Body of Proof - "Hunting Party"

Body of Proof 2.02: “Hunting Party”

“See if this helps. I don’t have a role. I can’t control what Lacey sees or what she likes any more than I can control you when you go mouthing off to a suspect in a homicide. I am not trying to be Lacey’s mother any more than I want to be your mother and quite frankly I’m getting a little sick of you putting me in that position. So whatever’s going on between you and Lacey, figure it out for yourselves because I don’t want any part of it.”

- Kate

We begin in a forest with a guy in hunting gear. He hears a shot and takes off. One of his party found a deer and they spread out to trap it. Just as everyone lines up their shots, they fire and one of the women in the group falls to the ground, dead. Meanwhile, Megan and Lacey are having tea. Lacey is drinking herbal tea with sugar, even though she hates herbal tea. Her explanation is she’s trying to make herself like it. With some prodding from Lacey, Megan says she’s fine with Todd dating Kate and wishes people would stop asking. As evidenced later on, she’s not all that pleased. But she does agree to a shopping trip with Lacey the following day.

At the crime scene, Peter pulls up in a sweet little sports car driven by a pretty woman. Mean jabs him a little about it. It looks like the woman, Julie Lobe, was shot once through and through but Megan posits she tumbled after she was shot and that the fall probably killed her. And they’ve got three suspects, her husband and his two grown children. Megan is rather abrasive about her theory that one of them killed Julie. She points out a scratch on Martin’s (the husband) neck and as she and Peter walk away, she tells Peter she wants him to get the tissue if he drops it. And then we have a fun little walk and talk where Peter reminds Megan of every time she needed his help.

Unfortunately, Peter makes the mistake of bringing up Megan’s insecurities with Lacey. Kate interrupts to ask if she and Megan are good with how things have been going. Megan’s a little evasive and luckily is saved by a call for Kate from the Mayor’s office. Megan begins the autopsy, still ignoring Peter and finds the nail of Julie’s right ringer finger was pulled back and she had some traces of paint on her elbow. Kate shows up and boots Megan from the case for accusing Martin of killing Julie. Apparently he’s a rich guy who contributed to the Mayor’s campaign. This pisses Megan off quite a lot. Unfortunately, Kate drags Peter away back to autopsy. Megan’s still got the bloody tissue and orders Ethan to type it and what was found on Julie’s body. Back in autopsy, Kate is trying to assure Peter that taking over the case had nothing to do with her dating Todd. He professes to be Switzerland and avoiding getting involved. After all, he’s got three sisters and isn’t going to get in the middle of the cat fight.

The sort of C storyline of the episode is worth summing up fairly quickly. The transportation department is looking for a new driver and it’s fallen to Curtis to conduct the interviews. He sees all kinds of wacky people. It really provides some comedy throughout the rest of the episode. And with this storyline, it was really needed.

Over at the police station, Bud and Sam are talking to Martin, his two kids and his financial manager. All of them were on the hunting trip and none had line of sight with Julie. Megan shows up uninvited and asks Martin what he and Julie fought about because the blood on her fingernail and the blood from the scratch on his neck show that she scratched him. He denies they fought and says she must have had a hangnail and it caught on his neck when she helped him into his hunting gear.

Back at autopsy, Curtis shows up with Julie’s toxicology panel. It turns out she was pregnant. Megan shows up the next morning and takes a peek at Peter’s tablet to see that Julie was pregnant. Kate pops in and after telling Megan that if she pulls another stunt like showing up to the police station on a case that she’s not working, she’ll get busted down to driving for transportation, she gets a new case. Normally, I’d be concerned about two separate cases, especially when one of the leads of the show is pursuing the second one, but it all dovetails nicely in the end.

Bud and Sam are interviewing Martin’s business manager, Alan. He knew that Julie was pregnant but Martin didn’t. She claimed it was so she could get past the three-month threshold. She went to Alan seeking financial assistance. S he wanted him to look into Martin’s assets. Meanwhile, Megan and Ethan show up at the new crime scene and we meet some rather annoying new cops. I know Bud and Sam aren’t the only cops in Philly that work with Megan and company but these guys were just really two-dimensional. Anyway, this second victim is a guy named Patrick. He’s well dressed and groomed but in a crappy part of town. The officers think he was there to score some drugs and got carjacked. Megan quickly debunks that theory as he’s got no track marks on his arms and his car is sitting safely across the street. Megan’s also not too pleased that her investigator got called to another scene.

