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shadowkatDidn't feel up to cooking tonight - so went to the store to pick up half a rotesseri lemon herb chicken, quinoa fruit and nut salad, and just cooked green beans as a veggie and source of fiber. Also craved a baked treat - so went to Sweet Melissa's bakery and asked if they had anything gluten-free. The counter person was rather rude. She said "no" with attitude. Then repeated it when I didn't disappear immediately, "I'm sorry, no, we don't!" I thought, alrighty then. Then at the grocery store a kid with a grocery cart reamed my ankle - and everyone assumed for reasons that escape me that this was my kid??? The cashiers said - "we all thought he was yours, until he ran off and you ignored him and we realized, uh maybe not." No. I kept repeating. I don't have children. (Decided to go retreat inside again and not interact with people today. Besides was bloody hot for September - 88 degrees, but lovely blue sky.)
Finished watching Being Human. But here's the thing, the stupid DVR cut off the last five minutes of each episode. So I have no idea what Daisy and the other vampire raised with their bloody ceremony in the snow. I'm guessing from one of the reviews I read ( a rather negative one actually) that it was Henrick?? Is this true?
Regarding Being Human? Apologies to flist - I now understand what you meant when you said this series takes the characters to a far darker place than any other tv show on. Of course you couldn't tell me this without spoiling me. So thank you for that. You are correct - Tobby Whitehouse gives Joss Whedon a run for his money regarding vampires.
My main quibble with Being Human is the pacing. It's slow and made slower still with about a dozen commercials every ten minutes and the excruciating waste of time known as Inside Being Human. Note to BBCAmerica - I'd rather have more show and less cheesy advertising on said show. If I wanted interviews with actors and directors about the show - I'd go online and watch them. Do they do this on BBC? OR is this just a BBCAmerica thing?? Far too many scenes of people wandering down long hallways and repetitive conversations.
That said? Was rather impressed. The plot incongruities didn't bother me that much - as they did other reviewers. Yeah, Kemp and Lucy's plan made little sense and their justifications seemed sort of weak - but that's actually realistic and a nice play on fanatical groups that believe they are doing good by doing evil. In some respects the Lucy and Kemp plan made more sense and worked better for me metaphorically than Whedon's Twangel plan. Although it's probably not fair to compare the two. The metaphor is more or less the same though - which is Kemp had convinced himself that he was ridding the world of evil, that Mitchell, Annie, and George were monsters, evil and had to be killed because they were vampires, werewolves and a ghost. Lucy similarily had convinced herself that she was protecting her people, that they were a menace, but was conflicted regarding it. There is however a bit of leap of logic regarding "Annie" - it never made much sense to me why Kemp went after Annie or why he wouldn't to hurt her. She was shown as being more or less harmless as a ghost and was the only one of the three that was clearly helping and saving people.
Ironically, it is Annie who is thrown into hell and of the three she is the least deserving. I'm guessing the irony is intentional and it is for this very reason that Annie, the lighter and less sturm and drang of the three was taken. They also do provide nice foreshadowing for this - where in the first part of the season Annie is fighting the ghosts trying to drag her through the dark door to hell (never quite understood why that door had begun to appear over the other one...in the first season it is the door of light that appeared - is it because Annie killed someone as a ghost or enacted vengeance? I'm guessing that's the reason.) She finally obtains enough power to stop them, to keep them from taking her. She also gains enough to aid others in passing over to the other side - to such an extent that she begins to yearn to do much the same thing herself. It is this yearning that makes her vulnerable to Kemp. When Nina appears and coaxes George into joining her in the removal of their curse - via Kemp and Lucy's solution - Annie asks if Kemp can help her as well. She niavely believes he will help her pass over.
What does not work for me here - is how stupid Annie is in regards to Kemp. Kemp is portrayed as a creepy hell and brimstone priest into exorcising demons. He even tells both Annie and George that the werewolf is a demon. And when he attempts to help Annie pass over the first round, it is clearly an exorcism right out of well the Exorcist - with all sorts of words regarding "unclean spirit". You'd think Annie would clue in to the fact that the Priest sees her as unclean and evil and wants to send her to hell, along with her two friends. Annie may not be the brightest bulb in the cast, but I didn't think she was quite that dumb. True - you could argue that she's blinded by her own wish for salvation, much as George is - but George at least questions Kemp and is being prodded constantly by Nina into accepting the possibility. Also George's situation in some respects is far more dire than Annie's - as is shown in the previous and far better episode, where he runs through the streets of London attempting to not change into a wolf in front of everyone and kill people mercilessly. Reminded me a bit of an American Werewolf in London.
