Happy New Year, everybody! A new year is starting and, with it, a lot of TV shows start and meet their demise. It is time to tell you what I've watched - as community service for you, of course :) - and what I think about them.



Let's start with the already described ones:

• Doctor Who - The new season with Capaldi in the role of the 13th doctor has not started yet, but there were the 50th anniversary of the show, which pretty much saved Gallifrey and showed all the Doctors so far and even a bit of the new one, then the usual Christmas special, where Gallifrey saved The Doctor. Kind of a quid pro quo. Anyway, it seems to me that in less than 9 years they added at least 600 years to the venerable age of The Doctor. Soon he will become older than The Face of Bo, if he continues that way :)
• True Blood - I will be watching the new season, but I don't have much hopes for the show now. It was good while it lasted, though.
• The Good Wife - The old formula of the show started squeaking, as I was observing the last TV series post, so they cooked up something else. Alicia is leaving the company to form her own, to the dismay and hurt of Will, who is now intent on making her hurt back. A game of legal cat and mouse ensues (see what I did there?). It is a breath of fresh air for the show, but I don't know how much it can last. Will's character cannot maintain its value if he loses to Alicia in court all day.
• Haven - the fourth season sees sheriff Carter from Eureka be a psychotic bad guy. Good for him. They finally defeat him only to find a very changed Audrey Parker. Parker and Carter sitting in a tree...
• Southpark - Southpark had some very funny episodes lately. Not the best, but pretty cool.
• Homeland - Season three was weird. High tension, quick turns of the situation, great acting. Unfortunately the characters themselves lost their charisma and empathy value. I had no idea why anyone did what they did, even when they explained it several times. Not that it is confusing, I just can't relate to the characters. The end of the season made me think it was the end of the show, but it seems there will be a fourth.
• The Walking Dead - A plague, the Governor returning for a while and a lot of the characters leaving or dying. This can be good for the show, as some sort of renewal was desperately needed, but we'll have to see how it goes...
• Game of Thrones - waiting for the new season. There is a lot of tension about Martin not writing his books fast enough. The show is going to catch up and then what?
• Copper - Copper got cancelled. It kind of deserved it, though, after a boring and pointless second season.
• Arrow - I spoke too soon. I kind of like Arrow. I have no good reason for it, but there are a lot of characters, beautiful women, weird magical stuff that has nothing to do with logic and they even added Flash in the series. What I am most happy about, enough to take it from the notwant list, is the return of Manu Bennett, who I noticed in Spartacus as being a very good actor.
• Elementary - New dynamic. Lucy Liu's character is getting more and more attention as Sherlock himself starts to show all kinds of vulnerabilities and a human side. It works, I think, but they'd better not push it too much.
• The Tomorrow People (2013) - Ridiculously good looking actors also have superpowers, while being hunted by an evil agency. I am glad the show changed almost everything else in this remake, but the show could use more logic in it.
• The Legend of Korra - The second season ended in victory for the forces of good, naturally, but a bit better than it started. Korra seems to slowly mature. Really slowly.
• Rewind - A strange move to cancel this show after its pilot aired. It was a promising one, even if the base concept was a bit too morally unstable.
• Serangoon Road - The first season ended and I had the feeling of loss and of wanting more that indicates I really liked the show and its characters. There are a lot more facets of the world in it to be explored and I eagerly await the second season.
• Siberia - Siberia got cancelled and for good reasons, I think. I stopped watching it anyway.
• Sleepy Hollow - Magic, witches demons and American history. The concept could have gone in so many ways, all good, but they chose the melodramatic way.
• The Bridge - Interesting show, but I wonder how they intend to continue it in the second season, since all the major story arches of the first one got completed.
• The Originals - I am close to stopping watching it. It feels like Dynasty with vampires.
• The Psychopath Next Door - I really liked how this started, but it seems the pilot got converted into a movie and that was the end of it. Too bad!
• Under The Dome - I want to believe that King's story was better than this watered down, incoherent crap. I may stop watching it altogether.
• Witches of East End - The show got a little darker, but only a little. New characters and connections appear, but not much of a show besides the eye candy.
• The Last Witch - I liked the first episode, but there was no second. I really want this to be picked up for a series, but I don't know if it didn't or the plan to continue it later or what...

And the new or restarted shows:

• Marvel's agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. - A show that combines the idea of superheroes that seems to stick nicely to the public with the one about a good government agency: S.H.I.E.L.D. Their purpose: to police the entire world in order to protect it from itself and contamination from alien technology. I can't possibly subscribe to the mission statement, but the show is decent.
• Dracula - What started as a ridiculous concept caught up with me. Dracula is no angel, but he fights an even darker agency: the order Draco. Everybody is a bit conspiratorial and over dramatic, but I like the show so far.
• Killer Women - An US remake of an Argentinian show, it features Tricia Helfer as a Ranger! She uses her womanly powers to fight crime, alas. I really hoped for a better premise. I would predict the show is going to be cancelled pretty quickly, as woman police shows usually get, but I could be wrong, seeing that is a remake of another show, so at least part of it should stick to audiences.
• Misfits - Misfits ended. It was a nice show, but a little too pointless. I will still recommend you watch the first seasons.
• Ripper Street - This show was also cancelled, after just two seasons. Me and an entire bunch of people protested against its cancellation because it was a good show! A bit inconsistent, true, but good actors and a nice starting point. Bring it back, you wankers!
• Wizards vs Aliens - Yes! The second season of the show features yet again wizards taking a stand about the alien hungering for magic: the Necross! There is even an episode about the world where magic originates, where the wizard kid and the female Necross (there transformed into a woman) live together and have a child. Is that weird or what? :)
• Sherlock - The third season of the British reinvention of the Holmes mythos just started. I am going to watch it, but as you may remember, I don't particularly like the way they did it, even if it stars Benedict Cumberbatch.
• Ghost in the Shell: Arise - I watched the second episode of this Japanese anime series. If you don't know what Ghost in the Shell is, you should start watching it immediately. Arise is just a reinvention of the series, with better graphics and a change in technology and character stories. It doesn't seem to be as poignant as the films or the Stand Alone Complex series, but it may change in the future.
• A Young Doctor's Notebook and Other Stories - The second season appeared! Just like the first, four episodes of 20 minutes each. This time the humor is almost not present, instead terrible despair. The main character's ... err.. character is so awful and pathetic that even the viewer has to loathe him. His older alter ego is prepared to forgive him, only even he can't! A very good show, with a completely different structure and feel from anything I've seen so far.

There have been a lot of new shows lately, but many of them I just skimmed or downright refused to even try.

Ripper Street appeared at the same approximate moment with another similar series, Copper, also a historical series about policemen made by the BBC. The Ripper Street inspector is a man of justice, but also one that believes in the process of finding proof and sending the guilty to trial, which is relatively the same with the guy in Copper, who was a little more violent, but basically good stock. He employs (not unlike Copper) a doctor that is using scientific methods to determine the cause of death and other details that help in the investigation. His love life is in shambles as he mourns the death of his daughter, just like in Copper. A lot of the script also revolves around a female brothel owner, beset by financial troubles, but that ultimately proves ruthless. And also both series have ended abruptly, just before the second season's finale. This similarity can't be coincidental and it bothers me to no end that they used the same scheme for two different markets, just to see how it will work, with TV viewers as lab rats for their experiment.

But there are also differences. While the Five Points violent stage for Copper was more appropriate for the genre than East London after Jack the Ripper's case, the lead was never terribly charismatic. He seemed like a nice good looking Irish boy who was way over his head as a policeman. Instead, in Ripper Street Matthew Macfadyen uses his deep baritone voice and intimidating presence to portray perfectly the driven inspector Edmund Reid. Also, while the support cast for Copper did their job rather well, none seem to reach the height of theatrical performance that Jerome Flynn brings to Ripper Street while playing the violent but good willing police sergeant. And the final nail in the coffin for Copper is that most of the issues of the lead character are personal in nature, while the inspector in Ripper Street is tortured by his personal life failings, but is loyal to his job as a policeman.

