It now also appears that this movie may have been filmed using solely whatever lighting was already existing on location.

It turns out that the person doing the shooting was the Token Black Friend (way to go, writers!) and apparently he was in Egypt, and the X-Men thing can "activate" some kind of buried pyramid that will be safe from the apocalypse. Seriously, did they just take random words from Ancient Aliens and make them into a screenplay? Also, Misha Collins is apparently supposed to be angry, or passionate about saving the human race or something, and he's talking in his Castiel voice now.

(Now I'm eating mac and cheese. And consuming certain adult drinks. And putting together my Iron Man 3 legos)

The next 10-hour countdown is almost over, and they've said "It's going to be a bigger bang." This time, the volcano is under the Great Pyramids, to nobody's surprise, and apparently this causes the Mediterranean sea to flood into Egypt. Then, they decide not only to evacuate all pyramid-like sites, and to nuke stonehenge after all.

Also, Misha Collins mocks his Token Friend of Color's belief that Earth goes through cycles of destruction and rebirth. Like the theory about Merlin, that's not really any more weird than the "correct" theory. One also has to wonder how much Syfy is paying these actors for this movie... their entire budgets can't be more than 1-2 million, so deduct salaries for the crew and filming permits alone... I'm not an expert on film financing, but some of the actors have got to be doing this for the pure fun of it.

So our antagonist puts the X-Men stone on the altar, stuff is happening, and someone says "Holy Crap!" and a giant pyramid is rising out of the ground in Mexico.

And, apparently, it was an American military base that was over near stonehenge. Because once the order to nuke it was given, and therefore the order to evacuate, everyone runs and climbs over stuff like the building is on fire. Because I guess whoever's got their fingers on that red button can't wait twenty minutes to allow everyone to exit in a calm and orderly fashion?

For some strange reason, once they get into the pyramid, it turns out the guy with the stone has... activated that pyramid and run away? Why? Back where the scientists are, they say that the stones are "sucking up the entire planet's electromagnetic energy." What?

Misha Collins chases his ex-friend/antagonist through the woods of vancouver maine and eventually retrieves the X-Men thing. Meanwhile, the scientists discover that someone is a mole, and they shout at him to get out of the base that's apparently been evacuated or something? But the mole points a gun at them, as if they would be capable of forcing him to leave otherwise, or as if they weren't about to all die anyways.

In the end, Misha Collins' character sacrifices himself to save the planet (in a way I'm still not sure about) and Tori Higginson's character takes over his radio show. And we get two brilliant newspaper headlines: One calling his character a "fringe scientist" making me think of a certain favorite show, and the second, "Death Toll Too High To Count." Not "tens thousands" or "hundreds of thousands" or "estimated at two million," just "too high to count."

Hemlock Grove, Part 1

So my roommate and I were bored the other night and ended up slogging through two episodes of the travesty that is Netflix's second foray into original programming.

I feel like someone attempted to mash up Revenge and Teen Wolf and Grimm or something but failed to do it with any remote kind of competency. The series opens with a guy drinking in his front yard, and someone who's acting like a "precocious child" stereotype telling him that she's decided he's a werewolf.

Turns out, they're both in high school, and he is a werewolf. Also, he gets butt-naked, probably because of the werewolf thing.

In fact, lots of the characters are high schoolers. And much of the plot so far involves the high school.

There's a Victoria Grayson type character, who I guess isn't human. She seems to be having sex with everyone in town. She's got a high school age son, who is strangely pale-looking and apparently has a foot fetish. I guess he's supposed to be one half of this show's werewolf/human/vampire trio that's a staple of fantasy? She also has this daughter, who is hairless and supposedly has scars or something on one side of her face but I don't think that eye is even human. In any case, it's definitely not fitting with a human skull. Normally, this girl wears a wig worthy of Cousin It, and apparently bandages on her hands, and I guess her mom has everyone thinking she's severely mentally challenged or something. But, she types eloquent letters to her mom's brother, who from here on out I'll refer to as Uncle Fester.

Uncle Fester has a wife, and a daughter who's pregnant and completely and genuinely believes that an angel did it.

Also, werewolf boy is living with either his mom or his sister in what looks like a double-long version of a double-wide somewhere out in the forest. That set is the one thing I love about this show: The way that the lawn chairs are on the flat, empty space in front of the house, the years-old beer bottles in the dead leaves, bring up memories of the kinds of unfurnished "outdoor living space" kind of places all over the rural, working-class-to-poor areas where I spent my childhood.

The rest of it... for a show supposedly set in PA (or maybe OH, but either way, close enough) it's got believable scenery. At least they didn't film it in Griffith Park, or worst of all, Bronson Canyon. But there are other problems: The camera work is generally not impressive, and oh dear god, the lighting. There's a scene where they're outdoors, in a field, on a partially cloudy day. Now, the light there will be generally sunshiny, although not as intense as LA - maybe white with a slight greyish tint on a cloudy day, and a slightly warm white on a sunny day. But, the lighting on the characters and props make it look like they're standing under one of those giant yellow-and-white striped tents that you see pop up at county fairs and large church parties.

And the writing. Where do I get started with the writing? For that matter, where did anyone get started with that writing? I feel like each writer was given a different character's plot line, and then at the end they each swapped papers with another writer in an attempt to "edit" and give it some sense of continuity, and then declared it ready to be filmed.

Apparently, this series had a $45 million budget. I'm trying to figure out what they spent it all on: My current best guess is the funds that were required to haul an entire film set off to the middle-of-nowhere kinds of locations where they filmed.

Doctor WHAT. THE. HELL?!?

So, Saturday was the season finale of Doctor Who. In an episode titled "The Name of the Doctor" - which worried fans because not knowing his name is a big thing over the 50 years of the series - we were promised answers to questions that had been raised over the past season and some, including "Why doesn't Clara remember that she was a Dalek and a nanny?" and "Why does she keep using the same phrases over and over?"

Well, without spoiling anything, all of those answers, as well as a few things that were mentioned in previous seasons, were wrapped up neatly in a package that made sense and didn't really require any universe-resetting.

But then, at the very end, after all of that, we got...

[BIGGEST SPOILER WARNING FOR THIS SHOW EVER]
[I swear I'm not exaggerating. I don't think anything so unexpected has ever happened in the reboot. Or in a lot of other canons. You have been warned!]

Hiatuses, cancellations, and new stuff!

So, there hasn't been anything new on this blog in a little while. Reasons include:

• Arrow has been on hiatus
• Cult has been canceled with no indication of when the remaining eps will air
• Zero Hour has been canceled, but is still airing in Canada
• I have a part-time job (yay!)

I've also been watching The Following, aka the last cult conspiracy show standing. It's getting quite interesting, but the characters continue to do more and more stupid things. I want to start a drinking game based on how often Kevin Bacon goes into a building where a serial killer is without backup. There may or may not be a post on the compiled stupidity of the first season.

The pilot of Defiance aired this weekend, and it's a kind of last-remaining-human-outpost show that feels like Falling Skies meets Outcasts. So far, I think I kind of like it.

Tried watching the first two episodes of Hannibal. I found it deeply weird. Deeply, deeply weird and kind of fucked up. Like, the creepiest episodes of the early years of X-Files weird and fucked up.

And my roommate has gotten us both addicted to Alias. Some of the stuff is a blast from the past and is so late 90's/early 00's it's ridiculous. And there's a young Bradley Cooper in it!

Best of all, I have 20 episodes of Ancient Aliens queued up on my DVR. My "Best Of" selection of some of the episode titles includes:

• Aliens and the Secret Code (sounds like Nancy Drew)
• Aliens and the Third Reich (yep, Nazis again!)
• Aliens and the Undead (zombies are popular, too)
• Aliens and Bigfoot (sounds like X-Files)
• Aliens and Dinosaurs (There was a Doctor Who episode or three like this)
• Aliens and Cover-Ups (Conpsiracy theories exist to cover up the real conspiracies!)
• Destination Orion (We already know that all alien things lead to Orion)

So, yeah. New stuff soon!

