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Eureka – Some Initial Thoughts August 31, 2008

Posted by ce9999 in Eureka.
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After hearing some positive comments about this show, I decided to give it a try. I’ve watched the first three episodes, which includes the extra-long “Pilot”, plus the first two regular length episodes, “Many Happy Returns”, and “Before I Forget.”

Regrettably, my initial impression is not very positive, although I’m planning on watching a few more episodes, in order to be sure. After all, it often takes a bit for a good show to hit its stride at the beginning.

I have various issues with what I’ve seen so far. First off, the thing with Sheriff Carter (Colin Ferguson) being an inept, guilt-ridden father, complete with snot-nosed teenage daughter who not only is the dominant person in their relationship, but who somehow has more expertise and moral authority than he does when it comes to relationships in general—this is really tiresome. Why do shows do this? It’s not fun, it’s not funny, and frankly, it’s a little bit insulting. I don’t know any real fathers who allow their daughters to treat them like this. It’s a cliché, and I wouldn’t feel at all bad if the whole idea went away forever.

There’s a femme fatal on the show (Dr. Barlowe, played by Debrah Farentino), although this doesn’t become apparent until the final few minutes of the pilot. A couple of things bother me about her. Having a character like her in such a picturesque, suburb-like setting reminds me more of Knots Landing than any sci fi show I’ve ever watched. That’s really not what I’m wanting to be reminded of. It also bugs me that she’s the only sexually assertive female character on the show, and she’s evil. This is another tiresome cliché (one even older and more worn out than the inept father idea). Why don’t they just call her “Dr. Mantis” and get it over with? And, as if those things weren’t enough, she’s also a psychiatrist. That alone would make her annoying, but with the rest, I’m just kind of hoping she mysteriously goes away.

Ok, I admit, it’s probably too early to fully judge her as a character. I’ll be interested to learn more about her motivation. Why is she evil, exactly? And how evil is she? Yes, she’s working for some shady corporate interest, but why? Is it just for money? That would be disappointing.

As for her being evil, this raises the question of how good and evil will be portrayed on the show. Are they going to be simplistic, black-and-white concepts? If so, then I’m probably going to have a hard time staying interested. So far it looks like that’s where they’re headed. In three episodes, we have one woman who’s a poisoner/murderer (and not for any reason other than pure avarice, as far as I can tell), and one guy who uses a magical memory-wiping gizmo to steal his wife’s entire life (which he does strictly for his own vanity). Not a very promising start. Villians need to be interesting for a show to succeed.

I mentioned a magical memory-wiping gizmo, which brings me to the next thing, namely that the show is pretty heavily gizmo-oriented. The stories seem to revolve around gizmos and people who misuse them. Neat gizmos and technobabble don’t make an interesting story, or a successful series. You can pile those things onto a story all you want, but in the end, it won’t really be about anything, other than a machine that goes haywire, or maybe an evil guy who uses an evil gizmo to commit evil. The messages conveyed with these kinds of stories are pretty suspect, too—”evil machine” or “mad scientist” or “innovation is dangerous.” I need something better than that if I’m going to really enjoy a series.

Believe it or not, there were actually some things I liked about the show. The cast is likeable enough. I especially enjoyed the deputy who molded her own bullets in the pilot: Erica Cerra, as Deputy Jo Lupo. I could see myself becoming a fan, if she keeps up with the coolness. In the succeeding two episodes she sort of reverts back into cookie-cutter mode, though. I hope she doesn’t stay there.

Matt Frewer (formerly of Max Headroom fame) also makes an appearance as the local whackjob, Jim Taggart. He plays the part with a prominant Aussie accent. Nice. :)

I also have to admit that I’m liking Zoe Carter (Jordan Hinson)…when she’s not being an annoying little brat. (Seriously, the teenage attitude problem is yet another tired cliché. Writers really need to figure out how to portray inexperience and immaturity in a more interesting way.) Will she develop into someone interesting? Hopefully she will. As a teenager, they are going to have to make her develop as a person just to be realistic. She’s also forming a friendship with Deputy Jo, which is very promising for both characters.

Like I said, I’m going to give Eureka more chance than just these three episodes. There have been other shows with less than stellar startoffs that went on to be quite good. Stargate: SG-1 for instance, arose out of a movie that was just plain dumb, but then the TV movie was better, and its first season kicked all kinds of butt. Buffy the Vampire Slayer had some very good points in its short first season, but was quite rough around the edges and didn’t really become itself until season two. Star Trek: The Next Generation didn’t get really good until its sixth season, and Star Trek: Voyager was totally abysmal in its first couple of seasons, getting much better later on. It’s a rare show that’s just plain excellent right from the beginning. So I’m going to stick with it a bit, just to see what happens.

The Nox, Hathor, Cor-Ai March 8, 2008

Posted by ce9999 in Stargate: SG-1.
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Friday night, I continued my SG-1 marathon with three more episodes.