Of the three characters, George is perhaps the best developed and has the most realistic and compelling arc. An oddity. Since usually it's the vampire or ghost that does...werewolves are hard to do well in these shows without coming across as somewhat cheesy. Perhaps the reason for this in Being Human - is that George is actually still alive, still human. He has a monster inside. Both Annie and Mitchell are dead and sticking around, no longer, technically speaking, human.
The Mitchell arc is interesting in part because of Mitchell's interaction with Lucy, and the moral back and forth between the two. Lucy has not heeded that old warning - when looking into abyss, be careful it does not look back into you and you fall into it. She has fallen. As she tells Mitchell - each morning the first faces I see are the people I killed in that chamber, and every night they are the last. I killed four people. I told myself that I was saving them, that they were monsters, cursed, that I was doing good. But I became the monster. In doing evil to do good, I betrayed everything I care about, everything I love, everything I believe - I no longer know who or what I am. Mitchell responds - "you are a monster now, like us." Kemp has equally become a monster, for much the same reasons Holtz in the Angel series did. He's shown as a kind and giving Minister, who comes home one day to his wife and daughter being brutally murdered by a gang of vampires. His reaction to this incident and choices afterwards turn him gradually into a monster himself, a far worse monster than those he hunts. As Mitchell tells Lucy: The difference between you and me, is you had a choice. You weren't compelled to kill these people. You chose it. (Although I'm not sure that's quite fair...Mitchell also chose to kill. He did not have to.)
My difficulty with these shows is innocent people are killed willy-nilly, but when the hero gets close to or is about to kill the people who hunted him and his kind, who incited these actions - he balks. OR as happened in this case - George talks him out of it - stating the time-worn line: We are better than this. If you kill him you lose all your humanity. You are gone. There's nothing left. You mustn't. (Uh, George, Mitchell just killed half the facility, and a train-load of innocent people who had zip to do with it. I seriously doubt killing Kemp is going to make that big a difference at this point. Vampire Diaries annoyed me for somewhat the same reasons - uh, Elena, it's not like Bonnie hasn't killed anyone before...with magic. Killing Damon isn't exactly the same as Caroline killing the poor innocent guy wiping his bloody nose on the car. Caroline is the one you should be worried about here. Not that I wanted Damon to die - if they killed off Damon, I'd stop watching, but...from a story-telling standpoint, this whole - we are heroes and we don't kill nasty monsters who are trying to kill us shitck when we obviously do kill other monsters who are doing this, doesn't quite play. Stop doing it tv shows! I get the morality, but it feels incredibly unrealistic. What I'm enjoying about George RR Martin's Storm of Swords - is he is not doing that. His characters do seek vengeance and do pay for it. Whedon also went there with Willow - had her ignore Buffy and kill Warren, and yes it took her over the edge of sanity, although I think she was there already...killing Warren (okay only in the tv show, he was resurrected in the comics because the writer liked him for some reason (and yes, ew)) didn't really make much difference one way or other (as we can see in the comics). That's where they dropped the ball in my opinion - they clearly kept Kemp alive - so that they could have that ending in the farmhouse. That was a bit of cliche decision. A far more interesting decision would have been to let Mitchell kill him, ignoring George, and force George to handle that. Instead they chose to go with the cliche...which is Kemp reappears, tracking Lucy to their hideout. Kills Lucy, tries to kill Nina (note it's the women he attacks not the men), and by killing Lucy opens a door for Annie to jump through - which she does only to pull Kemp through the door and with her into hell. Satisfying, sure, but also a bit predictable (seen that trick done before). Annie's self-sacrifice...makes the others want to save her now. Previously, it was really just Nina hunting a way to do so - trying to get inside Lucy's head, trying to understand what happened, yet in reality only bringing Lucy and then Kemp to them (which I suppose provided the same result.)