Off-Topic: Stats!

I think I may have found the best search term yet that's led someone to my blog:

"Fox Moulder [sic] looking stupid." 

Readers, that is all for now.

TV update!

So, in a post about new midseason shows, I covered a few. Here's what I've been watching that I haven't been relentlessly blogging:

Arrow: (CW, Wednesdays 8 PM) Yes I'm blogging it but just need to say I love this show I love this show I FREAKING LOVE THIS SHOW. And the producers are self-admitted Whovians, which they say is why they got John Barrowman and Alex Kingston in the same episode!

Body of Proof: (ABC, Tuesdays 9 PM) Still an enjoyable forensics show. 

Bones: (Fox, Mondays 8 PM) Meh. Nothing particularly interesting lately, and it's been getting a bit like CSI: After-School Specials, it feels.

Continuum: (Syfy, return TBA) I'm actually really, really liking this series. Things get very interesting in the last few episodes of the first season!

Criminal Minds: (CBS, Wednesdays 9 PM) This is alternating between being like almost-softcore-torture-porn, and having some really, really interesting episodes with unexpected endings.

Cult: (CW, um... when?) I think the only positive point of this show is just how genre-savvy it is - it mercilessly makes fun of the industry. But that's enough to keep me watching. It's been shuffled around time slots, because it used to be Thursday, but then a week and a half ago I found it in the Friday Night Death Slot, so I'm guessing it's doomed. Unless the fact that a lot of it is filmed using the WB lot as "on location" happens to make it worth the few viewers it brings in.

Elementary: (CBS, Thursdays 10 PM) So much love for this show, and it just keeps getting better. If you don't already, watch it. 'Nuff said.

Glee: (Fox, Thursdays 9 PM) Somehow, this show went from over-the-top satire, to confusion, and now it's surprisingly good and has a more diverse cast than ever. Plus, they have been doing some truly amazing songs - including a rendition of "In Your Eyes" complete with a boombox, and a wonderful mashup of "Bye Bye Bye" and "I Want It That Way." 

Grimm: (NBC, Fridays 9 PM) The plot is really, really picking up and I'm really liking it. Also, this show is doing a good job of surviving the Friday Night Death Slot, as some SF shows do - and probably with an increased audience now that Fringe (RIP) is off the air.

Haven: (Syfy, returns fall 2013) I love this show. I started it after one of my friends who watched Fringe liked it. The first season was very, very reminiscent of old-school X-Files. (There was a guy whose shadow killed people in one episode, I know for sure. But they solved it by surrounding him with ambient light)

Law & Order: SVU: (NBC, Wednesdays 9 PM) Still full of ripped-from-the-headlines cases, as usual. I'm liking the two new detectives, though.

Project Runway: (Lifetime, Thursdays 9 PM) There's not anyone I love this year, but there was an episode with male stripper. And the team dynamic is really interesting.

The Following: (Fox, Mondays 9 PM) This is a lot better than I expected. Granted, Kevin Bacon's character likes to go alone into places where he knows that there are serial killers, a lot. The story is moving, and it's actually not going down the apparently obvious plot lines.

Off-Topic: Stats Part 2!

This week in "what search terms lead people to my blog" the results are:

Zero Hour: 1 x 03 "Pendulum"

What's our cheesy intro going to be now?

"Two is the number of love, lives ever lost in breath. Sometimes its life(?) pursuit leads not to life, but death."

Spoilers lie beyond!

My DVR: Not Deleted Yet

These are shows that were cancelled or ended. Sometimes, I was too sentimental to delete it from my DVR; in other cases, I had given up, or had finished watching, and simply ended up deleting any remaining episodes when I needed the space but not deleted the "series recording" thing on my DVR itself. Note the preponderance of sci-fi series that were either on Fox or BBC America here.

Torchwood (BBC America)
Oh, the Doctor Who spin-off that went from "dark, funny, and sexy" to "darker, sexy, and kind of tragic" to "really dark, kind of twisted, and tragic" to "really, really, dark and super f*cking messed up." Despite all of this, I'm still kind of attached. 

Fringe (Fox)
Let's just refer to this post, and I don't want to admit that it's over by deleting the series recording. Because it's IMO one of the best sci-fi TV shows ever, and certainly my absolute favorite. Plus, put "Fringe" into Google images and you'll see an endless stream of gorgeous photos. 

Primeval (BBC America)
Gorgeous British people chase around dinosaurs and futuristic monsters, and sometimes getting killed, but only to be replaced by even more gorgeous British people chasing around dinosaurs. This show is pure eye candy, no matter which gender(s) you prefer. And, it's an ITV series, not BBC, for those of you who care. 

Alcatraz (Fox)
So very promising! And yet, Fox wasn't about to give us a second season of Alcatraz and a fifth season of Fringe... so the sharply dropping ratings of this one meant it got axed less ceremoniously. And this was one of those shows that left the main character(s) in the limbo of a cliffhanger ending. This is where the line between "sentimental" and "too lazy to delete this" lies.

The River (ABC)
Oh, god, what a mess. This would've been the perfect show to be fodder for this blog. The synopsis of this was something like "A missing scientist's family looks for him in an obscure branch of the Amazon and strange things happen" but it could be better described as "A white guy tries to mess with magic on an obscure branch of the Amazon and then his family and a camera crew goes looking for him and doing the most stupid-white-people things that they could think of when confronted by probably magical things." It was an absolute train wreck of mediocre production, unremarkable acting, cultural appropriation, and the characters making the absolute worst decisions possible in order to provide plots for the episode... but like a train wreck, you just can't stop watching! Also, much like Alcatraz, it has a finale leaving the character(s) in limbo. 

Terra Nova (Fox)
In which the transportation of mid-22nd century people into a prehistoric, dinosaur-filled era is not as notable as the transportation of mid-20th century "family values" into the mid-22nd century. Also, all of the black or dark-skinned non-white people are bad guys. I didn't even finish this one. 

Prime Suspect (CBS?)
I loved this show, even though they were constantly filming outside my apartment, or setting up base camp in the nearby parking lot, either of which made it hard to get to my car. Jane Timmoney was just awesome! 

Outcasts (BBC America)
A one-season BBC series featuring Jamie Bamber and some other people. A bit slow at first, but things get exciting near the season one finale. Which also turns out to be the series finale. And sort of is in a little bit of limbo, but not as bad as it could've been. Sensing a trend here? 

Sanctuary (Syfy)
It could be bad, bordering on awful, sometimes even "you kind of hope the characters all die in a hole because it'll be more interesting than this" awful on occasions. But, it was a lot of fun, so I still watched it from time to time. 

The Finder (Fox)
So I never really did understand the premise of the show, but it was a lot of fun to watch. This is the one series I'm actually OK with having been cancelled so early, because I don't think they could've replaced Micheal Clarke Duncan. 

Last Resort (ABC)
Gave up on this after I discovered it wasn't very much like Lost.

Unforgettable (CBS)
Tried watching it when it said the detective was from Syracuse. I gave up quickly, and sometime after that it got cancelled. And, apparently, it's been un-cancelled for some reason.

Ancient Aliens: Underground Things!

So, the producers are endlessly creative about finding themes of. What they're not endlessly creative about finding, though, is content. Because currently they're showing pretty much the only four rock drawings that they ever show, including the "TARDIS rock art"

So there's an underground city in Turkey, that people carved out of soft volcanic rock. After a gratuitous image of a pyramid, we get to see inside this city. Apparently, although things that are obscured from space by trees are always in unbelievably straight lines that are perfectly lined up with constellations, aliens couldn't care less about things that are underground.

Then, they first of all suggest that this has to do with a Zoroastrian myth telling of a culture hiding underground to escape a global winter, and abruptly change tack to suggest that the people were actually hiding from a giant space battle that included at least one faction dedicated to wiping out humans. We're treated to an cheesy CGI sequence of spaceships firing on each other.