Perhaps Ripper Street started with a promise of bringing light on the good of people in a hellish corner of the world, but in the end managed to do the opposite. In truth, the last scene of the series (and you might want to skip this slight spoiler if you plan to watch the series) is with the woman who loved the inspector turning in disgust when she sees him order his sergeant to kill a man in order to bring justice outside the system. In fact the last scene shows him betray all at once everything he stood for during the entire series. It's a slip up, of course, driven by desperation and something that would have probably been thoroughly explored in the third season. Alas, there is no third season to be had, for reasons of decreasing audience. It is difficult to pretend to be the best television producer in the world and then only care about audiences, like the assholes across the ocean, BBC!

The inconsistency in the show's quality can be blamed for the cancellation of the show, as well, but overall Ripper Street was entertaining and thought provoking. It could have been better, but not by much, I think. Good cast, good atmosphere of the old East End, some pretty compelling scripts. I believe it a shame to stop the show now. It was clearly better than Copper and that show had two seasons as well. Ripper Street deserved better, as well as all the viewers hooked on it.

I've just finished the eighth episode of the fifth season of Misfits, the last in the series, as the show finally reached its end. I am convinced that most of the people reading this post don't really know what Misfits is and I mean to rectify that. Be warned, this is not the epitome of television and the last seasons were rather disappointing compared with the first few, but those few were pretty refreshing for a TV show.

Misfits is a British TV show about superheroes. Unlike American heroes, who are all beautiful and good and perfect, the first batch of Misfits superheroes is a bunch of losers on community service that get caught in a freak storm that gives them "powers". They use those powers in the most outrageous ways, completely out of control and with a tendency to think only of themselves and accidentally kill probation workers. Unfortunately it is the most consistent trend through the series, as actors change from season to season and the mood and quality of the show oscillates wildly.

My point, though, is that the show has a very nice premise and its worst problem was that instead of focusing on character development, they tried to ramp it up, adding more people with powers and gradually increasing the danger and weirdness of the situations in which they were involved until it just became ridiculous.

I don't know (or care) about ratings, but for me a nice show would have pitted these few guys against the real world, not a weird (and ultimately meaningless) version of itself where a lot of people have superpowers, but nobody notices. I repeat myself, but the idea of normal blokes and girls having superpowers and acting like normal people while they have them was a great one and the show creators should have followed it through. Too bad they didn't.

To wrap this out, I highly recommend to sci-fi fans watching the first two seasons of Misfits. Its... britishness... brings a refreshing perspective to an already overloaded and tired genre of the superhero and not getting exposed, even a little, to Misfits makes you miss out on a nice and unfortunately shortlived slice of the mythos.

I really wanted to give you a compilation of the best moment in Misfits, but apparently YouTube is infested by "Best funny moments of Nathan" which is the rude Irish pretty boy from the first season. Instead I leave you with the trailer for the series:

It's the middle of autumn again and more and more series are making their entry into the list. But there are a lot of shows that I carry around from post to post without actually watching them. I've decided to remove them from the list until that time comes.



Let's start with the already described ones:

• Doctor Who - Math Smith has left the show and the new doctor is an actor which I really like, Peter Capaldi, who you might remember from The Thick of It. Unfortunately, he will be very polite in Doctor Who; I would have loved to see him as irreverent, sweary and Scottish as in his other role.
• Dexter - season 8 of the series has just ended (disastrously) and thus the show. It was a good run, I guess, even if the last seasons were quite ridiculous.
• True Blood - I am becoming conflicted about this show. On one hand some of the storylines are very interesting, while on the other the multitude of stories, one more over the top than the other, shown in parallel in every episode, make it all feel like one supernatural soap opera. The ending of the season, with the invasion of the zombie vampires, also left me deflated.
• The Good Wife - the fifth season just started, but I haven't got around to it. I think the show continues to be good, but they probably should wrap it up and do something else before it too dissolves into pointlessness.
• Haven - the fourth season has just started. I will probably watch it with the wife, she seems to enjoy it.
• Falling Skies - the third season was just weird. It's difficult enough to justify an almost medieval human resistance while being caught in an interstellar war even without having incompetent writers, which unfortunately the show has.
• Southpark - Southpark is still running hot at season 17. The Butters episode in which he becomes a DMV witness was delicious.
• Suits - Suits started fun, I really enjoyed it; for stupid reasons, but I did. The third season showed me that even those reasons are quickly fading. Everybody acts over the top and with almost no connection to real life. It's like a movie made by advertisers.
• Breaking Bad - I started watching the first episode from season 5 only to realize I don't understand what the hell is going on. Did I even watch the fourth season? Unclear.
• Homeland - season three starts with Carrie being thrown to the wolves as she goes more and more insane. Having a similar situation in the family doesn't make it easy to watch.
• The Walking Dead - the fourth season just started, but I didn't get around to it, yet.
• Game of Thrones - there was a lot of outrage on the Internet linked to the Red Wedding episode. It's the first true test of the show. If people will continue watching it even after blatantly killing some of their favourite characters, then the show will go on until Martin stops writing (or maybe not even then). I am afraid it might not happen that way, though.
• Mad Men - does anyone remember this started as a movie about advertising people? Right now it seems to be more about the "mad" part of the title, as Don devolves more and more into a crazy person.
• Continuum - Continuum continues, even if it got kind of weird in the last season. Everybody is related to everybody and makes deals with all. It's becoming an intertemporal high-school drama.
• Copper - Copper started as in interesting show about Irish policeman in Five Points, but after the second season it got cancelled. The last season was pretty confusing and less and less having to do with the job and more with the personal. I did not like that.
• Longmire - who killed the killer of madam Longmire? Was it sir Longmire? No. Was it Lou Diamond Philips? No again. Was it the killer hired by Lou Diamond? No, because he wasn't a killer. Does that mean people will stop worrying about it? Definitely not. I really want Longmire to retain that authentic countryside sheriff feel; the screenwriters seem to feel otherwise.
• The Newsroom - drama, politics, revenge, more drama and finally, some drama. All over the top and on high speed. No wonder the city never sleeps if everybody is overactive.
• Arrow - new Arrow season, with tales of bringing more superheroes into the story, like The Flash. Will this become the testbed for Playstation and XBox game scripts?
• Elementary - the second season started with some interesting episodes. One even features Lestrade, as a celebrity addict. Funny, that.
• House of Cards - this show is the first to be launched on Netflix (and produced by them as well). This means the entire first season was launched on the same day. No more waiting week after week to see a bit of the show, but how much time will it pass now until the next season? It's almost like releasing 10 hour movies.
• Father Ted - I watched almost all episodes of this very old and obscure show, basically just because it was old and obscure. It's a laughing-track comedy about two idiotic priests on a small remote island in Ireland. Supposedly ireverent to religion, it's just a very silly show.

New shows:

• The Tomorrow People (2013) - this remake of a really dumb old series just started. I haven't started watching it, but I've read a review that seemed to praise it. It stars beautiful young actors with superpowers, though.
• The Legend of Korra - the second season has started with a transparent nefarious plot that only the dumb female avatar doesn't seem to get. Her character is so annoying!! Ugh!
• Atlantis - I expected Atlantis to be a sort of Rome or Spartacus. The bronze-punk science fiction would have made a great show. Unfortunately it seems to be more a kind of a Hercules/Xena kind of show. There is this modern guy who gets into Atlantis through a portal, meets Pithagoras and Hercules, who are both different from the myths, and runs around with swords.
• By Any Means - I could barely survive through the first episode. This is a British show about a group of people that are hired by the police to bring people to justice. Why doesn't the police do that directly? Because this group uses illegal and imoral acts to achieve their goals, then rationalize them by them being "the good guys" and acting all cool and funny. The show was basically offensive to me.
• Hostages - a show about a doctor who must opperate on the United States president. Her family is taken hostage to force her to kill the president. Yeah, like that could happen. It has good actors and an intriguing plot, but it could go both ways. I've watched just the first episode.
• Ironside - another show about a cop. This time the cop is black and in a wheelchair, even if he continues to strong arm suspects and his team with impunity. I found it pretentious and yet another show which is trying to force feed us vigilante justice from charismatic characters.
• King and Maxwell - a show about a detective agency run by former Secret Service agents. At last a detective agency not run by complete amateurs that got bored. Rebecca Romjin is one of the pair, which makes the show nice to look at, at least. Now, the first episodes felt a bit silly, like a comedy, so I didn't continue watching it, but it could become better.
• Low Winter Sun - TV series starring two less known, but nevertheless good actors: Lennie James and Mark Strong. It's very dark, with corrupt policemen and rampant gangs, but I can't say I enjoyed it much. Probably because it seems to miss a point.
• Ray Donovan - something that stars Liev Schreiber and John Voight should be better than this, but the show is not bad. There is this guy that acts like a sort of damage control expert who has to contend with his father getting out of jail and being a dick. Control that damage, if you can!
• Rewind - it is the season of shows about people playing God. This time they are not policemen, thank you, but an agency that uses technology to go back in time and "fix" things. All seemed straightforward until the end of the first episode, which promises a longer story arch and maybe even more interesting action.
• Serangoon Road - another Australian show about private detectives, this time placed in Malaysia. Chinese, Australians, Javanese, British and Americans are all dancing around each other, trying to win the jackpot in this country torn by civil unrest and government dissolution. An interesting show, which I continue to watch.
• Siberia - I almost want to ask "What is Siberia?" in a Matrixy sort of way. It is a series that starts as a reality show, only to have the contestants meet strange phenomena until the entire premise explodes and they find themselves stuck in Siberia, with no contact to the outside world and in mortal (supranatural/scifi) danger. The problem with the show is that it is pretty inconsistent and difficult to watch. It's like it doesn't know what it wants to be: a reality show, a Lost rip-off or something else.
• Sleepy Hollow - Sleepy Hollow the movie was a masterpiece, combining a moody atmosphere that hinted of the supernatural with a main character that used logic and science to prove that it actually wasn't. The Sleepy Hollow series is the complete opposite, with a clear supernatural storyline involving good and bad witches, demons and Ichabod Crane, a civil war soldier who has found himself in the present and now helps (of course) the police deal with the rise of evil. It could have been good, but I really don't like any of the actors or characters, except maybe the sheriff, but he dies.
• The Blacklist - I really wanted to like the series, because it stars James Spader (an old and bald one), an actor which I really liked in the past. But it's a confused mess. Spader plays the role of a rogue FBI agent that surrenders after 20 years only to help the FBI find catch the "truly bad" guys. He enlists the help of a girl FBI agent who probably is his daughter, even if he doesn't say it out loud. She is basically a clone of the FBI agent from Haven, while Spader's character is an arrogant prick. Impossible to empathise with anyone and even harder to see a point of this show.
• The Bridge - an American remake of the Danish/Swedish series Bron, it involves a murderer that leaves a body on the exact border of Mexico and the US, forcing the creation of a joint taskforce. Beautiful Diane Kruger plays the functional autist American agent, while Demián Bichir plays the complex Mexican policeman. There are other characters, but some are even detrimental to the story, in my view. The show is solid and has some interesting and good acting. I hope it stays that way.
• The Crazy Ones - just so you don't say I don't watch any comedy shows, this stars Robin Williams as a crazy and inspirational ad man, helped by two equally crazy guys and his daughter, played by Sarah Michelle Gellar. It has its moments, but it isn't really my style. Why can't they make comedy that also seems real, rather than completely over the top?
• The Originals - oh, what a bunch of pretentious crap! a (too) late comer in the vampire TV show business, it even tries to reuse the vampire aristocrat variation. The only modern take of this soap opera like show is that it also adds witches to the mix. This is they year of the witches, after we got tired of vampires and werewolves and zombies didn't quite catch on.
• The Psychopath Next Door - not an easy show to watch, it's full of psychological violence. It features a young very attractive female psychopath and how she deals with the world. Being a British show she really acts like a sociopath, shows no remorse and does the most atrocious acts just to get ridiculously unimportant things, rather than help the police catch bad guys or whatever :) A really good beginning and a fascinating glimpse in the mind of a true psycho.
• Under The Dome - when in doubt, use a Stephen King story. Alas, I usually don't like King's writing it tends to drag on. Making a TV series out of one makes a rather boring watch. This is a sci-fi show about a transparent and impenetrable dome that completely isolates a small community from the outside world. The situation quickly devolves because of the people there, as primate tribes are wont to do when consequences disappear.
• What Remains - British show, I just started to watch the first episode. It seems to revolve around human remains, discovered a long while after the crime (if it was one) and how people lives are affected by the investigation. Could be good.
• Witches of East End - told you this is the season of the witch. This show is about a family of witches, incredibly good looking ones. The mother is Julia Ormond, her sister is Madchen Amick and one of the daughters is this hot and curvy brunette. Of course good looking guys and evil witches appear soon after. It seems a typical teen show, with drama coming exclusively from social situations, people who are romantic interests or/and are trying to kill you.
• The Last Witch - The show just appeared and I haven't had the chance to watch it, but it's about witches, which validates my view that witches are the new vampires. At least this show is British.
• Blackout - a faux documentary British series about a fictional British power blackout that lasted for more than a week. Kind of hard to watch because it's made like a montage of different camera shots taken by different people on handhelds and phones.

Well, it seems that removing the shows that I am not actively watching makes this list more manageable, but it also means you will have to look at more "TV Series I've been watching" blog posts to get an overview.

There are multiple problems with Star Trek Enterprise that doomed the show from the beginning. One, I am sad to say, is Scott Bakula, who I couldn't really see as a smart and resourceful captain till the very end of the show. Another reason was the name, making people confuse Star Trek Next Generation with this series.

Yet another, and perhaps the most important reason, were the producers who abused their station to steer the show into an impossible position: an Earth ship that is older than Kirk's starship stuck in the middle of epic conflicts through time and space. Even the writers complained that it should have remained a show about early exploration and abstain from the flamboyant temporal cold war or the Xindi saga.

You see, the show started very nicely, with the launch of the first warp 5 capable human starship. The Vulcans are still not sure whether the humans should attempt this, if they are ready for the big bad universe, while humans react like teenagers that have been forbidden something. We get to see the birth of technologies so important in the Star Trek universe: the transporter, newly invented and feared (maybe rightly so, considering the multitude of episodes that involve some accident with it in the other series); they use grapnel hooks to tow; they use explosive torpedoes at start and phaser cannons that they constantly upgrade; the replicators can only manufacture simple food and they have cooks on board for the rest. The interactions of the crew were also welcome, as all of them seemed perfect for the job.

That is why the first season was good, promising a very interesting show about the beginning of human exploration. Then they botched it, with the introduction of a silly and pointless race, the Suliban, who have a faction of people receiving instructions from the future, while other future people are trying to stop them interfering with the "proper" timeline. Basically they should have asked Jean Claude VanDamme to come. This almost destroyed the second season.

A strange decision, which I can't quite say was bad or good, was to make a season that is continuous, rather than the individual episodes of Star Trek until then. They introduced the Xindi, another intriguing concept, of a coalition of species: reptilian, arboreal, simian, insectoid and aquatic. This probably wreaked havoc with their budget, so only the humanoid species usually appear. Somehow they wanted to write about terrorism, since all Americans were being influenced by 9/11, therefore the theme appeared throughout season three and quite a few episodes in season 4. First were the Xindi, who (for no reason that I can see) tested a small variation of a weapon on Earth, in preparation for a bigger one that they were still constructing. Rather than compare it with the American atomic bombs, which were the natural analogy here, they, of course, compared it with the 9/11 attacks.

A strange patch of the universe where the laws of physics are warped by huge metal spheres that have weird effects is the stage for the entire season three, while Enterprise goes to find the Xindi and stop them from destroying Earth. I felt that it was an interesting season, the only bad bits being some inconsistencies of the overall story, rather than individual episodes.

Then they had a religious sect that threatened to blow themselves inside Enterprise unless Archer destroys their enemies. The caricatured religion and condescending jabs at Palestinians should have angered Muslims more than cartoons of Mohamed. Then there was the final act of terrorism, when a faction of xenophobic humans take over the Verteron array on Mars. That script was a mess, probably because it was the last episode before the show ending one. Too much terrorism for a show that defines the transition of humanity into a peaceful future.

And then there was T'Pol, played by the lovely Jolene Blalock. That was probably the problem: she was too damn sexy. They had, therefore, to make her have emotional issues, get into relationships with everybody, make regular trips in the decontamination chamber and rub her body with antiseptic cream and so on. It is a disgrace for women in Hollywood that her role was massacred by all of these preconceptions and easy ways to get audience attention. And she was a Vulcan, the precursor of Spock, for crying out loud!

