The temperature starts going down again day by day this week. By the weekend we could be down to just over 90°. The 20% chance of rain for Friday is now down to 10%. More fires in the area, too. It’s gotten so bad that they’re considering banning smoking in the parks around here. A fire started in George Bush Park last night and all of a sudden 1000 acres were burning.
Did another 1200 words this morning. I’m hoping to hit 20,000 words by the end of the weekend, after which I’m on a 9-day hiatus from writing. I also have to write a Storytellers Unplugged essay this week.
Self-referential observation of the week: Rizzoli’s nemesis, Hoyt, was reading a Tess Gerritsen mystery in this week’s summer season finale of Rizzoli and Isles. It’s a little hard to understand how people can become acolytes to a man like that—especially a prison guard who should have seen it all. It was a very twisty episode and I don’t think it quite holds up to close scrutiny. A guy is killed just moments before he’s released on bail so that the medical examiner can find that he has swallowed a balloon of teeth. The guy doesn’t die immediately, so that means Rizzoli and Isles go straight to the infirmary, so that Rizzoli can stumble upon Hoyt, who’s there getting cancer treatment. He mutters cryptic clues in his apparent daze, which leads Rizzoli to believe Hoyt knows something about a family that went missing six years ago. She figures out all the clues and goes back to get a death bed confession out of Hoyt only to be sandbagged by him and his pet guard. He’s dying, Isles confirmed that, but he’s not as bad off as he’s been playing.
The fight at the end was the best part, if you can buy into the guard’s participation. Jane is a hellcat and isn’t ready to accept Hoyt’s “birthday present.” She head butts. She kicks. She tases. She wrestles with Hoyt on the floor and gets the upper hand. Finally she plunges the scalpel into Hoyt’s chest in a manner that would make Dexter (or Van Helsing) proud. So she gets her birthday present after all.
The birthday sub-theme was okay. Jane doesn’t like birthdays because they never turn out the way she expects. This time she gets a surprise party that genuinely takes her by surprise (after a fake out), her brother’s gift is the fact that he scored high on his detective exam and Maura gives her tickets to a race car school.
Maura remains an implausible character. She does a show and tell about prison shivs in the middle of an important case, admiring the ingenuity of prisoners in creating deadly weapons. Half of Jane’s dialog involving her is “Really?” in response to something outlandish she says.
Michael took care of his business with Agent Pearce in short order on Burn Notice last week. Sam and Fi disrupted the CIA convoy to give him the chance to explain to her that Tavian was the real killer, and Tavian is eminently cooperative, admitting to the killing and jumping to his death when Michael reveals that he’s wearing a wire.
Time for a complete change of pace and a new threat. When Michael gets home, his old foil Larry is waiting for him. He has a “kidnappee” in the trunk and the guy’s wife is somewhere else with a bomb around her neck to force him into compliance. Larry wants Michael to help him break into the British Consulate and put some fake documents in dispatch pouch. Despite the threats, Michael and Larry still find time for verbal jousts, first about the decor at his place. “I see you have a woman’s touch now. Or is it Fi?” Another typical exchange: Larry: you have any idea what they feed you in an Albanian prison? Michael: I don’t know…yoghurt? Larry: I ate it every day for eight months and I still don’t know.
The kidnappee rubs me the wrong way right from the get-go, but not Michael, who provides him with a knife so he can break loose from the trunk of the car while they’re in the consulate and go to Sam and Fi. Fi tries to rescue the guy’s wife but she’s too late. The bomb already went off. Why would Larry kill his leverage? Sam and Fi try to blast their way into the consulate (You’re finally speaking my language, Fi says to Sam) but Larry is watching everything. He greets Sam: I see Jenny Craig has done her magic. Thinner but not smarter.
Larry tells Michael he deserved to be burned because he watched Larry kill people in Chechnya and then helped him cover it up. Fi distracts Sam and plants a shaped charge on Larry’s window. Seconds after her bomb goes off, another one goes off in the lobby, killing two guards. Fi is devastated and spills her guts to Michael, all very incriminating, and then Anson shows up to demonstrate how he has the place bugged and all their conversation is on tape. It was all a setup from the beginning. His profession was psychiatrist who treated CIA spies, so he was able to predict how they would respond to the situation. (Nobody brings out the mad bomber in you like Larry, he tells Fi.) He even pretended to be Michael’s mother’s therapist once to get the goods on Michael’s psyche. He’s the one who sent Tavian to kill Max. He watched Michael burn down an organization he spent years creating. Now that he has incriminating evidence on Fi, he’s going to use Michael to do his dirty work. Cornered again. His parting shot: Enjoy the sunset. It’ll get dark soon.
I want to go on the record saying that Colin Ferguson (Sheriff Jack Carter on Eureka) is one of the funniest physical actors on TV. Hardly an episode goes by where he doesn’t suffer some physical injustice and his reaction to these is always low-key but hilarious. The way he limped to his feet after the narrow miss with the teleportation device on this week’s episode, for example. Good to see Matt Frewer back as the mad Australian scientist Taggart. Jo doesn’t know what happened between them in this reboot of reality, so she has to proceed with caution with him. Turns out he proposed and she turned him down. Afterward he went walkabout, a voyage of self-discovery.
The Titan mission is just about ready to go, but there are always problems. One scientist who was supposed to go has to resign when his cow melts. “What’s black and white and dead all over?” Carter asks. Yeah, you don’t see that very often. Parrish (Wil Wheaton) is first alternate (It’s like he’s almost a winner, he’s told), but he fractures his ankle when he stumbles over Carter’s melted van (sensing a trend here). Two crises happen at the same time. The first is that Deputy Andy, the robot who is having an affair with Carter’s sentient house (yeah, that’s pretty rare, too), gets sent to Titan by accident, thereby nullifying the women scientists’ argument over who should get the honor of being first to step foot on the surface. “It should be a woman. You guys got the moon. This way we’re even Steven.”
Then the guano from Taggart’s genetically modified bats start melting things. Important things like power supplies at GD and Carter’s house’s circuits. Carter flirts with a holographic version of Allyson and is accused of virtual harassment (I had a dream that sort of went like this, he tells her). Then he has to go into a huge tank of poison gas, bats and superacid. Big kick out of Taggart telling him how to identify the female bat they need. Thick Aussie accent: Females are lah-ger.
Poor Andy is freezing and every effort to get him back to earth before he turns to ice fail. He’s prosaic about the situation. “No one ever said being a deputy in Eureka was easy. You wake up in the morning and you never know where the days going to take you.” Carter thinks to use Allyson’s holographic projector to visit Andy so they can get him to the location he needs to be, the sky clears and there’s ringed Saturn in the sky. Well there’s something you don’t see every day. Andy: Are you an angel? Jack: Not even close.
All’s well that ends well and Jack invites Allyson to move in with him after they see Andy coming over to have another conjugal visit with his house.