She takes a break to go shopping with Lacey and is a little horrified to find out that the shoes Lacey wants to buy are rather dominatrix looking. Lacey says she tried on a pair of Kate’s and really liked them. Megan is clearly not pleased with the kind of influence Kate is having on her daughter.

Bud and Sam are at the ex-wife’s house to interview her (apparently she was the one who get Martin into hunting). She says she hated Martin for dumping her for a younger model but didn’t kill Julie. The kids had an interesting spin, too. Even if Julie had children, their inheritance wouldn’t be so diminished to kill. Bud still thinks they’ve got a money motive. And then there’s the whole semi-secret pregnancy. Peter ran some tests and Marin isn’t the father.

When Bud and Sam share the information about Julie’s pregnancy and the fact Martin wasn’t the father, they expect to find motive. But Martin explains that following prostate surgery, he became sterile. Julie was going to a sperm bank but he didn’t know which one. And now Peter’s out canvassing all the sperm banks in the city. Oh he’s so going to get jabs from the gang for that one.

Megan confronts Kate about Lacey seeing Kate’s shoes and Kate basically tells Megan to deal with her issues with Lacey and to leave her out of it. She’s not interested in the family drama. Megan doesn’t have much chance to get far in rebutting Kate’s accusation when it’s time for her autopsy with the newbie cops. And I have to say it was kind of dull. They’re just so boring and don’t get Megan. But they learn that Patrick was an interior decorator who lived in the nicer part of town with his husband. Megan kind of zeros in on Ethan telling her that Peter was canvassing sperm banks. More on that in a minute. Peter explains that Julie did go to a sperm bank but left empty handed. He also talked to her doctor and she showed up for the insemination process with sperm on ice but he didn’t know where it came from. Megan interrupts the group pow-wow to share the news that Patrick was the father of Julie’s baby. She figured it out because they both had the same paint trace on them and since Patrick was gay, they weren’t having an affair. So now she’s back on the case-of-the-week.

Megan and Peter go to talk to Patrick’s husband and they learn that Patrick and Julie were old friends and she asked him to be the father of her child because she didn’t want it to be a stranger. But they didn’t tell Martin because his ex-wife, Alexandra, blamed Patrick for introducing Julie to her husband. Patrick decorated the Lobes’ house a few years earlier. And it turns out Patrick was beaten to death with a tire iron for high end German cars.

Megan is meeting Lacey for some quick tea and a chat. Lacey assures her mom that even if she likes some of Kate’s things, she doesn’t like Kate more than her mom. No one will ever replace Megan. I think Megan needed to hear that most of all from Lacey. Bud and Sam are at Alexandra’s house checking her car but the CSU techs find nothing useful in the car. But it turns out, according to Alexandra, Martin hid all kinds of physical assets during their marriage. Megan and Kate have a two-person pow-wow to share the latest intel on the cases. Kate discovered some trace in the bullet wound that come from a rare oak tree that isn’t in bloom.

Now we have some fun Ethan and Curtis in the woods finding the tree. They find the tree and some residue from hairspray. Bud and Sam are going through the Lobes’ assets because they think maybe someone didn’t want Julie to see what the assets were. Peter is checking out Patrick’s loft where he spent a lot of time painting and finds a video camera (more on that later). Bud and Sam figure out who killed Patrick and Julie just as Megan does. Alan, the financial manager stole from Martin a while ago and he just kept stealing. He couldn’t pay back what he initially took so he just kept going. Megan knew who it was because he has acid reflux and coughed up calcium on Patrick. Unfortunately, as soon as they take Alan out of interrogation and Martin sees him, he shoots Alan. Now they have something to arrest Martin for.

That night, Peter stops by Megan’s office with the tape from the camera in Patrick’s loft, insisting that she watch it. Patrick and Julie were painting a crib for their baby. Even if Martin was going to raise the child, Patrick and Julie wanted the child to know how much he loved the baby. Megan gets teary-eyed as she watches. She calls Lacey to tell her that if she really wants the shoes, she should have them. It sounds like she’s over Kate being in Lacey’s life.

Person of Interest - "Pilot"

Person of Interest 1.01: “Pilot”

“I think you and I can help one another. I don’t think you need a psychiatrist, a support group, pills. You need a purpose. More specifically you need a job.”