Now, we're in the American Southwest, discussing how a lot of the various tribes that live there have similar creation myths. They talk about some Hopi legends that indicate that people went underground for protection from "storms of fire and ice," and "cataclysms," and then go into a complete non sequitur about developing large eyes from living underground and cave paintings with large eyes, and then something about legends involving some kind of "lizard people" and "ant people", as the narrators described them. Then, they ask "If so, could some of them still be living beneath the surface of the Southwestern desert?" The next shot we have involves a van driving through the desert, implying that these people are actually going out alien-hunting in the desert. This is gonna be good! although alien hunting in the desert sounds like it might be fun if you do it with the right people


They're out at the Jicarilla reservation, home to an Apache tribe. They talk briefly with a Native person about the legend, and about stories relating to the nearby Archuleta mesa. Then, it gets better: They show a still photo of the mesa, complete with photoshopped moving sparkly rays!

Now, because it's the US Southwest and aliens alone aren't enough for a good conspiracy in that area, they talk about eyewitness accounts that "are not only true but evidence of a secret collaboration between underground aliens and the US military." Wait, what? The whole "The government experimented on aliens in secret laboratories in the Southwest" thing is a classic conspiracy theory, but "The government and aliens experimented on humans in secret laboratories in the Southwest,"  is a whole new twist on it!

Incidentally, the first commercial in the break is for a show called "The Vikings." From the commercial, I can't tell whether or not this is supposed to be a part of Ancient Aliens until the title screen and the "On the History Channel" bit comes up.

Now, we're in the Andes, discussing an indigenous tribe that lived there, and an Italian Catholic missionary who was given gifts that were "elaborately carved" and contained symbols that he didn't recognize. Apparently, the evidence that aliens were around hinges around the idea that in the 16th or 17th centuries, the Incas were still stuck in the very early part of the Stone Age or something. So, in the 1970's, there's a video of him... wait a second, there were Catholic priests going out to convert indigenous peoples in South America in the 20th century? And this hinges around the idea that, by the 20th century, it's unlikely that the Native tribes could've either made or found intricately carved things?

So, then, someone who's fascinated with these things decided to find out more. There was a guy who had claimed to have been in the cave in '46, and seen lots of things like metal books with strange writing, and things that looked - to him, at least - like some kind of mathematical formula. Someone else went searching for this cave in the 70's, dragged along Neil Armstrong, used an entrance found by the Ecuadorian army, and it appeared that large areas had been excavated. The biggest thing that they seemed to find in the cave was a stone ring. Hasn't anyone here read enough Tolkien to know of the dangers of finding rings in caves?

As of recently, though, they think they got the wrong cave, because they didn't find what they expected. They're very frustrated that they can't find the cave that has what they expect in it, because the local indigenous tribes are keeping all their caves' locations a secret.

Then, the Yucatan peninsula is next up. After following records from 17th century priests, they found a cave with entrances submerged underwater. Once inside, they found an underground temple, complete with a pyramid and bones. They point out that it's consistent with Mayan legends of the entrance to the underworld, with things involving bats, jaguar bones, and other things that could represent various pieces of the myth. But, here's where the circular reasoning comes in: Some archaeologists suggest that this place was intentionally modeled after their legends about the entrance to the underworld. But, our narrator suggests that the Mayan holy book was actually written about this cave! Because, of course, the Mayan underworld deities were aliens, come down from the sky, and were bloodthirsty.

Now, we're at the North Pole, which contains no indigenous human inhabitants, and probably not any caves, either. So the narrators tell us what, "according to mainstream geology," the earth is like! Aside from the fact that someone said "mainstream geology" completely deadpan, it gives an accurate and brief overview of the crust, mantle, outer core, and inner core, and mentions that scientists figured this out by measuring gravity, magnetism, and seismic waves.

But, this is not a show to let any mainstream science get in their way, because they say "But no one has ever seen these areas."

"Could the frozen surface of the pole be hiding a gateway to a world within our surface world?" They ask, and promptly answer themselves by saying, "There are those who believe that the answer is yes, and what they believe is known as the 'Hollow Earth Theory.'"

Yes, they're actually supporting the Hollow Earth Theory on this show. It's almost unbelievable, except for the fact that I've already seen some similarly preposterous things on this show, like that time that they suggested that destructive hurricanes happened because people had stopped worshiping Poseidon, or something like that.

Anyways, they try to give this theory credence by citing that Edmund Halley proposed this theory in 1691. I'd like to point out that, whatever else Halley may have figured out about astronomy, the time that he proposed that the earth consists of a matroishka-like series of spheres around an "inner sun", it was a mere sixty years after the Inquisition accused Galileo of heresy for suggesting that the earth revolved around the sun, not vice versa.

Moving on, the show says that someone proposed that there were "massive openings at each pole", and reference the Jules Verne novel Journey to the Center of the Earth, and suggest that the interior might contain extinct creatures, or advanced civilizations. Further things they mention are "ray guns," "special weapons," and "flying saucers." This all seems quite implausible, so they ask, "Is there any evidence that such fantastic theories might actually be true, and has anyone actually be inside our earth?"

Of course, since this is Ancient Aliens, the answer is always "Yes, of course!" Aside from anything you might be wondering about Brendan Fraser, the person that they claim has been inside the earth is the explorer Richard Byrd. They claim that "Hollow earth theorists" - my next favorite phrase after "ancient alien theorists" - believe that on February 19th, 1947, Byrd flew inside the earth where the inhabitants used a tractor beam to land his plane, and then told him that they disapproved of humanity's use of nuclear weapons! Of course, since there's no evidence of this, the narrators' rational explanation is that the government covered it up, yet at the same time "staged" a naval operation supposedly involving him near the South Pole so he could "slip away to the other end of the planet, unnoticed by the media."

So, the episode ends with a bad pun, saying "Perhaps we've only just scratched the surface of our planet's underground mysteries."

Off-Topic: The Academy Awards

I'm going to keep it brief considering it was a 3-hour telecast...

The opening where Captain Kirk awkwardly kept telling MacFarlane he'd be the worst Oscar host ever? That was kind of prophetic. Since the list of things that merely fell flat, or were painfully awkward and/or bizarre (The teddy bear, anyone?) is too long, here's the short version:

Things that were overtly offensive:

• "We saw your boobs"
• The joke about eating disorders
• The joke about the show not being gay enough
• The joke about Quvenzhane Wallis having 15 years before she's "too old" for George Clooney

The actual funny things:

• The sock puppet "Flight"
• The intro for Christopher Plummer
• The time he simply said "The next presenter needs no introduction" and actually just walked off the stage without doing an introduction. (The presenter was Meryl Streep)

Entertaining moments that had nothing to do with MacFarlane:

• Jack Nicholson sitting in his usual seat
• The performance of "Goldfinger"
• A tie for Best Sound Editing
• Quvenzhane Wallis being freaking adorable
• Jennifer Lawrence tripping on the way to the stage
• Michelle Obama announcing the Best Picture winner
• That moment of suspense where we all wondered how it'd go over if Best Picture went to Zero Dark Thirty

Absolute worst moment unrelated to the show:

• The Onion's Twitter feed made MacFarlane look tame and inoffensive by comparison when they tweeted some 'satire' calling Quvenzhane Wallis (a nine-year-old girl!) the "C word."

So, yeah, that's it. I'm now an enthusiastic supporter of the 'Tina and Amy to host EVERYTHING!" movement again.

Zero hour: 1 x 02 "Face"

"One is the number of man. One is the number of you. But sometimes one is not one. Sometimes one is two."

Well, I'm glad to see that the principles of basic mathematics are out the window in this show. That's probably going to explain a lot.

