I’m so pleased with my decision to switch to Chrome on my home desktop computer that I converted to it on my work desktop as well, and I think I’ll put it on my laptop next. I only have one web app that occasionally balks in Chrome, but it’s not a big issue. I can’t get over how lightweight it is.
A couple of jabs about Canadians on last night’s TV episodes. First of all, on NCIS McGee was deployed to Canada to look for the murderous female Mexican drug lord, Paloma. He makes his video report in front of a couple of RCMP officers while one of their horses keeps nudging him from behind.
Then, on Sons of Anarchy, the bikers plan a trip up to Vancouver to look for Cameron, who kidnapped Jax’s son, Abel. Jax says that he can’t ask the others to jump bail with him to go to Canada. “But I can,” Clay says. “You lose. Eh?”
It was good to see Castle return to form again. The show was designed with a conceit that has been used a lot lately: a prolog that is really from the end of the episode, followed by a card that says: X hours or X days earlier. But it was a very good prolog, with both Beckett and Castle apparently aiming guns at each other. For a while it looked like the case was going to be a Breaking Bad clone (even Castle commented on it), but it went in a slightly different direction. The parallels between Castle and Beckett’s awkwardness and his daughter Alexis’s teenage angst over a boy who didn’t call her on her schedule was funny. Adults really do behave like kids sometimes.
I didn’t plan to watch The Event, but I found it on our OnDemand listing last night when there was nothing else on, and I’m glad I did. The show has something of a FlashForward feel to it, but I hope it fares better than that series, which was canceled just when it was getting good. There was a lot of the X hours/X days earlier going on, so you really had to pay close attention, but the piece de resistance was the last few seconds, which really took me by surprise. I did not see that coming. However, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I don’t think the president was the target. I think they were after the leader of the former prisoners. I haven’t read anything about the series, so I don’t know if there have been any rumors about where the show is going, and that suits me just fine. I definitely don’t want to be spoiled about this one. Please don’t get canceled.
Survivor just finished. Glad to see the old farts pull off a challenge win. I didn’t want this to be another season where one team was chronically weak and picked itself apart while the other tribe thrived. And then there was this amazing tribal council where the young’uns imploded. I’ve never seen anything like it on Survivor. I definitely don’t think the evicted party would have been selected if he had kept his mouth shut. Two weeks in a row someone cut off their own legs at tribal. There are some people playing this season who seem…unstable. I mean, what was the deal with the shoes? Could get interesting.
There wasn’t a lot of forward momentum on Sons of Anarchy this week, but there were some nice things going on all the same. I liked the circular camera motion when the lawyer told SAMCRO that their bail might be revoked. “This spun my head too,” the lawyer says at the end of the scene, emphasizing the camera work. Later on, when Amelia is thrust against the living room wall, there’s a crucifix in the foreground of the shot. When she falls to the floor, her arms are spread exactly like a crucifix, too. Subtle but nice. And there were two beautiful scenes involving Hal Holbrook. In the first, he was sitting at the lake, contemplating suicide. Not a word said, but his entire emotional spectrum is played out for all to see. Later, he and Gemma sit on a bench in the garden, surrounded by flowers as he tells her how days like this, the ones where he can remember everything, are the worst. More than anything else, he remembers how useless he was to his wife in her final days.
The SAMCRO situation reminds me of an episode of MASH, the one where Hawkeye needed a pair of boots so he set up an elaborate series of trades. A dentist appointment for the boots. A pass to Tokyo in exchange for the services of the dentist. A date for Radar in return for a cake for a party for Frank needed to get Margaret of Henry’s back so he’ll sign for the Tokyo pass. A section eight for Klinger in exchange for a hair drier to bribe the nurse to date Radar. On Sons of Anarchy, SAMCRO needs guns to pay off the Grim Bastards (really? you call your gang that?) to spy on the Mayans. To get the guns they need to supply Henry Lin with porn actresses to entertain his Chinese clients, which means that Opie has to swallow his pride and let his new girlfriend ply her trade. In both cases the carefully constructed houses of cards collapse. The deal with Lin was going to give SAMCRO some extra cash to fund their search for Jax’s son, but they were chasing a red herring anyway.
Then there was Stephen King’s cameo, which was a hoot. He rode up on his cherry red Harley-Davidson Road-Glide, wearing black and looking vaguely like Frank Dodd from The Dead Zone. Bachman (yes, that’s his name) acts so strange that even Tig, who can be as weird as the best of them, is creeped out a little. Bachman measures his subject (did you notice that King let the tape retract before noting the measurement?), tests her for rigor, looks at her teeth and, in a moment that topped it all off, groped her breasts, presumably checking for implants. When he emerged from the basement and announced he was done, Tara asked him where she was. Bachman turns on her and glares. “Where’s who?” he hisses. And, in an inspired moment, when he’s invited to take articles from the house to supplement the cash they have at hand, he makes a beeline for the statue, the golden praying hands, that Tara used to whack Amelia (fair payback for being whacked herself).
We never really got to find out much about Amelia, but I imagine that she had a hard life in Guatemala before coming to America. She’s hard as brass tacks. She spits in Gemma’s face when she’s duct taped to a chair, and she uses the few seconds afforded by Tara’s inattention to scope out her surroundings and figure out what is nearby that she can use to her advantage.
I’m going to go out on another limb and suggest that Trinny, the girl who came home from holiday to Maureen’s in Ireland carrying her laundry is John Teller’s daughter. I don’t know the timeline of Teller’s visit to Belfast, but it’s clear that he and Maureen had a past.
My favorite exchange of the episode, after Opie and Lyla got done making out:
Jax: Looks like you guys are working things out, huh?
Opie: I can never tell. Every time I try to talk to her we end up naked.
Bobbie: Just marry her. That’ll stop it.
Tim Curry on Criminal Minds: “I’m like…God!” Pure magic. A second later. “Uh oh. Even a god discovers that sometimes people have bad luck.”