The show did take a huge risk with Mitchell. Instead of seeking vengence on say Lucy or just Lucy and Kemp, or hunting them down. Mitchell when he discovers it was Lucy, goes on a killing spree with Daisy - taking out an entire train filled with passengers. Ivan's death galvanizes them both into action. It motivates Daisy to torture whomever she can find, and Mitchell out of guilt for getting Ivan and the others killed joins her. He gets literally and metaphorically drunk on revenge, blood and retribution. To the point that when George and Annie encounter him again, he makes no sense and acts as if he's just come back from a drinking binge, he has - but not of the alcoholic variety. The scene where he and Daisy attack and kill a train filled with trapped passengers is horrifying. It's not skimmed over. And makes Dexter or even the Trinity killer's crimes seem pale by comparison. IT is also made clear that Mitchell has done this before in flashbacks. He merely fell off the wagon. Ivan had pulled him into line, much as Ivan had pulled Daisy into line...just as Henricks had to a degree.
I think I missed the episode where Mitchell killed the constable, or don't remember it? I thought I saw all of them. The show is slow paced and my attention admittedly drifts while watching it.
I focus too much in my work life so look for entertainment options that do not require that same degree of focus. Hence the reason I find Rubicon boring and sleep-inducing. It's well-written, but I'm too tired to focus on it. That may be true with Being Human as well. I don't know.
George's arc works the best and held my attention. The actor is oddly compelling with his goofy ears and confused and somewhat bewildered countenance. He tries to have a normal life, complete with job, girlfriend, child and house. But after he proposes - he finds himself in a situation that demonstrates how impossible this dream truly is. He goes to some sort of family and friends gathering with his fiance and her daughter - an engagement party of sorts. It is daytime, or early evening, he believes he is safe. But it is also a fully moon, and he begins to change at the party, racing to get away from people, his fiancee's daughter Molly follows him and sees the beginning of his changes - he screams at her to "Run" and she does screaming - at the fanged wolf that stares back at her. He races in the opposite direction towards Annie, towards the cage. And it is Annie who prevents him from killing Kemp and Kemp's associate outright - it's Annie who manages to put him in the cage - protecting not herself but others, including George.
When he awakens - he races back to his fiancee (Sam) and Molly. But upon seeing him, Molly screams in fright and won't stop. He is forced to tell Sam that he is a risk. That he must leave, that he can't stay with her. And Sam is understandably devastated. It's always something she opines, the guy is either cruel, racist, or hates children...you were the one person who didn't, but you have this other "thing" that you won't tell me and I can't have you. Nina echoes this speech -stating to George, it makes sense, the only guy who found me attractive, who fell for me, turns out to be a werewolf and I get similarily cursed. Am I worth anything? Hunting for love and never finding it and wondering why you can't and everyone else apparently can - is universal I think. And it is this sense of lonliness of having no one, of disconnection - that Being Human does rather well.
So George goes back to Nina, when she reappears offering the dream solution. And both get their hopes dashed in the cruelest way possible - discovering those promising a cure, were in fact mostly invested in extermination. You pose a danger, we don't understand you, we are afraid, you don't fit in - so we will merely end you.
Holed up together in farmhouse...they mourn the loss of Annie. Who we discover has landed in a particularly odd sort of hell. "We sit in a room and just wait for our number to be called. Then are put in another room and sit. Then another. Until one of us disappears and we don't know where or why and we aren't permitted to speak of it. And the whole time there is whispering behind doors, that we can't quite make out." No control. No knowledge. Forced to Wait. And boredom suffocating you. With no time. An intellectual hell, not a physical one. But Being Human is an intellectual horror tale more than a physical horror. The wounds are emotional and intellectual.
Mitchell's pain is that Lucy manipulated him. And she tells George - she did it to get George, it wasn't for Mitchell. And yes she fell in love and she shouldn't have. Perhaps falling in love was the only thing she did right?
What else is there - but love? Companionship? And how lonely are those who feel without it?
Even if it is in our own heads. Annie wants to pass over because she dreads being alone, not being seen. She does pass over but into a new kind of hell, one where she just waits and waits.
