Living in interesting times. In a good way. Lots of great stuff happening in 2012. So long as the world doesn’t end, that is.
I have a special relationship with Always Something There by Naked Eyes. It was the first song I listened to on my very first Sony Walkman, which I purchased in 1983 for the princely sum of $99. The Walkman was as big as a Stephen King paperback and twice as heavy, but hearing this song through the headset was mesmerizing. Remember the days when we thought walking around with 10 songs on our hips was a big deal? I head the song this morning while exercising, along with their other hit, “Promises, Promises.” At the time, I was listening on my iPod, which contains virtually every song I’ve ever bought—about 35 days’ worth—and is substantially smaller and lighter than that Walkman.
I watched the first of two episodes of The River last night. Not sure about the series yet. Mysteries, sure, but not many likable characters. One thing that sucked me into Lost early on was the fact that I liked Jack and Kate and Locke and Sawyer and the rest of the merry band. Not so here, at least not yet. I’m also not a big fan of shakycam.
NCIS celebrated its 200th episode last night with a show that was cross between This is Your Life and It’s a Wonderful Life. Gibbs is slow to shoot when someone draws down on him in a diner and he goes into a kind of limbo where his old buddy and mentor, Mike Franks, shows him what life might have been like if he made several different decisions along the way. Franks isn’t the only phantom from NCIS past to show up, and everyone he encounters isn’t dead. It was a nice way to recap the series, and the rapid-paced montage that followed the shooting was fascinating, too. It was good to see Gibbs with his wife and daughter, and to see how drastically different things would have gone if she hadn’t died, or if he hadn’t killed her killer. For a show that is routinely the most watched on TV, it doesn’t get a lot of ink, but it’s a cute show with great characters. Plus it has more letters in its title than any other alphabetic police procedural. Not bad for a spin-off.
I like the way Castle handled the fantasyland story in this week’s episode, too. They alternated between the case in the present and the recreation of real events in the past, though Castle substituted his family and colleagues as the players in his mind in the 1940s noir detective tale that featured a dingus to rival the Maltese Falcon. Femmes fatales, lots of booze, some gunplay, thugs, gangsters, they were all there, along with the tried and true Ross MacDonald trope of unidentifiable bodies. One of the funniest parts was when Castle tried to get Ryan to say “boyo” the way his Irish counterpart did in the retro-tale. “Like a leprechaun.” The killer was sort of hauled out of the background at the last minute, but that’s my only quibble with the story.
I like the How I Met Your Mother episodes where the same thing is shown from different points of view. This week, a party is broken down room by room so that things that bleed over from one into the other gradually all begin to make sense. Very clever writing.
House was interesting this week, too. The wrapper story was about an investigation into a case that went badly wrong. The guy heading the investigation is Foreman’s former mentor—Foreman thinks he’ll cut him a break. We don’t find out until halfway through the episode what the real crisis is, which is a bit of a cheat since you’d think that would be the main subject of their discussions, but you allow for these sorts of things. The most interesting part was the way House reacted when he was cleared, and his last discussion with the stabbing victim.