[consider this your warning about spoilers, except that it's hard to call them 'spoilers' when the show's plot progresses in exactly the most convenient and predictable way possible, however illogical that may be]

So, then the FBI Agent and Our Hero are in the sub with Vincent, having found a Nazi that looks just like Our Hero, a fob watch, and a cryptic journal. The FBI Agent points out that it's best to kill Vincent now before he can wreak more chaos. Our Hero points out that if he's killed, he won't be able to say where Leila (Our Hero's wife/motivation) is, and Vincent understandably sides with him, so they convince the agent to back down. Then, Our Hero starts pestering Vincent about what the frozen bodies in the sub are, and why this random pocket watch is important, and what he knows, and he takes cell phone photos of the pocket watch, and in the process Vincent makes himself the most relatable character in all of this show by being annoyed at him.

Then, Vincent somehow blows up his SUV, hijacks the FBI's seaplane, and sinks the Nazi sub all at once. But, the FBI Agent and Our Hero somehow manage to get back to NY, where they start bickering again and Our Hero insists that his wife is still alive because he believes it.

The assistant is wondering why he can call the local police, the FBI, and INTERPOL, and they'll still tell them that they haven't made any progress in the case and they don't have any new information. I, personally, am wondering why he can just call up the FBI and INTERPOL and expect to get any information about one of their cases in the first place.

Now, we're back with Vincent, and he threatens to kill Leila and dissolve her body in lye. Which will totally work, because people do it on crime shows, right? Anyways, he then asks her to prove why she's valuable to him in order to save her life. She says she can't, presumably dooming her.

Back at the magazine offices, the priest walks in, and everyone starts talking about how people always think that it's the End Times. Then, the priest goes on about how, in Revelation 16, the first angel pours out his "bowl", and "painful sores" break out on people. He explains that some people, although not him, believe that it refers to AIDS. Then, he says, "Next angel comes, pours out his bowl on the rivers, they became as blood."

Hang on, let's look at that: Revelation 16 is where angels pour out bowls on things, so that's one point for the writers. But...

• The first bowl is "...ugly, festering sores broke out on the people who had the mark of the beast and worshiped its image." So if you consider that the show seems to be referring to this as HIV/AIDS, that creates some major unfortunate implications.  
• The second bowl is the seas becoming like blood, whereas the rivers being like blood is the third bowl, so they got those mixed up. It may seem like a minor mistake, and maybe could even be easily retconned, if it wasn't for the fact that a priest said it.

So then they open up this other pocket watch, and observe that the gears are soldered together. "This clock was never meant to work!" they say. "Who makes a clock that's not supposed to tell time?" Well, aside from the Doctor and the Master and a bunch of other Time Lords, I'd put shadowy secret organizations that a fake CIA division is involved with pretty high on the list.

At least not all of the clocks will have hidden diamond treasure maps in them. But, they have a brilliant idea: Maybe it's a celestial map! Of course it's a celestial map, because the characters' massive leaps to conclusions are always correct if they're necessary to keep the plot moving. So then they look at the time and date that the watch is stopped at, and pull out some kind of book, and somehow manage to figure out that the constellation needs to be viewed in Chennai, India.

Our Hero decides that more clues to this might be in the cryptic journal, but refuses to try to chase down the journal because the FBI Agent has it. The girl assistant agrees to, tracks down the FBI agent, they chat, and the FBI agent hands over the journal saying it's not of any value to the FBI so our protagonists can have it. The guy assistant sends a previously unseen flunky to go online and research plagues and AIDS and rivers of blood, and them him and the girl translate the journal from German.

Anyways, the assistants translate the journal, discover that some guy named Corben or something was a Nazi doing field research on this "Zero Hour" thing (isn't it so convenient how everyone used the same code name for it?) and that a private collector had more information. They track down the collector, and he's conveniently a fan of the magazine, so he's happy to help them out. Super uncomfortably, he's got an entire room decked out in a ton of Nazi paraphenalia, where he shows them a filmstrip kind of thing from the Nazis. It's about their expedition to India to talk to a girl who could reportedly talk to the dead, and this Corben guy looks suspiciously like Our Hero, which manages to make things even more uncomfortable.

Somewhere in here, we're shown a shot of a bathtub with a lot of empty jugs of lye. We can't see the interior of the tub so it's unclear whether this is meant to be a red herring in the classic vein of "No body, no proof," or whether the producers have simply decided that showing the body would be too much for an otherwise very PG-rated show, or perhaps if the producers simply could not be bothered to figure out what it would actually look like (much less have the effects department try to recreate it) if someone decided to attempt to dissolve a body in lye. 

In the meantime, Our Hero and the FBI Agent have made their way to Chennai. They sort of make peace and agree not to kill Vincent when they find him. Just as they're about to have nothing to talk about, Our Hero gets a call from the assistants informing them of everything they've figured out. So they go to find this woman, and the FBI agent mentions that the ideal of a Hindu woman being an apostle might be offensive enough for people to kill over it.

Back at the office, the assistants find a letter in a secret pocket in the journal. It's a letter from Corben to his wife, and it's going on and on like some kind of inanely mushy love letter. I think this guy is supposed to be the Rosicrucian/Nazi double agent? During this voiceover, we have a bizarre scene of the Nazi who looks like Our Hero giving a young Hindu girl something, and his Rosicrucian cross, and she puts a Bindi on his forehead. And I suppose it supposed to promote happiness and harmony and "we're all humans inside" but it just comes off as weird and extremely uncomfortable, although I'm not educated enough on Hinduism to know if that scene is flat-out wrong or just unlikely.

So Our Hero and the FBI Agent find this "Hindu holy woman," as they describe her, and bring her an "offering" of something. She tells them that Our Hero had told her to destroy the clock if she ever saw his face. Our Hero goes off on the but-I-KNOW-my-wife-is-alive tangent and so it's very important that she tell him her secrets anyways. She refuses, saying that his return would prophesy "the coming of the angel of death." I'm trying to decide whether this would be more entertaining with Terry Pratchett's version of Death or the Supernatural version.

As our protagonists leave, someone starts shooting up the area, and unsurprisingly, Vincent shows up. The holy woman willingly moves away from where she's standing, and Vincent steals the clock, then shoots her. So he's attacked on Catholic priest, killed another just a moment ago, and now has shot a Hindu holy woman. Not only is he on his way to becoming a serial killer (or perhaps a spree killer?), but a good DA could have a field day with hate crimes legislation after the next few victims. Anyways, as Vincent drives off, we're treated to a frankly hilarious scene of Our Hero reaching his hand through the fence towards the car and yelling "Leila! I'll find you!" as if he believes that Vincent is toting her around in the trunk of his car or something.

Then, Our Hero returns to where the Hindu holy woman is, and she's dying. Because this episode hasn't had enough awkward moments yet, the woman says with her last breath that she was wrong, and something about the darkness of the coming apocalypse, and that Our Hero alone holds the key to something (despite the fact that Vincent always seems to be one step ahead?) and if he continues chasing Vincent across the planet, he'll bring about the end of the world.

So, I'm not sure what I just watched. Lots of plot threads have been left dangling, and now I'm curious to see if this is a revelation-style apocalypse, and even more curious to see what the writers have decided that the secret that triggers it would be.

Off-topic: Stats!

Well, more specifically, the search terms that have led people to my blog:

This is going to get even more interesting once I start posting about the other conspiracy shows - I think I need to re-watch the pilot of Cult, and post about that, too.

Zero Hour: Pilot

So, the promos kept comparing it to National Treasure. How could I resist? This could be yet another opportunity to use [a slightly adapted version of] my Ancient Alien Bingo cards!

[This technically has spoilers, but they're not really anything that wasn't revealed in the promo. Or anything you won't know by the time the promo for the next episode airs]

So it opens with this probably-supposed-to-be-ominous voiceover:
"Twelve is a magic number. Twelve is divine. Twelve is both the beginning and end of time"

Yay, yet another show that makes me think the writers have been watching too much Doctor Who!

As far as I can tell from the preview, this show is about clocks. True to this implication, we see a flashback sequence where people are building clocks. At least, I think it's a flashback, because there are candles, but everyone looks suspiciously modern, like this is still the original pickup pilot.