- Mr. Finch

Before we begin, I just wanted to say I think “Person of Interest” was one of my most anticipated fall premiere shows. With a combo of JJ Abrams Michael Emerson and taking over the coveted CSI timeslot on Thursday nights, CBS clearly has high hopes. Anyway, let’s get to it.

We begin with what turns out to be a memory of a man and a woman in bed together somewhere calm and bright. A man does a voiceover about how losing the one person that connects you to the world leaves you wondering who you are and we cut to a subway car in New York and a group of white gang members who think they’re pretty tough. Tough enough to take on a drunken bum. Until said bum beats the crap out of all them without even getting a scratch. A female cop, Carter, shows up to take statements from everyone and has an interesting chat with the bum. She pegs him as special forces or some other covert branch of the military since the way he fought is no basic training. Carter says it would have looked better if he’d let the kids get some hits in, too. That way it wouldn’t look like he just went bat shit on them. He doesn’t seem interested and in fact, he refuses to give his name. So she resorts to a little cop trickery and snags his drinking glass to get DNA. Turns out his name isn’t in the system but his prints have shown up at various crime scenes all over the country over the past few years.

A man claiming to be the bum’s lawyer shows up and gets him out of the station before Carter can confront him about his prints being at multiple crime scenes. Turns out the attorney’s boss wants to speak with the bum. The bum, whose name we learn is John Reese (or at least that’s one of the names he uses), is driven to an underpass near a river and he meets Mr. Finch (played by Michael Emerson). Mr. Finch offers John a job and a purpose. He knows John used to work for the government and now the government thinks he’s dead. Finch also knows John’s been trying to drink himself to death. Admittedly, if I were John, I would be a little disturbed by this.

And it only gets creepier. John and Mr. Finch walk through the city and Finch gives his spiel about how someone dies in the city every eighteen hours and he has a way to try and stop it. But he needs John’s skills. Finch points out Diane Hanson, an ADA whose name came up on his list. He doesn’t know exactly what is going to happen to her but he wants John to find out and stop it from happening. John says he’s not interested and heads home. We next find he’s cut his hair and shaved hi rather impressive beard. He looks much hotter clean-shaven. And this way, while the cops are looking for a bum, they won’t notice him at all. He passes out with a bottle of something, dreaming about a woman named Jessica (the one from the beginning of the episode), only to wake up to a phone call. It’s Mr. Finch. He forces John to listen to a woman being murdered and not be able to stop it. John manages to get free (he’s tied to his bed) but finds it was a three-year-old recording Finch used to make a point. He says John couldn’t save that woman or Jessica but that he can still save Diane.

John seems to agree to help Mr. Finch and so they head to a defunct library Finch owns which seems to be his base of operations. It also happens to be where his machine is that churns out the information he uses to stop violent crimes from happening. He gives John six cover IDs with plenty of money and passports. Just like when he worked for the CIA. The interesting thing about the machine is it only produces social security numbers, not names. And he’s got the list tacked up on the wall, mapping out to all kinds of people. Finch calls them lost chances. But that’s likely to change with John in the mix now. We get a montage of sorts as John breaks into Diane’s apartment, clones her phone and sets up video surveillance. He’s also narrowed the suspects (he thinks she’s going to be a victim of a crime) to two people, a co-worker and the defendant in her current trial. We got a glimpse of the trial as Diane questions one of the detectives, Lionel. He goes off-script from what they prepared and John overhears (thanks to tapping her phone) that she has to make absolutely sure the right person goes to prison.

That night she goes to see the defendant, Pope, in prison for a private meeting (without his lawyer). She tries to tell him she thinks he’s innocent and wonders if his younger brother, Michael, saw what really happened. Pope gets pissed at the mention of his brother so John knows something is up. He needs to find the brother before whoever framed Pope goes after Diane.