In other words the powers that be exaggerated everything and allowed Archer to be moving through time or singlehandedly creating the federation, while trying to keep something for Kirk and Picard to do. I know it is difficult to make an enticing and modern prequel to series that you watched and loved as a kid, but randomly choosing themes and ideas to "fix" the show to be more something or another is not a solution. That is why, while it the newest series of Star Trek, it was also one of the worst.

The disappointment comes, for me, when I see several portions of the show actually being great. The MAKO concept, for example, highly trained military personnel that accompanied Enterprise in the Xindi story arch was a good thing and the interaction with the regular security personnel. The controversial decisions that Archer had to make to protect Earth lent more character depth than most of the moral cardboard crap that usually infests Star Trek. The old school technology made the voyages of the new starship bring smart new levels of excitement to the exploration of space. I liked the "In the Mirror Darkly" episode, which was not a crossover to an alternate universe, but only a show about the Enterprise of the alternate universe where there were all ambitious and evil. Even the start credits looked different, showing the glorious history of Earth conquests.

My conclusion, especially today, when the number of sci-fi shows explodes as the audience requires more and more fantasy, is that Star Trek represents the hope of humanity for a bright future and that allowing it to be defined by money hungry Hollywood production companies was ultimately a mistake, no matter how much soul the writers, directors and actors put into it. A space exploration show made by Europeans, something that would mirror Star Trek's United Federation of Planets in cinematography, bringing talent and ideas from Britain, Germany, France, Russia, etc, and borrowing from the sci-fi legacy of all. I would love to see that.

I am a complete fan of the Ghost in the Shell franchise. For those unfortunate enough to not know what that is, it is a series of manga and anime stories that describe a near future where integration with machines is the order of the day, giving rise to cyborg bodies, mind hackers and all that stuff. It is also a police procedural, where the heroes are an independent force designed to counter cyber threats. It is also an espionage thriller, since many of the actions in the stories are not linear, but have many political implications and intricate plots. But what I thought was better than a beautiful and detailed sci-fi world with deep characterization and complex storylines is the exploration of the human soul and mind in a background that is mechanistic and science squeaky clean. To manage to do this repeatedly in manga, films and anime series is truly wonderful.

For me it all started with the movie. With impressive music by Kenji Kawai and a complexity and beauty and care for detail that I had never seen before (and rarely since), Ghost in the Shell blew my mind. Then there was the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, a two season series that went a little more toward the police procedural, but overall was just as wonderful as the film. And then the second film: Innocence. And now they made Ghost in the Shell: Arise, a four part OVA series, prequel to the film. Having seen the first one hour part, I can say I am very pleased and can't wait to see the entire series. It details the roots of major Kusanagi and what are the roots of her team. Very nice indeed. The only thing that I miss is Kenji Kawai's music.

I leave you with the trailer for the series and my recommendation to see all of the Ghost in the Shell animes, even the Tachicoma OVAs :)



Update September 2014: I've watched the entire series. The episodes are almost stand alone and totally worth watching. I liked the fourth one most, as it was clearly created to made the connection with the film and series. I loved the small tips of the hat to hallmark scenes in the film: the cloaked jump from a skyscraper, the destruction of the cyber hands while pulling on the lid of a battle tank and so on. Does that mean that a new series and/or film will be created? I certainly hope so. My only problem with the new OVA is that the music of Cornelius is not even close to the haunting quality of Kenji Kawai's.

As I was saying in a previous post, there seem to be a lot of series and films in the Star Trek universe that are fan made. I have just finished watching Star Trek: Hidden Frontier and I have to say I was impressed. The show is by no means a masterpiece of cinema, but the effort and dedication were clearly great and applaudable.

Now, when you go to the Hidden Frontier link and you start watching from season 1, a warning pops up, inviting you to watch a more recent episode rather than starting from the beginning. And that is because season 1 was ridiculous and the show only started to look like something watchable somewhere in season 5 or 6. You see, Hidden Frontier is filmed exclusively in front of a green screen and all the décor is borrowed from existing Star Trek shows. The first Hidden Frontier season is low resolution, bad green screen capture and incredible bad acting. Does it make it any less remarkable? No. I have to say that, leaving the acting prowess of people that are clearly not actors aside, the last two seasons were almost on par with the real thing. The greenish contours are still there, but less visible, the 3-D models are better (at least imperial star fighters don't appear in battle scenes as in the first seasons), the actors are better. I would call it a success, although I don't have many friends who would be as enthusiastic watching it.

There are other series and films in the same universe. Star Trek: Odyssey will be next on my list. What really surprised me is that the scripts were very like Star Trek Next Generation and Voyager, but their quality did not improve with time. I was expecting a bunch of ST geeks to be able to make complex and interesting stories, the kind of stories that are usually not allowed on TV due to violence, moral complexity or scientific knowhow needed to understand the script. It was not to be. Also, they made this attempt to balance the Star Trek universe by bringing in gay romance and kisses. It would have been all good if they didn't also almost ignore any romance between girls and boys. It really is ridiculous how a single boy gets into at least three relationships, while the only straight love stories seem to be between a Vulcan and a human and between two old people. Being biased in the other direction doesn't bring balance, you know.

So all in all I recommend this show as a new experience, something to give us hope that ordinary people can still create and distribute independently, and a monument to the power of fans.

I consider myself a Star Trek fan. I've seen all of the series starting with The Original Series, all the movies, even those made by J.J.Abrahms and once I almost got my wife to divorce me because I was watching Star Trek series non stop when I came home. And yet, there is a parallel Star Trek universe I knew nothing about until now, when reading Phil Plait's blog entry about Star Trek Continues and searching the web I stumbled upon this (really) hidden frontier of Star Trek.

Having just watched the first episode, I have to say that it is not much worse than the original 1967 low budget Star Trek series. The script and stage props and even most acting was consistent to what I expected from the first series. The only problem are the actors, all of them fans that do this for fun rather than profit and therefore not the best in the world. But they grow on you. The "Pilgrim of Eternity" episode continues a TOS episode that involved the god Apollo. I found it interesting and nice that the actor that played the aged Apollo was actually the actor playing the god in the original episode. Also part of the crew are Christopher Doohan, son of late James Doohan and playing his father's role, and Grant Imahara, which you may know from the Mythbusters team. Even Marina Sirtis, the annoying Deanna Troi from Star Trek Next Generation is acting as the computer voice. Overall I can say that I liked it, especially in this "free for all" format that I personally expected to take over the Internet a while ago, the way "apps" took over mobiles. Turns out I was wrong, but not completely, as you well see.

But that was just the tip of the iceberg. Searching on IMDb I found out there are many other Star Trek projects that I had no idea existed. Here is a list:

• Star Trek: Of Gods and Men (2007) - a movie apparently staring Chekov and Tuvok and directed by Tim Russ (Tuvok)
• Star Trek: Renegades (2014) - the continuation of Of Gods and Men, with actors like Eduard Furlong and Corin Nemec and Robert Picardo
• Star Trek I: Specter of the Past - guesting Deanna Troi and Data, amongst others
• Star Trek Versus Batman (2006) - I don't even want to know what this is, even if a Spock vs Joker encounter sounds intriguiing
• Star Trek: Hidden Frontier (2000) - Are you kidding me? It has 7 seasons!
• Star Trek: New Voyages (2004) - seems to be continuing Next Generation, has one season
• Star Trek: Odyssey (2007) - the only review on Imdb is killing it, but it has 3 seasons
• Star Trek: Intrepid (2007) - the adventures of the Intrepid?
• Star Trek: Federation One (2008) - another series in the Hidden Frontier universe. 1 season
• Star Trek: Osiris (2009) - 1 season
• Star Trek: The Helena Chronicles (2009) - I don't know what this is about, but episode 1 starts with a gay wedding and Klingons among the people applauding. 2 seasons.
• Star Trek: Henglaar, M.D. (2009) - Whahahaha, I imagine an alien doctor with a limp and an antigrav cane. 2 seasons and it is an audio drama!

I expect most of this to be horrible, but look at all the effort! A lot of information about this parallel Star Trek universe seems to be available here: Star Trek Expanded Universe and as you have seen most of the series above are under the Hidden Frontier umbrella. You can see a list of shows and their episodes here: Star Trek Hidden Frontier episodes

I am taking advantage of the switch to the summer season for TV series to mark the changes.



