Television Of The Weak: Making, Breathing, Showing, Punching. And Killing.

This week, we've got the season finales of Dollhouse and The Celebrity Apprentice, the first installment in the BBC's Wallander series, and your regular doses of 24, The Mighty Boosh, Lost & Fringe.

24: "5:00AM-6:00AM" by Tucker Stone

Did you catch it? The inside joke. The one about Kim and her 2009 version of cougar problems. Yeah, it wasn't very funny. It was nice to see the coporate bad guy from The Shield show up as Kim's doomed protector, in a subtle tweak on the old "hire a warhorse character actor to trick the audience into being surprised when he's slaughtered in a bathroom", but they blew the trick a bit when they brought in Don McManus as the neck-snapper, who you might remember from Magnolia, The Shawshank Redemption or any of the eighty television shows he's appeared in over the last twenty years. In the battle of "hey, that guy", a friend of Paul Thomas Anderson is always going to be more important to the plot then a grown-up Alex Diaz from 90210. Either way, McManus is a definite step-up in the role of "somebody who will eventually die for the crime of threatening Elisha Cuthbert in an attempt to get Jack Bauer to do something."

I have to pull back the curtain for a second here: I really wasn't aware that there was a group of people actually worked-up about this whole "Jack has a terminal illness and will die soon" thing. I realize that the prevalence of entertainment news can spoil shows, but even without knowing that Kiefer Sutherland is signed on to star in at least one more series of the show, I just assumed that everybody watching already knew that whole subplot was complete bullshit. This last week, I was surprised to discover that no, that isn't really true, and some people--who I happen to both like and think are relatively intelligent--are pretty freaked about the possibility of Jack heading off to a bioweapon induced death. So--okay, I guess? Here's a random prediction on how this is going to play out, unless 24 plans to work crazy time-jumps into the show: Jack and Kim will die on the operating table while they play out that whole "stem cells fix everything" experiment during the final seconds of the season, there will be a variation on the silent clock, and in January the show will start up again with some kind of "Gotcha" moment. Hopefully, Kim won't be back, and we can really get down to the business of Jack Bauer being a depressive psychopath. (That's assuming that Kiefer doesn't get himself sent back to jail for headbutting the Proenza Schouler guy.)

Anyway, back to basics: we're fully into the final hours now, which means next week's episode is going to be a budget-heavy action festival, and while "5:00AM-6:00AM" wasn't as mundane as last week, I'm chomping at the bit for some smack-tion. Watching Kiefer Sutherland beat the shit out of a handcuffed Carlos Bernard was nice and all, but I doubt anybody was rooting for the final Jack versus Tony showdown to be a minor car wreck happening at 20 miles per hour. "We don't have time for a chase," said Jack. Really? You don't? Not even a little one, for the viewer at home? I'll make time if you want to give me a chase. Other than that, the bioweapon threat was dispensed with in a shot-for-shot remake of Season Three's "throw the bomb in a glass case" moment, with a Hazmat truck taking over for a cafeteria refrigerator. (Unfortunately, nobody got their hand cut off this time.) Olivia Taylor continued to play the whining sleazebag while Glenn Morshower and Leland Orser restrained themselves from saying "You know, you're a really shitty liar," so get ready for another scene where Cherry Jones screeches "What is GOING ON around here, I am the PRESIDENT."

You know what though? Nobody cares. 24 has always had filler sub-plots to serve as breathing room between the snarling. They might have been a little better when Dennis Haybert was around catching baseball bats, but they ain't going anywhere, or getting better, anytime soon. All that matters is how Jack versus Tony will play out. Two hours to go.

Dollhouse: "Omega" by Matthew J. Brady

Thank god for Alan Tudyk; let's get him to star on the show regularly, mmkay? Yeah, that's not going to happen, but he does things right. Last week, he was revealed as the villainous Alpha, a rogue doll who has dozens of personalities sharing space in his head. He plays that craziness to the hilt, flitting between personas from instant to instant, with the help of some skipped-frame editing. It's pretty awesome, especially compared to Eliza Dushku's incompetence when trying to do something similar. Yes, even in what might be the final episode, I can't stop beating that horse. Alpha's scheme involves implanting Echo with a bunch of personalities, hoping she'll join him as a godlike ubermensch and take over the world or something, but she wants none of it. There's probably supposed to be some moral debate going on here, but it mostly boils down to the idea that even with a wiped mind, the dolls retain some of their original character, so this means that Alpha, who we discover was a serial killer in the making, is evil, while Echo is all nice and shit. Simplistic, but it works pretty well. Better still is the moments where Alpha downloads Caroline, Echo's original personality, into a random girl that he kidnapped and forces her to face "herself". That was kinda cool.