We get another bit of memory about John and Jessica. They’re down in Mexico and she’s lying to her mother about who she’s with. And John says he’s quit his job to be with her. The happiness doesn’t last long because Jessica turns on the TV to see that 9/11 has happened. So I guess we now approximately how long ago Jessica was alive. Back in the present, John is watching Diane’s office from a rooftop and he sees her co-worker, Wheeler, check the information on her computer and sees the information on Pope’s brother. John manages to find Michael but Michael dodges him. John does slip a phone into Michael’s bag to track him but he’s going to need more than just a cell phone to handle whoever is coming. So he stops by for a visit with Anton (one of the kids from the subway) and ends up shooting pretty much everyone in the room in a pretty sweet stunt. He takes all the guns so he’s got firepower. And it turns out he’s going to need it. Michael’s been picked up by whoever is after Diane. It turns out to be the cops. Oh joy. John gets to be pretty bad ass and shoots up the car and drags Michael to safety. Things are only going to get worse. John snaps some shots of the group of corrupt cops, a mix of narcotics officers and Lionel. It seems the drug cops steal the drugs and money and kill the witnesses sand Lionel sets up a fall guy. John shares the intel with Finch and we get a rather long walk-and-talk with exposition. I mean I get they needed to explain how the machine came about and what it does but it was a little bit of an info dump. Anyway, we learn that Finch built this machine after 9/11 to cull the terrorists from the general population before they acted. But the machine picked up other crime indicators, too. So Finch programmed it to split the lists, one relevant (major loss of life) and the other irrelevant. And he built himself a back door to access the irrelevant list (he gets the social security numbers before midnight when the list erases).

Things are about to get extra dicey. Pope is killed in his cell and Lionel make a call to Diane to tell her where to meet. John thinks this is it. The cops are going to kill Diane. She shows up and it looks pretty sketchy. Diane’s looking around, calling out to see if anyone’s there but it quickly turns out she’s not a victim-to-be. She’s in it with the cops. And they need to get rid of Wheeler. John, unfortunately, gets spotted and Diane gives orders to Lionel to get rid of him, permanently. So now John’s got two problems: save his own ass and stop one of the narcotics cops, Stills, from killing Wheeler.

John regains consciousness in the back of Lionel’s car. They’re at Oyster Bay, and that’s where Lionel’s going to kill John. They have a little conversation about why Lionel became a ‘bad” guy. John says he knows Lionel is loyal and he needs a cop on the inside to help do his work. John releases what looks like a flash grenade in the car and causes an accident. He manages to climb out the back of the car and drags Lionel free and then shoots him in the back to make a point (Lionel’s wearing a bullet proof vest). Now it’s time to save Wheeler.

Stills shows up at Wheeler’s building and they’ve got one guy watching him from the apartment. They think he’s alone and one of Stills’ cronies assures him that Wheeler goes to the gym every night. So they’ll kill him in the lobby. And they’re using an ex-con that Wheeler put away to do it. But they didn’t count on Wheeler’s son being there. Stills says he doesn’t care and he’ll make the ex-con shoot the kid, too but John intervenes and Wheeler and his son get out safely, without knowing anything was about to happen. Things aren’t looking good for Diane. She’s in the middle of another trial and when she tells the bailiff to play a recording, it turns out John switched them and we hear her giving orders to have Wheeler killed. Too bad for her.

John and Mr. Finch meet up at the same spot under the bridge (though this time there’s a nice bench) and John says the machine gave Finch another number. Finch explains the numbers never stop coming and that he chose john because they have quite a bit in common. Both are thought dead and both have lost someone. It looks like John’s going to be ticking around a while. And Carter will be looking for him. We end with him staring directly as a traffic camera and pull back to reveal all the machine drives in a giant warehouse somewhere. Nice way to say the government is watching.

Body of Proof - "Love Thy Neighbor"

Body of Proof 2.01: “Love Thy Neighbor”

“You couldn’t handle a desperate housewife. Believe me.”

- Megan

I want to start off by saying I’m not sure if the first batch of episodes are the “lost” five episodes from season 1’s 13 or not but it definitely felt like we were following straight from where we ended last season. Anyway, I’m excited to be back blogging this fun show.

We begin in the woods in the very early morning and we see a young girl looking really nervous. It turns out she’s waiting for her boyfriend to show up. He almost didn’t make it because his dad nearly caught him sneaking out. They have about two seconds to share a kiss before a car comes racing over the nearby embankment and straight at them. They dive out of the way just as the car smashes into a tree. Cut to later in the morning as Megan arrives to take Lacey to school. Megan’s ex-husband, Todd, needs Megan to drop Lacy off because he’s got a deposition. Megan seems thrilled to get to spend some time with her daughter until Kate walks out the front door. The two share very tense “good mornings” before Kate and Todd leave. I sort of don’t blame Megan. We get an interesting little beat with Megan and Lacey and Lacey declines breakfast in order to study for a test since she couldn’t study the night before. The walls are too thin. Megan starts to panic a little until Lacey elaborates that she could hear the TV in the living room.

