We’re still on target to have every day in August go over 100° and still mired in drought. We had rain last Sunday but nothing since then. Yesterday we broke the record for the number of triple digit days in one year, and we’re adding to the consecutive-day streak daily.
I didn’t realize that Ike (2008) was the last hurricane to strike the US mainland. This year’s i-storm, Irene, is threatening to be the next.
I’ve been spending a lot of my normal writing time reading for the past week. I did get a short story tidied up and submitted to a new (to me) market, and finally finished my review of Robert McCammon’s The Five, as well as working with my editor at Screem magazine over some technical issues with my essay for the next issue. Other than that I’ve been spending most of my time with 11/22/63, which I finished this morning. I don’t want to say too much about the book at this point, since it won’t be out for a couple of months, but holy cow. An impressive story that has some fantastic set pieces and an ending that packs a wallop. It’s as much a love story as it is a time travel story.
Eureka irked me this week with their bad science. Usually the show has sort of a grasp of the basics, but having something “coated with methane” made no sense at all, nor did the yellowish orange ethane cloud. Also, the combination of ammonia and methane in oxygen, assuming something sparked the reaction, would produce cyanide, not just something that smelled bad and was noxious. The recreation of Titan on main street Eureka was cool, though.
This week’s episode of Haven was one of the best yet, a riff on Groundhog Day. It was supposed to be Audrey’s day off from work, but she ended up in this loop that got her as far as noon, at which point someone would be killed and she’d be sent back to the time when she woke up and have to solve the problem, which would change things and end up with someone different getting killed. Way to knock off the cast one at a time!
I saw the first episode of the new BBC series The Hour and am intrigued. It’s something of a cross between their State of Play (not to be confused with the US movie remake) and Mad Men. Lots of smoking. The lead isn’t as charismatic as John Simm but their “Peggy” is a knockout. It also features Burn Gorman (Owen from Torchwood) as a mysterious killer. There’s a politically charged mystery at the base of it, running in parallel with the creation of a new hour-long news program, sort of like 60 Minutes. The stabbing death of a scientist is being under-reported, and the one person who thinks there’s something more going on, a socialite who has a past with one of the reporters, is convinced she’ll be killed if she stirs things up. Seems she was right.
Walt is starting to lose it on Breaking Bad. He’s turning into something of a megalomaniac. “It’s all about me,” he tells Jesse, and he blows up at Skyler when she asks if what happened to Gale could happen to him. “I’m the one who knocks,” he tells her. He feels that everyone is underestimating him in some way. Last week it was Hank, singing the praises of Gale’s chemistry. This week it was Skyler and the guy who sold them the car wash, who wondered if Walt was up to the challenge of running the business. Walt got so snarky that he wouldn’t even let the guy take his framed “first dollar” with him, and petulantly took it down after the guy left and used it to buy a soda in the vending machine. He also gets a bunch of women who work upstairs in the laundry in trouble by hiring them to clean up the lab. When they’re led away to be sent back to Honduras, Walt tells the new guy (Gus’s go-between) that it’s his fault. Blame me, not them, he says. “He does,” the new guy says.
Meanwhile, another hijacking of a pollo truck. Seems they learned from the last time. Instead of opening the back doors they hooked up the exhaust line to the intake and barred the back so the armed guys inside couldn’t get out. This week the machine gun strafing of the truck came from the inside. All for one tub of drugs. Seems like they knew what they were looking for—and it was all part of a message to Gus. They gave the tub o’drugs to some meth heads to attract Gus’s attention. Mike brought along Jesse as backup. “What you may not know about meth heads,” Mike said, then paused. “Maybe you do know—is that they’re kinda unpredictable. I don’t like unpredictable.” Jesse was in his comfort zone, though. After a failed Plan B, he grabbed a shovel from the trunk (there was one of those quirky POV shots from a camera attached to the tip of the shovel as Jesse carried it from the car to the yard) and started digging in the meth head’s yard, knowing it would attract his drug-fueled curiosity. Soon, he’s handing the shovel off to the meth head, who continues to dig for the rest of the scene, without having a clue what he’s looking for. Meanwhile, Jesse goes inside to confront the far more paranoid of the two and finds himself staring down the barrel of a rifle. He gets the upper hand and conks the guy with what looks like a crystal bong. When Mike arrives (plenty impressed, I think), he reads the message on the drug tub: “Ready to talk?” Gus doesn’t want the war to escalate so he tells Mike to set it up. When Jesse asks Gus why he’s picked him to ride shotgun with Mike, Gus says, “I like to think I see tings in people.”
Meanwhile redux, Skyler is listening to Walt’s phone message with new ears and isn’t finding it quite as romantic as she did last week. She goes walkabout with the kid, ending up at the four corners, where she tosses a coin as if where it lands will decide her destination. Twice it lands in Colorado, but she drags it back to New Mexico and returns home, where she finds that Walt has purchased a garish red car for their son. “Someone has to protect this family from the man who protects this family,” she tells Walt, who probably isn’t moving back into the family casa any time soon.
Episode 7 of Torchwood was a little like an episode of Lost.
Meanwhile, in the modern day, Gwen tazers Jack and ties him up to deliver to whoever it is that has her mother, husband and child captive. She blames herself a bit for being seduced by the importance being part of Torchwood conveyed upon her. “The more people we lost, the more I was a survivor.” However, she tells Jack that she won’t hesitate to see Jack killed like a dog (because, remember, now he really can die) to get her daughter back. For his own part, Jack warns Gwen that he will rip her skin from her skull before he lets her take his life away from him. So, they have an understanding. When they reach their destination, Gwen asks Jack what is the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen in all of his journeys. Then the mystery lady arrives, played by Nana Visitor from Star Trek: Deep Space 9. But Rex and Esther haven’t been sitting on their hands: they mobilized Welsh SWAT teams to free Gwen’s family and are set up with sniper rifles to take charge of the situation. “You’re going to live,” Gwen says when the dust settles. “It’s a talent of mine,” Jack says. But the mystery lady doesn’t think she’s lost the upper hand yet. She has one more card to play. Jack is going to want to meet the person who knows how the miracle began: It’s Angelo, and he’s been waiting a long time. Over 80 years, in fact. WTF?