In other news, we find out that Dr. Saunders, the Dollhouse physician who got some nasty facial scars when Alpha escaped, is actually another doll who was (permanently?) imprinted with her doctor persona. We get some flashback scenes of her life as a doll, including a nice bit in which she and Alpha play a Mickey-and-Mallory-style pair of psychos (although who knows why somebody would pay for that). Amy Acker isn't nearly as convincing as a blank slate though; that's one area where Eliza Dushku actually outperforms someone. It is kind of neat to see her come to the realization that she's a fake person though, and a scene where she berates poor Victor and calls him useless after Alpha carved up his face is pretty effective.

And we also get a sort of new status quo, with Agent Ballard deciding to work for the Dollhouse for some reason, even though he's highly morally opposed to their very raison d'être. He does bargain to have a doll released, which surprisingly isn't Echo (or not all that surprisingly, really, since they're not going to get rid of the show's nominal star). Instead, it's November, probably because he was guilty about fucking her. He does get a pretty awkward goodbye with her though.

And I guess that's it? Not a bad season-ender, although Alpha just kind of conveniently escaped, able to return and menace people another day. That's going to be the hope for a possible second season: that Alan Tudyk shows up at some point. Let's see more of that craziness and less of Eliza Dushku desperately trying to act her way out of a wet paper bag.

Fringe: "The Road Not Taken" by Matthew J. Brady

This isn't the season finale, but it could be considered part one for next week, since it sets up most everything for whatever the big event is going to be. It is a relatively self-contained affair, but a good portion concerns the meta-plot and it ends with a bit of a cliffhanger. Fun? Well, at least one of the ideas is, with Olivia suddenly having weird visions that don't line up with reality, including seeing two bodies at a spontaneous combustion/pyrokinesis crime scene when there's really only one. As always, Walter guesses what's going on, and gives us a science-fictional lecture while explaining it: she's jumping into parallel universes! You know, the kind that result whenever anybody make a decision, with the other possibility going on to form its own cosmos, like if I forgot to brush my teeth this morning and as a result everybody turned into Nazis. (I'm sorry?) That's of some sort of interest, although it's never explained why this is happening, or why it's happening now. It does help her solve the case though, by finding out the identity of the second body and tracking them down. Also solved: that obnoxious FBI guy who hates Olivia and kept screwing with her earlier in the season. Turns out he's evil (well, more evil), working with the bad guys, but he gets a nice bit of flaming death. And when Olivia confronts Walter about whatever experiments he was up to in the past, he still can't remember the details (because he's crazy, you know), but it was all for a purpose: to prepare for some coming disaster. Ooh, portentous! Walter also gets spirited away by the Uatu-esque bald guy who has shown up previously, so something big is in the offing for next week.

On the debit side of the equation, there's a pretty ridiculous bit of pseudo-science in one scene, even more silly than the usual stuff in this show. We hear details about a secret project Peter is working on, providing some not-very-subtle foreshadowing that he's going to reveal it at a key moment. It turns out that he was building a device to digitize Walter's records (which is pretty fucking overkill; you don't need an electron microscope for that sort of thing, you just need a turntable that you can connect to your computer), which he uses to read the audio that was melted into a pane of glass when a character burst into flame (I would say that it makes sense in the story, but it really doesn't). This involves cutting a circle of glass from the window, taking an image from it, then somehow playing the grooves in the glass to hear what was happening at the time. And for some reason, he has to spin a turntable like a DJ to control the playback. Good god, that makes no sense whatsoever. I blame Akiva Goldsman, who has apparently stuck his fingers deeply into this show; he didn't completely write the episode, but he's credited with "story".

I guess we'll see if anything interesting is going to come of all this next week in the finale. But given the trend of increased stupidity in the show, I don't know if I'll bother sticking around next season. Fuck you, Akiva Goldsman, you ruin everything.

