Bryce's Pipe Bomb Survival Guide*

Okay, I mentioned this show way back when I was talking about how awful Grimm was. How time slips away! So, this is the other "fairy tales are real!" show to hit the fall lineup, and it's corny, I'm not going to pretend that it's not, but corny can be good. There's been a "lot" of controversy over this show, saying that it's a rip off of the comic Fables , and why didn't they just do a serial adaptation of that?  So, let me spell it out for you, other than there being fairy tale creatures in the real world, there's not much of a connection between the two. In Fables, all of the fairy tale characters have fled their home lands, and they're hiding out in our world as refugees from some despot or another. In Once Upon a Time, the Evil Queen from Snow White has cursed everyone to live a life of tedium in our world, they are trapped in a podunk town where nothing changes and they have no memory of who they were. The only ones who se...

Time for one of my favorite new shows of the season. Person of Interest stars Jim Caviezel, as some sort of black ops government attack dog, who's become disenchanted with his role in the world. He's recruited by a man named Finch, who created a computer system that monitors all communications and surveillance in the New York area, and crunches the data in order to predict the next 9/11, in theory. As a byproduct, it also identifies people that are about to be involved in smaller scale incidents, like murders. Finch creates a backdoor that allows him to get just the social security numbers of these people, so that he can try and prevent whatever bad thing is about to happen. The trick, of course, is that they don't what exactly is about to happen, or if the person identified is the victim or the perpetrator. The dynamic between the two main characters is amusing, because they're both trying to remain anonymous from the other, and they each have their strengths which th...

As always, it seems like genre shows come in waves. This year we've got a theme of fairy tale characters meet reality, I've watched two shows that both fit into this slot, Grimm and Once Upon A Time. Today we're talking about Grimm. The main character is a homicide detective named Nick Burkhardt, who is unknowingly the last in a long line of "Grimm"s. A Grimm is basically the justice system of the world of fairy tale creatures. They're judge, jury and executioners. Ya see, there's a sort of truce between the fairy creatures, and mankind, that only the Grimm's know of. In theory this means that our pal Nick should be running around and smoking whatever goes bump in the night in the wrong manner, but instead, he's a cop, so he runs into these creatures in the line of his work, and he has to go about it like a cop. The result is that you end up with a really frustrating hour of television, where all the major players all know who the bad guy is, and t...

Okay, well, we're long past the new fall shows, and I really should have been posting my impressions about what I've been watching a month or two ago. I got a late start though, and hey! I'm in college, homework rules my life (of course, I don't let that stop me from putting 30 hours into Saints Row: The Third every week, but let's not go there.) Over the next week or so, I hope to cover everything I've recently started watching. To start with, there's Prime Suspect. Sadly, Prime Suspect was just cancelled, but that doesn't mean it's not worth checking out. There are 9, so far, really solid episodes of cop show there. It stars Maria Bello as Homicide Detective Jane Timoney. She's the only woman in her squad, and the first few episodes replayed the same theme over and over again, of her fighting the oppression of not being "one of the guys", but then the guys completely screw up a case, and she's the only one who does it right. Th...

Hey! It's Fall again! That means it's time for new shows! Terra Nova is Steven Spielberg's baby, pretty much the only thing I knew about it going in was that it had something to do with dinosaurs, and that I'd read a handful of articles about how many problems there were filming and producing the first couple of episodes. Our story kicks off in the year 2149 where the planet Earth is a smog ridden, overpopulated hell-hole. Everyone breathes through masks when they're out in the open, if they're smart, and there are population control measures in place, everyone's limited to two children, with propaganda all over the place "A Family Means 4". Our hero, a Hugh Jackman knockoff, is a police detective that for some unknown reason decided to have a third child. During a surprise inspection, they hide kidlet #3 in the air duct, but when the breeder police knock something heavy over, she squeals. At this point, Superdad goes apeshit, and starts kicking th...

