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Weeds: “Go”

Theoretically this episode should have been the series finale since its last scene showed lead character Nancy Botwin fleeing for parts unknown shortly after setting fire to her family home in the Calfornia suburb of Agrestic.

However, it wasn’t. Whether or not that’s a good thing I still haven’t decided. However, I will admit that I was getting a bit tired of the Agrestic sets and that “Little Boxes” song they played during the opening credits. I wasn’t very sorry to see those two items disappear after the third season.

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Lost in Austen (The Mini-Series)

Wow! Elizabeth Bennet’s parents must have certainly liked sex a lot when they were younger. Granted, they lived in a time with little -- if any -- birth control, an age in which a married woman was expected to look forward to having a large family. But I never realized until I saw the 2008 mini-series Lost in Austen what a large family they had -- and I cannot help thinking how unlikely such a family would have been if there had not been some point in the Bennets’ lives when they actually looked forward to the act of conception.

Indeed, it says something about Alex Kingston’s portrayal of the Bennet family matriarch that I found myself empathizing with a character most adaptations of Pride and Prejudice just as soon wish I not identify with. After all, even with the help of servants -- who, of course, have to be paid -- it could not have been too easy for a young housewife to meet ends meet when there was little money to go around and so many mouths to feed. Indeed, while it is easy for the average twenty-first century TV viewer to lay back and snicker at how shamelessly she promotes the marriage prospects of her daughters, I cannot help thinking how unlikely it is that she does all this because she likes playing such a scornful role.

Indeed, it could be argued that, like most women I have known in similar positions, Mrs. Bennet is a realist. She is not marrying her daughters off because she necessarily wants them to be unhappy; she is doing so because the society in which she is living does not give her much choice. The Bennet family does not have the financial resources to support such women in perpetuity and there were not a whole lot of jobs available in that time and place for a woman in their class. And those that were were not generally open to a woman of the Bennet family’s class. So it is either marriage or some nameless fate which is sure to be worse than marriage. Given such circumstances, it could be argued that Mrs. Bennet’s desire to see her daughters married well if not necessarily happily is an act of love -- or at least, it is as close to an act of love as we will ever see Mrs. Bennet display in this mini-series.

But you all are probably wondering about why I am going on and on about Mrs. Bennet when it is her daughter Liz who usually gets the lion’s share of attention in such adaptations. Well, for one thing, Liz (played by Gemma Artherton) does not spend much time on-screen in this version. Early on, she appears in the bathroom of a twenty-first century woman named Amanda Price (played by Jemima Rooper), a bibliophile with a thing for Jane Austen novels. The first time she runs into Liz, Amanda thinks she is a hallucination. She has trouble picking up on the fact that the Liz she meets is a real person and not just a fictional character -- a confusion which we TV viewers are undoubtedly supposed to find ironic given that Amanda, too, is a fictional character.

Liz appears to have wandered into Amanda Price’s apartment by means of a magic door and seems to be as fascinated by Liz‘s world as Amanda is by Liz‘s. But Amanda does not appreciate this too much and blows her off until the second time she appears at which time Amanda actually opens the magic door and finds herself entering the world of Pride and Prejudice.

Of course, the minute she steps over the threshold into this world, the door slams shut behind her and Amanda is unable to open it. Nor does Liz give her too much help, preferring to stay in Amanda’s old world rather than to go back where she came from.

Amanda soon gets involved in the world of the Bennet family and introduces herself as a friend of Liz. Liz backs her up on this by giving her a message through the magic door which introduces her to her father and explains away Liz’s absence by pretending Liz is away visiting a respectable friend in the London suburb of Hammersmith. However, that does not keep Amanda from soon making a dog’s breakfast of the original storyline for Pride and Prejudice.

One character falls in love with Amanda instead of with a Bennet daughter, another blames her for various mishaps and Mr. Darcy himself -- a character Amanda swooned over in the real world -- takes an active dislike to her.

Can Amanda smooth things over in time for a traditionally Austenian happy ending? And can she ever go back to the twenty-first century after being seduced by the various luxuries of Liz Bennet’s era? For the answer to those and other questions, you all will simply have to watch the mini-series.