The Celebrity Apprentice: "Season Finale" by Martin Brown

The first season of The Celebrity Apprentice was revelatory; the second was a mess. But this season, which concluded this week with Donald Trump hiring Joan Rivers over Annie Duke, seems to have created more hype than any season of The Apprentice since the first. Mostly, that’s because it did the same things most VH-1 caliber reality TV-shows do—the screaming matches, and the self-parody, and, you know, all the Bad Girls Club shit, just cleaned up a little for NBC and with “celebrities” competing for “charity.” When it comes down to it, Joan Rivers is not a whole lot different from Tykeisha Thomas (AKA “Somethin” from Flava of Love 2), except that she didn’t shit on the floor in the first episode THAT WE KNOW OF. Rivers treated her competitor Duke like absolute garbage, berating her at length, and not allowing her to speak in her own defense—or even wish Rivers good luck—and Trump refused to acknowledge a single bit of it. Even his response to Melissa Rivers’ conniption fit in Week 9 was a muted “That wasn’t your best moment.” It’s possible that Trump didn’t know going into the season that he was going to pick Joan as his apprentice, but it’s likely that he knew he might pick Joan as his apprentice, which is more than could be said for 75% of the others—including, apparently, Annie. Hence, his absolute unwillingness to say anything remotely negative about or around her. What probably happened was this: Joan picked up on, or already knew about, Trump’s fondness for her, and instigated a fight with the best player in the game, Annie Duke, in order to ensure her spot in the final two (Trump picked the finalists last season based on the fact that he wanted to see Piers Morgan and Trace Atkins face off.) That’s why the inciting incident behind Joan and Melissa and Annie’s feud was a supposed conversation that took place off camera.

I’m harboring no illusions that Annie Duke is anything remotely resembling a good person. It’s pretty easy to pin her right off the bat as a self-obsessed, narcissistic egotist—and, yes, those all mean the same thing, and, yes, Annie Duke is all of them. Damn it, though if she didn’t play the game perfectly. She knew exactly what she had to do to win—raise money, win challenges, bring in celebrities—and she did it 300% better than anyone else on this season. However, while Annie played the game, Joan played the show. By actively breaking the glass ceiling of decorum that usually accompanies these shows and these celebrities trying desperately to enhance their self-images, she created some incredibly compelling television (if not qualitatively good television, which I remember the first season being, though now I might have to rewatch it to see if I was right)—and she was rewarded by Trump and producer Mark Burnett for it, just as they were rewarded by NBC for it. Season 3 airs next Spring.

The Mighty Boosh: "Mutants" by Sean Witzke

"Look at your face - ambient, pure ambient. It's like The Orb's third album."

So this week, "Mutants". This is the second episode of the series, and while it would be nice to see a season run in order, it's kind of pointless now that Adult Swim started off with Boosh season 3. That season, the latest, is definitely the most weird and dark that the show has gotten. It was a strange decision, and I had assumed that Adult Swim had only been able to clear the overseas rights for S1 and S2. But here we are, "Mutants" immediately following "The Chokes". Six episodes in, and suddenly Howard and Vince are much younger. Everyone works at a zoo. Richard Ayoade is completely gone. Howard's crazy after a lady who looks like Sara Palin only w/ a french accent. Vince has terrible hair. Matt Berry is here as the scenery chewing karate-chopping billionaire bad guy. No crimping, and Bollo doesn't talk. It's a good thing that this show has absolutely no continuity episode to episode or season to season. People might get confused.

Stuff that's cut - the Kenan and Kel variety show opening with Howard and Vince giving introductions is out. That's a shame, those are the funniest parts of these early episodes. Bob Fossil dealing with a class of kids, trying to convince them there's an elephant in front of them but it's camouflaged. The credits skit is actually a payoff for a line that's been cut between Vince and the cobra. Relatively little compared to the Argento film that was the American edit of "The Chokes" last week.

This version of the Boosh is a lot more like a children's program, only written and performed whilst fucked up on mushrooms. Howard and Vince work at a zoo, animals talk, and the stories are more adventures than situations. This time, zoo owner Dixon Bainbridge (Matt Fucking Berry) is kidnapping animals and people to create multi-species mutants, supposedly to drive up zoo attendance. Whereas in season 3 it's less Scooby Doo, more standard sitcom, only both formats processed through the Boosh's ramshackle Douglas Adams/Muppet Show aesthetic. It's also a lot less packed with jokes - by the time they got around to "The Party", these guys really knew how to cram in the gags, callbacks, and extended conversations that are in themselves funny on top of the silliness and crazy costumes. Coming off of their radio and live shows - of which I am sorely ignorant - they took some time to figure out the pacing needed for episodic TV. Matt Berry is a fucking force of nature, as one who knows his work cannot deny. Dixon Bainbridge doesn't have much to do here other than be a mad scientist and a dick, he doesn't even have much dialog, and he still owns this episode from start to finish. If anything, the man becomes a star when you see him in full surgical scrubs holding a beaker full of scotch. The mutants are appropriately hideous and noticeably handmade, which is fantastic. The Mutants song that closes out the episode is one the Boosh's best songs - up there with "Love Games" and "Tundra" for pure children's TV simplicity and pop song catchiness. The problem with S3 is it's the least musical, and the great music in it is mostly crimps. Of course, a full fucking minute is cut of "Mutants" for the US airing, which is just a fucking slap in the face for anyone who'd actually wanted to listen to the songs on this show. But of course, I don't think they give a shit. If they do, they've got a mean way of showing it.