I finally decided to give this show a shot, and the quick verdict is total guilty pleasure. The premise is that an "ordinary family" mysteriously gets super powers. The initial problem is that this is not an ordinary family. Mom is a brilliant researcher, who can afford to put her family in a beautiful mansion of a house, and take the entire family on business trips to Brazil. Michael Chiklis is a completely emasculated police sketch artist, slash mr. mom. The children are remarkably normal, in that they're ungrateful brats, that you'd be tempted to drown in the river if they weren't your own children. One of the basic themes of the show is that when they get their superpowers, they each get powers that allow them to achieve what's been missing in their lives. Mom's a workaholic, and doesn't have enough time for her job and her family, so she gets super speed. Son's a moron, so he becomes a super brain. I'm not sure exactly what the dea...

Community is a sitcom that's about halfway through it's second season. My good friend would mention it occasionally, but never really said "hey, you need to watch this" So, I'm going to lay it out for all of you: "Hey, you need to watch this" Community starts off with Jeff Winger, who was a very successful lawyer, going back to school, because he lost his license due to his "Degree from Columbia" being from the country of Columbia, and not the university. Jeff is a vain, superficial hipster, who is also a world class manipulator. At any point he is typically capable of bending a group of people to his will, through sheer charisma and creative logic. Jeff is taking a Spanish class where he notices Britta, who is probably the least interesting character, there's nothing wrong with her, but she's just kind of the typical sitcom female lead, she's pretty, smart, and believes in honesty and doing the right thing, even if she doesn...

I finished the latest book by Richard Castle a few days ago, and I've been thinking about how I want to write this review ever since. You see, Richard Castle is a rock star amongst murder mystery novelists, he struck it big with his series of Derek Storm novels, but shocked the world by killing the character at the end of the last book in the series. After that, he found inspiration in NYPD detective Kate Beckett, and based his new character, Nikki Heat, off of her. Naked Heat is the second book in the Nikki Heat series. What's so weird about that? I'm sure all three of my regular readers already know, but none of these people are real, Rick Castle and Det. Beckett are both characters on ABC's crime/drama/comedy series Castle. Haven't watched Castle? For shame, I highly recommend it, it's a perfect guilty pleasure movie, a series of one and done murder mysteries, that are fairly light hearted, with a great comedy dynamic between the characters of Castle, Becket...

I feel like I've spent more time talking about SG :U than any other show on this blog, is that because I love it or hate it? I'm loving it, it's the closest any recent show has come to making me feel like I felt as a kid, watching Star Trek: TNG . That being said, last nights episode just bored the hell out of me. Spot the weakest link The picture shows the core cast members. From the left going clockwise: Camille Ray - She's a civilian administrator, the survivors aboard the Destiny are a mix of military and civilian personnel. She's responsible for the civilians, and butts heads with the military leadership frequently when they make decisions without considering basic human rights. Colonel Everett Young - He's the ranking military officer, with all that entails, he makes the hard decisions, and then has to live with them. He's also not afraid to get his hands dirty. Greer - I think he's a Sergeant, but don't quote me on that, he's actuall...

What is the "Event" I'm three episodes in, and I'm damned if I know. The Event is a new show, trying to capitalize on all those viewers of Lost that don't have a weekly conspiracy to gnaw at anymore. It's got no fewer than two conspiracies, aliens, passenger jets being yanked out of the sky, DB Sweeney, gun fights, explosions, and flashbacks, oh god does it have flashbacks. The first is the worst, as the old rhyme goes with the show constantly jumping back and forth between at least three different time periods to try and tell you a story, just in the most confusing way possible. This is what I've kind of gathered. A group of Aliens, seemingly, they look human, although their DNA is 99% similar, which is further apart from us than chimps. Still DNA is DNA, and the fact that they have DNA even that similar makes me think that they are likely terrestrial, but this is Hollywood science, so what do I know? Back to the point, they look human, but they ag...