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Room 222: “El Genio”

Whenever I am watching an old TV show from the late 1960s, I find it all too easy to focus on the easy stuff: the funny clothes, the eccentric hairstyles, the “hip” dialogue that rings so weird to the ear nowadays that the words might as well have been carved out of tin. What is not so easy is remembering that TV shows back then did not have to deal with the lenient -- almost nonexistent, it sometimes seems -- censors of today’s shows. They had to deal with a more harsher breed of censor.

Moreover, TV shows which tried to do something different back then did not always get the support you would expect. True, there was room for iconoclastic shows like Laugh-In and All in the Family -- but most of those shows were tolerated because they were hits. Even then such shows had to compete against more conventional shows like The Beverly Hillbillies and The Brady Bunch which generally avoided social commentary as much as possible.

Add to that the problem of adequately dramatizing a complicated social situation in half an hour -- minus the time needed for commercials -- and it is a wonder that the first season of Room 222 accomplished as much as it did.

That said, it was hard for me to watch the “El Genio” episode without thinking what a lost opportunity it was. “El Genio” is Spanish for “The Genius” and as you may guess, the episode with that title revolves around a young Spanish-surnamed individual named Salazar* who is a lot smarter than his grades indicated. Salazar was the first Mexican-American character I saw on Room 222 and apart from his girlfriend -- also a Mexican-American -- we don’t see any other Hispanic students on the series at all. An odd circumstance given the fact that even back in the late 1960s, Los Angeles had a substantial Mexican-American population. Even odder when you consider the fact that the Chicano movement was just getting started back then.

Of course, even the best TV show cannot cover everything and for a while, this episode -- which focused on student teacher Alice Johnson’s attempt to keep Salazar from wasting his academic potential by dropping out of high school -- seemed like it was making a valiant effort to deal with a complicated issue.

But then the episode got to the point where Salazar had the chance to get a scholarship from a white non-Hispanic who could not resist taking the time to point out the statistics concerning the large number of Mexican-Americans who drop out of high school. Instead of having Salazar argue against such statistics or point out the many social factors -- including discrimination -- which might have led Mexican-Americans back then to consider dropping out, the show's writers chose to have Salazar act as if the man was personally disrespecting him and then had him give up on the idea of an academic career altogether.

Salazar later gave in and took a college placement test in response to a dare from Ms. Johnson but once he passed the test, he went ahead with his original plan to drop out and marry his girlfriend, leading Ms. Johnson to feel like she was a failure for not being able to inspire him to do better.

Granted, it would have been unrealistic to show the teachers on Room 222 being successful with every student they tried to help but then again, it would have been nice if the first major failure of the show did not involve a Mexican-American student. It also would have been nice if the show had shown more than two Mexican-American students -- both conveniently in a relationship with each other -- if for no other reason than to show that not all such students were potential drop-outs like Salazar. For that matter, the implication that Mexican-American students like Salazar usually give up on higher education because they are too hot-headed or dysfunctional to get along that well with educated people was hardly the type of lesson I expected to see taught on a liberal TV show, even one as old as Room 222.

I would like to think things would be much different if Room 222 were to air today but who am I kidding? There seems to be even less chance of seeing a show like Room 222 on the air today than there was in 1969, much less an improved version, and I doubt that is going to change any time soon. Of course, it would be nice to be proved wrong but I am not going to hold my breath in the meantime.

* A name which was perhaps inspired by real-life Mexican-American journalist Rubén Salazar.

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Angel: “The Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco”

I never really got into the show Angel while it was still on the air because it always seemed like a dumping ground for all the ideas that were not quite good enough for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the show from which it spun off. Nor did it help that Angel was never one of my favorite characters on BtVS. He was more a character I tolerated for the sake of the other characters.

I finally broke down and watched the DVD for the fifth season a while back and found myself quite pleased with the result. Not every episode in the fifth season was a classic and not every plot twist a welcome one (for example, I believe what they did with the Fred character later in the season was a mistake but I can see why they did it) but as a whole, the season was a lot better than I expected.

