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!)

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."

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.