Let's start with the already described ones:

• Doctor Who - despite my efforts, Doctor Who becomes less watchable by the season, so I removed the 'want'. Now Math Smith has announced he is to leave the show.
• Torchwood - A new show appeared called Frankie and starring Eve Myles, the frontwoman for Torchwood. This might mean a permanent end to the concept.
• Criminal Minds - it's a neverending story, this. Three seasons of episodes have piled up. I doubt I will ever watch them, but hope yet remains.
• Dexter - season 8 of the series will be the last. It's official. The launch date is June 30, 2013.
• True Blood - June 16, 2013 is the release date. The trailer seems to imply something epic.
• The Good Wife - the show continues to be good relative quality. My wife asked for it specifically after the end of the first halfseason of the year.
• Haven - The third season is over, a fourth was announced. The ending of the third season leaves me with few expectations.
• Falling Skies - season three will start on June 9, 2013. It's one of those that are just good and sci-fi enough to keep watching.
• Southpark - season 17 starts on September 2013. Can't wait.
• The Killing - still on my watch list, haven't started watching it.
• Suits - third season is about to start. It doesn't make much sense, but I like it. Release date for the third season: July 16.
• Breaking Bad - There is still one half of the last season starting July 2013. This will end the show. Maybe then I will watch it all to see what happened.
• Californication - Season 6 was really lame. There will be a seventh one, date unannounced, but who cares anymore?
• Homeland - Season three is announced to start on September 29, 2013. I can't empathise with ANY of the characters, but I like it.
• The Walking Dead - the season three finale was pretty intense, if a bit rushed. Andrea finally died! Yes! And Carl is more and more awesome by the day, albeit a little psychopathic.
• Game of Thrones - two more episodes from the third season. The show maintains its good quality. I wonder what will happen when they get to the end of the books and R.R.Martin has still not finished (or started) another book.
• Mad Men - Season six is not as great as I have expected. Characters I liked get pissed upon and those I don't get back to main status. And Don annoys the hell out of me. Who could get bored of Jessica Paré?!
• Misfits - the show has been renewed for a fifth season. I will watch it, but I don't have much hopes for it.
• Sherlock - the third season of the series will begin probably late 2013. I liked it, even if a bit too... Moffaty? Benedict Cumberbatch is more and more present on the small and big screens.
• Spartacus - Vengeance - Finally watched the final season. It was good, I give it that, but in the end it had to be at least a bit faithful to the factual story, so Spartacus died. And also Manu Bennett had less and less of a presence in the series, which was too bad, since he is clearly the best actor there. Dustin Clare and Simon Merrells weren't bad either.
• My Babysitter's a Vampire - No news of a third season, and probably there won't be one.
• Continuum - the interaction of the characters has gained complexity, even if the characters themselves are a bit like cardboard. I like it.
• Copper - the second season of this cop drama starts late 2013. I liked the show and the characters.
• Longmire - the second season has started, with the main character being haunted (almost literally) by the mistakes and people of his past. I don't know if I like this new direction, but we'll see.
• The Newsroom - the second season starts on the 14th of July. It's too NewYorky for me.
• Arrow - I don't want it, but I watch it. Addiction is a horrible thing.
• Elementary - an interesting twist about the identity of Moriarty in the first season finale. And they arrest Moriarty as well. That only in the first season. What will they do with the second one, starting September 2013?
• Hatfields and McCoys - This American Civil War miniseries was filmed in Romania and stars Kevin Costner. I really wanted to see it, but didn't get around to it, yet.
• Hit and Miss - Probably a miniseries, if the first season is only 6 episodes. The synopsis is funny though: "A transsexual contract killer's life is thrown into turmoil when she discovers that she fathered a child eleven years earlier and must now mix her killer instincts with her parental responsibilities."
• Hunted - if the second season will even exist, it will be a reboot. Same character, different series. Melissa George is so insanely beautiful and plays in cool productions as well.
• Parade's End - another miniseries. The trailer looks really promising and I haven't read the book. As soon as I watch it you will know.
• Restless - actually, it was just a two part movie. It was fun to watch, but some of the elements in the film were hard to swallow. It was a war time story remember in the present. All the present time bit was bollocks. It did star Hayley Atwell, though, who is a foxy little Brit.
• Ripper Street - First season has 8 episodes and ended well. I like the show and I can't wait for the second season.
• The Fear - I've made the mistake to read reviews. Almost all negative. I won't watch this.
• Vegas - Vegas was cancelled. I liked it, that's why! Damn their idiotic audiences to hell!
• Wizards versus Aliens - there will be a second season, starting late 2013. I don't know if I will still watch it, but it's childish fun.
• Banshee - weird little modern western, its second season will start in January 2014.
• Bates Motel - A TV series based on Psycho. Haven't started watching it.
• Black Mirror - the second season was the same gritty, despondent, dark thing that the first season was, but the stories weren't that good, I think. Somehow it was difficult to watch and it was kind of downletting.
• Broadchurch - The second season of the series will start March 2014, but what is the point? Same character, completely different setting and story? This one pretty much started and ended all threads. I liked it, though, with that British quality of adding depth to characters, God bless them.
• Cracked - Another Canadian cop production. Cracked follows the newly formed Psych Crimes Unit within a Canadian police department set up by a psychiatrist in partnership with the police.
• Cult - the series was cancelled as it aired. I will probably not watch it.
• Golden Boy - The series follows the successful, meteoric rise — from age 26 to 34 — of Walter Clark, an ambitious cop who becomes the youngest Police Commissioner in New York City history.So, yeah, a police drama again, but it seems more than the usual crap. We'll see.
• House of Cards - I almost added a "want" status to this new series on the basis of Kevin Spacey being the lead actor alone. It is an adaptation of a previous BBC miniseries of the same name which is based on the novel by Michael Dobbs. This also lends support to the theory that the show is good. People that started watching it liked it, as well. So, all I need is to start watching it.
• In the Flesh - I think this might be a gem in the mud. Some episodes are not great, but overall this series is an interesting one.
• Labyrinth - I don't know what to say about this show yet. John Hurt stars in it, it seems to involve a connection with the long lost Christian sect of Cathar and is a drama fantasy. People seem to like it well.
• Monday Mornings - The only medical drama in the recent past that I liked. It was cancelled, obviously.
• Motive - Motive is a Canadian police procedural drama following working-class single-mom Detective Flynn (Lehman) in her investigation of crimes. Each episode also reveals the killers and victims at the start of the show, unusual in police procedural dramas. Haven't watched it yet.
• Orphan Black - The show got me. It is about a bunch of (very good looking) female clones who did not know what they were until they met accidentally. It could have been a great show, but they left the science and logic aside and went for Desperate Clonewives meets every bad conspiracy theory TV series ever made.
• Privates - BBC One drama television series set in 1960 which follows the stories of eight privates who are part of the last intake of National Service, and their relationships with their officers and non-commissioned officers, civilian staff and families. Didn't start watching it, yet.
• Red Widow - a housewife from Northern California whose husband, a figure in organized crime, was killed. She has to continue his work to protect her family. Don't know how good it is yet.
• Scandal - an American political thriller television series created by Shonda Rhimes, of Grey's Anatomy fame. I fear the moment when I will present this to my wife and she might like it.
• The Americans - Keri Russell is the perfect American housewife from the 80's, only she is a Russian KGB agent and so is her husband! The series is interesting and the actors play well. I hope it doesn't go ballistic (pun intended) in order to secure audiences and thus lose any touch with reality.
• The Blue Rose - a New Zealand crime drama television series about some lowly clerks who join forces to fight the corporate corruption that caused the death of one of their colleagues.
• The Doctor Blake Mysteries - Australians have made a good TV drama here. An openminded doctor in a conservative little town has a sweet tooth for police investigation. The police chief likes him, most of the others despise his irreverence to the status quo. This prompted me to watch a similar Australian drama series called "Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries" which is about the same thing, only with a female detective in the 20's. Doctor Blake is better, though.
• The Following - watched a little of it. I might continue. I don't care much about the subject, but it was well done and acted.
• Twisted - A teen with a troubled past reconnects with his two female best friends from childhood. He becomes the prime suspect when a fellow student is surprisingly found dead in her home. Didn't start watching it, but it doesn't sound great.
• Utopia - a British conspiracy thriller that follows a small group of people who find themselves in possession of the manuscript sequel of a cult graphic novel called "The Utopia Experiments" which is rumoured to have predicted the worst disasters of the last century. This leads them to be targeted by an organisation known as 'The Network', which they must avoid to survive. Sounds interesting and has a high IMDb rating.
• Vikings - a Canadian-Irish historical drama television series, inspired by the epic sagas about the raiding, trading, and exploring Norsemen of early medieval Scandinavia. It follows the exploits of the legendary Viking chieftain Ragnar Lodbrok and his crew and family. Sounds cool, but I didn't look at it, yet. My friends watched it, though, and liked it.
• Wallander - There is to be a fourth season airing in 2014. I will watch it.

