The Vampire Diaries

So, the new review's up. You can watch it here.

This show, despite its early troubles, was saved almost entirely by something that gets overlooked in the performing arts pretty frequently: chemistry.

All three pairs of siblings started out with great chemistry, and that made The Vampire Diaries enjoyable to watch from the start. When the plot was bogged or MIA, I knew that I could count on the interactions of Stefan and Damon, Matt and Vicki, and Jeremy and Elena. They quickly gave the impression that they had known each other for years, that they knew each others tendencies and automatic responses, in short, that they were siblings.

Sounds elementary, no? And yet, a ton of television disregards this simple feature that enhances immersion and overall quality immensely. Heroes started out with no chemistry between its various families and it was painful to watch with few to no redeeming features. Stargate: Universe opened in medias res with characters that had been working together for years but acted and spoke as though they had just met, and its pacing and character development suffered for it.

There are a few points early in The Vampire Diaries where this chemistry really shines; early in the first episode when Elena follows Jeremy into the men's bathroom to see if he's been doing drugs; when Damon and Stefan imitate each other (which doubled as impressively funny, to boot); Matt's reactions to Vicki's priorities and her messing with Tyler and Jeremy.

They were little touches, but they kept me watching a show that I might have given up on otherwise. They also impressed me with the actors, none of whom I'd seen anywhere before, and most of whom I'll keep an eye out for, because I've seen that they can pin down an elusive and rare quality and bring it to life as few can.

From the Audience

Yeah, I know, been doing a lot of these. Bite me, I'm watching unmemorable TV. What show you ask? Well, I can't tell you; I don't remember.

On the Time Travel episode in SGU Season 1: It was resolved (mostly, sorta) in the webisodes. Really, all it shows is Eli and the others watching the final recording from the retrieved Keeno.
--Izkata


Webisode. Gech, that really is a terrible word. It's difficult to say, and SpellCheck doesn't recognize it. Incidently, SpellCheck also doesn't recognize SpellCheck. In any case, I totally get expanding upon the world that the producers have built in web content, but the bulk of the plot and everything should probably be in the original medium. In other words, it's a television show so everything that goes into the show should be complete and self-reliant. It should not depend on the web content to explain basic plot points.

As to the blue aliens.. Check out the full Season 2 trailer. They did something to Chloe (no longer so useless, eh? =P )
--Izkata


No, she's still useless. In fact, she's so useless she needs an external force in order to have any bearing on anything. Take that.

... But yeah, I see that you are trying to fill a niche that no one is really covering at the Escapist right now. And it is a welcome addition, since I'm a big fan of series TV and that content is missing from most anywhere right now, except straight media entertainment sites. I'd say you should expand your range of possible targets to be any episodic series, since web content is a slowly growing format now. ... but I wrote this whole thing mainly to say: Babylon 5, the greatest sci-fi drama of all time? You, Ma'am, are my new personal hero.

--Shawn

Actually, that's the whole reason I started critiquing TV shows in the first place: No one else was doing it. Well, there are people that do individual episodes, and there are the reviewers that marketing people pay to review shows, but they don't really count. And you're very welcome, Sir. I do my best.

I discussed the idea of expanding into web serieses and that opened up a whole new can of worms: What, precisely, is my purview? So after some conversation I have decided to lay down some rules here where I can look for them if I feel like breaking them.

1. Anything episodic visual media is mine for the reviewing. Miniseries: yes. Made for TV movies: no.

2. Web serieses are also good to review, but in moderation. The bulk of my reviews should be actual television shows. I shall probably resort to web series when I'm behind schedule and need something fast.

3. Web supplements to television shows may be reviewed separately, but will not be considered part of the content to their show. See above comments about web content for explanation, if you haven't yet gleaned my preconceptions about web content.

4. Other rules that I decide to create as the situation arises.

So, within my utterly arbitrary rules, I can review Dr. Horrible because it was released in scheduled segments, like a miniseries (Insert maniacal laughter here). So that's exactly what I shall do. It's only forty-five minutes of watching, so I can get it done in time for Sunday, which will push White Collar back to next week and put me back on schedule. Bonus!

From the Audience

The other day  my computer had a pretty thorough meltdown. It pitched a little fit and shut off and refused to find Windows when I turned it back on. That's happened before, and if I hit Ctrl+Alt+Delete enough times the little bastard usually decides that it's not worth the effort to keep my operating system from me and goes and retrieves Windows from... I don't know, time-out perhaps.