One of my favorite episodes is “The Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco” which introduced a whole group of Mexican wrestlers into a show -- and genre -- that had been notably short of Hispanic characters. The wrestlers in question moonlighted as demon-fighters and had a history of battling both the natural and supernatural evils faced by the local Mexican-American population until all but one wrestler -- the “Numero Cinco”* of the title -- were killed. Fortunately, the wrestlers did not stay dead but came back for one last battle with their old comrade-in-arms Numero Cinco -- who, prior to this episode, had been working for Angel as a mail carrier. (Yes, it probably would have seemed unrealistic to see a former wrestler working as a paralegal or a file clerk. But a mail carrier? I guess we should all be happy that they did not make him a janitor.)

It would have been nice if the wrestlers had stayed around longer because I found the concept of Hispanic characters battling the supernatural quite intriguing. After all, it was not like you ever saw a whole lot of Hispanics on BtVS, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, etc., and apart from Numero Cinco, you rarely saw a Hispanic character on Angel as well. But it was not to be. They only lasted for a single episode -- after which they returned to the dead. And I suspect they were only introduced because the title character Angel was at a loss as to how to stop an ancient Aztec demon who was on the loose. (In short, some PC screenwriter figured it was not cool to portray Angel as the Great White Hope of Los Angeles by having him defeat an nonwhite demon so they brought in a group of token Mexicans to do his dirty work.)

Most of the show's fans criticized the wrestlers for being ethnic Mary Sues and indeed, I would have been nice to have seen more believable qualities displayed during their brief appearance. I do find it troublesome that a show set in Los Angeles (a city with one of the largest populations of Mexican descent on Earth) could not be bothered to find even one Hispanic character to show up on a regular basis prior to Numero Cinco's appearance at the beginning of the fifth season -- even if said character was a bothersome cop or a nosy journalist. Nor am I fond of the fact that when said characters did appear, the show's writers promptly wrote them off as soon as possible. (Okay, long-running character Cordelia Chase lasted about four seasons on this series despite being played by a Hispanic actress. But Cordelia does not really count as a Hispanic character.)

I realize that no one expects social realism from a show named Angel and that adding token ethnic characters to appease audience demographics would not necessarily have improved it. On the other hand, I get so tired of the notion that writers who put Hispanic characters on their shows are somehow doing us Hispanics a favor. That we have no stories to tell that are as interesting as the ones white non-Hispanics tell about themselves. That having a TV series whose characters never interact with Hispanics despite residing in a city with a large Latino population is somehow realistic because Latinos to the average screenwriter seem even more mythical than werewolves and vampires.

Oh, well. I suppose I could have more important issues to kvetch about than the characters on one TV show. And to tell the truth, I am not all that fond of the masked wrestler character in either American or Mexican culture.

But I did relish the chance to see a group of Mexican characters fight their own battles for a change -- and to actually save the day for the title character instead of waiting to be rescued like the Mexicans in Giant. And I'm kinda sorry that they never got the chance to have their own spin-off. At least it would have been interesting to see what the writers would do if they had to contend with a Hispanic character every week. And to see how such a show would compare with Angel.

* “Numero Cinco” is, of course, Spanish for “Number Five.”

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Dollhouse: “Epitaph One”

Apparently “Omega” was not the season finale of Dollhouse's first season. This episode was. And what a episode it was, indeed.

Unlike the other episodes, this episode didn't even try to stick to the season-long formula which asked the perpetual question: “Who is Eliza Dushku playing this week?” Instead, it fast-forwarded the action to the year 2019 and introduced a new set of characters who just happened to stumble across the now-abandoned Dollhouse. Through flashbacks, we learned bits and pieces of how the Dollhouse came to be abandoned and through bits of dialogue, we learned how the world as the characters knew it came to be.

Apparently the world had undergone a social meltdown thanks to a technological mindwipe. Only a handful of people called “actuals” (short for “actual-minded people”) survived and the characters we met in this episode were among them. Perpetually fleeing from groups called “butchers,” the group came across the underground dollhouse and the former doll once known as Dr. Claire Saunders. Unfortunately, a killer appeared to be stalking their group and as a non-actual, Dr. Saunders seemed like the most likely suspect. But, of course, one hardly needed to be psychic to guess that things weren't quite that simple.