The plot in the second season doesn't totally work on some levels - it never quite makes sense why Kemp goes after George and Annie, when clearly it's vampires that he hates. Any more than it quite makes sense why Lucy goes after George and Nina with her experiments, when the body count is due to vampires. You could say it is to get to Mitchell through them, but that's not how the plan is constructed or how it goes. Mitchell is oblivious to what is happening with Annie and George, and neither are approached until after Mitchell is allegedly killed. The three storylines never quite meet up until the last two episodes and that's the problem. They should have met up earlier for the plan to make sense. And Kemp's motivation comes too late and is far too little. I don't like him and I don't care.
So while the characterization is certainly spot on and we do have some excellent arcs, the plot falls short of supporting those arcs in a satisfying fashion. Also the pacing is far too slow. If BBCAmerica did cut bits here and there, I wish they'd cut more of the guys wandering down hallways.
It is a chatty show with a lot of aimless discussions that appear to go nowhere at times. And the dialogue is not memorable. OR truly quotable. But...it does resonate on an emotional level.
As a final note? I'm not sure what to make of the ending since it got cut off right at the moment that Daisy is wondering how much blood she has to give to whatever ritual she's conducting out in the snow in the middle of the forest. Stupid DVR and BBCAmerica. They couldn't have made the last five minutes an inside look bit? I wouldn't have minded being cut off in the middle of that.
Overall? I'd give the second season a B-.
Also watched Running Wilde - not worth watching or reviewing. Will Arnett deserves better. It's forced comedy. The situations fairly cliche. And with the annoyingly cute gimmick of being told through a kid's pov. A cute kid of course. My attention wandered. Not a keeper.
Raising Hope on the other hand appears to be a keeper and worth watching. The guy who plays the father used to play the cyborg/Terminator in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. And mom is Martha Plimpton. Two excellent character actors. Plus the writing is spot on, warm, snarky, and real. Situational absurdist humor that is not forced. This show unlike Running Wilde isn't trying to hard and isn't relying on a contrived set-up. It feels natural to the characters.
Big Bang Theory continues to amuse. It's possibly the only show that has found a way to do sexual humor in an innovatively funny manner that does not make me want to throw things at my tv screen. There's a bit with a robot hand that just had me dying with laughter. Also, Sheldon calculating how many men Penny has slept with...LMAO! While Sheldon's date outdoes Penny with the number of times her sexual pleasure centers were stimulated by a scientific experiment - that stimulate those areas merely by touching certain portions of her brain. (128 times vs. Penny's 31) Proving that the brain is the most effective sexual organ that we own.
Finished watching Being Human. But here's the thing, the stupid DVR cut off the last five minutes of each episode. So I have no idea what Daisy and the other vampire raised with their bloody ceremony in the snow. I'm guessing from one of the reviews I read ( a rather negative one actually) that it was Henrick?? Is this true?
Regarding Being Human? Apologies to flist - I now understand what you meant when you said this series takes the characters to a far darker place than any other tv show on. Of course you couldn't tell me this without spoiling me. So thank you for that. You are correct - Tobby Whitehouse gives Joss Whedon a run for his money regarding vampires.
My main quibble with Being Human is the pacing. It's slow and made slower still with about a dozen commercials every ten minutes and the excruciating waste of time known as Inside Being Human. Note to BBCAmerica - I'd rather have more show and less cheesy advertising on said show. If I wanted interviews with actors and directors about the show - I'd go online and watch them. Do they do this on BBC? OR is this just a BBCAmerica thing?? Far too many scenes of people wandering down long hallways and repetitive conversations.
That said? Was rather impressed. The plot incongruities didn't bother me that much - as they did other reviewers. Yeah, Kemp and Lucy's plan made little sense and their justifications seemed sort of weak - but that's actually realistic and a nice play on fanatical groups that believe they are doing good by doing evil. In some respects the Lucy and Kemp plan made more sense and worked better for me metaphorically than Whedon's Twangel plan. Although it's probably not fair to compare the two. The metaphor is more or less the same though - which is Kemp had convinced himself that he was ridding the world of evil, that Mitchell, Annie, and George were monsters, evil and had to be killed because they were vampires, werewolves and a ghost. Lucy similarily had convinced herself that she was protecting her people, that they were a menace, but was conflicted regarding it. There is however a bit of leap of logic regarding "Annie" - it never made much sense to me why Kemp went after Annie or why he wouldn't to hurt her. She was shown as being more or less harmless as a ghost and was the only one of the three that was clearly helping and saving people.
