Our new ChromeCast gadget arrived on Friday. Cool thing. Plugs into the HDMI port and USB port on the back of the new flatscreen TV and allows you to broadcast from Netflix and YouTube. Setup was simple and when you pick a video on Netflix you get the option of showing it on the iPad or Chromecasting it. It doesn’t tie up the iPad, either. In fact, you can turn it off once the video is running. Or play Angry Birds. I’m pleased.
I wrote a couple of book reviews this weekend: The Hunter and Other Stories by Dashiell Hammett and The Abominable by Dan Simmons. I also did an “end of season 1” essay about Under the Dome for News from the Dead Zone.
The first thing I watched with our new Netflix account was the five-episode UK series The Fall. Gillian Anderson plays a DSI (superintendent) from the Met who is detailed to Belfast to conduct the 28-day review of a stalled, high-profile murder investigation. She isn’t there long before she wants to tie the case to another, though the local officials resist her efforts to do so. She is quite naive about Northern Ireland politics, and she also has a couple of interesting personality quirks. On the other side of the equation is the killer, Jamie Dornan (from Once Upon a Time). He’s a family man with two young kids, a BTK sorta guy where no one suspects him. He’s also a grief counselor and fairly good at it, though his mind tends to wander. It’s an interesting study of the way people can have two separate personalities, but it’s not multiple personality disorder, rather a kind of compartmentalization that begins to fall apart. The ending isn’t quite a cliffhanger, but almost, and the show has been picked up for a second series. Highly recommended.
Then I plowed through the seven episodes of Derek, written and directed by Ricky Gervais. Derek works in a senior citizens home and is kind of slow, but he is the kindest person on the planet. Like many British comedies, it is a combination of pathos, bathos and crudity. Some shows have “comic relief” and others, like this, have “crudity relief.” It’s set up almost like a documentary and it’s guaranteed to tug at the heart strings of even the most stolid viewer. A little manipulative, but, all in all, tender.
Twitter was full of wailings and gnashings of teeth over the final episode of Dexter. I don’t know what kind of ending would have satisfied everyone, or even most people, but clearly this one wasn’t it. I would have been satisfied, I think, if it had ended with the cut-to-black in Argentina, but I understand what they were aiming for. Over the course of the past eight years, Dexter has come to understand and develop his feelings. He began to enjoy them—even revel in them, especially when it came to Hannah. Suddenly he was acting on them, giving everything up to follow true love. But then he discovered the flip side of feelings. They aren’t all good, and some of them will wrench your heart out. Too high a price to pay, he decided. He moved as far away from Miami as he could get (and still be in the US), to as remote a place as possible, where he wouldn’t have to interact with people any more. He’s not likely to stumble upon anyone who needs killing there, either. His eyes were dead and cold at the end. Everything he’d gained was lost. I think it will take some time to settle in, but it wasn’t a terrible ending, just a sad one.
Poor Jesse Pinkman. He did so good to get himself free of his chains and out of his pit, only to find himself recaptured a few seconds later. Dude is seriously desperate and not thinking things through, as Todd so clearly demonstrated. The guy is such a sociopath. He says the things he thinks he needs to say (“sorry for your loss” to Walt, “this isn’t personal” to Andrea). He’s smitten by Lydia and does not get her cafe spycraft notion of sitting back to back, so he ended up talking to the back of her head, which was even more conspicuous than if they’d shared a table.
Was it just me, or did Saul’s suitcases look lighter than air when he left the vacuum repair shop? Was that his farewell from the series? If so, I’ll miss him. And then Walt ended up alone in New Hampshire with his barrel o’money, dollar store glasses and do-it-yourself chemo. He tried to be the man and stick his own vein, but he couldn’t do it. Here’s my take on the ending. After his catastrophic call to Flynn, he decided to turn himself in, but when he saw his former colleagues from the billion dollar pharma company disavow his contribution to their enterprise, he saw red and went back into full Heisenberg. Though he’s clearly after the Nazis, I wonder if he’ll pay them a visit on the way back to show them his idea of fun with chemistry.
The finale is next week. Title: Felina. What the hell is that? An anagram of “finale,” or something more?