At the crash site, Megan finds Peter waiting for her. They examine the body as Bud and Sam show up (I’m glad we have them back as partners. Having just one or the other in episodes was a little dull). They discover a cell phone that fell out of the car as the EMTs tried to get to the driver, Daniel Davidson. Megan has her own phone troubles as she drops it in a puddle while trying to answer a call from her mother. It also turns out that there are no injuries consistent with Daniel being conscious when the car went over. In other words, someone subdued him and then pushed his car over the embankment.

Back at the lab, Kate is wandering around the lab with a schematic of a mass spectrometer when Curtis notices. Poor Curtis, he’s going to be in for a tough time this week. He starts to freak out since the new equipment costs his entire budget but Kate assures him that she bought it with grant money. Curtis makes the comment that at least she’s in bed with the right people and Megan takes the chance to make a snarky comment about it. I like the tension between the two of them but I really hope it gets resolved soon. Down in autopsy Megan tasks Ethan with fixing her phone. Too bad he’s got no clue how to fix it and spends a few minutes very comically trying to fix and ends up nearly breaking it. Megan notices some restraint marks on Daniel’s wrists plus a splinter in his arm and a red fiber in his nose. So it’s off to talk to the grieving widow.

It turns out Daniel lives on a cul-de-sac and we get a sort of iconic pan around of the people going about their business; one guy is fixing his motorcycle, another is watering his lawn. We don’t learn much from the widow, other than they were married sixteen years and he was a CPA. Megan is immediately suspicious of the neighbors given what kind of secrets such communities hold. While I’m not a fan of Desperate Housewives (I only saw one or two episodes) I loved the references and little nods to Dana Delany’s previous claim to fame. Just as Bud and Sam drive off, Megan notices Peter flirting with one of the women in the neighborhood. She calls him on it in a sort of brother-sister way which I thought was cute. The cuteness ends when Megan spots a broken white picket fence. And said fence has blood on it. So we’ve got the answer t one of Daniel’s injuries. Turns out he had a fight with one of his neighbors (played by Eliza Dushku’s boyfriend Rick Fox). The neighbor accused Daniel of poisoning his dog.

Back at the lab, Kate is looking for Megan and ends up putting Curtis in the middle of everything. Megan shows up not two minutes after Kate heads up in the elevator and Curtis comments that it’s like a tele-novella and no one survives. It turns out Kate needed to tell Megan that Lacey was sick at school. Since she can’t get in touch, however, Kate ends up getting Lacey herself. It’s quite obvious Kate is really uncomfortable with the parent-like role she’s had to play. Meanwhile, this season we get to see more of the police precinct. Bud has found glove impressions on the back o the car and a fancy key in the driver seat. Sam discovered an unsent text message to a woman named Vicky, one of Daniel’s neighbors. And the plot thickens. Megan gets a chance to bitch a little about her dislike of Todd and Kate being together when Peter shows up to ask about cause of death. Megan says it was a result of the car crash. She’s concerned about his brain though. It was discolored and shows signs of a disease that would only be present with a weakened immune system. And Peter rules out organ transplant and cancer. The only other possibility is that he’s HIV positive.

Bud and Sam head back to the cul-de-sac to talk to Vicky but it gets interrupted pretty quickly by her husband, Bill. Before Bill can throw them out, Bud discovers the key found in Daniel’s car goes to the locked cabinet in Vicky and Bill’s bedroom, containing all manner of bondage gear. Yeah, they went there. Creepy. And the creep factor (and the fascination with alternative lifestyles) continues when Bill reveals most of the community was into partner swapping. And Vicky had a relationship with Daniel. But Bill denies that Daniel could have been HIV positive because everyone got tested frequently. The lifestyle wasn’t all rosy for everyone. One of the neighbors, Kevin, lost his wife and kids because of the set up. Vicky admits that Daniel was with her until 4:45 that morning, approximately 15 minutes before the car went off the road. But he wasn’t really into the swapping thing anymore. He claimed it had consequences.

As usual, Curtis comes to Ethan’s aid when he can’t figure out how to fix Megan’s phone. Curtis stuck it in some rice which absorbs the liquid. Good job Curtis! He also finds the restraints used to tie up Daniel in Vicky’s trunk of bondage gear. Just as Megan turns on her phone, she sees a missed message from Lacey and races off. She’s rather pissed that Kate didn’t try harder to get in touch. I have to say though, it’s not all Kate’s fault. If Megan hadn’t been so bitchy, she would have gotten the message and could have picked up Lacey herself.