And now for new shows!

• Betas - a comedy show about four geeks trying to become entrepreneurs. It was a little too funny. It could have been a great drama. But think about it: I don't like comedies and I kind of enjoyed this one. Maybe it will turn out a good show.
• Da Vinci's Demons - Leonardo Da Vinci is young and pretty much a superhero. Besides making Gatling cannons, MIRVs, real time video, photography, independently flying mechanical birds, scuba diving and many others, he is obsessively looking for The Book of Leaves, in a time where mysticism seems as common (and valid) as scientific fact. Hard to believe, no connection to reality, but flamboyant enough to enjoy it. Think of it as a steampunk doctor House meets Sherlock Holmes. I know it's hard.
• Defiance - happy beyond belief that another sci-fi show went on the air, I was disappointed to see it just a bad western with a sci-fi paintcoat. I watch it, but it ain't great, partner!
• Frankie - a drama starring Eve Myles, the main actress from Torchwood. With John Barrowman playing in Arrow, I guess that means the end of Torchwood. Anyway, I haven't started watching Frankie, yet.
• Hannibal - a TV series based on the movies. Now, it could be interesting, but I doubt it. I have yet to start watching it.
• Hemlock Grove - a werewolf TV series. It seems the usual beautiful teen extravaganza, with little to show otherwise, but the mood was dark. I might still watch it.
• Les Revenants - a very cool idea that revolutionizes the zombie genre. The French had it, of course, and the Americans are now stealing it for a new show. But until then feast your eyes with the "naked redhead Gaul teens" version which, for good reason, is said to have a Lynchian Twin Peaks feel.
• Life of Crime - Another British miniseries. Short description: "A rookie cop is obsessed with tracking down the killer of a 15-year-old girl, who she hunts over the course of 28 years." I don't really think it's going to be great, but it stars Hayley Atwell, of babylicious fame.
• Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries - I've already mentioned this when I talked about Doctor Blake's Murder Mysteries. Both are pretty well done drama series and it seems the producers intend to alternate the two. Thus in 2014 we will probably watch season 2 of Miss Fisher, while the next year we'll be watching Doctor Blake. I do believe Doctor Blake's character to be of better quality. It manages to convey a lot of compassion and interest in the victims of the crimes, while Miss Fisher is merely doing it for the kicks.
• The Fall - It is a new police drama starring Dana Scully! "When the local police are unable to catch a serial killer who is terrorizing the populace of Belfast, Northern Ireland, a detective superintendent is brought in from London to head the investigation."
• The Politician's Husband - David Tennant, ladies and gentlemen, with Emily Watson as his wife. Both politicians, the wife always in the shadow of her husband's career. Now the roles get reversed. I have seen the first episode, though, and it was kind of boring.
• The Tomorrow People (1973-1979) - Now, this is the British version, from 1973. It is a children sci-fi series about children that have superpowers and they are chased by a shadowy organisation from the US. I wanted to see it because the Americans are doing a reboot in 2013. The problem is that the first was really rubbish: bad acting, bad stories, I fell asleep watching it! I really do hope there is nothing common to the new series except the name and the general idea.
• The Village - a BBC TV series written by Peter Moffat, it tells the story of life in a Derbyshire village through the eyes of a central character. Haven't started watching it, yet, but it doesn't sound very cool.
• Zombieland - you know the movie, right? This was supposed to be a TV series based on it. It was a comedy, though, and the characters were not funny and very hard to sympathize with. They only aired the pilot before it got cancelled.

A while ago I decided to comment on every cinema movie that I watch using the IMDb platform. I wanted to have a history of films I watched and also remember what they were about. (It might not happen to you, but there were at least three movies that I realized I had seen already only when the ending came). Also it would be interesting to revisit films I liked or hated and see what changed in my perspective during time. Certainly it happens this way with books, as you've seen in case of the book Dune, by Frank Herbert.

So today I went to see the list of my comments. They became rarer and rarer because I have many more responsibilities and also I am watching a lot of TV series, which I usually don't comment on. It is a list of 1075 movies, the first one being in the 27 of December 2004 and the last today, the 1st of June 2013. That's a difference of almost ten years, more exactly 3239 days. It amounts to a little less than a movie every three days. I realise that this is an enormous waste of time. Think about it, leaving all TV series aside (which at the moment take a lot of my time as well) I spend half an hour of every day on average just watching films. That's 2% of my total time, in which I include both sleep and work. And I don't even watch TV. If I did, I would have to factor in hours of commercials and channel switching, nature and science documentaries and news shows.

I believe this to be an addiction. I have difficulty even admitting this here, which lends credit to the idea. Moreover, I know it is an addiction, a total waste of time, but I have known it for a long time and I have never managed to stop. I never even got myself to attempt it. Extend this to the entire human race and it is a staggering waste of human time and life. If a disease would kill 2% of all human kind it will be called a pandemic, it would be called horrible, it would kill 140 million people. Add TV and you get a billion people dead. You can then add the time spent discussing movies and TV with friends and acquaintances and it just grows. How come something that serves little purpose becomes the biggest time killer of all time?

That being said, if you are interested in the latest movies I've seen, the list is in the left there, in the About me section. We can discuss them together! Oh, wait...

The last few years have been great for (un)dead people. Vampires have taken over the screens, even werewolves, the ridiculous people that in their greatest moments turn into mangy canines, have had their fair share of screen time and now it's the turn of zombies to have their days. Not that zombies were not done to death, so to speak, the same idea reinvented and rehashed, but basically unchanged. It was only fair that zombies become "mainstream" by appearing in a TV series: The Walking Dead. And they were not even the modern, raging running rabid type of zombie, but the slow and mindless, yet highly infectious kind. But hey, it's about supernatural monsters, a step away from sci-fi, so it is cool, even if it reiterates the same tired story of people that love drama too much and can't help fight each other and getting in the way of the undead when their emotions run high (which must invariably do so, else the characters would he boringly successful in avoiding any danger).

You might think that I am criticising the new zombie uprising because I am the kind of movie critic asshole that thinks everything sucks unless done my way, but it is not so. I have solid evidence that the undead genre can be awesomely innovative and deep in meaning. I give you three examples, all of them European, not because I am some sort of continentalist, but because the American stuff just sucks ass! I've decided to pointedly single out these three TV series and discuss them outside my "TV series I've Been Watching" section, because they prove without a shred of a doubt that TV can be for smart people, they are just not that many of them and it's not feasible economically.

Here it goes:

• The Fades - this British series had dead people that could not go to Heaven turn on the living and becoming zombies, only smart, feeling ones, that just consider death is treating them badly and are lashing out. A brilliant take on the whole undead concept that went unexplored because the series got cancelled after a season. By far the best supernatural TV series of the decade, though!
• In the Flesh - new British show that features actual zombies, the kind that eat on people. Unlike their American counterparts, they place the action of the film after the rise, when the undead are being "treated" and returned to their families. PDS (Partially Deceased Syndrome) sufferers have to deal with the reactions of small town people used to shooting undead on sight and being proud of it. Typical British thing to take a zombie idea and turn it into a deep exploration of social issues.
• Les Revenants - last, but certainly not least, a French series about people coming back from the dead. They just come back, not remembering how they died and not knowing they did. People have different reactions to them and many have noticed the "Twin Peaks" feel of the series. Dark and psychologically violent, as only the French can make them, this is as far from La Horde as In the Flesh is from The Walking Dead. There was also a movie on which this series is based, which in English was translated as "They Came Back".

I highly recommend you watching these series. I don't care what the audiences were. In my view low audience to a movie or TV show can mean only two things: it was really bad, or it was really smart. I believe these three examples fall into the smart category.

So many new series and I haven't started watching them all and there are more still coming!