Undercovers, a spy story about pretty spies, doing spy things while looking stylish. This is the latest show from JJ Abrams, the man behind the Star Trek revival, as well as the tv shows Fringe, Lost, and Alias. I haven't watched Lost or Alias, but I've heard good things about both, and Alias was another spy show. Undercovers is not bad, but it's not good either. It's one of those things that's hard to identify exactly where it falls short. The action scenes are well done, with impressive fight choreography, and lots of explosions and gunfire, but it really just fails to make any of that interesting. The basic premise is that... wow, I actually can't remember their names, anyway, the two spies are actually retired spies, who left the agency to lead normal lives, and get married. They started up a catering business, which is floundering, and they employ her sister, who is annoying incompetent, yet they consistently give her all of the responsibility. Then...

It's Fall, and there are a lot of new shows out there, I've sampled a few of them so far, and I'm going to try and do a write up a day. First off, we've got Terriers. This is the show about a recovering alcoholic ex-cop, by the name of Hank Dolworth , played by a personal favorite actor, Donal Logue . Logue's life is a shambles, he's divorced, disgraced and unemployed (or at least poorly self-employed). About the only thing he's got going for him is that he's sober now. He teams up with a former thief named Britt Pollack, played by another favorite, Michael Raymond-James, and the two find work as private investigators, albeit as the unlicensed, shady, less than legal variety. Logue manages to bring just the right amounts of patheticism , gall, intelligence and reluctant morality to his character, whereas Raymond-James is a good foil as the loyal friend who plays dumb as part of their partner-dynamic. The series got off to a slow start, with them inv...

Stargate kicked off season two last night. Rejoice! I enjoy this show quite a bit, it's got a nice kind of classic kind of scifi feel to it, for my thoughts in general on the series, see the previous blog post . I do have one gripe about it, which has been a few times over on IO9.com, it just seems like the show is glued to the status quo. At the end of a typical episode, everything is more or less the same as when it started, no one dies, nothing significantly changes. They're still not really in control of the ship, they're still short of resources, Greer is still angry. On the rare occasion when something does change and isn't resolved by the end of the ep, it's resolved by the end of the next ep or two. Some examples: In one episode, they come across a planet in a system where it seems like the entire solar system has been created by some unkown power. Leaving a huge momument, a number of the ragtag group of survivors decide that this is God, and they shou...

Really, right off the bat, The Deep has nothing in common with Seaquest other than they're both underwater adventures. The Deep kicks off with some kind of research submarine losing power, with one lone research out in a mini-sub, also losing power and sinking to the depths. Once into the show proper, we're introduced to a new submarine crew, in a new sub built from the same plans as the first one, setting out to complete the research that the first failed, and possibly bring back news of what happened to them. The original mission was to investigate thermal vents found under the North Pole, which is home to all kinds of undiscovered life forms. It's really difficult to talk anymore about the plot, because there are twists and turns starting from the very first episode. There's a lot of tension, the special effects are wonderful, the characters are written well, and acted better. James Nesbitt (Jekyll, watch it now if you haven't) is phenomenal as the engineer/haunt...

Let me just get it out of the way that I loved every second of Supernatural to date, it had wit, humor, cleverness, action, drama, and of course, the supernatural. All in pretty consistently enjoyable proportions. This last week, the finale of the most recent season aired. There be spoilers comin' so avert yer eyes if you've not seen it and you want to be surprised. During the previous season the brothers unwittingly kicked off the apocalypse, and set Lucifer free from his prison. This last season mostly dealt with them trying to thwart the full on apocalypse, and trying to find a way to kill the devil without having to wipe out half the planet. It's further revealed that the brothers are both destined to be the vessels for Lucifer and Michael to possess and do battle to determine who wins. The eventual scheme that could succeed is to collect a ring from each of the four horseman, which when used together, form the key to the prison where Lucifer was confined, Sam lure...

