A deluge of steaming torrents

Breaking Bad

Season 3 of Breaking Bad is under way and I'm loving every minute of it. It's so painful being reduced to 1 episode per week though --- it was much better playing catch up...

Caprica

This is a new sci-fi show set in the same fictional reality as the excellent Battlestar Galactica, 58 years before the events in that series. It deals with the creation of the first Cylons and features a young William Adama. Eric Stolz plays Daniel Graystone, the scientific genius and technology mogul who creates the first Cylon and coins the name (in T2-speak, he's "the man most directly responsible" for the carnage to come). 

I was a big fan of BSG and I loved the finale, so I was fairly enthusiastic about this show, even though it smacks slightly of milking the franchise.

Unfortunately, however, I just couldn't get into the show: I gave up half-way through the third episode. It's not that there isn't anything to like: the special effects are great, and I love the depiction of Caprica city as a kind of New York City meets Coruscant. It's just that the story and characters aren't that interesting or convincing.

24 Season 8

"Contact NSA: the terrorists just took out CTU" - Jack Bauer

Jack's back for the eighth and final time (modulo a possible movie adaptation or two). 

I originally fell under the spell of 24 around about the time Season 6 was current (this was back in the days of borrowing/ripping DVDs). It was the perfect show on which to play catch-up: at one point I got pretty darn close to watching the entire 24-hour "day" (1 day = 1 season = 24 x 1 hr episode) in real-time. I raced through the first 5 seasons within a matter of months (being between jobs alone in Dublin helped there). 

But by around Season 6 the spell was starting to wear off and it was becoming clear that every conceivable terrorist attack scenario had been explored -- several times. A memorable scene illustrating the silliness of it all was a few episodes into Season 6 when Jack, just hours after being released from one and a half years of unimaginable horrors at the hands of the Chinese, witnesses the explosion of a (small) nuke in Los Angeles and instantly gets that look which tells you he's about to save the world again.

By Season 7, I was coasting on momentum -- driven mostly by curiosity to see what would happen to Jack this time and who could possibly be left to kill. Notwithstanding the plunge into new levels of implausibility (viz. the re-incarnation of Carlos Bernard as Tony Almeida --- who was assumed dead back in Season 4 or 5), it was surprisingly entertaining and gripping. I appreciated the fact that the show was starting to poke fun at itself, with Jack practically begging to be allowed to torture suspects but being held at bay (for most of the season) by the nouveau regime.

Season 8 seems to be trying to take itself a bit more seriously, and is less interesting as a result. The cliches are feeling tired, and at this point -- slightly more than halfway through -- I'm not as gripped as I should be (to be honest, I should admit that part of the problem is watching the show at the drip-feeding level of one episode per week: it would undoubtedly work better at higher doses).

Anyway, I expect I'll see it through to the end, but I'm glad to hear they'll be calling it a day after that.

Secret Diary of a Call Girl

Watched season 3 (all 8 episodes) of this UK version of Sex And The City a couple of weeks ago. The storyline is hopelessly contrived, and you feel they are really struggling to keep things interesting with such a limited set of characters, but it is still easy to watch, feel-good entertainment. This season sees Belle dealing with the success of her first book and her struggle to meet her editor's demand for a sequel.