Let's start with the already described ones:

• Doctor Who - episode six of the seventh season has just appeared. I will probably watch it tonight.
• Torchwood - no news at all for the fifth season. The only new things about it (for me) is that a Torchood episode has 50 minutes on Starz and 60 on BBC One.
• Criminal Minds - episodes keep piling up, but it never came up as a priority.
• Dexter - season 8 of the series will be the last. It's official. The launch date is June 30, 2013.
• Fringe - Fringe has ended! Finally! The whole observer invasion thing was like a stupid rehash of German occupation movies.
• True Blood - June 16, 2013 is the release date. The trailer seems to imply something epic.
• The Good Wife - the show seems to be oscillating between working and not working, with all the unnecessary complications that add no value to the story. Like a hard drive that develops bad sectors I expect it to fail any time now, even if I still like the series.
• Haven - The third season is over, a fourth was announced. The ending of the third season leaves me with few expectations.
• Falling Skies - season three will start on June 9, 2013. It's one of those that are just good and sci-fi enough to keep watching.
• Southpark - season 17 starts on September 2013. Can't wait.
• The Killing - still on my watch list, haven't started watching it.
• Suits - third season is about to start. It doesn't make much sense, but I like it.
• Breaking Bad - I was saying in the last post that the fifth season has ended. It hasn't! There is still one half left starting July 2013. This will end the show. Maybe then I will watch it all to see what happened. Reading the episode synopsis might work as well.
• Californication - I have demoted Californication to neutral. It feels really tired. The LA back and forth talk doesn't do it for me and there doesn't seem to be any (relevant) action.
• Beavis&Butt-head - It seems the show was quietly axed. I haven't heard anything about it for a long time.
• Homeland - I've seen two seasons of Homeland and it's pretty cool. Season three is announced to start on September 29, 2013. I can't empathise with ANY of the characters, but I like it.
• The Walking Dead - slow walking dead people don't really seem a threat anymore. Instead, psychopathic humans do! Oh, and Lennie James appeared as a recluse madman in the last episode, and the season three finale airs today.
• Game of Thrones - season three premiers tonight. There are many fans of the books and series in my friend circle and I like the show so far. I still feel that it doesn't capture the feel of the books, but then again, maybe it will develop its own.
• Mad Men - season six is to premier on April 7, 2013. I will keep watching it, because it is just great.
• Misfits - the show has been renewed for a fifth season. I will watch it, but I don't have much hopes for it.
• Sherlock - the third season of the series will begin probably late 2013. I liked it, even if a bit too... Moffaty? I really don't want to see more and more people acting like Doctor Who. One is enough.
• Spartacus - Vengeance - I had hopes for this season, but it seems it's just the same thing, with a slave rebellion thrown in. It will probably have a Braveheart ending.
• My Babysitter's a Vampire - No news of a third season, but the show has built a faithful (if childish) fan base. What, they don't sell stuff to children in Canada?
• Continuum - the second season starts on April 21, 2013. Sci-fi cop show? Have to watch it.:)
• Copper - the second season of this cop drama starts late 2013. I liked the show and the characters.
• Longmire - still now date for the second season, but I liked the characters and the setting. The script is well written, too.
• The Newsroom - my wife loves this. I will watch the second season, but I can't decide if I like it or not.
• Arrow - I still watch this, as a superhero show with beautiful actors.
• Beauty and the Beast - removed from my viewing list.
• Battlestar Galactica - Blood and Chrome - there will not be more. It was a series of webisodes that were part of a pilot that no one bought. I really liked it, though.
• Elementary - watching it, but it's not great.
• Hatfields and McCoys - This American Civil War miniseries was filmed in Romania and stars Kevin Costner. I really wanted to see it, but didn't get around to it, yet.
• Hit and Miss - A new show I really know nothing about. Six episodes so far.
• Hunted - Cinemax still negotiating a second season without BBC support. Boo, BBC! Anyway, hopes are waning.
• Parade's End - another miniseries. The trailer looks really promising and I haven't read the book. As soon as I watch it you will know.
• Primeval - New World - I really tried to like this show, but I didn't. I removed it from my viewing list.
• Restless - a miniseries. A young woman finds out that her mother worked as a spy for the British Secret Service during World War II and has been on the run ever since. The synopsis sounds interesting. Two episodes so far, that I have yet to watch.
• Ripper Street - It's a bit like doctor Watson working for Lestrade, but I like the characters and the setting.
• The Fear - A Brighton crime boss turns entrepreneur and then he goes crazy. Like mentally ill crazy. I haven't started watching this miniseries, but it might be interesting.
• Vegas - It seems that to keep audiences happy, unreasonable dramas and conspiracies must be presented. Again I feel cheated, as I really like the show but I already see how the mass production version of the script looms its ugly head.
• Wizards versus Aliens - there will be a second season, starting late 2013. I don't know if I will still watch it, but it's childish fun.