The latest run of Doctor Who is kicking off with a tremendous shake up. Russel T Davies has been the show runner for the entire run since the 2005 return, but he stepped down after the last season in favor of Stephen Moffat. David Tennant's also bowed out, in favor of new-comer Matt Smith. And a new companion in Karen Gillian. New companions and Doctor's are nothing new to a Who fan, so I wasn't too worried that a change would drive me away from the show, there's always a period of transition while you get used to the new characters, and the actors settle into their roles. More troubling was the idea of the guy responsible for all of my experience with the Who universe leaving the scene, until I realized that Moffat was responsible for writing some of my favorite episodes. Still, so many changes, I was expecting to be a little uncertain of the early episodes. I can now report that I couldn't have been more wrong, this first episode was simply fantastic. Smith...

Based on a review I read the other day, I decided to check out Better Off Ted. If you want the quick and dirty review, it's this: Why hasn't anyone I know told me about this show? It's funny, nerdy, well acted and has a ridiculous amount of just out there mad science moments. You'd think that everyone I know would be raving about this show, but they aren't. So, Ted is the manager of the R&D department for an evil corporation called Veridian Dynamic. Ted's good at his job, and just about everyone likes him, he's a single dad, and he always tries to do the right thing. You'd think that Ted would be an unbearbly perfect character, and he is a little disgusting at times, but he has just enough flaws to make him interesting, he's overly competitive, a stickler for rules, and has somehow created a rule to keep him from hooking up with the hot product tester that he knows is a perfect match for him. He also has a nasty habit of breaking the four...

Human Target is a new prime time show which just aired its first episode this last weekend. The premise is that our hero, played by Mark Valley, runs a firm which specializes in flushing out would be assassins. He does this by impersonating someone innocuously close to the target, to avoid spooking the killer, and then subduing them once they've revealed themselves. Thankfully this first episode doesn't do a lot to set up our hero's origin, there's no flashback scenes to his military service in Afghanistan or a Batman-esque origin a CEO who's entire family was killed in an attempt on his life. He's just introduced as the solution to your assassin problems, and then they run with it. The action was intense with the main plot involving a train scene which was very much trying to emulate the first Mission Impossible movie, and succeeding. Fight scenes were also very well choreographed, and featured a certain playfulness that I hope they manage to carry through...

Just recently I started watching Fringe. I know, I'm behind the times, welcome to last year and all that rot, well listen, The Prisoner waited 40 years for me to watch it, and it wasn't bitter about it. In a year or two I might get around to watching Lost, and then you can all bitch about how I'm only writing about it now that it's over. Fringe has more to do with Lost than just me being late to the party, they were both created at least in part, by JJ Abrams. Along with Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman. Together this trio always rebooted the long stagnant Star Trek franchise with a motion picture this last summer. One could say it's got a good pedigree, but Orci and Kurtzman also wrote the script for both Transformers movies, which no one will accuse of featuring stellar plots or dialogue. Perhaps that's not their fault though *ahem* . Back to Fringe! Fringe kicks off with an airplane landing during a medical emergency, which it turns out was a virus intentio...

So, if you've been following, I watched the original BBC Prisoner series from the 60's, and absolutely loved it, although I was quite confused and overwhelmed by the ending. Then I watched the 2009 AMC remake, and I was bored to tears. What's a guy in the market for a little more Prisoner action to do? Track down a copy of the Prisoner comic mini-series that was published by DC in the late 80's. Shattered Visage takes place 20 years after the ending of the Prisoner, it offers up a more definitive interpretation of the events in the last episode of the series, as well as a new story involving the island, that still manages to capture the feel of the original series. In other words: It's good! The story deals with number Six, who has been alone on the island since it was evacuated 20 years ago. The interpretation of the final episode is that when Number Six assumed the role of Number 1, it finally broke him down, due to his conviction that he was not any number. ...