The next morning, Ethan greets Megan with the news that Daniel didn’t have HIV or any other immune-suppressive disease and that he was knocked out with break cleaner. So she and Peter head back to the row of unusual suspects to talk to Kevin, the guy who’d’ been working on his motorcycle the day before. They don’t find anything suspicious in his garage though. He admits he had been seeing Daniel’s wife, Andrea, and that his wife realized before he did that he had feelings. So she left. Megan wants to understand the whole culture but stops herself from asking because it would be too weird. Peter and Megan call Sam and Bud to share the latest intel and they discover that Andrea took out an advance of $15,000 on her credit card. So the new theory is she hired someone to kill her husband.

The gang brings Andrea in for questioning but she says she didn’t hire a hit man. She took the money out to put as a down payment on a new time share condo on an island near Bermuda. She wanted to go there so she could rekindle her relationship with Daniel. But he got pissed when he found out about the money. Apparently, Vicky was the one touting this new condo set up and that she was having a presentation at her house. Megan offers to go to see what it’s all about sine Bud and Sam don’t have a shot in hell of getting back in. Not surprisingly, it turns out to be a horrible scam. Megan shoots it down pretty quickly. There is no island. It’s more of a landfill and it’s not near Bermuda, but in the Bermuda Triangle. She clears the group out pretty fast and demands Vicky return all the money. But it’s not the only thing going on. She notices all the women crying for no reason and Peter points out that Megan’s crying. Megan snags a few tears in an evidence vial and even though it comes back as negative, it’s a pH of 4. Something changed the pH levels in their mucus membranes. It’s time for Megan to take another look at Daniel’s brain slides. It turns out he was suffering from toxins found in paint thinners, acrylics and many other things. Megan and Kate also butt heads over Lacey. Megan shares a moment when she felt like Lacey’s hero and that she’s only disappointed her daughter ever since. Kate doesn’t want to be caught up in the family drama.

Meanwhile, Bud, Sam and a whole mess of cops head back to the cul-de-sac to evacuate everyone since whatever was affecting Daniel was in the whole town’s air and soil. They spot some funky flowers in Kevin’s yard. Kevin’s been cooking meth and Daniel found out. Kevin started cooking it after his wife left to try and get enough money to get him out of the hole he was in. Daniel found out and Kevin killed him to keep from losing anything else.

It looks like Peter’s hooking up with the cul-de-sac chick he’s been flirting with and when Ethan says he wants to get in on the action, Megan says he couldn’t handle that kind of neighborhood. That night, Megan stops by to check up on Lacey. Megan correctly points out that Lacey wasn’t really sick. Lacey admits she wanted to take her science test because she knew she was going to fail and she didn’t want to disappoint her mother. She likes art (and is pretty good) and Megan assures Lacey that she can never be a disappointment.

Valuable Lessons

I have learned a very valuable lesson (again). Now I've had my share of technology snafus in the past. Mainly by getting viruses on my computer by watching TV in not-so-smart places. No, don't worry. I haven't gone and done anything like that in ages.

But I did manage to kill an external hard drive and I thought I lost everything. School work, music, manuscripts. I was not pleased when the Best Buy guy told me they couldn't fix it and it would cost somewhere between $1500-$3000 to maybe (possibly) retrieve my data. So I bought a new drive and a carrying case and went home.

Now, I have a few flash drives lying around my apartment and I checked them. Lo and behold, between the two of them, I recovered most of my work. I need to redo my resume and hope to piece together some stuff for writing samples. But I've got most of my material back. So now, to protect myself, what have I done, you ask?

I have now triple backed up all my files. That's right. I've got them on my online drop box, I've got them on a flash drive and my new external drive (this also has my music). So I will endeavor to update everything weekly. This way I won't have to worry about losing material ever again.

Summer TV Rewind Round Up

As promised, here is the round up for my Summer TV Rewind of series 1 of BBC's "Robin Hood".

Robin Hood 1.01 "Will You Tolerate This?"

Robin Hood 1.02 "Sheriff Got Your Tongue?"

Robin Hood 1.03 "Who Shot the Sheriff?"

Robin Hood 1.04 "Parent Hood"

Robin Hood 1.05 "Turk Flu"

Robin Hood 1.06 "The Tax Man Cometh"

Robin Hood 1.07 "Brothers in Arms"

Robin Hood 1.08 "Tattoo? What Tattoo?"

