I'm done with American chicks, man, they're all boring and they've all told each other about me online

Thank God that writing is such a lazy and unimaginative profession - it means I don't even have to write individual reviews for shows and movies anymore, I just have to write one review and then group the relevant shows together with it.
For instance: "I think it's awesome that the lead character is an asshole because it makes you want to emotionally invest in their predicament and root for their success."
See?  Now I don't have to write individual reviews for shows like Selfie, Scorpion and Blackish, although if I was a professional type writer-ing person of things, I would probably have to pad the different reviews for each with relevant specifics even though I was essentially saying the exact same thing about them overall, which doesn't seem at all fair when people specifically get into writing to avoid work, but I'd likely mention the "know your place" message of Blackish that is totally not racism because a black guy is doing it, and we know he's only a total eedjit so it's even more okay even if the keen observer will note that the actual notions of racial segregation that he espouses are not ridiculed but taken as a given, it's still okay because it's a black guy doing it, and if you try to point it out that actually makes you the racist, or possibly - even worse - a Social Justice Warrior who values fairness and equality, and no-one wants to be one of those.
With Selfie, I would probably point out that it is yet another example of a female-led tv show that doesn't seem to like women very much even while profiting from displaying them prominently as sexual objects, but hey, Bitten is getting a second season so what the Hell.  Do your thing, Selfie, just stay the fuck away from my tv.
Scorpion is basically Mind Games, only dumber.  Well done Hollywood.
Personally, I expected something a bit more intelligent from a show produced by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci etc,etc, but it's the usual nerds-act-like-jocks to solve problems involving driving cars very fast and/or defusing bombs bullshit, and I imagine if you are 12 this show is pretty great, but there are far too many shows right now that pursue an aggressive anti-intellectual agenda while using big words to disguise this agenda, and I'm getting along just fine with Hawaii Five-0 so I'm not sure how many other dumb-as-fuck things I need going on at the same time on my tv.

I just smoked a big fattie and the Cartoon Network's entire lineup makes sense to me again

I did like the humorously meta "we knew this day would come" line delivered by Chakotay when faced with the prospect of Borg storylines at the introduction of season 4 of Star Trek: Voyager, but it's hardly the only metacommentary to be found around this time, especially in the episode "Worst Case Scenario", when characters argue about the internal logic of stories and the importance of consistent characterisation, which is just hilarious in the context of an episode of Voyager, doubly so knowing what's coming in the next couple of seasons of the show when it would often become lcd trash in pursuit of viewers, losing the warm and emotionally mature character of Kes in favor of something more friendly to the halfturbating fanboys that were presumed to be the only people watching televised sci-fi at the time.
The much-vaunted Year Of Hell two-parter is a lot flabbier than I remember, and doesn't line up with the show's canon, which wouldn't normally be much of a problem except it's a storyline that's a year-in-the-making thanks to an unusual and welcome amount of inter-episode continuity for a Trek Show not called Deep Space Nine, specifically a (pretty decent) time-traveling Kes adventure back in season 3, and on top of that, Chakotay removed from Voyager  to the midst of the enemy timeship and trying to solve a problem with science sounds more like a Janeway resolution to conflict, Paris using engineering trickery to help him sounds more like a Torres story, and we've found out from the earlier time-travel episode that it's Janeway and Torres who are absent from Voyager during this storyline, so there's the suspicion that rewrites went a lot further than the obvious substitution of Seven of Nine for the departed Kes that we can discern from such scenes as the "chroniton torpedo" bit where it's supposed to be Kes, not Seven, that has a close encounter with a time-weapon (the earlier time-travel episode cannot have happened without this encounter occurring).
Continuity quibbles aside - in time-travel stories all questions about why story specifics are bullshit can be hand-waved as being the result of "timey-wimey stuff" - the average episode is - no pun intended - top-heavy with Seven Of Nine appearances after her introduction.  It's not that Jeri Ryan is awful as an actress, as she clearly has charisma enough to sell the idea she's an imposing presence rather than someone who wandered in from an underwear photo shoot next door (a common problem where I live), but the earliest scenes on Voyager with the Seven of Nine character when the actor is trying to do something onscreen have considerably more depth and nuance than later, when ironically the character is supposed to have more depth and nuance.  In the beginning, the writers, the actor, and the show are all clearly trying to do something and find their feet with a new dynamic created by the emotional vacuum of the departure of series regular Jennifer Lien's elfin androgene Kes, but this experimental period quickly comes to an end and instead the last character through the door dominates the show from this point onwards.
While watching CSI MIami in its entirety - an endeavor which I admit stalled around season 3 - the lead performance of David Caruso clearly evolved in response to what his character was given to do, requiring emotional depth only in the opening episodes when he was given sad children to riff with, but Caruso quickly nails down the minimal requirements of his role and then refines them to create a consistent center around which the rest of the show could revolve and I would be remiss if I did not mention this as a possible rationale for Jeri Ryan's eventually-minimal and cold performance, though it does rather hinge on the idea of this being Star Trek: The Seven Of Nine Show rather than the fourth season of an ensemble piece that already had at least one Mary Sue (Janeway) and one egotistical socially-awkward robot type (the Doctor) in the core cast.  It makes no sense that so much of the episodes would be devoted to her, with episodes centering upon other characters moving along nicely and then suddenly someone says they have a problem that usually they could solve on their own while standing behind their space-desk, but for some reason from this point onwards they just look sideways at whoever they're talking to and say "you know who might be able to help me with this?"  There's often some fumbling attempts to hide this shoehorning by the lines being something like "hey, you know we could ask Seven of Nine to take a look at this" or some other supposedly offhand way of making it look like an afterthought on the part of the character rather than a directive from the producers to involve her somehow in stories where she has no place, almost like they're aware of the shadow cast over proceedings by the character and want to downplay it.  If I didn't know any better, I'd call it embarrassment.
To Voyager's credit, in fetishising 7, they don't actually have an episode that revolves around a visit to a mudwrestling planet, but on more than one occasion IT IS A VERY CLOSE THING, and yes I am looking at you, episode starring the Rock...

