And it rained today. And rained and rained. We got in some quality tv-together-time (T3).
1. ‘Millennium’ … Frank Black accompanies Peter Watts on a not-quite-sanctioned trip to Germany to find the long-lost hand of St. Sebastian. It’s as if ‘Millennium’ took over ‘Relic Hunter’ for an episode. It’s sort of a ‘mythology’ episode for the series, and C C H Pounder was back (cue ominous music). Season two is really playing up the religious angle to the group, and as the reviews at the A.V. Club have pointed out, it’s occasionally a kind of ‘genius insane’ (or insane genius). Here we flesh out the group by showing levels of authority above Peter Watts, by showing how it has international scope, how it has a very long history, and how it has enemies without that know about it and tempt those within. That is to say: the Millennium Group has become a fictional standin for another mostly fictional group, the Illuminati, or any such organization.
Given we have Terry O’Quinn here, I’d love for there to be a Rimbaldi tie-in, though I know there isn’t.
2. Over in ‘The X-Files’ our homicidal friend ‘the Pusher’ is back, this time breaking himself out of prison and engaging with his fraternal twin sister in a kind of ‘fox hunt’ (see: the episode title). By the end Modine is dead, as is his sister, and so that is all wrapped up. It’s a decent monster-of-the-week that explores Mulder’s psychology a little, and it works as a television episode, but there’s very little Mulder-Scully specific in it; in fact, their relationship is strained at best here (and it’s not as if the plot of the episode serves to explore and then repair their relationship) … they share screen time but there is no banter, no interaction. This could have been an episode of some other show.
3. During dinner we watched “Toy Story 2”, which I’d not seen in some years (since Berlin?). Last week or so we rewatched the first. At the risk of getting myself in a little trouble, I must note the following: Ms. S. always told me that she hates animated films / cartoons. Such a silly thing for an adult to watch, she notes. They’re just for kids. She did not fall in love with “The Incredibles” when we watched that a year or more ago. And yet then there was “Wreck-It Ralph”, during which she smiled, and then “Bolt!” And then she suggested “Toy Story”, I believe, and even the sequel.
Something is amiss!
4. Several new-ish television shows have failed to really capture our attention, and other things we love do not currently have new episodes available. We tried ‘The Following’ and it started dire and became more so. I could not work up enough energy to care about ‘Cult’ past the second episode, which went nowhere after the first, which was clever but not as clever as it wanted to be. It was a meta show about fandom and the internet, but understood neither. ‘The Americans’ holds great promise; we watched the pilot together, and I then watched the second episode. It has received good reviews, and so I think I’ll get us into watching it at a later date, perhaps once most of the episodes have aired. At some point we’ll just sit down and watch all of the second season of ‘American Horror Story’ at once … because that’s what it demands. Things we enjoyed or at least tried last year (‘Revenge’ and ‘Once Upon A Time’, respectively) haven’t really held our attention.
This is just a prelude to saying that when we have time left on the clock and want to watch something, we’ve recently started up episodes of ‘Ripper Street’. It’s expertly crafted and its production values are good. It’s well cast, I think, and they’ve laid the groundwork for plenty of character elaborations. But also as the A.V. Club noted, it’s a perfectly fine procedural, if that’s what you want; but it doesn’t really stand out as spectacular or game-changing. Its concept is simply: police procedural in late-Victorian London.
What makes it work for me is that tangentially works as a kind of cultural history of the place and era. It’s smart but not exactly witty; it does not strive to be more than mere entertainment and it’s not ‘bad’ enough to go off the rails. While I enjoy how the plots give us history’s first snuff film (in a sense) and all that good stuff, I really do wish in a way for more of something in the mold of “From Hell”, something even more esoteric and ambitious.
It’s really quite good.
But is it something that I’ll rewatch? Unlikely.
It stormed around 6am, plus or minus. It did it again around 8 or 8:30pm, and it was a certain kind of glorious.