Robin Hood 1.09 "A Thing or Two About Loyalty"

Robin Hood 1.10 "Peace? Off!"

Robin Hood 1.11 "Dead Man Walking"

Robin Hood 1.12 "Return of the King"

Robin Hood 1.13 "A Clue: No"

Torchwood: Miracle Day - Not So Miraculous!

First of all, I want to apologize for disappearing all summer. I got very busy with work and studying for the MPRE (which I passed by the way) . Then school started and well here we are at almost the middle of September. And I promise, in the next few days I will post a round up of my Summer TV Rewind of series 1 of "Robin Hood" over on More TV, Please !

Anyway, last night Torchwood aired the series 4 finale on Starz. After watching the conclusion, I felt the need to do an overall reaction to the series (if you pop over to More TV, Please!, you'll see that I blogged episode 7 "Immortal Sins" for Jen). Be warned, SPOILERS abound for the finale.

***

Way back when they first announced Torchwood was coming back, I was excited. We would have Jack and Gwen back on our screens. Then they said it would be set in America and have two American team members. I grew skeptical. As sad as it makes me to say this, I'm afraid "Miracle Day" was not miraculous for me.

If I had to pick one overarching problem with series 4, it would have to be the storytelling. I believe the show suffered, rather than benefited, from the enhanced budget and production values. Sure the explosions looked good but the story being told was not as compelling as the writers (yes I'm looking at you RTD) would have liked to believe. The premise, the entire world becomes immortal one day when no one dies, in and of itself had the potential to be amazing. In execution, it was lacking. We had more than half the series full of episodes about political and Big Pharma drama instead of fighting aliens. In fact, if you are as big a fan of Torchwood and Doctor Who as I am, you will be outraged to know there was no alien behind the miracle at all. Just a big chasm running through the middle of the world (which made me wonder whether the hole in "A Whole in the World" in Angel season 5 was somehow related). I think Torchwood worked better either with the format of series 1 and 2 (with more monster of the week episodes) or the mini-series format with a shorter episode run. Children of Earth was so compelling and mind-blowingly intense because it was crammed into a shorter span of episodes and it was mainly nonstop action and craziness.

Miracle Day by comparison was drawn out. We could have done without the entire PhiCorps nonsense. In the end it really wasn't all that important. Yes, The Families had their fingers in a lot of pie, including Big Phama but still, they could have shown that in a much abbreviated form. The same could be said for the overflow camps. We understand that no one dying means the economy goes to shit. But we didn't need to see people burned alive. We really didn't.

In addition to sub-par storytelling, I found the new characters of Rex and Esther to be poor substitutes for well...any of the prior Torchwood team. I'll probably never forgive RTD for killing Ianto but even Tosh and Owen wee preferable to clueless Esther and over-the-top Rex. I didn't feel, even by the end of the series, that I'd connected with them as people who I cared about. When Esther got shot, I honestly wasn't surprised or felt that I cared that she died. It was more, okay who of the team will get killed this series. RTD has a penchant (much like Mr. Whedon) for killing off characters. And perhaps the stupidest part of the whole resolution of "Miracle Day" involved Rex transfusing Jack's blood so that when the miracle reverted, he became immortal like Jack. I will concede that perhaps what Rose did to Jack in "The Parting of the Ways" probably affected him physically but they never said his blood was what made him immortal. Also, I dislike Rex enough that him being immortal now just pisses me off.

Now, the series did have a few high points. We got some shout-outs and throw-backs to prior Torchwood members. In the pilot, Jack goes by the name Owen Harper to get in to see the bomber that got charred. And we had several references to Ianto (usually when Jack was dealing with some hot guy he'd slept with). And we had some deepening of Jack and Gwen's relationship, especially in "Immortal Sins". Even in the finale, we saw how close Jack and Gwen had become over the years. She was willing to kill him and he willingly let her do it to save the world.

If Starz orders a fifth series (and RTD is around/available to write it) I hope they do a shorter order and for god sake, have aliens in the damn thing! I really think "Miracle Day" could have been done just fine from Cardiff, even if it wasn't back in the Hub. Needless to say, if I feel the need to indulge in some top-notch Torchwood, I will be going back to old favorites like "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" and "Captain Jack Harkness" before I venture into "Miracle Day" reruns.