And now for novelties

• Banshee - for a show I almost decided I did not like, it seems crazy that I watched all episodes so far. The basic premise is that a recently released inmate assumes the identity of a cop in a small town, where he has to battle local thugs, Serbian mobsters and the town's crime lord. The characters are just fun enough to enjoy, even if the story is totally implausible.
• Bates Motel - A TV series based on Psycho. Haven't started watching the two episodes that aired so far.
• Black Mirror - the second season of Black Mirror is here! Didn't watch it, yet, but probably will. There are three one hour British sci-fi stories with a moral per season.
• Borealis - Weird pilot about a future where nations battle control over Arctic resources in a very covert way. The result, a frontier town Western set in the future, didn't convince anyone and therefore did not materialize into a series.
• Broadchurch - Another small town cop thing? At least it is British, with David Tennant playing the main character (and cannibalizing some other former Doctor Who actors. It seems to have good production values, as well.
• Cracked - Another Canadian cop production. Cracked follows the newly formed Psych Crimes Unit within a Canadian police department set up by a psychiatrist in partnership with the police.
• Cult - the series centers on a journalist blogger and a production assistant, who investigate a series of mysterious disappearances that are linked to a popular television series named Cult. The bad guy is T-bag from Prison Break.
• Do No Harm - A horrible attempt at a TV series, it features a surgeon that secretly has a split personality. A Jekyll and Hyde thing? No. Just a bad show. I removed it from my viewing list.
• Girls - this is not a new show per se, but one I didn't watch until recently. It sounded like a smart Sex and the City, so I got around to check it out. It stars an incredibly ugly, stupid and self centred girl and three of her friends. One of them is really hot, but it couldn't save the show. Weird and ugly people that attempt to appear interesting. They are not.
• Golden Boy - The series follows the successful, meteoric rise — from age 26 to 34 — of Walter Clark, an ambitious cop who becomes the youngest Police Commissioner in New York City history.So, yeah, a police drama again, but it seems more than the usual crap. We'll see.
• House of Cards - I almost added a "want" status to this new series on the basis of Kevin Spacey being the lead actor alone. It is an adaptation of a previous BBC miniseries of the same name which is based on the novel by Michael Dobbs. This also lends support to the theory that the show is good. People that started watching it liked it, as well. So, all I need is to start watching it.
• In the Flesh - Another zombie TV series! And it's British! What's even funnier is that the main character is a rehabilitated zombie Partially Deceased Syndrome sufferer. I didn't yet got "the bug" for it, but it might become a "want". I have watched two episodes so far.
• Labyrinth - I don't know what to say about this show yet. John Hurt stars in it, it seems to involve a connection with the long lost Christian sect of Cathar and is a darma fantasy. People seem to like it well.
• Mayday - the story of a missing May Queen teenager in a small English country village and the dirty secrets this brings up from the depths of its inhabitants. It's a British miniseries, but the viewer response has not been positive.
• Metal Hurlant Chronicles - This is a low budget European sci-fi series based on the comic books with the same title. Only five episodes and probably there will not be a second season, but it was fun enough.
• Monday Mornings - In the last post I was saying that I was in the mood for a good medical drama. This is it so far. Not so much medical, as ethical, though. The story revolves around the weekly meetings of all the surgeons in a prestigious hospital to discuss medical incidents. I like the actors and so far it has been a pretty solid story. A bit too melodramatic, but for an American medical drama, it's good.
• Monsters vs. Aliens - this is a kiddie animation show based on the movie with the same name. After a mere 20 seconds of loud colourful characters smiling and talking maniacally, I stopped and deleted the file. Will not ever watch this.
• Motive - Motive is a Canadian police procedural drama following working-class single-mom Detective Flynn (Lehman) in her investigation of crimes. Each episode also reveals the killers and victims at the start of the show, unusual in police procedural dramas. Haven't watched it yet.
• Orphan Black - The first episode aired yesterday. It's a sci-fi drama, something to do with clones. I hope it will be good.
• Privates - BBC One drama television series set in 1960 which follows the stories of eight privates who are part of the last intake of National Service, and their relationships with their officers and non-commissioned officers, civilian staff and families. Didn't start watching it, yet.
• Red Widow - a housewife from Northern California whose husband, a figure in organized crime, was killed. She has to continue his work to protect her family. Don't know how good it is yet.
• Rome - only two seasons in all, but it told a story from start to finish from the perspective of two friends, soldiers in the Roman legions. Great production values, great acting, loved the actors. At the end, even if it was a great show, I didn't feel like I was hooked and needed more, which is rare with TV series.
• Scandal - an American political thriller television series created by Shonda Rhimes, of Grey's Anatomy fame. I fear the moment when I will present this to my wife and she might like it.
• Seed - A comedy about a guy that donates sperm and finds himself cornered by the resulting offspring. Started badly, was clearly a cliché from the start.
• The Americans - Set during the Cold War period in the 1980s, The Americans is the story of Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, two Soviet KGB officers posing as American citizens and a married couple. Another show waiting for my attention, but it stars Keri Russell, who I love, so I will probably watch it at some time.
• The Blue Rose - a New Zealand crime drama television series about some lowly clerks who join forces to fight the corporate corruption that caused the death of one of their colleagues.
• The Carrie Diaries - Wow! A TV shows based on King's horror story! Nope. It's the TV version of Sex and the City, with a teenage Carrie... the horror, the horror...
• The Doctor Blake Mysteries - an Australian television series. Doctor Lucien Blake returns home to Ballarat in 1959 to take over his deceased father's general medical practice after an absence of 30 years. Doctor Blake is a keeper of secrets and a solver of mysteries. No data on the quality of the show yet.
• The Following - a series about a psychopath obsessed with Poe's writings that creates a cult following of wannabe serial killers. Interesting premise and it stars Kevin Bacon, but it might fizzle.
• Twisted - A teen with a troubled past reconnects with his two female best friends from childhood. He becomes the prime suspect when a fellow student is surprisingly found dead in her home. Didn't start watching it, but it doesn't sound great.
• Utopia - a British conspiracy thriller that follows a small group of people who find themselves in possession of the manuscript sequel of a cult graphic novel called "The Utopia Experiments" which is rumoured to have predicted the worst disasters of the last century. This leads them to be targeted by an organisation known as 'The Network', which they must avoid to survive. Sounds interesting and has a high IMDb rating.
• Vikings - a Canadian-Irish historical drama television series, inspired by the epic sagas about the raiding, trading, and exploring Norsemen of early medieval Scandinavia. It follows the exploits of the legendary Viking chieftain Ragnar Lodbrok and his crew and family. Sounds cool, but I didn't look at it, yet.
• Wallander - I liked this British adaptation of a Swedish police drama. It stars Kenneth Branagh and is still placed in Sweden, even if spoken in English. It is as much a classical police inspector centred series as one can be, straightforward three seasons of three episodes each. Now, I can't say it was great, but me and the wife watched all nine episodes in about a week.
• Star Wars - The Clone Wars (animated series) - I can't really give this a bad rating. If the show is made for children, then it's not really that awful: count Duqu and his Syth lords are being mischievous and evil, while Master Yoda and his Jedi are always kind and good. But that is what makes the show an awful experience for anyone over the age of 12. If you think about it, the movies were not that different from this, but they showed real intrigue, violence, tough choices, even grey characters like Darth Vader. While this show lasted for five seasons, there were only a few moments when they tried to show the evolution of Anakin Skywalker from a Jedi knight to a servant of the Syth, while the technology and thinking in this series was antiquated and childish. That made me stop after a season or so, I watched the last episode of the third season, didn't see an improvement and now it has been announced that the fifth season will be the last.

Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae o Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai (lit: We Still Don't Know the Name of the Flower We Saw That Day) has only 11 episodes and the last episode finishes up the story completely, so it wasn't something larger that just got cancelled. Better known as "Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day", it is the story of very close childhood friends that pass through a deep trauma when one of them dies in an accident. A few years later, they all have drifted apart and each of them blames him or herself for the way things ended up. And here comes the ghost of the dead girl Menma, showing itself to only one of the group and asking him to fulfil her final wish so she can get to Heaven. The five friends get together to fulfil that wish, even if no one, including Menma, remember what it was.

At times it got annoyingly emotional with everybody crying and cringing and getting angry and stuff like that, but overall it was a nice anime, exploring the deep feelings of childhood that we don't really get over. So overall I liked it and, being short enough, I can easily recommend it to everybody, even if at times it feels like a soap opera. Perhaps making it a movie or a small series would have made it better.

This 6 episode long anime can by all rights be considered a single movie segmented into 6 small stories. The story is not extraordinary and the animation not great, but the quiet way it is told makes it nostalgic and generates a lot of kind feelings. What's it about? There are these two (highschool, of course) guys in a not far away future where robots and androids are common place. Some of them are advanced enough to obey complex commands and to look human and they all follow the Three Rules of Robotics, as coined by Asimov. One of the guys notices in the logs of his house android that it goes out from the house, occasionally, to places where it hasn't been instructed to go. The two friends follow the logs and find a weird bar where androids and humans must obey a single rule: all customers are to treat each other the same and not discriminate against robots. This makes the two understand the complex feelings that robots can have and discover their own difficulty in relating to said robots under the weight of society expectations. There is even an "Ethics Committee" that hates robots and wants to limit the interactions between man and machine, but just before they make any move the show ends.

Eve no Jikan was an interesting concept, something that reminded me of some of the quieter episodes from Ghost in the Machine or Denou Coil, which says a lot considering that GiTS is my favourite anime ever. However, the sixth episode felt like one of the others and then it suddenly says the story is finished, so its production must have ended prematurely. Maybe with a little more backing, it could have become a cult anime, as well.

Macross Frontier is a 2008 anime series of 25 episodes set in the Macross universe, itself 25 years old at the time. Humanity is expanding in the galaxy using huge self contained colony fleets that are defended by the ubiquitous Mecha humanoid robots. Their enemies, a strange race of space bugs that seem to have no mind of their own, but whose method of communication or reason for doing anything is a mystery. Enter Alto, a beautiful guy - and when I say beautiful I mean it, as he is cute as a girl and many times in the series people address him as one, to his chagrin - that wants to be a pilot. He accidentally joins up with an elite piloting force and there the story seems to become interesting: space battles, interesting aliens, amazing tech, even political machinations. But wait! In Japan there has to be more. And there is! Alto is 17 years old, that means he is also in high school. Two of his pilot buddies are his colleagues. Then there is this galactic idol pop star singer that is very beautiful and somehow falls for Alto and subsequently becomes a student in the same class! And there is another girl who also wants to be a singer and she becomes one rivalling the first, only to fall for Alto and... join the same high school class! And all the time they need to act on their feelings, without actually expressing them in an articulate way, and trying to protect one thing or the other. And if you thought the two singers are just a filler device, not at all connected to the main story, you are wrong. The singing of one of them seems to affect the alien bugs!

To quote a friend, WTF is wrong with the Japanese? Why would you mix space battles with j-pop and high school? Why hasn't there appeared a service that strips the annoying 2 minute singing at the beginning and then at the end of every episode and lets you watch everything start to end? It would be perfect if it would also remove in separate streams the fighting plus the sci-fi from the ridiculous fascination with high school puppy love!

To conclude, it wasn't great by any means, and the insistence of showing every space battle in the context of a pop song was really annoying. The story was OK, although I could spoil it for you in about 5 minutes. The animation was standard, I didn't think there were any issues with it. If you love the kind of "oh, oh, poor me, I am in a love triangle and can't get out" story, this is the one for you. The sci-fi was, really, taking the backseat in this one. I have to admit, though, that the highschool theme was not exaggerated much, nor was it absurd to the point of annoyance like in Elfen Lied, for example.