Yes, it is a flashback! Apparently in the 1940's, because we see that there are Nazis. One of the characters quotes the "Nation against nation, kingdom against kingdom" Bible verse about the "End of Days." Another character says what turns out to be the most rational and intelligent statement in this entire episode: "Every generation has thought it applies to them and them alone. Every generation has been wrong."

Speaking of being wrong, the person quoting the verse cites it as Luke 4:22. But, wait! Luke 4:22 actually says, in the NIV:

"All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips. “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” they asked."

So, aside from the fact that this show involves many elements of Catholicism and therefore managing to get a Bible reference wrong is an especially egregious research fail, let's continue.

Then, his friends retorts, "But never before have the dead risen!" That's right, readers! This show doesn't just involve Nazis, but Nazis and zombies! And it gets better! As they're sneaking around in this secret Nazi facility, they run across a baby with white eyes, and say "This child was born of no womb." And, because this isn't enough, a Nazi is shown holding a cross with the Rosicrucian symbol on it!

Then, the Nazis storm the cathedral, as people sneak something away. One old guy says "Not even God can help any more. Only the Twelve can." Seriously, this is so heavy-handed, who was writing it?

Anyways, so now that we've stuffed enough conspiracy theory elements for a Dan Brown novel into the first four minutes of the show, we go to modern-day Brooklyn.

We see a couple - later revealed to be the lead character and his wife - strolling through a flea marked or something. The woman buys a clock and goes somewhere, while the guy goes to his job. His job is running a magazine of some sort, which seems to be largely focused on cryptozoology, with a staff of precisely two assistants, a guy and a girl.

Then, he gets a phone call. His wife's shop is being broken into! When you discover that someone's breaking into the building where you are, is the proper reaction to:

1. Call 911?
2. Call and ask for your husband to call 911, who then shuffles off that task to his assistant.

If you guessed #1, congrats, you're right! If you also guessed that the reason #2 exists is because that's precisely what our intrepid heroes did, you're also correct.

Next scene, the police have arrived, and the wife is missing. The main character is angry that the police only asked "generic" (yes, that's the exact word he used) questions and haven't tried to figure out why the thief didn't take anything other than the wife. Apparently, the ideas that a) maybe the break-in was simply the means for a kidnapping and/or b) maybe he was scared off when he realized that someone was inside, calling for help, are both unsatisfactory. No, this must be a conspiracy!

A few hours later, the FBI stops by the guy's home! They say they know more than the local police, because they've "been working on this case for a very, very long time." Then, they ask this man if the name "White Vincent" means anything. They claim that he's the world's "highest-paid mercenary" (again, exact words) and that he's "on every no-fly list we've got." Because, in alternate-conspiracy-world, the TSA's no-fly list that nobody can even find out if they're on is insufficient.

Then, the FBI agents start asking him questions about his wife, trying to figure out if she had any connection to anything that might make this "White Vincent" character take notice of her. This prompts a complete 180 in our character's behavior. Rather than being angry that people aren't going enough to find his wife, he now seems entirely concerned about the fact that the FBI thinks that maybe his wife was somehow involved with something less than perfectly pure and legal, and unbelieving of the idea that they may still want to find his wife.

So, after they leave, the guy pulls out the clock his wife bought earlier that day, which he correctly (but through an inexplicable leap of logic) assumes is the thief's highly sought-after item. So he takes the clock back to his office, where the assistants gather around and pull out a diamond. They see a "flaw" on the diamond, but after examining it closely and shining some light so it refracts on the wall, it's a map! With a spot somewhere in Canada marked! This is starting to feel almost like a plotline in Alias... but not as much as it feels like National Treasure 5 or whatever they're on by now.


Now, they're arguing about whether or not treasure maps really exist. Now, regardless of what they think, this is a map, with a spot marked and labelled on it. It seems pretty obvious that there's something important that someone wanted hidden at that spot.

So, they've decided that the only person who can explain it to them is a priest that this guy know. The priest explains to them that this involved Rosicrucians, but as monks or whatever, they probably didn't do the whole "treasure" thing, and therefore the map  Priest points out that rosicrucians probably didn't do treasure, so the place marked on map is probably lost city, in arctic circle.

Just as the plot might slow down, this guy gets a call on his cell phone! The person basically keeps asking questions about the clock, and asks the guy to exchange the clock for his wife. The guy agrees to that, and leaves the diamond in the church safe with the priest.

But, when the guy informs the FBI about this, he inexplicably decides to fudge the truth and tell them that the caller is demanding a cash ransom for his wife, not a clock. So, the FBI runs him through it, and says they'll track the caller. As the exchange goes down, although it's not clear which item is being exchanged, the FBI discovers that the caller was routing everything through a room in an empty building.

Then, it turns out that the priest was attacked, and the diamond was stolen from the church safe. The main character guy tells the FBI that "We are done" and says that the caller "got what he wanted." When the FBI asks what it is that the mysterious caller wanted, the guy apparently decides that finding his wife is not remotely as important as taunting the FBI, so he refuses to say and storms off.

Anyways, he decides that this mysterious person has gone to New Bartholomew, taking his wife along with him, and decides to go up there himself. The female FBI agent catches up with him at the airport, and once again he refuses to do more than obnoxiously hint at the fact that the FBI has no idea what's going on. The FBI agent points out that there's nothing he can do to stop her following him, and that she also has a gun and is allowed to take it on the plane, and says something about terrorists and convinces him to grudgingly cooperate with her.

Then, the two assistants, annoyed at being left behind, decide to track down the person who made the clock. They find out that he's 93, living in Bulgaria, and has neither phone nor email so the only way to talk to him is to fly out there and go to the address in person.

Then, we see someone who's presumably the kidnapper. He scratches a "zero" on the bathroom mirror, and takes out contacts, revealing creepy white eyes. Presumably, he is the white-eyed baby that the Nazis created. Presumably, this is also what the "white" in "White Vincent" refers to.

Anyways, the guy and the FBI agent have managed to get to the location of this "New Bartholomew" with almost GPS-like precision, only to find a Nazi submarine with a variety of bodies frozen inside. Apparently, they have managed to beat the kidnapper to this site.

The assistants track down the clockmaker, and show him the clock. Eventually, the clockmaker explains that in 1938, in a move so secret that not even the Pope knew because something secret could bring about the end of the world, so the Church invited twelve "New Apostles" to keep this secret. They were named things like "New Luke", "New Peter", and - you guessed it! - "New Bartholomew." Apparently, New Bartholomew was both a Catholic and a Nazi! I am not going to make any comments about the Pope here...

So, apparently our Nazi/Rosicrucian apostle, like all the other ones, had an individualized clock. The clockmaker goes on to give us a final voiceover. Apparently, the Nazis had figured out the first steps to achieving eternal life! And he says that it's important to find the clocks before "the enemy" does (what enemy? Are there still Nazis around?) and that the secret thing will pit "science against religion, country against country..." and that this giant upheaval is called "zero hour," because in the middle of hiding world-changing secrets from Nazis the most important thing to do is to come up with clock-themed names for everything.

So far, I've got two reactions: One, I'm disappointed that so far, we haven't seen anything about the dead having risen, and two, I'm wondering what kind of secret the writers could possibly dream up that could be that important.

Book: Graceling by Kristin Cashore

So, I was looking around for some YA fantasy featuring female protagonists or something, and someone reccomended this book to me. Sounds good!

The description on Amazon.com goes:

"Katsa has been able to kill a man with her bare hands since she was eight--she's a Graceling, one of the rare people in her land born with an extreme skill. As niece of the king, she should be able to live a life of privilege, but Graced as she is with killing, she is forced to work as the king's thug.

When she first meets Prince Po, Graced with combat skills, Katsa has no hint of how her life is about to change. She never expects to become Po's friend. She never expects to learn a new truth about her own Grace--or about a terrible secret that lies hidden far away . . . a secret that could destroy all seven kingdoms with words alone." 