In any event, this episode seemed like a breath of fresh air. Eliza Dushku did make an appearance in the flashbacks but since the episode didn't revolve around her, her appearance seemed more bearable. A number of philosophical questions were raised that the show did not even attempt to answer but for once, the lack of answers seemed more realistic than annoying.

Prior to this episode, I was a bit pessimistic about Dollhouse's second season because the first season seemed all too often a waste of a good premise. But now I'm a bit more optimistic. While I doubt all upcoming episodes will be good as “Epitaph One,” it would be interesting to see if and how the subsequent episodes deal with the ideas raised there. Of course, there's always the chance that I'll be disappointed. But then there's always the chance that I won't.

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Room 222: “Richie’s Story”

Five minutes into the episode and we were being introduced to spunky young student teacher Alice Johnson (played by Karen Valentine) who had just been assigned to work with high school history teacher Pete Dixon (played by Lloyd Haynes) at Walt Whitman High School. Six minutes into the episode and Ms. Johnson casually mentioned the fact that she once went to a segregated school whereupon Mr. Dixon replied that he went to one too.

And so we were off with our first reminder that this show, which aspired to be so modern judging from the multiracial crowd of students in the opening credits, was really made a long time ago. Granted, that is not something I am eager to acknowledge about a show that first aired when I was still in elementary school but then when you’re old enough to remember when the idea of a black teacher teaching a predominantly white class seemed like a new concept -- instead of the normal thing it would be nowadays -- it seems silly to pretend otherwise.

Anyway, Ms. Johnson was white and Mr. Dixon was black. Contrary to what you might expect from a liberal show, not much was made of the fact that a black teacher was teaching at a predominantly white high school. Nor of the irony of a black teacher being presented as the more experienced of two teachers at a time when most white schools in my native Detroit would have considered such a teacher a novelty. Indeed, one of the more refreshing things about this show was how much racial issues were dealt with in a subtle manner. On one hand, the show was hip enough to take racial integration for granted. On the other, it was also wise enough to acknowledge that integration was still a recent thing to most of its viewers in the late 1960s without overemphasizing this point.

That said, the show moved on to the issue of the week: an eager young black student named Richie Lane was discovered by school counselor Liz McIntyre (played by Denise Nicholas) to have used a phony address in order to gain admittance to the school. Apparently his old school -- a predominantly black school on the wrong side of the tracks, it was implied -- was not what Ritchie considered an ideal learning environment. And since Dixon once attended the same school, he had no trouble coming to the same conclusion.

Unfortunately, the school’s principal Seymour Kaufman (played by Michael Constantine) was not convinced that Richie did not deserve to be transferred back to his original school. A controversy developed and the principal finally agreed to accept Richie at Whitman High only if he agreed to take a course not offered by his old alma mater. His two choices were calculus (which he does not qualify for) and... Hebrew.

Did I mention the principal’s last name was Kaufman?

As you might guess, the episode ended on a happy note but unfortunately, the question it raised -- what exactly can we do to help students trapped in a bad public school? -- was not one that is easily answered. And it does not help to realize that this same question could have been asked today. For all the progress we have made on racial matters, there are still bad schools in this country, there are still bad schools with predominantly black student bodies and despite the many suggestions that have been floated during the last forty years, there is no clear solution to the problems raised by these facts.

It would be nice to think that someday the questions raised by this episode will be obsolete and that the Richies of the world will not have to worry about changing school systems. However, as of this writing, that has not happened yet.

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House M.D.: “Three Stories”

Some men get Sela Ward. Others get an old cane and a handful of Vicodin.

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Six Feet Under: “Pilot”

The first time I tried to watch this episode over five years ago, I had to shut it off because I was still grieving over my late father and the last thing I really wanted to watch was anything that reminded me of dead fathers.

After enough time had passed, I was able to watch it and even appreciate it. It's probably best known to today's viewers as the show that first introduced actor Michael C. Hall, best known today for playing the title character in Dexter. In this series, Hall played a closeted gay mortician named David Fisher.