Curiosity is my sweet tooth. Knowledge is my candy.

My rewatch of Star Trek: Voyager rattled along nicely, though it became apparent that the problems of the show are not something we can retroactively lay at the feet of certain producers just because they went on to make Star Trek: Enterprise, but because there is clearly a struggle between two different Trek universes going on behind the scenes and it was clear that the producer who eventually got kicked off the show they had created (Jeri Taylor) was the one pushing for expanding Trek beyond the rut it had been dug into with later TNG seasons, with episodes like The Thaw and Mortal Coil attempting new approaches to stale material in a way that would later become the norm for sci-fi in shows like the remade Battlestar Galactica, while Coda (written by Taylor) even goes so far outside the Trek wheelhouse as to establish that Captain Janeway's unseen arch-nemesis is the actual effing Grim Reaper, who follows her around eating the souls of those who die in her wake and who is 100 percent for-reals-canon waiting for her like a slavering wolf at the end of her days.
There was hope that maybe I'd misremembered a lot of the show's problems or at least exaggerated them because it wasn't Shakespeare, but nope - what potential there was - and there's a lot of it in the beginning - is not so much eroded over time as it is hammered from very early in proceedings into a more banal shape than it should be, such as the showdown between a 16 wheel truck and a spaceship piloted by a time-traveling archeologist - who's just escaped a compound of gun-toting survivalists under armed siege by the FBI - that involves a laser battle that ends with people jumping away from explosions and this sequence of events is somehow one of the most boring and unexciting things you will ever lay eyes upon.  You can still see the cracks where brilliance tries and fails to shine through the brick wall of middle-of-the-road mediocrity that defined the show - Nemesis, Living Witness - but by and large the struggle to make this a classic-style Trek show about people in extraordinary circumstances rising to present the best in themselves rather than the worst is instead about a bunch of unexceptionally exceptional individuals - all equally flawless and without character - encountering minor inconveniences on their drive home.
And then Seven of Nine's big stupid boobs arrive and it somehow manages to go even more to shit.

(TBC)

In Minnesota I'd be a supermodel

Whoopsy.  Got so used to not posting daily I forgot to post anything yesterday, but to be fair, I haven't watched much new genre tv lately so I'd be pressed to think of a way to fill the space anyway.