Ironically, it is Annie who is thrown into hell and of the three she is the least deserving. I'm guessing the irony is intentional and it is for this very reason that Annie, the lighter and less sturm and drang of the three was taken. They also do provide nice foreshadowing for this - where in the first part of the season Annie is fighting the ghosts trying to drag her through the dark door to hell (never quite understood why that door had begun to appear over the other one...in the first season it is the door of light that appeared - is it because Annie killed someone as a ghost or enacted vengeance? I'm guessing that's the reason.) She finally obtains enough power to stop them, to keep them from taking her. She also gains enough to aid others in passing over to the other side - to such an extent that she begins to yearn to do much the same thing herself. It is this yearning that makes her vulnerable to Kemp. When Nina appears and coaxes George into joining her in the removal of their curse - via Kemp and Lucy's solution - Annie asks if Kemp can help her as well. She niavely believes he will help her pass over.
What does not work for me here - is how stupid Annie is in regards to Kemp. Kemp is portrayed as a creepy hell and brimstone priest into exorcising demons. He even tells both Annie and George that the werewolf is a demon. And when he attempts to help Annie pass over the first round, it is clearly an exorcism right out of well the Exorcist - with all sorts of words regarding "unclean spirit". You'd think Annie would clue in to the fact that the Priest sees her as unclean and evil and wants to send her to hell, along with her two friends. Annie may not be the brightest bulb in the cast, but I didn't think she was quite that dumb. True - you could argue that she's blinded by her own wish for salvation, much as George is - but George at least questions Kemp and is being prodded constantly by Nina into accepting the possibility. Also George's situation in some respects is far more dire than Annie's - as is shown in the previous and far better episode, where he runs through the streets of London attempting to not change into a wolf in front of everyone and kill people mercilessly. Reminded me a bit of an American Werewolf in London.
Of the three characters, George is perhaps the best developed and has the most realistic and compelling arc. An oddity. Since usually it's the vampire or ghost that does...werewolves are hard to do well in these shows without coming across as somewhat cheesy. Perhaps the reason for this in Being Human - is that George is actually still alive, still human. He has a monster inside. Both Annie and Mitchell are dead and sticking around, no longer, technically speaking, human.
The Mitchell arc is interesting in part because of Mitchell's interaction with Lucy, and the moral back and forth between the two. Lucy has not heeded that old warning - when looking into abyss, be careful it does not look back into you and you fall into it. She has fallen. As she tells Mitchell - each morning the first faces I see are the people I killed in that chamber, and every night they are the last. I killed four people. I told myself that I was saving them, that they were monsters, cursed, that I was doing good. But I became the monster. In doing evil to do good, I betrayed everything I care about, everything I love, everything I believe - I no longer know who or what I am. Mitchell responds - "you are a monster now, like us." Kemp has equally become a monster, for much the same reasons Holtz in the Angel series did. He's shown as a kind and giving Minister, who comes home one day to his wife and daughter being brutally murdered by a gang of vampires. His reaction to this incident and choices afterwards turn him gradually into a monster himself, a far worse monster than those he hunts. As Mitchell tells Lucy: The difference between you and me, is you had a choice. You weren't compelled to kill these people. You chose it. (Although I'm not sure that's quite fair...Mitchell also chose to kill. He did not have to.)