When his father dies in a traffic accident, Fisher is forced to take over running the family business: a funeral home. His irresponsible brother Nathaniel supposedly comes home to help out but is not all that useful. Meanwhile, his sister Claire is struggling with the fact that she was high on crystal meth when she first got the news of her father's death and his mother is feeling guilty over her infidelity to her late husband.

So...good times.

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Weeds: “The Brick Dance”

Yet another episode about Latino drug dealers. Only these guys are a bit more ominous -- and believable -- than the wimp who threatened our Heroine in the first season.

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Weeds: “A Pool and His Money”

And the cliffhangers continue.

When we last left our Fair Heroine, she just found out that her best friend had found the marijuana she had frantically trying to locate it -- and kindly deposited in Our Fair Heroine’s swimming pool.

Plus we get yet another take on the writer’s twisted view of sociology. In their worldview, only white people live in the suburbs, only brown people work as their servants and black people of course all live in the ghetto. How enlightened!

But on the plus side we get to see actress Mary-Louise Wilson strip to her underwear and dive into the family swimming pool. Because, after all, why not?

Okay, to be fair, there's something about Wilson's character's need to scream out loud -- even if it only takes place underwater -- that seems a lot more familiar than I would ordinarily like to admit. Perhaps it is because you do not necessarily need to be a drug dealer or a drug user to want to scream underwater in this current economic climate. And you do not even need to have a pool.

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Weeds: “Doing the Backstroke”

And the cliffhangers just keep on coming.

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Two and a Half Men: “I Called Him Magoo”

Remember that really creepy scene in Memento in which the lead character hired a blonde hooker to come to his motel room and pretend to be his late wife?

Now imagine that very same scene appearing in a prime-time TV show -- and then imagine it being played for laughs. Only the hooker in question is not a Caucasian blonde but an Asian brunette. And she is not imitating Charlie Sheen's dead wife but rather his still living ex-girlfriend. So of course, it is a lot less creepier...

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Weeds: “Pittsburgh”

Every time I am tempted to give up on this show and its rather questionable ethnic politics, it manages to come up with one of those amazing cliffhangers that make it almost impossible to resist watching the next episode. And this particular episode -- which has one of the best cliffhangers I have seen on any TV show thus far -- was at the end of the second season -- a season I did not have high -- no pun intended -- hopes for.

I dare not spoil the fun by discussing it in detail. Suffice it to say that the first time I saw it, I screamed bloody murder when I realized that I would have to wait months to see what happened next. Okay, I did not literally scream but I felt like it.

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Eli Stone: “Freedom”

It says something about how much I warmed up to this show since the first episode that I didn't quite mind the inevitable illegal alien subplot that seems to be the first thing American TV writers think of whenever they want to introduce a Hispanic character. (Illegal drug smuggling, of course, is the second.)

Granted, I would have preferred a more original approach to the subject than the one this episode used and it says something about the rest of the episode that I found myself getting attached to the show anyway.

I'm still not happy about all the focus on the white male lawyer character but I like the way actress Julie Gonzalo (an Argentine-born actress best known for playing Veronica's roommate Parker on the last season of Veronica Mars) was introduced as an idealistic associate named Maggie. Granted, it would have been nice if the writers hadn't felt compelled to Anglicize Ms. Gonzalo's character but then Parker wasn't exactly a very Latin character either. Then again the idea that all dark-skinned Hispanics are non-citizens who need the help of white non-Hispanics because they're intellectually incapable of solving legal problems on their own while all light-skinned Hispanics are just Anglos in disguise is not one that I would like this show to encourage. After all, if that is the type of stereotype we can expect from a liberal TV show, God only knows what we can expect if the conservatives ever take over.

On the plus side, I do like the way Loretta Devine's character Pattie was portrayed even though I usually find the sassy black female stereotype as tiresome as the Hispanic illegal alien stereotype. Of course, it would be interesting to imagine how the show would be like if the show was ever written from her point-of-view but I'm not going to hold my breath expecting that to happen.