Next week "Bollo". Only it's the first season, so he's not funny, because Dave Brown's not in the gorilla suit until season 2. But we do get to spend a lot of time with Death, who talks like Alan Ford in American Werewolf in London.

Lost: "Follow the Leader" by Zeb L. West

Is Lost Fantasy or Science Fiction? Although any savvy TFO reader already knows the difference, there’s still some people who think they’re just one big lump category involving dragons or space or some shit. So what’s the difference?

The simplest I’ve heard it laid out is in terms of the plausible vs. the impossible. If you show a viewer a dragon, they say ‘okay, that’s impossible’ because conventional wisdom says that fire-breathing serpents don’t exist. But if you show them a space ship moving faster than the speed of light the viewer says ‘okay, that’s plausible.’ Even though they know it’s impossible according to current scientific theories, if they had to go toe to toe with a Trekkie at a SciFi convention, they wouldn’t be able to prove that it might someday not be possible.

So where does that leave Lost? Time Travel, teleportation and even psychic activity are usually dropped in the SciFi category depending on how they are treated. If you time travel by making a wish, teleport by wiggling your nose, or read minds through the use of a mystical crystal, you’re in the realm of fantasy. But if you bend the laws of physics to visit the past, listen in on the thoughts of others through a chemical imbalance in your brain, or teleport by molecular deconstruction and reconstruction, then suddenly we’re in the realm of SciFi!

There’s no doubt that Lost is laying a heavy foundation of pseudo-science involving the Dharma Initiative and a massive magnetic disturbance that sucks down airplanes. But the nagging fact remains that there are also elements of the fantastical everywhere! At this point it seems that Richard Alpert is immortal, Jacob is a ghost that haunts a shack, and that the island has an anthropomorphic will! Although each of these may eventually be given the pseudo-scientific treatment, at current count, Lost has one foot planted in each genre!

Don’t worry faithful reader: although I’ve appreciate you allowing my philosophical indulgence, I won’t forget to speculate on why it even matters if it’s SciFi or Fantasy! It matters because viewers who have been strung along with the promise of plausibility will probably be sorely disappointed if everything is chalked up to the magical. If it’s all a dream, if religious mysticism plays too large a part (i.e. Locke turning out to be Jesus), or if Atlanteans appear to explain everything, then we’re going to have quite an ugly Deus Ex Machina on our hands.

So if you watch the finale in a couple years and feel like it was all a bit too easy, don’t say I didn’t warn you about the red flags.

The major revelations of this week’s episode:

• The quaint little valley where the Dharma Initiative chose to build their suburb is unfortunately placed directly over the hydrogen bomb that Jack, Sayid and Eloise intend to detonate!
• Juliet and Sawyer are just about to happily accept exile to the mainland via the submarine, when their lovey-dovey session is rudely interrupted when old third-wheel Kate plops down between em!
• And my favorite musical theme returns this week as Locke leads an exodus of Others on a march straight to Jacob's cabin, where we get our final and biggest reveal of the episode - that Locke is so adamant about seeking out Jacob because he intends to kill him!

Wallandar: "Sidetracked" by Tucker Stone

While this isn't the first time that Henning Mankell's Swedish detective character has appeared onscreen, the series of TV movies that began this past Sunday are the first time that the character has been featured in an English language adaptation. The books, of which there are currently eight--not counting a collection of short stories or the spin-off novel centering around Wallander's daughter--are a global success, seeing print in America from the Vintage Crime imprint best known for purchasing the Black Lizard line of books, which is whom the world thanks for the still-in-print Jim Thompson library.

It's about time. The BBC--where this Kenneth Branagh starring series first premiered--and PBS' Masterpiece Mystery series, who are currently airing it in the US, have been churning out detective thrillers for years, and they had to get around to Kurt Wallander eventually. (Although the Swedes themselves released television films of the eight novels, a straight to video adaptation of the short story collection, a cinema-released version of the daughter novel as well as a mind-boggling 12 film series based off completely original scripts, few of these had traction in the US.)