The world-building in this book is a bit light for how I prefer my high fantasy worlds to be built, but still very realistic. For example, not everyone is born with a "cool" Grace like killing or fighting - instead, it's mentioned that some people are Graced with more or less useless skills like the ability to climb trees unusually well. And this does qualify as "high fantasy" pretty well, because although there aren't (so far) elves or dwarves, there are still plenty of castles and kings and swords and all of that.

Then, there's the character of Katsa. She's quickly taking her place as one of my favorite literary characters. She's not just a "strong female character" in that she can swing around a sword. She's also persistent, intelligent, and rather feminist. While there is romance, as one could guess, it's not your typical YA romance, either.  She actually takes time to think about, and discuss, what kind of relationship she wants, whether or not she wants children, and so on. She makes it a point to teach other young women how to stand up for and defend themselves.

There isn't much in the way of a plot - Read the blurb, assume that Katsa and Po end up travelling all around their known world for a while because high fantasy wouldn't be high fantasy without the main characters spending copious amounts of time riding horses from point A to point B in multi-day journeys, and it's pretty straightforward. The book's biggest problem is that a genre-savvy reader could probably see the plot "twist" coming from about halfway through the book, but otherwise, it's a solid start to the series.

My DVR: Cable & Foreign Shows

OK, so in this case, "DVR" may be a bit flexible, if the foreign shows aren't being imported sufficiently quickly. I'm also not quite up on what day these are on, so they'll just be listed by network:

Doctor Who (BBC America)
Oh, that classic BBC show. I've made many friends over it, and converted many more friends, and now you can go to Target and see people wearing Doctor Who t-shirts. And this year is the 50th anniversary! 

The Hour (BBC America)
It's like Mad Men meets The Newsroom, about a young woman who's made a producer of a new BBC news program in the 1950's. Plus, you get to laugh at Ben Wishaw's character (pre-Skyfall) constantly referring to the female lead as "Moneypenny." 

Mythbusters (Discovery)
If you need to know why I DVR this, you probably not only haven't seen it before, you probably don't even know what it's about.

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (Hub)
Yep, I watch it. But, for the record, it's really cute, and has super awesome lessons that even I sometimes need to hear repeated. 

Project Runway (Lifetime)
I was introduced to this my first week after moving into the dorms freshman year of college, during its 3rd season. I've been sewing for ages, and I love pretty dresses, so I've kept watching! 

Teen Wolf (MTV)
It's my new addiction! And I blog extensively about this one, if you can't tell ;-)

Continuum (Syfy)
As an earlier post mentioned, I've only just started watching this, so I can't really say a lot one way or another. 

Warehouse 13 (Syfy)
I started watching it because I loved the premise - when I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark, I always spent so much time wondering what else was filling up that warehouse, and thought the idea was so cool - and stayed for the characters, hilarious references to history and literature, and the heartbreak and emotional drama that the writers put us all through. 

Rizzoli & Isles (TNT)
My very favorite detective/forensics show ever, not the least because it features some really awesome female characters. Yay! Also, they're basically me and my roommate: I'm the blond socially awkward Irish girl, and she's the brunette part Italian Boston native.

Ancient Aliens: JACKPOT!

The idea that sparked a "nonfiction" book, this entire "ancient alien" theory, and one of the largest and longest-running sci-fi franchises.

Yes, this is it. This, blog readers, is the inevitable Aliens Built The Pyramids episode.

So, we start out with a random UC Irvine professor defining a "pyramid" as anything square and larger on the bottom and smaller on top. He suggests that pyramids are some of the very first structures humans built because they're so stable.

So far, it's just various people remarking on how many different places that one can find pyramids. And then our resident "Ancient Alien Theorist" says that the "greatest mystery of all time" is the question of who built the pyramids and how.

The next big question that this man asks is, why build the pyramids so tall? I don't know, why don't they ask the person who made that building in Dubai that's a freaking half mile tall?

So now they're talking about Egypt in 1940. I'm not sure which of the two (or more?) media franchises that deals with 1940's Egypt that I should start referencing now...

They mention that the sides of the pyramids are slightly angled in, and that the sun shows it at the solstices. "This implies that whoever built this was aware of the solar cycle." If they really think that ancient people couldn't have counted to 365 after millennia of practice or figured out which directions were east and west, they really need to read a Boy Scout handbook or something...

"Mainstream scientists believe..." Wait, WHAT? Stop right there.

They presented and opposing viewpoint.
THEY PRESENTED AN OPPOSING VIEWPOINT.
THEY PRESENTED AN OPPOSING VIEWPOINT.

Let's pause for a second and celebrate this momentous occasion!

But wait! Now that we've got the shred of good scientific research out of the way, we're getting into real pseudoscience, not just stuff that relies on ancient people not being able to handle 10th-grade math!

"It's possible that the earliest pyramids were made as beacons."  Beacons of... what? To what? But then they say that the Mayan pyramids can't be seen from above. Which either means they're still going on the "can't handle basic geometry" tangent, or else means that their beacons can pass through trees.

Now, they're talking about how a large Buddhist stupa was "a place where man connected with the gods."

Except, the concept of "gods" is not central to Buddhism. It's true that the beings at their highest level(s) of enlightenment could be loosely considered "deities", but worshiping, praying to, or otherwise attempting to please them is not something that really meshes with the Buddhist beliefs about how to attain that level of enlightenment.

And, because we don't have enough circular reasoning yet, the show is discussing how people make pilgrimages up the stairs of some pyramid or another because, according to the hosts, it's a metaphor for a journey to the stars. (I suspect that they did not consult anyone practicing any of these religions) But why are they a metaphor for a journey up to the stars? Because, the stairs actually did literally take people from ancient wherever-it-is up to meet extraterrestrials!

So, now the conversation returns to where pyramids are, with China as the location of the moment. "While some researchers believe they were tombs, others believe that they are pyramids, covered up by the Chinese government." Well, alright, there's no reason that they can't be both, but carry on...

Now they're asking, "Why is the Chinese government attempting to hide these ancient structures?" I don't know, does anyone in the Western world have a good understanding of why the Chinese government does anything? These people probably don't, judging from their complete ignorance of millennia-old Eastern religions.

"Ancient Chinese emperors claimed contact with extraterrestrials...." Pretty much every single leader of every single vaguely nation-state-like thing since the beginning of time up until the 19th century claimed some kind of special blessing or avenue of contact with their deity of choice. Which, on this show, means "extraterrestrial."

"Countries that want to ensure that the truth of their extraterrestrial origin will never be known." Apparently, whoever's saying this - likely That Guy With The Hair - has forgotten that they're well on their way to claiming that every single country on the planet (including the USA), if not the entire human race, has extraterrestrial origins. I give them until halfway through next season.

Fast-forward through some almost identical stuff about buried pyramids in Bosnia, that do not provide any additional opportunities for snarky pictures.

And the narrator just used the words "forbidden archaeology." As if there's an archaeology police that will arrest you if you start talking about aliens. Instead of just side-eyeing your psuedoscience and not publishing you in peer-reviewed journals. Even Stargate SG-1 got that one right.

So, apparently they're done with ancient pyramids, because now they're talking about a "massive pyramid of fiberglass" financed and built by a Russian defense contractor, in Ukraine. This defense contractor, around the time of the fall of the Soviet Union, believed that pyramids produced "energies that could affect biological and non-biological materials." Congrats, that's every kind of material on the planet. And what kind of energy, by the way?

"The Russian air force knows this." Yes. The Russian (or Soviet) air force is exactly the most technologically advanced, well-informed air force in the world!

Then they asserted that "...by placing materials within the pyramid it promotes growth, it promotes health, it promotes longevity." Um, citation, please? Oh, wait, they just used the phrase "Pyramid power."

Happily, the show has gone back to topic ancient Egypt!