This time, though it didn't work. So I took my laptop to my resident computer guy (that would be Dad. Dude used to contract at Intel, so he gets all the computer-related bitching withing a mile radius), and he did some surgery and concluded that something on the motherboard had melted. Fortunately my hard-drive is just fine, so all of my writing and reviews and stock pictures and slides aren't lost they're just inaccessible. Until someone around here (four other computers in the house, surely someone is willing to let me tear apart their tower to replace their hard-drive with mine for long enough to retrieve a couple of massive folders. Surely) lends me (Dad) their tower for a bit.

So my review schedule is shelved for now. I'm trying to do what I can on the computer in the living room, but unless I revert to nocturnalism (which is looking better and better by the hour), I have to share it. I'm going to try to get White Collar out on time, but no guarantees.

Incidently, White Collar is terrible. More on that on Sunday (I hope), but yeah. Not great.

Seems to be a thing with these shows that could have been. Burn Notice could have been a modern day MacGyver, but is instead James Bond as done by Micheal Bay with worse writing. Heroes, could have been a fresh take on superheroes, but instead was just slow and painful. Stargate could have been an intense, psychology driven survival drama, but instead is shameless cashing in.

Speaking of Stargate, now that I'm a bit calmer, here's the comment I got on... whenever the hell that was. I'm going to outline my response paragraph by paragraph, rather than taking the whole thing on at once. And here we go.

Problems with your review are manifold, and almost all come down to your own unwillingness to watch the intervening series'. Now, you can critique the "big issues" exactly as you did without issue, as the ones you mentioned are all related to the mechanics of the show, for the record we disagree about the characters. However, your "quibbles" section is full of things which are either down to your own inadequacy(really, you can't keep track of nine characters?) or your own lack of knowledge about the franchise, but I'm in a nice mood so I'll help you out.

Points for the condescending tone. Also, the word manifold means "many and varied". You've got half of that down pat, but your complaints with me seem to all be "ignorance", which really isn't very varied. And why the hell are you telling me that you disagree about the characters in the same paragraph as you calling me "inadequate." Insults and legitimate opinions should never go together. And you can take your "nice mood" and shove it where-- oh, look another paragraph.

1. You can't apply Newtonian physics to a damn wormhole. In normal circumstances, a person entering a Stargate will exit with the same direction and velocity. However, while within the wormhole itself, a person is simply energy and an encoded data stream, so in the event other factors influence the gate at either end, or the wormhole itself, they can be literally thrown out of the exit aperture as a safety measure. For the record, this has been observed in each of the ten seasons of SG1, as well as the 5 seasons of Atlantis, and the TV movies.

Now, I'm not a physicist, but why can't you apply Newtonian physics to wormholes? Oh, right, wormholes are unproven. Still, that doesn't mean that you can abandon physics just because half the situation is hypothetical. And further, Meta is Bad, remember? Dude, I don't care if there was an ad in the paper explaining the physics of this show, if there's a logical discrepinsy that isn't covered in the show, it could light itself on fire and tango in my front yard and I still wouldn't care.

2. FTL is explained in the series as one of several standard sci-fi variations based on vague real science hypotheses. Hyperspace is the most common, in the case of the Destiny, it would be appear to be some variation on the Alcubierre drive.

Meta is Bad.

3. Your argument about the ship's longevity is entirely dependent on knowledge of what materials were used in its construction, which we as viewers do not have. Considering the knowledge we have from earlier series'(which you couldn't be arsed to watch), Ancient technology is extremely advanced, one would assume their materials sciences would be as well.

Meta is Bad.

4. Your complaint about the Ancients is, once again, down to your own lack of knowledge rather than a flaw in the program(seriously, you couldn't even waste ten minutes reading the Stargate entry on wikipedia?); Stargate uses the "humanity was seeded by aliens" trope, those aliens being the Ancients who built Destiny. The entire five-season run of the Atlantis series was based on this very premise.


Boy are you proving my point. New audience remember? Not everyone who watches Universe is going to have watched fifteen previous seasons of material! It must be accessible to everyone, elsewise someone is falling down on the job.

