Another two editing passes through the new short story this morning. One pass usually ends up being a “flow” revision, where I suddenly discover that everything is okay, but it’s all in the wrong order. I move paragraphs around. I move sentences around within paragraphs. And all of a sudden it all falls into place and the thing flows from beginning to end. It’s an interesting process. Reminds me of the possibly anecdotal story about the famous writer who managed seven whole words one day, except he wasn’t sure of the order.
It’s been raining all morning. When’s the last time that happened? I can’t recall. For a moment, I couldn’t remember where the lever was to turn on my windshield wipers. It was covered with cobwebs.
Yesterday I spent the better part of an hour talking to Bob LeDrew via Skype for his Kingcast podcast series. Most of the time we talked Dark Tower, and in part about the proposed movie adaptation. About six hours after we finished, Universal announced it wasn’t going to finance the project, rendering moot a lot of what we’d discussed! Not entirely; the project isn’t dead. They just need to find another studio to back it. Anyhow, here’s the interview: Episode 13.
The concept behind this season of Torchwood is easily stated. After a certain date and time, no one (no human) on Earth dies. Or can die. That little concept, though, has a lot of interesting implications and kudos to the show for digging into some of them. If a person can’t die, hospitals need to rethink the whole concept of triage. Treat the least injured first to get them out of the unit. People aren’t going to die if they’re made to wait. However, infections can be a problem since badly infected people won’t die, so humans become incubators for germs. There aren’t any more organ donors. Pain killers are now a number one priority since horribly mangled people will survive, seemingly forever. The food and water supply will run out…what then?
The second episode acknowledged the classic inspiration for the story: Tithonus, lover of Eos, who asked Zeus to make him immortal but neglected to ask for eternal youth, so he was condemned to get older for eternity until he finally shriveled up into a cicada. Post-miracle, the people on earth are still aging, as evidenced by the shrinking of their telomeres. I love it when a show gets all scientific like that. Or by showing how to synthesize EDTA at 30,000 feet. Newman from Seinfeld shows up as the evil CIA guy who burns his own agents, Rex and Esther, to eradicate all traces of Torchwood. What’s his motivation? Curious. And Lauren Ambrose from Six Feet Under enters the story as a pharmaceutical rep who can’t even give away her business cards at first. Bill Pullman’s character is getting interesting. Is it all a con? I thought I saw a trace, a smidgen, a nanosecond of a smile when he entered the elevator after his “performance,” but that might have been just my imagination. The best sight gag of the season so far was the CIA agent with the broken neck. That just looked wrong. That’s what you get when you make the mistake of calling Gwen “English.” The little blue mini getaway car was pretty funny, too. “I thought you Americans all drove big SUVs. This is rubbish.” So far, so good.
Imagine the scene: Giancarlo Esposito (Gus) gets his script for the first episode of Breaking Bad, season 3. He flips through the pages. Gets to the end. Flips through again. “What?” he rants. “I only get one line?” Instead what he gets is about five minutes of silent menace during which he does little more than take off his jacket, hang it up, remove his tie and his shoes and don protective clothing. He listens to Walt rant and rave. He picks up the box cutter for which the episode is titled. And then he makes his bold statement. Still not to his line: that doesn’t come for another few minutes, after he washes his hands, removes the gear, puts his jacket, tie and shoes back on, and has almost reached the exit of the lab. Intense stuff. To think how worried Walt was when there was one teeny little fly in his lab. I guess he’s gotten over the obsessive compulsive cleanliness thing.
“At least we all understand each other,” Jesse says. “We’re all on the same page…the one that says, ‘if I can’t kill you, you’ll sure as shit wish you were dead.'”
This show has some of the quirkiest cinematography on TV today. The camera lingers on odd compositions and has some funny transitions, like from Walt’s swirling mop to Jesse’s french fry swirling in ketchup. And was that supposed to be a joke, Walt wearing red sneakers after he left the lab? I thought it was pretty funny.
Random stuff: A copy of King’s Everything’s Eventual among Gale’s possessions. The fake eye in Jesse’s drawer. And the most ominous of inert objects: a copy of Gale’s laboratory notebook on a desk not far from his body. You just know that’s going to come back to haunt someone.
A virus infects the communal iPod on Eureka and all of sudden “I Shot the Sheriff” and “Who Let the Dogs Out?” and “Burning Down the House” become literal. Funny. Looks like the Consortium is back, with Dr. Barlowe planting something in Allyson’s brain.