They said, verbatim, "The pyramids seem to be placed where the energy is..." which is quite confusing considering that they seemed to be promoting the idea that pyramids somehow created "energy" right before the last commercial break! And, the ambiguity of this energy continues - it's referred to as "cosmic energy" and "underground energy", but they never go as far as specifying whether it's electromagnetic energy or what.

And, this is the line that we've been waiting for, right here...

"Could ancient civilizations have built pyramids to mark sites of extraterrestrial contact?"

I just don't have words for that one. Except that.... alien ship landing platforms.

Now, they're saying something about "Is it possible that the Mayans, and other ancient cultures, could have been given information about energy pyramids blah blah from aliens?" [Author's Note: My brain kind of gave out here, so transcription is somewhat incomplete] "Blah blah (probably 'ancient astronaut theorists') believe that the pyramids of Giza could produce enough energy to reach not just across the planets, but across the universe!" And once again, they don't mention what kind of energy these pyramids supposedly produce!

Now, they're finally getting back to some remotely (and I mean very, very remotely. Like, makes Antarctica look just next door remotely) scientific attempts to explain this theory.

So, what they're talking about, is that in '77 and '87, an electronics engineer did experiments on top of the pyramid. He was using not just standard equipment, or equipment that had been tested or calibrated to ASTM standards or anything, but equipment he had designed himself. And then, he says the words "energy field." I believe that Neil deGrasse Tyson has something to say about this...

If I could only follow one Twitter account, this would be it.

Then, they go on to state "He developed, in his laboratory, a method for generating this pyramid energy so he could do research on it." Alright, excellent! Methods? "... a model pyramid and centrifuge and alternating magnetic field..." and they say that this creates a "bubble" that could block all electromagnetic radiation, even gamma rays.

They include a photograph of this equipment. Notably, the equipment is not blocking electromagnetic radiation in the visible spectrum.

Now, it gets really, really fun and psuedoscientific. This makes the preceding episode sound like amateur hour. Ready?

Supposedly, this model pyramid became weightless (which I take to mean "levitated", unless the person in question actually had it on a scale at the time), started moving, aligned with the constellation Orion (It's the First Law of Pyramids: All pyramids somehow align with Orion) and - get this - went into hyperspace.

Now, they're mentioning something about string theory. Let me take a minute to tell you what I, as a physicist, think about string theory: It's either a completely brilliant or completely crackpot theory, but either way, it's what happens when you mix theoretical physicists and mind-altering substances.

Anyways, now they're saying the pyramid acted as a time machine, and something about... wait, "weird electromagnetic vibrations"?  Um, electromagnetic vibrations are no fancier than light. Granted, they can also come in the form of radio waves or microwaves or infared or UV or gamma radiation, but if you hear someone say the words "all electromagnetic radiation", replace it with "light." If it sounds improbable, laughable, or flat-out wrong, they're probably being imprecise at best, or maybe even outright psuedoscientific!

So then they close out saying that nobody built more pyramids like that because aliens stole the blueprints or something (yes, they said "blueprint") and something about gateways and "advanced otherworldly technology" but, very sadly, they didn't say the word "stargate" once in this episode.

And, fortunately, that's over. I don't think my brain could've handled any more.

Ancient Aliens: DISASTERS!

Now we're blaming every great big disaster on aliens. Once again, a Doctor Who link is only appropriate...

So, is this going to get insensitive at any point in the episode, or are we going to stick to dinosaurs and Pompeii and hasn't negatively affected anyone who's currently alive?

Oh, wait, they started off with the Japan Earthquake in 2011. Wow. This is so much more astoundingly insensitive than I thought it would be!

This is apparently bolstered by the claim that UFO's were sighted over Japan shortly after the earthquake and tsunami.

Fortunately, now they're back to ancient Mediterranean places, and they're talking about Poseidon. Let's all take a moment to let that sink in: This show, which airs on a channel that purports to be about history, is actually promoting the idea that major earthquakes are caused by angry, invisible, superpowered beings, instead of things like plate tectonics.

And they're angry because you aren't building them statues and temples any more, because nothing will make you think that you should start worshiping random long-forgotten deities like a natural disaster! Yet, Virginia Beach continues to somehow get hit by hurricanes despite having a large statue of Poseidon/Neptune on the shore. (Also, I totally found a photo of Medusa texting while looking for an image of that)

I'm sorry, that was the sound of... well, it was several sounds, including the entire scientific community doing their best Jean-Luc Picard impression, some young-earth creationists also laughing at you, and whatever small tremor happened somewhere in my county as I was typing up this very post.

Oh, and now the Haiti earthquake! This show is coming in as a late but strong contender against Pat Robertson in the "Who can say the most offensive thing about the Haiti earhquake" category.

They used the words "powerful thunderstorm" in the same sentence as "essentially nuclear-level destruction across the US." I think they're misunderstanding the words "essentially" or "nuclear" or more likely both.

Finally, they're back at the Flood, which seems like the logical and inoffensive place to start. They get points for noticing that the "Hebrew Bible" and "Islamic Koran", as well as the Epic of Gilgamesh, all contain similar stories.

And then they mentioned Krakatoa, which was kind of

They used the word "Chariot of the Gods" without referencing the book, or having the author on to talk about it!

Then, someone actually said the sentence,"Ancient extraterrestrials are hollowing out volcanoes to use as a base." Hang on a moment, I didn't put in a "Someone made a movie/TV show of this" square on my Ancient Aliens Bingo Cards! Because that is literally the plot of a Doctor Who episode involving Vesuvius.

So, now they're presenting the theory that aliens created deserts such as the Sahara. Rather than deserts being hot an inhospitable because that's just what happens when you get something in a place with low humidity and no water source, or that animals tend not to live there because it's hot and inhospitable, their explanation? That aliens zapped it with some kind of water-and-life destroying force or something. I don't know, I'm not paying that much attention now.

But, now they're back to repeating some of their most popular lines - for example, that every stylized human shape looks like an alien/spacesuits, and that ancient people were fascinated by the brightest star in the sky because it was where the aliens came from.

So, let's take another moment to sit back and comprehend the massive Occam's Razor fail here.

Now, they're talking about something like "certain comets that are programmed to bring life... certain comets that are programmed to bring destruction" with the implication that some alien/deity/beings tried to warn some ancient cultures about comets.

Seriously? What's the point of telling an "ancient" culture about an impending comet? What are they going to do about it? Build a spaceship out of rocks and sticks to put a nuke (also made out of rocks and sticks) in the middle of the comet?

Finally, they end on the Yucatan crater, asking "could it have been a planned event? If so, why?" Their proposals were that the dinosaurs needed to be killed off so the planet would be safe for humans. But, why? Why does it have to be humans, specifically? Why something so soft and squishy and tiny? Most importantly, why not let dinosaurs evolve until they're sentient? Because sentient dinosaurs would just be AWESOME.

My DVR: Network TV

So, if anyone's wondering what kind of TV I watch... I'm doing several posts on the contents of my DVR. So here's the regular-season network TV shows that are on my DVR:

Sunday: Once Upon a Time (ABC), Revenge (ABC). I don't actually watch either of these a lot - I don't have any way to catch up with the first half of season 2 of Once Upon a Time, and Revenge is my roommate's.

Monday: Bones (Fox), The Following (Fox). Long time Bones fan, but the show seems to be getting a bit boring, and The Following is just starting but looks promising.

Tuesday: Body of Proof (ABC). I like medical examiner shows, for some reason.

Wednesday: Arrow (CW), Law & Order: SVU (NBC), Criminal Minds (CBS), Supernatural (CW). Arrow is one of my new favorite shows, which I've blogged about before, and my DVR's priorities are set to record SVU and Criminal Minds if all three of the latter shows are on.

Thursday: The Big Bang Theory (CBS), Glee (Fox), Elementary (CBS). I don't keep up with Big Bang Theory very much, and I don't know why I still watch Glee but I kind of like watching it, and Elementary is another one of my favorites!