5. Stores of food? Seriously? You missed the part of the show which explained the concept of Destiny entirely then, you know, where the Ancients would 'gate into the ship with all the necessary supplies to set themselves up. Including food.

Yeah, that was a dumb complaint... but then it was also part of a list of other spectacularly petty gripes that weren't picked on by Fanboy Prime over here.

6. I'm going in order along with the video, so this is really a repeat, but: Alcubierre drives circumvent special relativity.

Meta is Bad. Also bad, is justification from other shows. The premise is universal, but everything else is, and should stay, compartmentalized.

7. While I agree with you that cutting the "stargate trip" CGI was a bad thing, the irony is this was done by the producers in order to please viewers such as yourself - non-fans who don't have the patience or inclination to understand the lore.

Oh, Gods, a cogent statement! Cutting the trip was a good idea, but they didn't cut it out every time, so it looks sloppy.

8. You're even going to get on top of the episodic cliffhangers? Really? I'm not trying to come off as offensive, but have you watched any sci-fi dramas before? It's pretty much an integral part of the format.

Dude, what kind of a sci-fi fan are you if you make a blanket statement that precludes the greatest sci-fi drama of all time: Babylon 5? And yeah, I was offended.

9. And the time travel. I had a suspicion you would have a crack at that episode after the first minute of your video. Again, watch the preceding series'.

"Everything else is, and should stay, compartmentalized." Just... stop talking. You're done. Just... no. Oh, shit, there's more.

I know I'm coming off as a dick, but SG:U gets a lot of crap, and I really rather enjoy it. Most the points people make I can agree to disagree, but fully half your review is predicated on problems which aren't really problems if you've watched the previous shows, or can muster the energy to type "Stargate" into Wikipedia.

Aaaand we're back to the condescension. Okay, being a fan does not, not, make you entitled. It just doesn't. Further, after watching seventeen hours of show, writing nineteen hundred words, making a hundred seventy six slides, and recording ten minutes of audio (heavily cut down), no I didn't "have the energy" to do some arbitrary research on something only tangentally related to the review! Maybe, SG: U gets a lot of crap because it's not a good show. Just a suggestion.

Would you review Return of the King without having seen Fellowship and Two Towers? If you did, would you base that review in large part on quibbles which would be solved by seeing them?

That's not even a relevant analogy. Apples and oranges there, bud. Or rather, books and television. Different mediums, is my point, and you can't make the standards there linear enough to cross-review.


I know I spoke at length on this last time, but I've since done some stewing, and what is the internet for if not spewing my opinions?


Ooh! Ooh! Also! This... guy on That Guy With the Glasses is featuring part of my Eastwick video in his Forum Feature segment. I'll put up a link here as soon as I have it. Let's just say that if he pans me unfairly I'm'a review his stuff and see what he makes of it.


In other, other news (This one's getting a tad long, so I'll keep it short), I saw Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-Long Blog the other day, and I would love, love, to review it. Sadly, it's technically outside of my purview, being an internet series, not a television series. So I'm'a leave this one up to ya'll. Review Dr. Horrible, yay or nay?

From the Fanboys

Universe is garnering some pretty substantial hate. It got me my first dislike, and an impressively negative comment here. I've got to admit, I'm a tad confused.

Part of the point of not watching the other Stargates first was to give the opinion of a newcomer to the franchise. The other part of the point was that the other shows are dead, and so are no longer relevant. Yes, I've done dead shows before, but never irrelevant shows. Eastwick was good but cancelled prematurely, Numb3rs was said to have done well with one of my personal pet peeves so deserved a look, and Heroes had a great, original concept that went horribly wrong and is fun to hate. The other Stargates can make no such claims, or at least, no one has made me aware of them, and I don't want to have to plow through, what, ten? seasons of something else just to be able to make my review of Universe knowledgeable. Further, as I said earlier, I shouldn't have to.

You can make a decent case for books having must-read-to-understand predecessors, and you can argue that Star Wars Ep. 6 wouldn't be as good if you don't watch Ep.s 4 & 5, but can you say the same of television serieses?

I don't think so. Partly it's, as I've said before, that there's so much more to a television series. Watching a single season takes eighteen hours (if it's a full season. Summer shows have half seasons), so to punish new viewers for not having watched all umpty-whatever seasons of the show that came previously isn't fair, nor is it reasonable, nor is it sound business practice. You don't ever, ever alienate prospective customers! Yet, the producers and writers of these shows seem to assume that it's just fine to do so. It's not.

