O'Hara's Own Corner

Remember my previous post about not liking television?  Well, I think I will have to qualify that.  There are actually a couple of shows I don’t mind too much, and, even better, here in Australia, we get more than one episode at a time.

I need to complain though that here in Australia, they just move shows around whenever they feel like it. We were starting to enjoy Jonathan Ross (@wossy on Twitter), and then he just disappeared from the airwaves here.  We might look at the TV schedule and think one movie is coming on, and hello, something completely different is on.

First, Heroes, on Wednesday nights. There was one part I knew about because it had only just caused a small flurry over the internet last week when it aired in the States. There’s a scene where a girl kisses another girl and tells her she has a crush (ew! btw). I forgot to check and see if her nails were short – to see if my stereotype held out or not. And… that chick was on another show, I forget which but Sharole would know (maybe the Nanny?) as a kid. She’s also on another show that Sharole and I have watched, but we won’t say which because that would be publicly admitting bad taste.

I’m way glad they show two episodes at once, not sure how many you get over there across the pacifistic.  The pacing is a little slow, which probably means I’m sucked right into it, but let me just say I’m so glad I got to watch the first season on Netflix (which they don’t and can’t get here – going in the negative against Australia) from start to finish bam bam bam, I think I watched it during that time when Sharole and the kids were here and I was folding up shop back there, since I don’t remember feeling guilty and I don’t remember Sharole being there watching it too.

Just now I was trying to think what I liked about the show, and it occurred to me that a lot of it is about discovery, who you are, what choices you’ll make, and this theme has more potential for renewal than the X-Men themes of ‘kill mutie’ (my overt reference to ‘kill whitey’) and saving people.  Dealing with new powers, trying to decide who is bad, inner struggles, and the ongoing struggles to: 1) figure out who the baddie is 2) stop disaster from happening 3) figure out how to use powers and various combinations of all the above.

And the deaf woman! It was so cool to see sign language. I recognised her but I haven’t had time to see what else she’s been in. Her power is more complicated than telekinesis, and is directly related to the fact she’s a deaf character, but at least she’s interesting for the same reasons as listed in the previous paragraph: self discovery, trying to accept these new ‘powers’ and deciding what to do with them.

The show also makes it so obvious how important it is to have good friends around you, especially if you have superpowers. For example, we can’t help but wonder what might have happened if Sylar/Nathan had stayed in the hands of the newbie shrink at the precinct rather than escaping and getting roped into the gypsy circus version of the Manson Family.

So that’s that show, 2 hours of my life on Wednesday night.

Then there’s CSI, and this week was a crossover week, in which the story leads through CSI Miami, CSI NY, and CSI TOS. This meant 3 full hours of CSI goodness. This also meant I was a zombie this morning.

My breakfast: 1/4 of a lambington cake, 4 small 3-day old pancakes with 6 year old maple syrup drooled liberally on top. I couldn’t eat the two yellow iced donuts, please don’t ask me why.

CSI Miami was up first. They found a severed leg done by a professional who is a pawn for the ‘Zeta’s as in Catherine Zeta Jones’ syndicate. Morpheus er I mean Dr. Ray (as they annoyingly call him in Miami) calls to say he picked up what they were laying down (slap me some skin dawg) and flies there (since CSIs have unlimited budget for solving any case, such as hours and hours of time sifting through garbage) and makes stunning observations that no one on the team there had thought of, including the fact that the severed leg was a pro job. David Caruso wasn’t as annoying. Not sure why, but I didn’t notice as much of the sunglasses action, or maybe I’m just more used to him now. Sharole and I both had a good chuckle as he tried to show his Hallmark Hall of Fame side in comforting a grieving mother.

The question CSI:My-oh-my could not answer was “Who is scattering the bodies?”

Then in New York, on an unspecified bridge, a drunk driver smashes head on into a semi carrying a padded cell with a young woman in it. We don’t discover until after the teaser that the drunk driver was not the one that crossed the median, and might have actually made it to his estranged wife’s house were it not for the psychopath in the semi. Which begs the question: what kind of concrete median would fail to contain the semi, and fail to inflict any damage to the driver’s side front corner of said semi prior to contact with the inebriatedly operated sedan. This expected damage was not visible whatsoever.

Upon arriving to the scene the first thing we’re introduced to is a barrel containing a victim. Then, instead of opening the back of the truck at all (which makes me wonder where the barrel was before impact) we go with the two romantically involved CSIs who are exchanging flirty banter until they open the little door leading directly into the cab/trailer (they are the same thing on this truck), and they yell to Mac “you’re gonna want to see this” and we the audience go with Mac, and are finally shown the horribly decorated interior.  It’s discovered that there’s a connection to the severed leg in Miami, and Dr. Ray  goes to NY where he gets to ride a dirtbike through a junkyard, with a shotgun on his back. The baddie who is a vicious evil person, who doesn’t hesitate to shoot a ‘red shirt‘ cop somehow cannot shoot Ray as he bears down on him holding the handlebars.  This same dude also somehow does not decide to blow his brains out on the spot, but instead is captured and gives the semi-valuable information: “she’s gone – poof.” We also meet in NY a greedy doctor who could have been out of the movie Dirty Pretty Things, who somehow didn’t realize the black market organs that magically arrived at his door were coming from healthy innocent victims.

Last but not least, the Detective Jim Brass show, aka CSI (Las Vegas).  Seriously Brass simply gets the best lines and has fantastic delivery.  Sharole has been predicting for at least a half hour now, maybe more, that the girl Ray has been trying to rescue, whose mother has been a consistent figure in the storyline, is alive, and will be saved from a horrible fate. I won’t spoil it if you’re planning to catch it on re-runs, or on netflix, so I can’t tell you if she was right or not.

As we went to bed, Sharole and I discussed how it’s hard to tell how much of that is TV. Thankfully Sharole is past the stage where she’d be picked up and forced into prostitution, if the age and scrawniness of the girls on the show are anything to judge by, but watching a story like that it’s easy to start worrying about all the evil that is out there, not for ourselves but for our kids.