My difficulty with these shows is innocent people are killed willy-nilly, but when the hero gets close to or is about to kill the people who hunted him and his kind, who incited these actions - he balks. OR as happened in this case - George talks him out of it - stating the time-worn line: We are better than this. If you kill him you lose all your humanity. You are gone. There's nothing left. You mustn't. (Uh, George, Mitchell just killed half the facility, and a train-load of innocent people who had zip to do with it. I seriously doubt killing Kemp is going to make that big a difference at this point. Vampire Diaries annoyed me for somewhat the same reasons - uh, Elena, it's not like Bonnie hasn't killed anyone before...with magic. Killing Damon isn't exactly the same as Caroline killing the poor innocent guy wiping his bloody nose on the car. Caroline is the one you should be worried about here. Not that I wanted Damon to die - if they killed off Damon, I'd stop watching, but...from a story-telling standpoint, this whole - we are heroes and we don't kill nasty monsters who are trying to kill us shitck when we obviously do kill other monsters who are doing this, doesn't quite play. Stop doing it tv shows! I get the morality, but it feels incredibly unrealistic. What I'm enjoying about George RR Martin's Storm of Swords - is he is not doing that. His characters do seek vengeance and do pay for it. Whedon also went there with Willow - had her ignore Buffy and kill Warren, and yes it took her over the edge of sanity, although I think she was there already...killing Warren (okay only in the tv show, he was resurrected in the comics because the writer liked him for some reason (and yes, ew)) didn't really make much difference one way or other (as we can see in the comics). That's where they dropped the ball in my opinion - they clearly kept Kemp alive - so that they could have that ending in the farmhouse. That was a bit of cliche decision. A far more interesting decision would have been to let Mitchell kill him, ignoring George, and force George to handle that. Instead they chose to go with the cliche...which is Kemp reappears, tracking Lucy to their hideout. Kills Lucy, tries to kill Nina (note it's the women he attacks not the men), and by killing Lucy opens a door for Annie to jump through - which she does only to pull Kemp through the door and with her into hell. Satisfying, sure, but also a bit predictable (seen that trick done before). Annie's self-sacrifice...makes the others want to save her now. Previously, it was really just Nina hunting a way to do so - trying to get inside Lucy's head, trying to understand what happened, yet in reality only bringing Lucy and then Kemp to them (which I suppose provided the same result.)
The show did take a huge risk with Mitchell. Instead of seeking vengence on say Lucy or just Lucy and Kemp, or hunting them down. Mitchell when he discovers it was Lucy, goes on a killing spree with Daisy - taking out an entire train filled with passengers. Ivan's death galvanizes them both into action. It motivates Daisy to torture whomever she can find, and Mitchell out of guilt for getting Ivan and the others killed joins her. He gets literally and metaphorically drunk on revenge, blood and retribution. To the point that when George and Annie encounter him again, he makes no sense and acts as if he's just come back from a drinking binge, he has - but not of the alcoholic variety. The scene where he and Daisy attack and kill a train filled with trapped passengers is horrifying. It's not skimmed over. And makes Dexter or even the Trinity killer's crimes seem pale by comparison. IT is also made clear that Mitchell has done this before in flashbacks. He merely fell off the wagon. Ivan had pulled him into line, much as Ivan had pulled Daisy into line...just as Henricks had to a degree.
I think I missed the episode where Mitchell killed the constable, or don't remember it? I thought I saw all of them. The show is slow paced and my attention admittedly drifts while watching it.
I focus too much in my work life so look for entertainment options that do not require that same degree of focus. Hence the reason I find Rubicon boring and sleep-inducing. It's well-written, but I'm too tired to focus on it. That may be true with Being Human as well. I don't know.
George's arc works the best and held my attention. The actor is oddly compelling with his goofy ears and confused and somewhat bewildered countenance. He tries to have a normal life, complete with job, girlfriend, child and house. But after he proposes - he finds himself in a situation that demonstrates how impossible this dream truly is. He goes to some sort of family and friends gathering with his fiance and her daughter - an engagement party of sorts. It is daytime, or early evening, he believes he is safe. But it is also a fully moon, and he begins to change at the party, racing to get away from people, his fiancee's daughter Molly follows him and sees the beginning of his changes - he screams at her to "Run" and she does screaming - at the fanged wolf that stares back at her. He races in the opposite direction towards Annie, towards the cage. And it is Annie who prevents him from killing Kemp and Kemp's associate outright - it's Annie who manages to put him in the cage - protecting not herself but others, including George.
When he awakens - he races back to his fiancee (Sam) and Molly. But upon seeing him, Molly screams in fright and won't stop. He is forced to tell Sam that he is a risk. That he must leave, that he can't stay with her. And Sam is understandably devastated. It's always something she opines, the guy is either cruel, racist, or hates children...you were the one person who didn't, but you have this other "thing" that you won't tell me and I can't have you. Nina echoes this speech -stating to George, it makes sense, the only guy who found me attractive, who fell for me, turns out to be a werewolf and I get similarily cursed. Am I worth anything? Hunting for love and never finding it and wondering why you can't and everyone else apparently can - is universal I think. And it is this sense of lonliness of having no one, of disconnection - that Being Human does rather well.
