We spent the weekend in a beachfront house in Surfside, Texas, which is on the Gulf of Mexico about 45 miles down the coast from Galveston. This is our fourth trip to that community, and our third staying in the same rental. It was a get-away-from-it-all weekend and it was perfect. There was a fairly strong wind coming in from the gulf that modulated the temperature. It never got overly hot, thanks to that constant breeze. The waves were high, loud and constant. We cooked meals, walked on the beach, sat on the deck without fearing sunburn and read. Oh, so relaxing. Highly recommended. The beach was fairly busy for so early in the season, though people tended to pack up around 4 or 5 p.m. The water must have been reasonably warm because quite a few people went in. Lots of kites being flown.
I finished The Night Season by Chelsea Cain on Saturday. A decent serial killer thriller, though a tad far-fetched in terms of the killer’s M.O. Nice historical tie-in and the saturated city and the looming flood were well drawn. The killer wasn’t caught by any kind of real deduction—they more or less stumbled upon him by accident. A fast read and some decent threats to the primary characters that kept the pages turning.
I also read about 90% (according to my Kindle) of Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson. This is her fourth novel featuring erstwhile detective/policeman Jackson Brodie, who still takes the odd case, often against his own better judgement. In this book, he’s looking for the birth parents of a woman from New Zealand who was adopted. Fairly non-threatening, but it puts him right in the middle of a decades old cover-up, and he’s not the only one interested. One common element among all of Atkinson’s novels is her reliance on coincidence to drive the plot. In general, writers of fiction avoid coincidence because it doesn’t seem credible to readers. Too convenient. But her use of it is so heavy handed that you just have to go along for the ride. Her style is complex and lavish, her word usage is eminently British, as are her cultural references to things like Gene Hunt (Life on Mars), the TARDIS (Doctor Who) and Hyacinth Bucket (Keeping Up Appearances). It’s a delightful novel. The little kid who makes stars with her hand and uses thumbs-up/thumbs-down to indicate her approval or lack thereof is a charmer.
The Montreal Expos still exist in the alternate world on Fringe. This week’s episode was a equal parts build up and fizzle. Walternate’s desperation is pushing the confrontation between universes to the brink, and our heroes on both sides have plans that don’t work. Fauxlivia stages an invasion, browbeats Brandon into coughing up the secrets of interdimensional travel but doesn’t heed his warning, so she gets caught with duff tech. And Peter’s plan to act as a giant Off switch meets with even less success. “If this works and I save both worlds, I want you to consider me officially retired,” he tells Broyles, who isn’t the least bit shamefaced about his behavior on acid last week. Just when Olivia is getting comfortable in Peter’s bed (except for Walter’s habit of walking around naked on Tuesdays), things go bad again. Loved Walter’s scene in the chapel, pleading for God to take his life instead of destroying the world. “I don’t know my way around here,” he says. And then there’s Sam, the guy from the bowling alley. He knows a lot. How does he fit into the mythos?
One thing to remember about The Killing: the eye of suspicion is going to track all over the place and fall upon many people. People may become serious suspects, be exonerated and then fall back under suspicion as new evidence turns up. Just because someone is a suspect now doesn’t mean you can exclude them from consideration just because it’s too early in the season for the killer to be revealed. It’s a tricky show, in many ways! (One of the interesting differences between this version and the original is that the detective in the Danish version was leaving for Sweden, where she hoped to work with the police but wouldn’t be able to arrest people or carry a gun because of the nationality thing. And her son was studying Swedish so he could go to school there. Not quite the same culture shock as going to northern California!)
Sad to see the cowboys go on The Amazing Race. Though the Globetrotters U-turned them, they had effectively already been U-turned by the bicycle ride across Lichtenstein. A couple of the early contestants got the answer right (which amazed me given the number of false turns some of them took) and the others colluded to provide the answer to the rest except for the cowboys, which meant Jet had to do the course all over again. I think they would have been out of the race even without the U-turn at the end. Hopefully they enjoyed the fondue more the Zev and Justin did. Some of the other teams think that Zev and Justin have a handicap since Zev’s going to have to do more of the roadblocks from here on out, but he just might surprise them. Boy, is Kent turning out to be a royal pain this season? I don’t remember him whining so much last time.
Doctor Who is back, and wow, what a way to start the new season. The Doctor has been sending Amy and Rory messages in history texts and inserts into Charlie Chaplin films and finally settles for a good old formal invite, complete with date, time and latitude/longitude, which takes them to the American west and an amazing sequence of events that left my head spinning. And that didn’t count River shooting the stetson off the Doctor’s head in a replay of last season’s Fez incident. A rather cheeky allusion to Amy packing on a few pounds and some queasiness told me her secret long before she spilled it to the Doctor. Does Rory know, one wonders? For this American two-part episode, lots of references to presidents and states. The FBI guy’s name is Delaware. The clue leads to an intersection of three streets named for presidents. And Tricky Dickie himself is there. River sums up his record: Vietnam, Watergate…there’s some good stuff, too. “Not enough,” the Doctor says. “Hippy,” she calls him. “Archeologist,” he fires back. Them’s fighting words.
I liked the bit between Delaware and Nixon, where Nixon says that the FBI guy was his second choice for the mission. “That’s okay. You were my second choice for president,” Delaware says. I was delighted to discover that the guys playing older Delaware and younger Delaware are real-life father and son. (I recognized the younger one as one of Captain Mal’s regular foes on Firefly.)
For the first time, the companions are one step ahead of the Doctor and can’t share information with him. The Doctor won’t trust River—he doesn’t even really know who she is—but he trusts Amy when she swears on fish sticks and custard, their private joke. The aliens are particularly creepy, looking like the kind that kidnapped Whitley Strieber. Unlike the statues that move when you blink, these ones blink out of your memory completely when you aren’t looking at them. Freaky. The scene in the Oval Office was great. Doctor: River, make her blue again. Secret Service Agent: Do not compliment the intruder.
And lots of flirty bits between the Doctor and River. “That’s her ‘he’s hot when he’s clever’ face,” he says. “That’s my normal face,” she counters. “Yeah, it is.” Plus River’s spoiler about her being a screamer. Funniest exchange, though, was when the Doctor introduced his team: The legs, the nose and Mrs. Robinson. “I hate you,” River says with genuine passion. “No you don’t.” And the Doctor’s tag line: “I’m OK. I’m the King of OK.”
Followed by the cliff-hanger to end all cliff hangers. The shot heard around the TARDIS.
I was really impressed with last season’s long game—the payoff of little bits of things that happened throughout the season at the end. I’m hoping for something similar this year, but I hope they don’t make us wait until the end to figure out what the first 10 minutes of this season mean.