And the fanboys happily perpetrate that idea: That if you haven't seen everything that came before, your opinion doesn't matter.

Nice, try, bud. But I write for a living. I don't critique professionally, but I do write professionally, and I know what it is that makes my reviews worth it. I put considerable time and effort into making these reviews good and relevant, and I won't sink more just to assuage my ignorance, when it's my blank slate, critical eye, and high expectations that make me good at this. If your argument against me boils down to "Compromise your opinions by reading about the other shows," then you are just as unreasonable as those TV producers who are stingy with their exposition.

-Gets off soapbox-

Stargate: Universe

Once again there are some things from my notes that didn't make it into the video. I'm not going to run through all of them, but I said something that may require more explanation than I gave it.

Stargate: Universe should not be a scifi show. It just shouldn't. There are certain expectations that come with a scifi: Aliens, space battles, new frontiers and discovery. SG: U manages two of those without effort, but the aliens and space battles have to be sort of forced in. Further (and it feels truly strange to write this) it seems like SG: U is going for a more realistic approach to aliens. They encounter more small, non-sentient things than they do sentients, and one of those aliens is a microbe. Seems fine... until I remember that it's still nothing close to proportional. They shouldn't have encountered five non-sentients to one sentient. To even pass as believable (again, a bizarre thing to say about a science fiction program), I'd expect a ratio or more like ten to one. Or fifteen. True realism would require something like five thousand to one, but reality is unrealistic.

They try to justify it with some nonsense about how the sentient aliens they meet have been tracking the ancient alien ship that our heroes are on, but it's just that. Nonsense.

Now if you look at it as a survival drama, where these people have to make do with what they have and what they can scavenge, constantly threatened by the decrepit craft more than by natural predators, it's suddenly a much better show. Now imagine if the writers had gone that route and written less about the Earth military, and more about the opposing factions on the ship; if they'd really gotten into the psychology and the stress of survival. Definitely wouldn't be an action heavy show, but it would have the capacity to be a much greater experience.

Will never happen, of course. Television shows are empty entertainment with no capacity to teach us or move us.

But it could have been. And that fact is more frustrating than SG: U's blandness.

Stargate: Uninteresting

I've been making slides for the Stargate review all day and I can honestly say that I will be thrilled to see the end of this. I wrote the script for this one and then didn't even look at it for almost a week. I'd focused my ire on Burn Notice, so by the time I got back to Stargate, I'd forgotten exactly how much I hate it.

Well, I've been reminded. I've been reminded all damn day.

There's a problem inherent to the slideshow-style video that I make: I have to illustrate everything. That doesn't sound like that big a deal, but then you try and illustrate a sentence like, "What this means for Stargate: Universe is that it's contractually obligated to look like the next installment of a science fiction epic," and it quickly becomes apparent that this isn't as easy as I'd like it to be.

Now, granted, for some videos I haven't even tried. Heroes and The All Bad All the Time Edition most notably, though I blame those on illness and massive amounts of medication, because I can. Point is, though, it's not easy. And to make matters worse, I have a lot to say about SG: U so the script is longer, and I'm anxious to continue the trend I started with The Mentalist and have better videos. I decided to make videos instead of written reviews so that they would be more interesting to the viewer, and having a seven minute video with only thirty images is a pretty fair cop out.

I'm sure that when I started writing this I had a destination or a point in mind. I don't anymore. Sorry 'bout that.

Also, Burn Notice is coming along nicely. Still tongue-shreddingly bad, but fun to watch... with other people. Because misery loves company.

Feeling a Little Off

It's so strange not to have anything to post tomorrow (today, technically, but I haven't been to bed yet so it's still Saturday, damnit). After two months of posting every week, I feel like I've failed or something, even though this week off was scheduled.

And then not doing anything tomorrow is also a tad bizarre, as not having the kind of job that requires my attendance on certain days means that I also have only the weekends I give myself. I usually work on Sundays.

-Sigh-

And the poll for the video to post tomorrow? By a resounding majority of one (1) vote, Heroes: The All Bad All the Time Edition won. So I'm just calling the whole thing off. I know that it was a silly little idea and everything, but I had hoped for a much better reaction.

So yeah. Stargate: Universe is next week. After that's Burn Notice.