Us loners gotta stick together

Okay, yes, I know I flounced off the Blog in a big huff a few months ago, but bear with me here, as I want to see what happens when I do a post or two, as I seem to be getting hundreds of views on the blog every couple of days now that I have actually stopped posting things on it - even after I went back and edited the wording of that post about the BBC's Wolfblood so it no longer had the phrase "children are all f**king idiots" in the body of the text because it kept attracting visitors using the search term "children f**king."  I still seem to be getting loads of visitors and I'm buggered if I can fathom why, so let's see how the hit counter behaves while I fill the blog with my usual shite on a daily basis.

ENJOY YOUR DEATHTRAP LADIES

Well, the time has come to bid farewell to Blogger, as the straw met the camel's back behind the scenes, and though there's probably a fix I am buggered if I'm looking for it when I have work to do, so should you still be of a masochistic bent pronounced enough that you can't get through a day without seeing what - in an episode of a terrible-looking tv show you've never seen and never will - has enraged some hungover layabout enough to take to the internet to grumble about it, I'll be taking my rambling, occasionally angry but always entitled rants over to Tumblr where I intend to continue much as I have done for the last four years here on Blogger.
This is sort of goodbye, then, but no reason to post a link to - perhaps - Florrie Forde's Goodye-ee... if this is the end of our dalliance, dear reader - and I shouldn't blame you if it is, given the four years of justification for a parting of the ways in evidence below - then instead listen to this and think of me - it's not a funeral, after all.

Unless you've photoshopped my head onto the body of a dragon don't interrupt me

And lo there came a day that Bryan got orf his arse and got his shit together and went back to daily blogging instead of Skyrimming the day away*, and for good measure decided to put a deadline on all that stuff marked "I'll get to it whenever."  It seems like I take forever on these caveman pages I'm drawing at the minute, which is weird because you'd think an average of 18 panels per page would go by pretty quickly, and this is why I prefer collaborating to writing my own stuff - because when you collaborate, you get to blame everything on someone else.

So is there like a writer's retreat doing a discount on bulk orders of time jumps in narratives or something?  So far this week there's been a time jump in Fargo (1 year later), Falling Skies (four months later), Crisis (five days later), Defiance (nine months later), Dominion (20 years later), DC comics have a weekly comic book title launched a month or two back that's set five years in the future**, and I'm sure I mentioned that The Survivalist jumps 500 years between novels to a time where only white people live on the planet Earth (which I imagine does wonders for any poor fucker defending the books to people who dismiss them as the deranged fantasies of a right-wing chauvinistic gun fetishist).
Okay, it was an original turn once in that sci-fi show about the humans in the big spaceship full of civilians trying to find Earth while being pursued by a larger fleet - you know the one, it had that love triangle between the cocky young pilot and the flighty lady type that always seemed to be beyond his grasp and ended up with some other guy when the pilot accepted a more healthy relationship with a career military woman who worked on the bridge of the ship answering the space phones, and then they got to some desolate planet where they settled down and built an uneasy culture with the people from the fleet that were pursuing them which also looked like humans and even managed to interbreed with humans, too, and the show jumped ahead 18 months at that point and dang it, I just can't remember the name of the show, but I'm sure it'll come to me later - anyway, that show did it first and then Lost did it, made it mainstream and ran it into the ground until we hated it, then other shows started doing the same thing because it seemed like us thickos could understand this new flashforward concept but you know an idea is old hat when Brannon Braga starts using it so they all stopped, until this week when for some reason every show on tv decided to do the exact same time-jump gimmick at more or less the same time in a depressing display of morphic resonance again, playing the thing out even faster than the plague of In Medias Res/jump back to the beginning openings did to that concept over the last year or so of US telly.
Ah, I'm rambling now, I have to go watch the rest of Falling Skies so I can properly ridicule it, having stopped watching when it got to the "X time later" bit because coming as it did at the end of four minutes of tropes that were lazy and decried and awful by fans of V: The Series thirty years ago, I was genuinely angry at how lazy and unoriginal the show was despite the effort expended upon its production and how little the makers think of my intelligence, which is a dick attitude to have about me when I've stuck with this turkey for four years now.   I mean, I don't expect you to buy me a ring, The Makers Of Falling Skies, but after all this time I thought at least you respected me.


* I mean I play the videogame Skyrim a lot, and not that I'm doing some disgusting sexual act that even the Turks would think was going too far.
** Future's End, the first issue of which is reviewed here and which - despite treading some over-familiar territory - feels a lot more like the relaunch DC tried to do two years ago.