So George goes back to Nina, when she reappears offering the dream solution. And both get their hopes dashed in the cruelest way possible - discovering those promising a cure, were in fact mostly invested in extermination. You pose a danger, we don't understand you, we are afraid, you don't fit in - so we will merely end you.
Holed up together in farmhouse...they mourn the loss of Annie. Who we discover has landed in a particularly odd sort of hell. "We sit in a room and just wait for our number to be called. Then are put in another room and sit. Then another. Until one of us disappears and we don't know where or why and we aren't permitted to speak of it. And the whole time there is whispering behind doors, that we can't quite make out." No control. No knowledge. Forced to Wait. And boredom suffocating you. With no time. An intellectual hell, not a physical one. But Being Human is an intellectual horror tale more than a physical horror. The wounds are emotional and intellectual.
Mitchell's pain is that Lucy manipulated him. And she tells George - she did it to get George, it wasn't for Mitchell. And yes she fell in love and she shouldn't have. Perhaps falling in love was the only thing she did right?
What else is there - but love? Companionship? And how lonely are those who feel without it?
Even if it is in our own heads. Annie wants to pass over because she dreads being alone, not being seen. She does pass over but into a new kind of hell, one where she just waits and waits.
The plot in the second season doesn't totally work on some levels - it never quite makes sense why Kemp goes after George and Annie, when clearly it's vampires that he hates. Any more than it quite makes sense why Lucy goes after George and Nina with her experiments, when the body count is due to vampires. You could say it is to get to Mitchell through them, but that's not how the plan is constructed or how it goes. Mitchell is oblivious to what is happening with Annie and George, and neither are approached until after Mitchell is allegedly killed. The three storylines never quite meet up until the last two episodes and that's the problem. They should have met up earlier for the plan to make sense. And Kemp's motivation comes too late and is far too little. I don't like him and I don't care.
So while the characterization is certainly spot on and we do have some excellent arcs, the plot falls short of supporting those arcs in a satisfying fashion. Also the pacing is far too slow. If BBCAmerica did cut bits here and there, I wish they'd cut more of the guys wandering down hallways.
It is a chatty show with a lot of aimless discussions that appear to go nowhere at times. And the dialogue is not memorable. OR truly quotable. But...it does resonate on an emotional level.
As a final note? I'm not sure what to make of the ending since it got cut off right at the moment that Daisy is wondering how much blood she has to give to whatever ritual she's conducting out in the snow in the middle of the forest. Stupid DVR and BBCAmerica. They couldn't have made the last five minutes an inside look bit? I wouldn't have minded being cut off in the middle of that.
Overall? I'd give the second season a B-.
Also watched Running Wilde - not worth watching or reviewing. Will Arnett deserves better. It's forced comedy. The situations fairly cliche. And with the annoyingly cute gimmick of being told through a kid's pov. A cute kid of course. My attention wandered. Not a keeper.
Raising Hope on the other hand appears to be a keeper and worth watching. The guy who plays the father used to play the cyborg/Terminator in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. And mom is Martha Plimpton. Two excellent character actors. Plus the writing is spot on, warm, snarky, and real. Situational absurdist humor that is not forced. This show unlike Running Wilde isn't trying to hard and isn't relying on a contrived set-up. It feels natural to the characters.
Big Bang Theory continues to amuse. It's possibly the only show that has found a way to do sexual humor in an innovatively funny manner that does not make me want to throw things at my tv screen. There's a bit with a robot hand that just had me dying with laughter. Also, Sheldon calculating how many men Penny has slept with...LMAO! While Sheldon's date outdoes Penny with the number of times her sexual pleasure centers were stimulated by a scientific experiment - that stimulate those areas merely by touching certain portions of her brain. (128 times vs. Penny's 31) Proving that the brain is the most effective sexual organ that we own.
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Date: 2010-09-26 03:23 am (UTC)While Mom and I fast-forward like crazy. ;-)
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Date: 2010-09-26 03:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-26 03:36 am (UTC)I'm not that fond of multi-tasking, I'm afraid. Problematic, I know, since I live in a world in which you are expected to multi-task 24/7.
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Date: 2010-09-26 03:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-26 03:46 am (UTC)