Friday: Grimm (NBC). This one is fun if still a bit monster-of-the-week, but the season 2 storyline is picking up quickly, and I still can't even get over the last screen before the (very long) midseason break, which read "To Be Continued... Sorry."

Off-Topic: Hockey. *sigh*

Just in case any of you were wondering "Wow, is all you do with your time watching Teen Wolf and Ancient Aliens and blogging about them?" the answer is "No! I also watch many other TV shows, as well as LA Kings hockey, and CNN is always on in the background. Even when I'm watching Teen Wolf on my laptop.

Currently, the Kings' attempts at playing hockey are what's made me yell at the TV the most lately. I just don't really blog about this because this isn't a sports blog.

It's so depressing. Like, we won the Stanley Cup last spring. It was awesome! I was able to take a subway to downtown LA and watch the Cup be paraded down our street. I stood in line to get Dustin Brown's autograph on one of my Stanley Cup posters for my brother.

And then we were like "Yeah! We get to say we're the defending champions! Yay!" and then the hockey season was locked out, and we were all cursing Bettman's name, and breathed a small sigh of relief when finally the lockout ended and a shortened season was announced.
But then... what is this that they're doing on the ice out there?

New midseason TV!

Now that Fringe is over... OK, I still haven't gotten over Fringe, and there's now an empty Fringe-shaped space in my heart on Friday nights. OK, there haven't been any Friday nights yet, but there will be.

New shows that sound interesting are Continuum (Syfy), Defiance (Syfy), Cult (CW), and The Following (Fox). Then there's Zero Hour (ABC), which looks like it might be compatible with my Ancient Aliens (or Dan Brown or National Treasure) bingo cards.

First of all, the pilots of Cult and Zero Hour won't air for another month or so.

I saw the pilot of The Following last night, and unlike when I saw it at Comic-Con, I saw it from the start. It has Kevin Bacon, making the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon even easier now, and one Shawn Ashmore, the twin brother of Aaron Ashmore who I liked on Warehouse 13 (Oh, hey there's two of them! I can live with that ;-) Plot-wise, it so far seems like there's a non-zero number of characters who will, sooner or later, end up doing stupid things that will result in me yelling at the screen. Oh, and it's about this retired FBI agent who is apparently now consulting (something that retired FBI employees get asked to do both frequently and for good pay, in a rare glimpse of realism on television. It's less realistic that they get paid to consult on catching serial killers). 

Defiance has Jaime Murray from Warehouse 13 (yep, I love that show) and also has a cool-looking MMO. Unfortunately, it does not have a cool-looking MMO that's compatible with Mac OS or Ubuntu Linux. Maybe the little things that are available On Demand will catch me up on what's going on? And there's this really neat website you can mouse around and check out. No, really. Sadly, we'll have to wait for April to see it. (And then it will be back-to-back with Warehouse 13. Yay!)

Also watched the pilot of Continuum, which is apparently Syfy's next entry in its (now) long and storied tradition of just straight-up importing stuff because Canadians are the only people actually making new scifi right now. Future cop winds up chasing down future terrorists in 2012 (really? Did they know they weren't even airing this until 2013?) but this seems like it'll raise a lot of interesting paradoxes about time travel and things, especially considering that Future Cop can't stop a present-day character from seeing glimpses into the future and knowing that they're going to be important and famous.

Slightly spoilery speculation for Continuum behind the cut...

Four Years, Four Months, Nine Days, and 100 Episodes

I don't know how to express my feelings right now, other than to say that this is my very favorite TV show. I grew up loving the original Star Trek series and with an appreciation for all it's spun off, I discovered the amazing and tragically short Firefly, I became part of a exponentially growing fan community of Doctor Who which has endured for fifty years. As wonderful as all of those experiences were, this one still stands out.

It started when I saw posters like this. The premise was something I naturally was interested in, as a long-time X-Files fan, the production team looked promising, and the gorgeous, gorgeous visuals pushed it to "I can not wait to watch this live" status.

It didn't disappoint. There were characters I loved, interesting and original concepts, and super amazing special effects. But we lived in fear of Fox pulling a repeat of Firefly, and moving the show to the Friday Night Death Slot and then cancelling it due to low ratings.

Then, Fox ordered the second half of its first season. It wasn't the most surprising thing in the world, but still not something I had counted on. This first season ended by introducing the other universe.

It was renewed, happily, for a second season. It seemed to have escaped the fate of Firefly. Characters died, and alternate universe versions of all the familiar characters were introduced.

Then it was renewed for a third season. A more overarching plot was coming into view, and more about the characters were revealed. More attention was paid to the tiny, tiny differences between the universes, and the "art piece" episodes were introduced. In the middle of this, our worst fears began to come true: Fox moved it to the Friday Night Death Slot.

Despite this, it was renewed for a fourth season. Due to a plot point, the entire of both universes was changed, creating slightly different versions of the characters in both universes, and the stories became more intense and high-stakes.

As ratings held steady but low, the fans mobilized and created a Twitter campaign in which we made an episode-specific hashtag to get trending during the show's airtime. Then, somehow, what was almost a miracle occurred: Fox began cooperating with the campaign leaders, putting the episode-specific hashtag in the corner of the screen rather than the typical "#Fringe" hashtag. It meant, importantly, that someone at Fox actually wanted to renew the show. As time dragged on, the showrunners even went so far as to film two separate endings to the season depending on which decision the network made.

Then, a mere two weeks before the season four finale, the show was renewed for a final thirteen-episode season. This season was set in a dystopian future, with older versions of some characters, more new characters, and a number of character deaths, along with the impending sense of tragedy when the show finally would end.

In the end, I watched every episode. I bought every DVD season, went to the Comic-Con and Wondercon panels, swapped people at SDCC for the gigantic Fringe backpacks both years I went, got a fedora from that final panel, participated in a (successful!) fan campaign, and made some amazing internet friends.

Ancient Aliens: TIME TRAVEL TIME! And NAZIS!

Half of me just wants to make this entire post a link to Doctor Who on Netflix.

Alright, now that I've got that out of my way....

In the first 30 seconds you mentioned Hitler. Please tell me this isn't going to be about Hitler. Please.

"Could Einstein have accidentally helped the Nazis build a time machine?"Well, I guess it is going to feature Hitler....

I guess this week people watched "Let's Kill Hitler" and the Indiana Jones movies before producing this?

They're talking about Nazis potentially doing stuff in secret as if it's a question. Third Reich scientists carried out clandestine experiments on everything. Even - no, especially - implausible metaphysical type things. Are you seriously failing that badly at history that's only 80 years old?  Oh, and "Super secret Nazi technology?" Thank you for those precise academic terms.

For what is probably the first time, and quite possibly the last, in this show's lifespan, it argues that an ostensible spaceship crash is actually not a spaceship crash. Because it's a Nazi time machine crash.

"...rituals of stargazing, believed to enable time travel." Well, if you take the Wilfred Mott approach, I guess stargazing maybe can help time travel?

Sirius is apparently where these aliens came from, because why else would people in multiple, separate ancient cultures be fascinated by the brightest star in the sky?

Nope, that actually doesn't look like a representation of a spiral galaxy. That is actually a single spiral, and that is a series of concentric circles. *facepalm*

Inaccurate visual of the day: A discussion of neutron spins accompanied by a clip of people in a lab lit solely by green light, pouring something that looks like liquid nitrogen into something else.

Oh, they actually used the word "Stargate". I HAVE WON ANCIENT ALIEN BINGO!

No, they're mentioning the LHC now... even better.

And they just used the word "god particle."

Oooh, and they're talking about aliens like the "Roswell" aliens. And how they look like how some people think humans might look in the future. Once again, some kind of wibbly wobbly timey wimey logic they're using here!

Not really an entire post...

But ran across something from io9 titled "This is what happens when you give fairy tale characters guns on Once Upon A Time" and just had to check it out.

Be warned, this contains spoilers up through the January 13th, 2013 episode!