Spam tram and tingling gonads

I’m going to mention Life On Mars here to see if I can attract more spam comments from ABC.

I started reading Black and White and Dead All Over last night. It’s by the same guy who wrote The Darwin Conspiracy, which I liked quite a lot. The author, John Darnton, seems to like blending fact and fiction. There’s a sentence in the opening chapter that had me laughing out loud. He was describing a hard-as-nails assistant editor who ruled the newsroom (a thinly disguised NY Times—Darnton used to be a Times reporter and the book is a roman à clef) with an iron fist. The line goes: “When he walked into a room, other men sometimes felt a tingling in their gonads.” The first chapter has a terrific arc to it, ending with another LOL joke that has been set up brilliantly.

NCIS was pretty good last night. The main storyline—the case to be solved—was pretty much incidental to the opportunity to see Gibbs in his hometown with his father. It was a reconciliation story, and a good one at that. The “car in the garage” gimmick hasn’t been done since, oh, LOST last year, but what the heck. Ralph Waite was perfect as the elder Gibbs. The payoff from Tony’s one question was brilliant—the flashback where we find out where Gibbs’s rules originated.

The writers of The Mentalist must have been reading Agatha Christie lately. I’m thinking of Murder On the Orient Express. I found it interesting how the episode was pulled apart and reassembled for the preview, with the order of lines scrambled or condensed for increased effect. Best scene: when Lisbon and her colleague raid the trailer to find Patrick Jane playing chess with the suspect. Worst scene: the fake hypnotism.

I’m not sure what to think of The Unit last night. Whenever Steven Webber’s character is inconvenient to the plot, they just ship him off to D.C. for a meeting, I guess. I could see the “punch line” coming a mile away, as soon as Jack picked the guy up. Way to bond with someone over parental suicides. It wasn’t a bad show, but it’s been done before, and better. And I don’t think we ever did find out how the guy arranged the escape, since he hadn’t had visitors or phone calls in a while.