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Eli Stone: “Pilot”

Jonny Lee Miller plays an ambitious lawyer named Eli Stone who wakes up one day and starts having aural and visual hallucinations that don't go away until he does the right thing. For a lawyer show, this wasn't all that bad. But I must admit that I liked it a lot more when it was called Wonderfalls. Or Joan of Arcadia. And I especially hate the way they booted out the female protagonist and replaced her with a male character. Apparently we can't have too many shows about white male lawyers on American TV.

Oh, well. It was nice seeing Victor Garber play something other than the character he played on the TV show Alias. Then again he played the title character's father on Alias and he is playing the title character's boss (as well as the father of the title character's girlfriend) on this show. Not really much of a change, is it?

Oh, well again. Perhaps this show won't be too bad after all. Not that it isn't a bit academic for me to say that about a show that was canceled after two seasons.

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Doctor Who (The Second Series): “The Big Bang”

Oh, wow! I really didn't see that coming.

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Doctor Who (The Second Series): “The Pandorica Opens”

Oh my! Things do not look good for our heroes.

Amy Pond has just had an unfortunate reunion with Rory -- or at least someone whom she thinks is Rory; River Song has discovered something horrendous on board the Tardis; the Doctor apparently has every one of his enemies lining up against him. And I thought former producer Russell T. Davies had a thing for big finales!

Should I be alarmed that one of my female acquaintances regularly addresses me by the same term of endearment that River Song likes to use? And that as a result, “hello, sweetie” has officially become one of my favorite terms of endearment? Of course, if it was not a favorite before this episode, it definitely should be one now. Now if they could only get a character to say, “Hola, Sweetie”...

Anyway, it seems obvious that we are not going to get the answers to any of these questions before next week. Heck, we may not even get the answers then. We may not get the answers until next year. Or perhaps we may never get the answers!

Oh my, indeed.

I did like that they referenced one of my favorite Greek myths. And referenced one of my favorite periods of histo -- Wait a minute! Maybe they are getting this whole storyline from my imagination!

Yeah, right.

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Doctor Who (The Second Series): “The Lodger”

If last week's episode was one of the most ambitious episodes of the season, this one is sorta like in the opposite direction. No real specialized knowledge required here unless you're the type of person who has no idea what a call center is and how the game of soccer is played. Or you're the type of person who is stumped by the fact the British use the word “football” to describe the same game that we call “soccer.” (And if you are that type of person, you're probably not likely to be watching this series for very long.)

Anyway, the whole story involves the Doctor “accidentally” getting locked out of the Tardis and having to board with an apartment dweller who lives downstairs from a mysterious alien. At first, the alien seems awfully similar to the monster of this season's first episode but in the end he proves to be quite different.

As for Amy, she isn't in this episode much. Make of that what you will.

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Doctor Who (The Second Series): “Vincent and the Doctor”

This was obviously one of the most ambitious episodes of this season and the first one written for the series by former Blackadder writer Richard Curtis.

You don't have to know a whole lot about Vincent van Gogh or art to appreciate this episode. But it helps. Even if you did not know anything about van Gogh apart from the old story about him cutting off his ear, I suspect you would still get a lot out of it. After all, you don't have to know a lot about art to know what it's like to be depressed. Or to feel unappreciated. And it is a credit to Curtis that he manages to make van Gogh's feelings in that area more believable than one would expect to find in a science fiction show.

Of course, I can't help but wonder what would have happened if the Doctor has not found something wrong in a van Gogh painting like he did at the beginning of this episode but if instead he had found something wrong in an Escher print. Or a Hopper painting. Or a Picasso portrait. Or...You get the idea.

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Doctor Who (The Second Series): “Cold Blood”

Well, that did not seem like such a happy ending.

And it started off so well too.

Of course, if one were a spoilsport, one might wonder what might become of the two human characters who chose to be awakened again in the far-off future in a nest of ali -- er -- non-humans. Especially non-humans who have considerable reason to be mad at humans given the fate of the one of them who had been in human custody.

But perhaps it is better to think of this episode as being one of those episodes that works just right if you think about it provided you do not think about it too much.