Dispensing with any notions of completionism immediately by focusing the first film on the fifth novel, Sidetracked is mostly an opportunity to showcase the talents of Branagh alongside the omnipresent RED digital camera that films the series. Although any adaptation is always going to have to take liberty when it comes time to make the book to film jump, the Wallander series is a particularly difficult case, and in Sidetracked, it unfortunately shows. With the exception of one scene--where a couple of forensic examiners mention some recent instances of children inflicting themselves with harm--none of Mankell's long-running thematic questioning of what sort of community progress has wrought in Wallander's beloved sea-side town of Ystad survives. A brief insult towards Kurt when he mentions where he is from, "Did someone lose a cat?", is the only blatant hint that our protagonist comes from a town with a population numbering less than 20,000. Some of the books most popular characters find their personalities truncated to walk-on status, the most painful of which is the loss of the chief medical examiner's loathsome personality. On screen, no one matters but Kurt, and while that isn't extraordinarily far from the books, the choice to gift his compatriots with little more than utilitarian status is one that leaves the show completely on the back of Branagh, who is on screen for a good 90% of films running time.

He almost pulls it off.

Branagh's unselfish commitment to the part is apparent even in the first scene, wherein he's been called by a local farmer--Henning Mankell in a quiet cameo--to find out why a young girl is sneaking around the man's crops in the middle of the day. Branagh looks like hell. Sleep-deprived, doughy and brutish, he appears as a man confused by everything he comes across, and as he walks into the field--ignoring the farmer's disgust that yet another person is trampling across his livelihood--his face is completely absent of the voracious curiosity seen on televisions other popular detective, Hugh Laurie. It's obvious, before anything goes wrong, that Wallander expects nothing good to come of the visit. Nothing in his life ever does. When the young girl, frantic and terrified, covers herself in gasoline and lights herself on fire as Branagh's face changes from confusion to terror, he's merely proven right. Unfortunately, he doesn't have the innate cynicism to clear himself, and his disgust and loathing for those police that do--the ones who have seen the same bodies as him, and have made the decision to distance themself emotionally from the crimes they live with--is something he makes no attempt to hide. Although the opening of Masterpiece Mystery contains an irritating introduction from the endlessly weird Alan Cumming, there's a bit of truth in the way Wallander is described--he's a man who embraces the guilt for every crime he comes across, who identifies not just with the killer and victim, but the act, the emotional toll, itself. Branagh has it down pat, and as the actual "mystery" of Sidetracked strides through its main plot--a group of men involved in a sex trafficking ring are being slaughtered throughout the small town Wallander calls home--the film never abandons Wallander's obsession and grief over the girl. By the climax, where Branagh is put in the position of choosing to participate in the punishment being wrought on to the men whose actions pushed that girl towards a gruesome suicide, once again with a teenage life in the balance, things couldn't be more clear about who the Wallander character is. His interest in mysteries, in solving puzzles, is an arbitrary skill he wishes he didn't have. He solves these horrible things because it's all he's capable of doing, and he derives nothing but pain in the process. It's an interesting, somewhat cliched, play on the old "Don't take it home with you" maxim. In Kurt's case--both in the books and in Branagh's performance--there's no other option. He comes at solutions through leaps of intellect, but the entire groundwork for those leaps is built on his unwillingness to think or participate in anything else. Sleeping in a chair for scant hours at a time in his cheap, threadbare suits, rarely shaving or feeding himself, paying the scantest bit of attention to his estranged daughter or sickly father, there's nothing about the man that leads one to idolize him. His life, his job, the things he sees--it's all awful. While the films don't look like they're interested in the long-range style of character development Mankell uses for the series--the emotion-heavy scene in Sidetracked where Wallander's demented father expresses support means far less on screen than it did in the novels, where the moment had been built as the conclusion to a five book long subplot regarding his father's contempt and loathing for his son's chosen profession. Leaving in a token "things are getting worse" sequence without embracing Mankell's extensive, David Simon style analysis of the waste that urban progress leaves behind gives the main character an Andy Rooney style whine that doesn't fit. Still, it in some way finds a bit of success to call its own. If that's only because of Kenneth Branagh's performance for now, so be it. There's still more to come.

-Zeb L. West, Sean Witzke, Matthew J. Brady, Martin Brown & Tucker Stone, 2009

Comments

[Matthew J. Brady]

Hmm, Wallander seems pretty interesting. Branagh can be a pretty good actor, and this seems like a stretch for him. I might try to check it out.

[Tucker Stone]

You'll have to let me know what you think. I really enjoyed it, but I've wanted to see these books brought to film ever since I tore through the series a few years back. I'm still waiting to pick up a decent subtitled version of the original Swedish run--from what I heard, the budget and acting wasn't top notch, except for the lead. It'd be nice to find out how they play to somebody who isn't sitting there filling in gaps while watching.