I’m getting ready to leave for the airport to fly to Boston, where I will be attending Crime Bake for the next couple of days. I’ll report on it when I get back, and will probably post tweets if the WiFi at the hotel cooperates. Dennis Lehane is going to be there, so I hope to get a chance to meet him. Charlaine Harris, who I met at NECON a while back, is the Guest of Honor.
Surprising turn of events on Survivor this week, and I think Marty was as astonished as anyone. Based on the way he strutted down the catwalk after he cast his vote, I think he was convinced that Jill was done. And NaOnka surprised everyone by keeping the idol for another week. I wonder if she had inside information. I had to laugh when she counselled Chase not to get on Brenda’s nerves. As if she hasn’t been getting on everyone’s nerves. Funny line of the week came from Dan. “There aren’t any ziplines in Brooklyn. If there are, you’re a burglar.” The preview for next week looks ominous. Everyone looking down and reacting as if they’ve just seen the most terrible thing ever. Any guesses as to what it is, Jeff Strand? It’s always interesting to watch the Ponderosa footage on line, to see the dynamics of how the previous person adapts to the insertion of someone new who is just coming down off the game.
Big sense of deja vu watching CSI last night. The show opened with a bunch of young people skinny dipping and discovering a body in the water with them. The exact same thing happened in the opening scene of Law & Order: Los Angeles the night before. And in both cases the person had been killed elsewhere and dumped in the water—the Pacific in the case of L&O and in a sulfur spring on CSI. I was hoping to see more of the oil rig they visited as a crime scene on L&O:LA, as it made for an interesting setting. The defense attorney was someone the DA (Decker, played by Terrence Howard) knew from law school. When she said, “Imagine my thrill when I heard we were going to cross swords” he quickly countered with, “I didn’t realize you had one.” Later, when his assistant chides him for thinking that his manly approach would convince a reluctant witness better than hers, he said, “This voice has changed the minds of a lot of women.”
The opening scene of The Mentalist was a nice surprise. Does Lisbon know that Grace is dating the FBI guy? If so, putting him and Rigsby together was a risky move. And Hightower blows the killer away by shooting in a direct line with Lisbon and Jane. No through-and-throughs? You know you’re in trouble when your captor says, “I have to take my medication now.” Lisbon thinks she needs to analyze what Patrick would have seen at the crime scene, but she fails. Patrick would probably have identified the witness as a liar. I had my suspicions, especially because Lisbon said to check them out, which is something you don’t often hear the cops say. LOL at Patrick’s filing cabinet full of complaint letters. Not much Cho action this week. Lisbon got off the best line, sotto voce at the end: “I wish I had a cattle prod.”
A little bit of levity on Law & Order: SVU this week. Stabler is confronted with his nemesis, FBI agent Dana (Marcia Gay Harden). Every time they meet up with her, something bad happens to him. “I don’t have a good track record with you and explosives,” he tells her, then, winded after chasing a suspect, he gasps, “She’s not going to be happy until she kills me.” A few seconds later he catches one of her ricochets in the shoulder. Of course she brings him flowers in the hospital, so that’s okay. Munch got a little more screen time this week because the plot involved paranoid conspiracy theorists and he’s the resident expert on those. “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid,” Finn tells him when he’s reading their propaganda. Stabler did a little play-acting when he was interrogating one of the wing nuts. “Don’t look at the mirror,” he advises, before warning about “FEMA Death Camps.” I’m still not sure what happens to the kid Liv inherited when she’s called out on the job. I know Marcia Gay Harden is an excellent actress, and I enjoyed chatting with her on the set of The Mist, but I find I’m usually conscious of her acting when I watch her. Except at the end of this episode when she has to testify about her assault. That was engrossing.