The first of these was “The Nox,” a truly fascinating episode, and one of the best in the entire ten-year run of SG-1. Aside from being brilliant and very enjoyable, it lays some groundwork for a lot of what happens in the remainder of the series. Although the SG-1 team members don’t know it yet, this is their first face-to-face encounter with one of the four ancient races, who will play (to varying degrees) such an important role in their mission in the years to come. It’s also the first indication we have that the U.S. government isn’t entirely satisfied with the performance of the SG-C, a fact which will lead to all sorts of interference, oversight and outright shennanigans by a variety of other people, continuing even to this day on Atlantis. We also begin to get a sense in this episode of just how wily and challenging an opponent Apophis will be, when SG-1’s straightforward and simple plan to capture him ends up with O’Neill, Carter and Jackson all getting killed. If it wasn’t for the extremely sophisticated healing abilities of the Nox, the series would have ended about ten minutes into this episode.

Of course the Nox are the main point of this episode, so let’s talk about them a little. There are four of them shown, and their leader is played by none other than Armin Shimerman, of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame. Casting him in this episode was a stroke of genius, because the character Anteaus is such a marked contrast to Shimerman’s well-known roles in the other two series, and it’s always a pleasure to see a good actor do something different from what he’s done before. He’s just delightful here, managing to quietly eclipse much of his more well-known work in what must be only fifteen or twenty minutes of screen time.

The other Nox character to play a major role is Nafrayu, the cute little Nox kid, played by Addison Ridge. Observe Carter’s expression when she looks at him, as if she’s never seen anything so adorable in her entire life. Can you blame her? My favorte of the other Nox, though, would have to be Lya, played by Frida Betrani. She’s a sweetie. Pretty, too. :) I am quite infatuated with her, I admit—this is why I’m saying such totally unprofessional things. ;) She is the only one of the Nox ever to appear on the series again, after this episode. I had high hopes that they would play an important role in the series, but only Lya comes back a couple of times, very briefly. This is very disappointing, because the Nox are an uncommon thing: an advanced alien species who actually seem advanced and alien. This makes them extremely interesting.

Apophis also plays a major role in this episode. In fact, is there any other episode in the series where he is “in play” as much as he is here? Not very many of them, that’s for sure. Peter Williams is still starting to get into the Apophis character at this point—later on, he gets better and better at it, until, eventually, the very sight of him makes a person want to scream in frustration. He’s the second best of all the Goa-uld to ever appear in the series, I think, bested only slightly by Cliff Simon’s hilarious, frustrating and brilliant portrayal of Ba’al, much later in the series.

In other matters, I must point out how much I enjoyed the musical score in this episode. I’ve noticed that, in general, the quality of the incidental music this season is pretty high. This is important to me, personally, so I thank the composer(s) for their efforts in these episodes, as well as the people who had the sense to hire decent composers in the first place.

In the realm of trivia, we see SG-5 briefly at the beginning of the episode, and I noticed that all of the Jaffa in Apophis’s personal guard are sporting gold forehead tattoos identical to Teal’c’s. This once again contradicts the idea that only first primes have gold emblems. I suppose it’s realistic to assume that different system lords would have different, um….systems to their Jaffa insignia, since they certainly would not be interested in trying to standardize something as trivial as this. After all, they have much more important concerns, such as how to kill all their rivals, live forever, and achieve domination of the galaxy. :P

I mentioned I watched two other episodes Friday: “Hathor” and “Cor-Ai.”

“Hathor” was better than I had remembered. I believe there are some inconsistencies between what’s presented in this episode and what comes later on, both with respect to the creation of the Jaffa, and to Goa-uld reproduction. It’s been a long time, though, so I will have to wait and see. The most enjoyable thing about this episode to me was Suanne Braun’s portrayal of the “goddess of sex, drugs and rock-n-roll”, Hathor. She’s just plain hot, in a beautiful, sensual, sultry and full-hipped way. I love it. :) It must also be said that Carter and Dr. Fraiser both kick a lot of ass in this episode. Indeed, this episode is all about the girls, since the boys end up spending most of their time in pheromone-induced thrall to Hathor.

“Cor-Ai” is a really good Teal’c episode, and pretty excellent in general. I really enjoy how it deals with questions relating to guilt, innocence, forgiveness, redemption, victim’s rights, the burden of punishment of a criminal, and so on. It’s quite fascinating. Briefly, some background: During the 1990’s, a hot political issue in the U.S. was the question of victim’s rights, namely the belief that the rights of the accused were being accorded too much weight by our legal system, and that this needed to be corrected in favor of victims of crimes. This episode hypothesizes a rather extreme solution to the problem, namely a legal system where the trial itself is controlled by the victim, who is also responsible for determining and carrying out the sentence. On the surface, it seems like a hopelessly barbaric way of doing things (at least it does to me, civil libertarian that I am), but the episode is written intelligently enough so we see that it wouldn’t really be that simple…although I still much prefer the American way of doing things. This episode is what science fiction is all about: using the story in a way that’s not only relevant to the complexities of the real world, but doing so thoughtfully, so that the viewer is actually drawn into thinking about an issue in a new way.